I recently picked up The Outer Worlds after it finally dropped on Steam, and completed my first playthrough. I really want to tell you about my experience with The Outer Worlds, because it will serve as a recommendation for anyone on the fence about trying this game, but also as a reflection on a singular experience I had with a great deal of relevance for the age we live in.
The Outer Worlds by Obsidian Entertainment brings back the best elements of the genre of deep immersive role-playing games (RPGs), and then goes a bit further. It received good reviews upon release, good but not raving - possibly because it was clearly not a eye-melting AAA title like its contemporaries from other studios, nor was it as sprawling as previous entries by the very same studio. Let's be honest, The Outer Worlds has a pretty good narrative supported by a deep system that can accommodate player interactions with multiple characters, including some key decisions that can permanently change the trajectory of the game towards one of multiple endings. But the gameplay mechanic that the player spends most of their time engaging with, that of a first-person shooter with skill trees - that part is merely serviceable... What I'm trying to say is The Outer Worlds is better marketed as an immersive interactive novel - very much in the same vein of Choose Your Own Adventure books from decades past - rather than a second-by-second source of fun - you know... like a typical videogame.
When speaking of the titular experience, I will consciously spoil one small side-story involving a secondary character within the game. This gaiden in itself does not affect the main thrust of the narrative in any significant way, so I feel comfortable talking about it because it was incredibly meaningful to me, and I hope that by using it I can better convey the depth of my feelings to you. I will then reveal a course of actions that I personally took, that are entirely optional, but also totally not recommended. I won't spoil the details of these interactions, only the outcome. That said, if you are interested to go into this game completely fresh and unspoiled, suffice it to say, I personally love and heartily recommend the interactive dieselpunk novel that is The Outer Worlds. Try it, you won't be disappointed.
So, in order to truly appreciate this game, you really should know The Outer Worlds is set in an alternate historical timeline where the 25th president of the United States, William McKinley, was not assassinated in 1901, and so Theodore Roosevelt, arguably a political titan in our timeline, never came to power and subsequently did not go on to introduce consequential policies that limited the growing asymmetric power of corporations. This bit of trivia is never actually revealed within the game, because it is set in 2355, more than 450 years after this point of divergence. None of us are aware of how major events that happened - or didn't - 450 years ago have decided the trajectory of the world we inhabit now, and similarly, none of the characters in the game are either.
However, this point of divergence turns out to be extremely consequential, because even as humanity has become a space-faring multi-system-colonizing species in The Outer Worlds, the power of mega-corporations has grown unchecked to the point where there is no separation whatsoever between the corporations and the state. Inevitably, the rulers of the Halcyon system where the game is set, is a bureaucracy that calls itself The Board - where chief executives of mega-corporates hold dictatorial power over entire planets/moons within the system. Meanwhile, there is a typical mirroring of our world's levels of inequality, with a permanent upper-class dwelling in a walled urban garden called Byzantium, while the rest of the workers across the system are mired in poverty, with dreams of social mobility that in reality functions more like a maze than a ladder. Unlike our world however, almost everyone in Halcyon has been ideologically bent into submission over generations of internalization and propaganda. As a glaring example, most of the characters you meet may not even say "hello", instead using their mother corporation's slogan as a means of greeting. It's not even a choice or a compulsion, it's their very own unspoken unquestioned culture. Yes folks, the satire here is so thick you can cut it with a knife.
You've tried the best, now try the rest. Spacer's Choice!
In the spirit of the best open-ended RPGs, The Outer Worlds features a robust character-driven system where your conversations, decisions and actions can dramatically and often permanently alter what happens to this world. For example, a typical game with a linear narrative might funnel you from location to location, as you watch your character make decisions as if in an out-of-body experience blown about the winds of an inevitable fate. In RPGs like The Outer Worlds, you can be a refreshing breeze that assists all characters who need help with diplomacy and ingenuity, or a destructive tornado that leaves a trail of theft, deceit and murder in its wake all in the pursuit of a selfish agenda. Whatever you choose at any given time, the game will adapt accordingly. Because of this high degree of flexibility, RPGs generally tend to invite multiple playthroughs like simulators for multiple unlived lives - and The Outer Worlds is by design a stellar example (pun intended).
