After a lengthy period of early access for Premium Edition buyers, The Outer Worlds 2 officially launches for all today. I've completed my first playthrough of the game and while I do want to play another character and make a few different choices, I'm not sure Obsidian has done enough to address the first game's problems.
Before we dive into gameplay and story elements, lets touch on PC performance. I've put around 35 hours into The Outer Worlds 2 so far. Like in the first game, you are likely to encounter frame drops in towns, but overall, I found the game to run smooth and I didn't encounter any major technical problems. The game looks and feels polished, runs at over 120FPS at QHD with an RTX 4080 and DLSS, and this time around, we also get the benefit of Ray-Traced lighting, bringing the game graphically on par with other UE5 titles, without losing the original game's colourful art style. On an RTX 5080, you can achieve even higher frame rates thanks to DLSS Frame Generation, enabling up to 4x higher frame rates at the cost of some additional latency.
I will say that Ray Tracing in this title is particularly heavy. While I can normally expect extremely high frame rates with Ray Tracing and DLSS enabled, in The Outer Worlds 2, I found that ray tracing often brought my frame rates down to the 60FPS mark on an RTX 4080, while playing with it switched off allowed me to achieve high frame rates (100+ FPS) at all times.
Now with that out of the way, let's get onto the main review section, where we go over the game's changes and improvements, or lack thereof.
Immediately upon finishing the prologue, The Outer Worlds 2 gives a much bigger sense of scale compared to the first game. Tiny planet maps have been replaced with much larger explorable zones, with caves and hidden laboratories to discover, alongside many side quests, faction quests and more. It is clear that some inspiration was taken from Avowed in this aspect, which also offered much larger explorable zones compared to previous Obsidian RPGs. There is a lot of stuff to find but equally, there are important things that you can miss on a playthrough. For instance, the main quest doesn't take you to Free Market Station for a very, very long time, but there is a companion character hiding away there, who you can completely miss by just visiting the main objectives. There are also some double-jump enabling boots on Eden that can be missed pretty easily.
Throughout the game, dialogue options are plentiful, and you will encounter instances where you can solve a problem through stealth, brute force or via diplomacy. With that said, I did create a character with maxed out Speech and I was ultimately disappointed in how few opportunities I had to use this to influence quests. The Observation skill is another funny one, as it is supposed to highlight ‘hidden' things in the environment. Despite investing into this skill, it was still quite rare for me to use Observation in exploration. I only found a few hidden rooms across my playthrough, and most of the time, these were small, closet-sized rooms with a lootable chest or safe inside. I didn't encounter any situations where Observation opened up an entirely new pathway through a mission objective.
When diplomacy and stealth options fail, you'll be forced to tough it out in combat. This is an area where Obsidian has massively improved compared to the first game. Combat in the original Outer Worlds was the weakest part of the package. It is perhaps best described as ‘functional but floaty', with many bullets flying past enemies and almost forcing players to use Adreno Time, the in-universe drug that allows the player to slow down time to better line-up shots. I had to use this ability in almost every combat encounter in the first game. However, in The Outer Worlds 2, weapons now feel more distinct, they handle better, they have more punch and most importantly, they are easier to aim. You can largely get through this game's combat encounters using your own mechanical shooting skill, with less reliance on character stats and the slow-time mechanic.
While I initially built my character around the tenets of stealth and diplomacy, more often than not, I found myself having to shoot my way out of situations. Overall, this gave me the impression that there is a ‘right' way to play The Outer Worlds 2, and so over time, I focused less on my speech and observation perks and more on guns and improving the effectiveness of my companions. This is absolutely not something you want the player to feel in a game that supposedly offers so much choice. Most of the time, it felt like combat was the only answer, with a few key exceptions during the main questline.
