The Outer Worlds

 You may have noticed that my recent blogs have been quite short. This is due to the fact that I got really lazy and I have not written those blogs as I finished the games, rather it has been months in between so the games were not in fresh memory as I wrote the blogs. I will try to get less lazy, starting now, and will be writing this blog just after I finished the game. This would also be the first one that I am actually rewriting before publishing since I felt like the first version wasn't good enough.

The Outer Worlds is an open world adventure RPG that was released in 2019 by obsidian entertainment, the same people that made Fallout: New Vegas. The Outer Worlds had a pretty good reception but also some bugs that people weren't too happy about. This is a game that I have been waiting for a very long time since I really liked Fallout new vegas and have been wanting for a bit more modern version of that game. I've been waiting for a good deal on this game, a deal that still hasn't arrived but the deal on Xbox game pass during E3 is something that I did manage to grab for myself and I played the game through that. I did experience quite a few crashes when launching the game but I believe this is mostly due to the Xbox app not being very good and causing those crashes. 

The Game

The game gave me an almost nostalgic feeling. It had pretty much everything that the fallout games used to have. Open world for looting and fighting. Interesting skill system for leveling. bunch of different dialogue options based on skills and more. Only thing lacking in the game was the amount of playable content, something that I will most likely never get through game pass, so unless some time in there future there is a good deal on a GOTY edition that includes all the DLC, all that can be said about this game is that it is very good but awfully lacking in the amount of content. But enough for now about what's not in the game, lets look at the actual game then. 

The skill system in the game is interesting and something that I haven't seen before. This doesn't mean that it has never been done before, it just means that I've never come across a skill tree like this. So basically there are different categories for skills, like social or weapons, and those categories have 3 skills under them. Leveling them up works so that you first level the category, until two of the skills reach 50 and then you level the skills separately. This is an interesting way to make sure that most skills would at least have some sort of foundation and after that if you really want to focus on a certain skill you really have to spend some points on them. Like I said, interesting system, and it seems to work quite well, but I'm not sure if I like it or not. 

The weapons system is also fun and engaging. There are different weapon types, like handguns or long guns, which have their own skills. There are also three different ammo types for different guns but it seemed a bit random as of which ammo goes to which type of gun. I stacked up a lot on ammo but never really had a point after midway through the game where any of my ammo would fall under 1000. This could also just be because of me trying to get through everything without fighting but more on that later. The game also includes different damage types for weapons. The most common one of them is of course physical damage as most guns just shoot bullets and most melee weapons are just swords and such. To me the damage types didn't always make that much sense and I spent almost the entire game trying to learn which type of damage is good against which type of enemy. It was also interesting to see how long it took for me to naturally find a gun that had corrosion damage type, especially when I had to fight mantisaurs from almost the beginning of game, the enemy type that only really takes damage from corrosion weapons. Later on in the game I did find out that it would have been possible a lot earlier for me to modify a gun to have corrosion damage. Modifying gear and weapons was one of  those things that I didn't do much since I was hoping to get a really good gun before I started modifying them, and almost completed the game before even touching the modifying stations. 

There is also an ability that you can use that would slow down time for a short period. This ability was quite similar to VATS in fallout, although I didn't use it much. The combat was easy enough without the need to slow down time. Other things included in the game that I didn't really use were consumables that would boost different stats. Only consumable that I ended up using was the healing one. Science weapons seemed to be a big part of the game as well, but I didn't really touch them. I tried one of them as I received it but it seemed very underwhelming so I didn't even look up the effects of other science weapons that I found. Another problem with even trying to figure out the science weapons was, like I mentioned, that the game was over before I really even started to get the hang of it. 

Most of the game ran quite well though. Some areas included a lot more combat, while other areas where mostly just talking my way through. In fact a big part of the game was just using social skills to get out of trouble. Maybe this is partly my fault since that was the play style that I was trying to skill my dude up for, but even still I was hoping that there would have been a lot more fighting in the game, even if I did use all the dialogue options possible to get out of trouble. Maybe this is also speaks partly to the shortness of the game, since straight  from the beginning you can have high enough skills to speak your way through almost anything. If I ever do play this game again. I might have to roll a dumb brute who will smash first and ask questions later, because at the end, once you got the hang of it, the combat was really fun. 

The Story

The main story of the game is a very interesting one. (spoiler alert) A mad looking scientist has rescued you from an abandoned colony ship where you have been sleeping in a pod for like almost a hundred years or so. You wake up in a new colony for man called Halcyon which is completely ruled by something called the Board. Halcyon is run like a capitalist dystopia where bureaucracy runs wild, people work all day and earn barely enough to survive and the elite who own most of the wealth have their own gated community where they can just do nothing all day. The point of the story is to work either with the scientist and try to free Halcyon or work for the Board and keep suppressing the population even if that means that they will die out due to mismanagement. (end of spoilers)

The main story of the game is really short, only like a few missions long. The entire game is quite short since completing almost all of the side missions that I could find only took me 19 hours or so. For a 60€ game that is not a very good deal. Thank god I didn't pay that much for it. And even though the story was very interesting it does not an excuse for how short it was. There is also the possibility of replaying the game since there are some decisions you can make throughout the game, so maybe playing it twice, each time with a different focus but even then it's not that good of a deal.

The World

Another beautiful part of the game is its world and the environment. Even if the colony of Halcyon is still quite young, it has already got different populated planets, each with their own purpose and culture. Each planet has its unique monsters and wildlife, its unique strengths and problems to be solved. It is absolutely wonderful to travel between the worlds, or it would be if each place had enough content.

I know, I know, here I go again complaining about the shortness of the game, but this problem is a little bit of its own, and also very much tied to the shortness of the game. Each one of these planets have their own areas. Areas that are completely separated from each other. This is a huge part that makes the game feel even shorter than it is. The different areas are so small that you can explore a whole area in a very short amount of time and it would be nice if it wasn't like that. It would be much better if the planets that have different areas would be connected, to make the world feel bigger, and this way it would have made the game longer as well. Maybe by only making me walk longer distances, and as crazy as it might sound that was something that I was missing a bit in this game. Towns were so close to each other that there wasn't enough wilderness to explore and I really would have liked to explore more of the wilderness because that part was a lot of fun and it was very exciting. 

But the world was a wonderful place. After this first game the world is also going to change a lot and I wish that in the second game that seems to be on its way, we can have much bigger areas to explore in a Halcyon that would hopefully be much more developed. 

TL;DR

I truly enjoyed the game a lot and it had a lot of potential to being a straight 10 but for this amount of actual content for a game that costs 60€ I just can't give it that high of a score, not even close. So even if this was a great game, it was so lacking in content that it will only receive an 8/10