As mentioned, I recently completed The Outer Worlds 2 (TOW2) after about 70 hours of playing. There is a lot of like about TOW2, especially in comparison to the original game, but there is an equal (or greater) amount of terrible game design. Moreover, for all the news articles extolling Obsidian’s return to Fallout: New Vegas form with this title, I see regression at best. And, seriously guys, it’s been 15 years.

First, the good stuff. The game is gorgeous, maps are large, the skyboxes interesting. One of my criticisms from the first game was that interior spaces felt generic and cut & paste in the “let’s pretend it was on purpose because modular sci-fi habitats” kind of way. Thankfully, TOW2 feels much more diverse and detailed. There is still a definite lack of something that the aging Bethesda Gameybro Engine is able to evoke, but it is worlds better than before. Also, the act of traversing the landscape itself feels great, with double-jumping and auto-vaulting on par or better than with Avowed.

Gunplay and collecting bits and bobs out in the world is also much improved. There are baseball-esque cards sprinkled around everywhere that grant you +1% critical hit chance (etc), which makes exploration more exciting. The world is populated with many junk items that can be broken down into crafting components and then turned into ammo or mods. The original game featured a punishing repair/tinker system that drained you of resources; this one lets you use whatever guns or armor you want (for the most part) straight into the endgame.

Where the game falls apart for me is with the Skill Checks, and a broader fetishization of “choices matter” when they really do not.

Before I begin, there is one aspect of Skills I do want to give Obsidian credit for: they solved the combat vs social skills dilemma. In almost every RPG I have played, allocating a limited amount of points into something like Speech meant you were radically weaker than someone who put them in Guns. Broadly speaking, that is not the case in TOW2. Each point is Speech gives you a +10% damage bonus against Human targets. There is further a Perk called Space Ranger that gives you a 2.5% damage bonus against all targets for every level of Speech you have. While that is not as good as an unconditional 10% per Guns level, it no longer feels as though you need to gimp your character in order to talk to characters in an RPG.

But, see… that’s just the thing. This is a game of “choices” which is governed almost exclusively by Skill checks. In the original game, you could respec, wear gear with Skill bonuses, or even take certain companions with you to achieve certain Skill thresholds. Not anymore. You are hard-capped at level 30, meaning you can have three Skills at 20 with maybe two points elsewhere; two Skills at 20 with a few more at scattered about; or a single 20 Skill and a more even distribution across a few interesting ones. Obsidian devs have said they wanted players’ “choices to matter” and for players to commit to mistakes. Choices made… where? On the character page, prior to knowing anything about the rest of the game? Something like the very meaningful choice between Lockpicking 5 and Lockpicking 6?

The end result is this nonsense:

I spent the last third of the game with 17 unallocated Skill points, and 5 unchosen Perks. This is an epic game design fail on all sorts of levels. For a start, it illustrates how easily I was able to forgo 170% extra gun damage and still breeze through the game (on Normal). Indeed, my “build” was capable of one-shotting every non-boss enemy in the game from stealth… with zero points in Sneak. Second, it makes a mockery of “commitment and/or consequence” seeing as how I was easily able to pop into the character menu and become an expert of any relevant Skill as needed. Finally, it demonstrates how boring the capstone Perks (ones requiring 20 points in X) were, that I was completely unmoved to commit the Skills points needed to get there. As a matter of fact, almost none of the Perks were especially relevant or impactful, which is crazy considering there are 90 of them.

Now, as pointed out in my Tips post, you don’t actually have to max out Skills to avail yourself of all the most meaningful options. You wouldn’t know that while playing the game though, which is part of the problem. A lack of meaningful information precludes a meaningful choice. Would you still choose to get to Speech 20 if you knew Speech 9 was good enough for the kumbaya ending? Or, honestly, Speech 5 considering how odious one of the factions ends up being. And if Speech 5 is good enough, why do we need Speech to be the determining factor in the decisions our character makes at all?

“It’s an RPG.” So are Mass Effect and Dragon Age: Origins. Is a game only an RPG if you have to put points in a Speech skill in order to make decisions? That sounds more like a Roll-playing game, amirite.

Having said all that, a lot of this is moot because the overall narrative of TOW2 is weak. The game starts off fairly strong with a much more consistent tone than the original. You learn about Auntie’s Choice, the ultra-capitalistic caricature of corporations from the first game, and then interact with the Protectorate, the ultra-authoritarian, brainwashing, jobs-assigned-at-birth and report-your-family-members bad guys. Later, you meet the Order, who represent scientists who use math and probability to predict the future. But then the Protectorate becomes generic antagonists and you just have Auntie’s Choice and the Order to play off one another and I could not be less interested. The vaunted, hard-hitting choices from the makers of Fallout: New Vegas boil down to who you want to attack you on sight for not taking them to prom. With a high enough Speech skill, you can take them both. Whee.

Maybe that is reductionist. All I know is that I played through all the faction quests and did not once feel a spec of moral gravity. Compare that to interacting with Caesar’s Legion, NCR, House, or going it alone in New Vegas. The companion quests in TOW2 did fare better than the main story, but it is one of those situations in which you sort of question why the writers are hiding the light under the bushel of characters you technically don’t even have to recruit. Maybe that’s what they mean by choice? Then again, that’s sort of like saying you’re making meaningful choices by not playing the game.

…which I may ultimately recommend.

In the final analysis, I did end up playing The Outer Worlds 2 to conclusion after 70 hours, so there’s something there. By the end of the utter slog that is the third act though – especially when Obsidian goes full Starfield with forcing you to fast travel across planets via 10 loading screens to talk to NPCs – all I could really think about is how much better Avowed was in comparison.

And I didn’t really like Avowed. At least it had respecs though.