This might not be so much of an issue if Obsidian embraced the idea of letting you respec your character. However, aside from one early check after the prologue, your character decisions are locked in for the entire playthrough. You won't be able to refund any skill or perk points if you change your mind later. As a result, I mostly let the game inform my level-up decisions. Have I encountered any doors I couldn't unlock? Then add some points into lockpicking. Have I encountered a speech check I couldn't overcome? Add more into speech and so on.
The one constant thorn in my side up until around halfway through the game was combat. There were far less ways to avoid shooting than I had anticipated going in so ultimately, as the game went on, I ended up putting more points into guns and leadership to improve the combat efficiency of my squad, rather than upping my other character traits.
This has left me with mixed feelings about The Outer Worlds 2. I had hoped for true freedom to play the game ‘my way', which typically involves exhausting every dialogue option and route possible until being forced into a fight. However, I often found myself being forced into fights regardless of whether I went through a sneaky vent or unlocked a particular door beforehand. There were a few key moments in the main questline where I could convince an NPC to ‘stand down', but these moments were so few and far between that building my entire character around those traits felt like a waste.
Again, without the benefit of a respec, this becomes incredibly frustrating, because there would be no way for you to know how useful or useless a skill really is until you've played the game. By the time you have figured that out, many of your skill points will already be committed, making it difficult to pivot.
The companions in The Outer Worlds 2 also feel more like mercenaries. Some of them have very little reason to be on your crew and some of them have no reason to care about your main mission at all.
One of my favourite companions, Aza, was a higher-up in a cult that worshipped the Space Rifts. During her companion questline, you learn that the cult was created by members of The Order, a strict religious group, as a way to spur leaders of the religion into action. This has absolutely no significant impact on Aza. Yes, she's annoyed that her cult betrayed her, but ultimately, she is still a believer and despite the whole thing being built on lies, she still wants to lead the cult once she's done helping you out. This leaves the character in the exact same place we found them in, with no significant changes to personality or goals. You found her as a high-ranking member of a cult and when the game ends, she will still be a high-ranking member of the cult.
Despite her questline being rather bland, I still enjoyed having Aza around for her enthusiasm. She will often chime in on conversations with threats of disembowelment, which I found quite amusing. Out of all the companions, she is probably the most ‘fun' to bring along with you, even if her reasoning for joining your quest is the weakest of the bunch.
The only companion who I really felt had a full ‘arc' is Marisol, a former assassin for The Order who is looking to destroy some dangerous scientific research before it falls into the wrong hands. By the end of her questline, Marisol is a changed person, less prone to bloodshed and more open to diplomatic methods. You don't get this level of character depth from most of the other companion questlines.
This brings me to my final point. The writing in The Outer Worlds 2 is very similar to the original game. The game doesn't take itself too seriously and bad news is often delivered with a cheery voice and a fake smile. You'll hear a lot of jokes about the pitfalls of extreme capitalism, but equally, communist life is shown to have quite the dark side too. It is all a lot of fun, and I had a good few laughs playing through it, but the lack of emotional response from various characters leaves me with the feeling that I, as the player, have very little influence in Arcadia and the larger forces at play will almost always come out on top.
If you did enjoy The Outer Worlds, I think you'll enjoy the sequel just as much, if not more. However, I don't think this sequel does enough to draw in those who didn't enjoy the original. A lot of marketing for The Outer Worlds 2 has centred around character build variety and ‘freedom' within the game but in practise, The Outer Worlds 2 is not a stealth game, or a social simulation – it is a shooter with dialogue options. I still had a lot of fun with it, and I am looking forward to giving it another run with a fresh character so I can see some of the other outcomes, but overall, this was a 7/10 experience at its worst and an 8/10 experience at its best. If the game had truly offered as much choice and variety as it claimed to, the game could have easily pushed into 9/10 territory, while also offering up more compelling reasons to go for another playthrough.
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KitGuru Says: The Outer Worlds 2 is a competent sequel, but it doesn't deliver on its promises as much as I had hoped.
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KitGuru Games: The Outer Worlds 2 falls short of greatness first appeared on
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