This is also a good moment to talk about the sights and sounds of Halcyon. In general, RPGs are incredibly exciting not just because they allow players to craft their own characters and narratives, but they also build up entire worlds, with their own history, terrain and rules, for players to inhabit. Obsidian is one of the few studios that has rubbed shoulders with the likes of BioWare and Bethesda by creating sequels to classic titles that in some moments exceed their predecessors in depth and narrative, like Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II and the venerable Fallout: New Vegas. In fact, The Outer Worlds borrows generously from the DNA and spirit of Fallout, but truly the highlight here is that the Halcyon system is an entirely new and original world. It may be a smaller world than most open-world games, and perhaps a more static one despite world events, but it is incredibly well-conceptualized and visualized with a turn-of-the-20th-century design aesthetic. It would be impossible to fault this presentation. Just see some of these screenshots for yourself!
As a player, you enter the Halcyon system at an incredibly opportune time. After more than a half-century since the exodus from Earth, the Board decisively won control over the population of Halcyon decades ago, and the patterns of life that govern the lives of citizens have been calcified in place. Everything, it seems, is going according to plan. (Interestingly, the Board-approved religion of Scientism speaks reverently of the Grand Architect and the Great Plan, a prescribed part of which is each and every individual's privilege to live out.) And then, one lone-wolf scientist, Phineas Welles, infiltrates a transport ship that was lost and left adrift in space during the initial exodus, and revives a single colonist from hibernation - you. You, the player, are the unplanned variable, and your actions will determine the fate of this colony.
The comic book villainy of the Board and the corporate propaganda that just about everyone endlessly and unironically chirps to one another are definitely humourous, reminiscent of the richest undertones in Fallout and The Colbert Report. Nothing is off-bounds, from middle-management obsessed with triple-signed and laminated forms, to the casual cruelty of requiring workers to rent out their own graves after a lifetime of indentured service. Especially exceptional is how these zingers are written with pitch-perfect dark humour and delivered by deadpan voice actors who are floating so painfully close to self-awareness but looking the other way. Well, for me at least, all this was funny at first, then a bit concerning, and then even grating enough that actively defying the plans of the Board started to give me the same sense of satisfaction as harmless quotidian schadenfreude. But a player could very well become an efficient instrument of corporate overreach in order to get into the Board's good graces, if they were to choose to do so.
Meanwhile, the seeds of rebellion already exist in Halcyon prior to your arrival, but you can play an outsized role in either amplifying these sentiments or crushing them. Your benefactor, Phineas Welles is one example. Multiple factions of bandits exist who have left the relative certainty of Board-sanctioned living to become outlaws. A cult of enlightenment that philosophically rejects Scientism and its domineering reverence of the Grand Plan, embracing instead the reality of a chaotic universe, thus escaping from the illusion of control and the false comfort such an illusion brings with it. Smuggler queens and neutral city-spaceships. A list of mega-corps, spectacularly profitable and completely sabotaged, each constantly trying to edge out the competitors with espionage and disruption. Your alliances and enmities with each of these factions will ultimately determine the resources you will receive in achieving your goals.
Caution: spoilers ahead. Do not read beyond this point if you don't want any spoilers.
So here comes the mini-spoiler. At some point late in the second act of the game, my crew and I arrived in Byzantium, the affluent capital of Halcyon where the rich live in comfort with immunity and impunity. The experience of seeing the manicured cityscape of Byzantium after at least a dozen hours in factory slums and rural frontier towns was already a low-level sensory shock... a visual confirmation that affluence and corruption are two sides of the same coin in Halcyon. Regardless, as I explored the city, I wandered into the boutique of Celeste Jolicoeur to purchase a dress for one of my crew-mates... yeah, long story sweetly told.
Celeste Jolicoeur,
fashion designer extraordinaire
Celeste waxes poetic about the player's well-worn-adventurer look, claiming it gave her flashes of inspiration. She begged me to be the muse of her next creation, requesting sincerely to see costumes worn by miscreants from across the system, aspiring to create a new line of "barbarian chic" clothing. Amusing, right? As I continued my adventures across the system, she even prepared a small shopping list of exotic materials to be gathered from the iconic (and dangerous) fauna of each planet I visited.
