The Outer Worlds

The Outer Worlds is a space-western that presents a satirical story about the ever-growing power of mega-corporations. Despite its interesting theme, however, the game is ultimately dragged down by a lack of complexity, cohesion, and nuance in its narrative and gameplay systems.

You play as a survivor of a colony ship subtly called Hope. A scientist by the name of Phineas Wells wakes you up from cryo sleep and sends you on a mission to help him wake up the rest of the colony.

The Outer Worlds is not shy about its themes. The first character you meet after landing in Halcyon has been hurt in an attack and yet refuses medical attention because he is contractually prohibited from receiving it from third parties. “Company policy,” he explains, using an expression that will be repeated often in the story to justify the most ludicrous and cruel of behaviors.

The narrative often uses satire to pinpoint how corporations dehumanize people in their quest for profit; how they boast a hypocritical discourse that frames their employees as members of a big, happy family, but it’s quick to fire anyone that doesn’t meet their quota or start questioning the way they are being treated.

The best writing in the game can be found in its first act. In the western town of Edgewater, you come across logs, e-mails, and letters that perfectly encapsulate the game’s main criticisms of corporate philosophy and capitalism. “Edgewater Cemetery is a property of the Spacer’s Choice company,” an e-mail states, “The Spacer’s Choice family takes care of its own, from the cradle to the grave,” it ends, hinting at how the entire life of those people belong to the company they work for, who grabs hold of them from the moment of their birth and don’t let go of them even after they die. Suicide, for example, is framed in an absurd light, being referred to as vandalism, precisely to reinforce how a person’s life is becoming more and more the property of the company they work for: “Receptionist shot himself. This is bad. Company’s going to have to call it for what it is: destruction of Spacer’s Choice property,” a letter says, revealing how, when an employee dies, companies often lament not the loss of life but of profit.

The people you meet in Edgewater are rarely annoyed by these ideas, however. Capitalism ideology makes people value diligence, obedience, and hard work. They truly believe that their worth as an individual is attached to their proficiency at their jobs: their work defines not only their identity but also their value in their society – even though their work contributes much more to their CEO’s wealth than to the world. Companies, then, proceed to exploit this unquestionable belief in the importance of work to exploit people, who live miserable lives and yet remain content because there are others in even worse conditions precisely because they don’t have a job.

The satire comes from how far this is taken and how on the nose the commentary is. Unemployed people in Halcyon, for example, are villainized by company discourse, which frames them as boogiemen in their advertisements to make people more agreeable when it comes to accepting horrible jobs. You see flyers explaining how healthcare is a privilege, not a right, and how it should remain tied to employment – a problem that should hit home especially to the people in the United States. The slogan “It’s not the best choice. It’s Spacer’s Choice!”, which implies how workers are not getting a quality product but the only product they can get – a more marketable form of “it’s better than nothing” – is repeated to comic effect. Even citizens often begin their dialogues with company slogans because they are contractually obligated to do so.

The problem surrounding meritocracy is also tackled head-on when you meet a character that is quick to diminish the value of all those around her. When questioned about it, she answers this with a straight face: “I earned my place here, just like everyone else. My grandfather was the CIO at the Tile, you see.”

You can even see glimpses of Calvinism in certain ideas: “Company always tells us –  weak spirits lead to weak bodies. If I didn’t want to fall sick with plague, maybe I should’ve worked harder. Maybe I should have taken more proud in my work,” a sick woman tells you, explaining that her disease is a sign from the universe showing that she wasn’t being diligent enough.

The Outer Worlds excels at presenting the problem, but not so much when it comes to suggesting solutions. After you leave Edgewater, the discussion becomes a complete, almost nonsensical mess. The narrative starts to present binary views on subjects and treating extreme ideas as the only viable options, even when they should barely be related to each other in the first place.

