Picked this up on sale at the beginning of this year.
The first chapter on Edgewater was good and promised enough to keep me playing, but it just didn't deliver in the later parts of the game.
Everything that happens on Monarch feels inconsequential due to the shameless segmentation of the game, which has the sole merit of scrupulously following the narrative on which lies its setting (being that the colony is under firm HHC control and moving around freely simply isn't on the menu for pretty much anyone but corporate white collars).
Meaning that the whole colony is broken down in planets/spaceships/stations/asteroids/dlcs which are almost utterly disjointed from one another.
Shit feels inanimate, like a game from Bethesda, and immersion takes a blow from it.
Doesn't help that it's signed by Cain and Boyarsky, who delivered some of the most interesting crpgs systems of the 90s. The Outer Worlds offers little in that department, despite its skill points group-based distribution mechanic (which, tbh, is quite good on paper, and I kinda wish to see this iterated upon), because the game design barely ever tries to give any illusion of openness.
Everything past Edgewater quickly starts to feel narrow.
Quest structure, level design, hubs layouts, dungeons (or rather, the single dungeon that gets repeated times and times again : a more or less remote lab/factory that got abandoned and overrun by beasts/robots/marauders, which -unfortunate aggravating circumstance- constitute the backbone of all bland copy pasted encounters, from beginning to end.
Even character progression just narrows as you gain levels. By the midterm of your journey, you'll just pick random perks for the sake of confirming the level up process.
Writing-wise, it ranges from uninspired to good, but there again does it take a dive after the first chapter.
I also wonder, and maybe someone here knows about this : doesn't the whole tone and quality of writing sensibly drop after Edgewater ? Or is this just an impression ?
It feels like a completely different direction was taken for the Groundbreaker, Monarch and on. In the case of the latter, you even have to suffer the slightly forced wackiness while talking to the leader of MSI, a major faction on the planet.
To mostly meet goofy folks is harming immersion enough, but at the very least, for the love of God, keep it serious when talking major plotlines with important npcs...
In the end, the narrative falls apart, lacking strong characters to rest upon, and you're left with picking sides and conflicts that simply do not matter in the greater picture, because they're disjointed from the main plot, as mentioned above.
Anyway, to utter a conclusive word : it's way too narrow. There's barely any room to fuck around.
It gets narrower and narrower in all compartments as your playthrough progresses, until you're suffocating, gasping for air, desperate to get some reinvigorating air out of a newly met NPC, before the cunt greets you with either some obnoxious meta-comments on corporatism or full on wacky and zany nonsense (sometimes, both).
Said obnoxious meta-comments on corporatism which, ironically, felt like more or less historically accurate depictions of the daily life in the late Soviet Union.
On the bright side : I dig the art direction (besides the writing that is). It legitimately doesn't suffer from any lack of personnality. I'd even say the game can be charming.
It truly is a shame that whoever was tasked with writing npcs and quests seemingly didn't have anything to offer. They were either shy or unconcerned. Let's hope for the sequel that it was the former, if any hope remains at this point.
Because there isn't a single noteworthy idea in sight there. Nothing. It's a well-presented, rather bug-free husk of a game. Which starts moderately sized, and then narrows, and narrows, and narrows on and on, like some crpg dying star...