When I had finally gathered the materials, she requested one last favour - merely to pick up the delivery from the postal service and come model her finest creation in her store. Just as I entered the store however, I was shocked to discover her lying dead on the floor, surrounded by the elite guards of the Byzantium authorities. What happened?! With a painful casual shrug, the commander of the guards explained that she had been found guilty of deviating from Board-sanctioned ideas and they had no choice but to kill her without mercy or prejudice. Her new creative direction was designated as dangerous, and for that imaginary injury, she had to be killed. Simple blunt logic. And then they just walked out, as if everything that needed to be explained had been adequately covered.
While I'd harboured a general unease about the citizens of Byzantium in their gilded cage while the rest of Halcyon wallowed in poverty, Celeste as an individual was innocent right? Wait what? Innocent? Trust me, even as I write all this, I'm also aware that Celeste was merely a figment of a writer’s imagination given form by a set of programmed software routines, pixel-perfect texture art files and pre-recorded lines in an interactive novel... can a fictional character in a videogame be innocent?
In retrospect, maybe it was the overwhelming anticlimax of this turn of events that was the most frustrating - to have gone through literally hours worth of errands towards a certain goal, and then seeing it get monumentally derailed just before the end. But also, the banality of extinguishing a human life with the same level of thought that goes into swatting a fly... that too for an alleged thought-crime that the so-designated criminal had no malicious intent to commit... not to mention how an artist chasing their creative vision could so easily fall afoul of the deep insecurity that fascism represents. I'm reminded at this time of Bill Hicks' tragicomic 2-minute pill of enlightenment.
Still... something literally broke inside me. While I had generally created a character who was diplomatic wherever possible, relying on skills like science, hacking, and persuasion to navigate the social puzzles of this game world thus far... but I hit this point where I was no longer interested to hear one more haha-oops tragicomic explanation from the Board or their lackeys, about why their will should override everyone else's, and how their way of preserving the hierarchy with top-down plans would be the path of least pain, compared to one of leaderless (and thus rudderless) anarchy. I was no longer capable of the presence of mind to entertain such notions even in the context of espionage and subterfuge.
By this point, my disruptive actions across the colony had piqued the interest of Sophia Akande, a power player within the Board, and I had been invited to parley with her. I marched into her office, in a tower in the centre of Byzantium, surrounded by a contingent of personal elite guards. She was going on about being practical about the future of Halcyon, and how the time had come when hard decisions had to be made for the sake of the greater good and inflicting the least pain. To be honest, I don’t even remember her speech very well, still reeling from the murder of Celeste, even though Sophia had nothing personally to do with Celeste’s death.
I won't reveal what Sophia asked; only that there might have very well been a way to accept her unethical proposal but subsequently manipulate events in a more humane direction. However, I was mentally not in the space to accept her offer, not even in the non-ethical context of a videogame. I refused her offer that couldn't be refused, and in the ensuing escalation, killed her and her contingent of guards. Almost immediately, I had become the pariah of Byzantium, and were I to return to the promenades near Celeste's shop, every guard on every street corner would have opened fire. For all intents and purposes, especially considering Sophia’s position as a de facto high-ranking politician of the Halcyon system, I had committed an assassination. I had accidentally become a terrorist, even though I was only forced to return fire because I refused a non-negotiable unethical request, and I had only refused because of a personal idealistic defiance that couldn’t be suppressed anymore. I don't necessarily regret it, but it gives me no satisfaction either. (By the way, this is not even the ending of the game, but understandably it deeply affects the ultimate outcome.)
Even as I write this now, a couple of days after concluding the game, I still shudder at the very real emotions I was feeling at the time, and the realization that, in one fantasy life in a videogame I became an ideological terrorist, washes over me in waves of confused sadness. In retrospect, the untaken choice of pursuing diplomacy even to the bitter end haunts me… especially because my actions didn't just end Sophia's life, it also sealed the fates of people on multiple planets, because the resources available at the disposal of the Board were key to saving the Halcyon system.
Perhaps as a takeaway for the real world we inhabit, I realize that sometimes being a blind idealist can be more damaging than inhabiting the role of a cynical almost-Machiavellian operator. Either way, you have to learn to live with yourself.
End of spoilers.
So yeah, The Outer Worlds is an astounding example of the renaissance that video games have been undergoing in the past decade, and I'm deeply thankful to the team at Obsidian for developing these intricate experiences that are redefining the art of storytelling. For me, The Outer Worlds represents the kind of free-form narrative that I look forward to in next-gen games even more than improved graphics and responsive mechanics. I highly recommend this game, and look forward to trading war stories from our collective explorations of unlived lives.