In the game’s second act, for example, you realize that the solution to corporate rule that will be constantly offered to you is Anarchism: you are either pro-corporation or a revolutionary. The Outer Worlds being satire doesn’t excuse its incredible lack of nuance. It’s also curious how a story about work abuse and oppressive corporations almost never – if ever – mentions Unions. The solution discussed is always Anarchy, which is not only extremist but something that barely makes sense.

The game, after all, treats corporations as a form of government, relates it to control and order, depicts Anarchism as a chaotic solution, never talks about Democracy at all, and ends with a quest that never touches on these subjects at all.

In Edgewater, you have the option to support Spacer’s Choice rule in Edgewater or an anarchic village on its outskirts – framing the latter as the worse option to the people. For the game, the optimal solution is often not to change, disrupt, or oppose the oppressive systems in place, but a mere question of putting more competent people in power.

Your ultimate goal, which is to save the frozen colonists, makes this stance even clearer. The scientist Wells often repeats how they are the most brilliant minds in the galaxy and that is why it’s paramount to save them. This, however, means that Halcyon’s problems are not related to the ideology in place, to forms of government, to corporate rule, or worker’s rights: it’s just a matter of competence.

The game, then, ultimately fails to connect its “end of the world stakes” to its core themes. It argues that if the Board, the group of people that rules Halcyon, was composed of these bright minds instead of self-serving, stupid men, things would magically get better even with all the oppressive systems still in place. In other words, the capitalist ideology that The Outer Worlds spent so much time problematizing during its first act doesn’t matter in the end – work conditions and worker’s rights don’t matter when it comes to saving Halcyon: what matters is the level of competence of the people in power.

The game’s general lack of nuance is also reflected in the dialogue choices at your disposal, which usually offer bizarre, exaggerated, unrealistic responses. You can often say things like “senseless violence is the best medicine” or “I’m committed to taking as many drugs as possible” and people will still take you seriously and react as if you said something sensible. To make matters worse, the options are usually really aggressive, boasting an “I’ll do whatever I want” attitude that is sure to please certain gamers, but is going to put off most people, who will have to choose the only option that makes your character not sound like a complete asshole.

This severely hampers the role-playing aspect of the game, as the dialogue options limit the player’s character to two types: you are either empathetic or a violent idiot. When it comes to the game’s core themes, you can either tell people that corporations are rad and people are stupid, you own, and long live rich people, or that corporations are evil bastards that should be annihilated alongside everything else. The Outer Worlds is often extreme when it comes to offering options to interact with its world – and, while I do agree that you either are a sensible human being or someone that believes healthcare should be a privilege, that hardly makes for good, nuanced roleplaying.

Gameplay options are not The Outer Worlds’ strongest suit either. Its approach to stealth is very problematic, for example, since the game gives you a machine that makes you magically blend in with a certain group of people if you have the ID Card of that group, which is often just lying around in plain sight near their base. The machine’s power depletes over time, however, which means that instead of sneaking carefully into a place, the stealth approach means that you will be haphazardly running as fast as you can, passing unbelievably unsuspecting guards to get to the quest marker before the timer runs out. That is, until you realize there’s basically no penalty for letting the timer run out: you just have to pass a fairly easy speech check, when a guard says something in the lines of “Wait, you’re not supposed to be here” and you answer something dumb like “You’re wrong,” and they go “Ok then” and the machine simply recharges. During the last mission, things get even funnier, as the game doesn’t realize that you are not storming the place guns blazing, but trying to infiltrate the place undetected, and still offers you “help” in the form of “friends” appearing out of nowhere to shoot everyone while screaming something in the lines of “WE’RE HERE TO HELP THE CAPTAIN!”

Not that the game gives you much incentive to use stealth in the first place, as in the normal difficulty you quickly become a GOD capable of dispatching anything in the blink of an eye, even if you don’t have many points on offensive stats. And for a game that makes you travel between two alien planets it’s disappointing that there are only four types of enemy creatures: there’s a monkey, a dog, a snail, and a mantis monster and that’s it. The game lets you slow down time to better line up shots and see enemy weak points, but the player is given little reason to bother with it, as emptying a clip on an enemy’s face usually does the trick.

