A 2019 space exploration game that’s super story heavy with some elements of mystery, and if you’re thinking of a certain other Outer game, you’d be thinking wrong. This one has guns! It’s one of the Obsidian RPGs, and I’m honestly surprised at how engaged I’ve been with this, since I’m not usually the kind of person to do well with dialogue heavy story games.
So you’re a guy (or gal) who’s been frozen for 70 odd years, and has just been woken up by an enemy of the state* to help with his plans to revive the rest of your colony, which was just, abandoned and left to drift in space for eternity. By all metrics you shouldn’t be alive, nobody has ever been revived after 70 years frozen, so your existance is sort of a miracle, and now your scientist saviour needs your help to find more chemicals to revive more colonists.
But this is an Obsidian RPG. So of course before you even start you have to create a character with a set of personality traits and skills. You can respec your skills if you want to, but your personality is permanent, no way to go back and change those, which would have been nice to know before I started seeing a bunch of perception options that I couldn’t use in dialogue checks, so spent most of the game leaning on quick load and caffenoid…
The weapon selection certainly isn’t any kind of Borderlands procedurally generated weapon pool with hundreds of base weapons that can be modified with hundreds more weapon parts to make super unique lists of numbers to compare, I’ve found myself sticking mostly with an arsenal of 5-6 weapons that I swap out every 10 levels or when I find a copy of a gun with a higher model number. All guns are created equally, all level 18 bolters will do the same damage when you first pick them up, and it’s on the player to tinker and modify them to raise their level and change their attributes. Other than that it’s more or less just the highest big number in the top. You’ll want something with high DPS to deal with swarms, and something with high single shot damage to deal with armour. The whole being frozen for so long thing also left you pretty fucked up overall, so now you can percieve time at incredibly slow speeds to help line up shots for specific effects or critical hits. You’d think this would be a problem, but it’s actually entirely a benefit.
Maybe I’d have an easier time with gunplay if I didn’t spend the whole game dumping my stat points into dialogue and stealth options like persuade and hack, but I suppose thats what an RPG is about. I want to be neutral party gremlin rogue detective instead of staunchly pro- or anti-corporate murder merc. You may have noticed an asterisk above next to the word “state”, that’s no mistake. This game isn’t run by governments and states, it’s entirely run by distopian corporations who treat people as property and care about profits above everything. I’ll let the story do the rest of the explaining and how you want to react to and feel about this situation.
Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/578650 £24.99
Humble Bundle: https://www.humblebundle.com/store/the-outer-worlds £24.99
Switch: https://www.nintendo.co.uk/Games/Nintendo-Switch-games/The-Outer-Worlds-1611883.html £24.99
Note: Prices above for base game only, I personally played the “Spacers Choice Edition” on the Humble Choice bundle which includes 2 DLCs, which raises the price on Steam at least to ~£45
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