The game doesn’t handle skill-check dialogue options very well either, as a high level of persuasion, for example, will not have your character display an improved, more persuasive rhetoric but keep saying the same obvious things, but now with the magical effect that makes the other characters listen to the protagonist – sometimes even changing their tone in a drastic and often very funny manner.

The game struggles to react to your decisions and sometimes it even fails to react at all. There’s a reputation system, for example, that judges your actions towards a faction and makes the world react to that, with prices increasing and guards just shooting you on sight. The problem is that your actions affect your reputation with just one group. So, let’s imagine that you arrive at the city of Byzantium with your reputation with the Board being very low. All the guards in the city will be already shooting at you and the prices will already be at their maximum value. So, if you, let’s say, decide to slaughter everyone in the city, murdering every civilian, blowing everyone up, absolutely nothing will happen because your reputation with the Board is already at its lowest point and the rest of the world doesn’t care at all if you are a raging maniac. It’s just ironic that a game with so many gratuitously violent dialogue options doesn’t know what to do when the player decides to act accordingly – and the fact that the sweetest member of your party, the mechanic Parvati, keeps saying “sorry” after blowing up the heads of innocent people, instead of acting outraged and leaving you, just makes everything even more ridiculous.

Talking of companions, they are a mixed bag, with most being flat characters that are known for their one, very repeated trait. Doctor Ellie boasts a “lone wolf” attitude and that’s her. Vicar Max keeps talking about “order” and the Great Plan – in a very boring manner – and that’s him. Their character arcs, consequently, are very simple, with Ellie finding out the value of trusting other people and Max realizing that a bit of chaos is actually good for the soul. Felix, meanwhile, doesn’t even have a trait going for him and he just accompanies you because he has nothing better to do. Parvati is the one who stands out with her cute awkwardness, but mainly because she is a nice counterpoint to your “I’ll do whatever I want and that may include genocide in Byzantium”, character and her companion quest offers a touching romantic story.

The sidequests in the game are also a letdown, lacking drama, conflict, thematic resonance, and consequence. There are not a lot of them, but that doesn’t mean the developers went for quality over quantity. There’s a place rumored to have cannibals, for example, so when you’re tasked to go find a missing worker there, you discover – surprise! – a group of cannibals. The game offers you options when dealing with the situation, but they are all dull: if you kill the cannibals or not it doesn’t matter, because they are not fully fleshed out characters – they’re just cannibals with a quirk or two – and the subject is never brought up again.

You rarely see the consequences of your actions during sidequests: the game presents you with choices but doesn’t make the world around you react to them. In an early quest, you are given the choice to give the medicine you found to an old man who is sick or to a woman that will distribute it to workers, and either way, nothing will happen in Edgewater. Since most of these quests are about nothing in particular – there’s one in which you act in a movie for no reason at all and nothing interesting happens – they lose any narrative weight that they could have otherwise had.

Finally, the game also severely falters when it comes to exploration. Take the game’s biggest map, Monarch, as an example: if you go off the beaten path and try to find interesting places on your own, what you will find instead is a bunch of locked doors that need passwords to open. It doesn’t matter that you have 100 points in hacking or lockpicking; you can only enter some places if you talked to the quest giver in the towns to get those passwords. In other words, you won’t stumble upon quests, interesting locales, or events: you will pick up a quest in town, follow the quest marker, kill everyone there – or not – and come back for your reward.

With flat characters, dumb dialogue, boring quests, and a good amount of ridiculous systems, The Outer Worlds is a disappointment. It may be cliché to end a text on The Outer Worlds with this sentence, but it’s too perfect to miss the chance. So, here it is: The Outer Worlds… is not the best choice. It’s Spacer’s Choice.

December 29, 2020.