Space Cowboy-ing It Up

You board a colony ship, headed for another star system light years away. You wake up from cryo-sleep centuries later, courtesy of your standard Doc Brown/Rick Sanchez-looking mad scientist. You're the only one woken up, because the ship was presumed lost, and by the time it was found, "The Board" that controls the Halcyon System wasn't interested in adding a bunch of cool, smart people to a situation that suited them so well. Which means you were woken up by, and are now working for, an outlaw mad scientist.

Of course, there's plenty of time for you to pursue your own interests in between jobs for him.

The Outer Worlds is FallOut, but in space. That's the shorthand description. It's first-person perspective, you put points into skill categories, which grants you a certain amount of leeway to complete missions in different ways. The whole setting has an air of decaying, capitalist folly, and most of the people you meet are morons. You curry favor or disfavor from various sects and colonies based on what you do. You gather companions to crew your ship, or tell them to piss off. You help them with their own personal business, or say, "We ain't got time for that shit!"

You can't actually say that, it's not a dialogue option. But the spirit of it is present in the options you do get.

The game offers you a "time dilation" feature for combat. Similar to the V.A.T.S. system in FallOut 3, it lets you target specific body parts, complete with a helpful descriptor of what targeting a particular limb will accomplish. Yep, that would have been really handy. . .if I remembered to use it. Likewise, I never utilized the companions' special abilities (nor did I remember how to activate them, or bother to look it up in the notes provided in the game.)

In general, I played Outer Worlds like I played FallOut 3 or New Vegas. I put a lot of points into Stealth, a lot of points into Dialogue, and let the rest sort itself out. Having the full range of dialogue choices to trick, frighten or flat-out bullshit an enemy is a lot more fun than another "pew-pew-pew" gun battle.

I mean, I could have defended myself from those security forces at the relay station, but why bother when I can convince them I gained control of the self-destruct function, and am prepared to use it? A battle avoided is a battle won.

This did leave me frustrated with a big final boss fight I couldn't talk or sneak around. Felt a bit like Deus Ex, being encouraged to play a certain way for dozens of hours, only to be told that is not an option for this incredibly crucial sequence.

Despite what I figured initially, I did accept all six companions. Actually, I'm pretty sure I told Vicar Max to piss up a rope, but he was waiting at my ship when Parvati and I got ready to leave, so I must have just told him not to accompany me at that moment. I ended up helping all of them with their personal quests, most of which weren't too exasperating, Parvati's being the notable exception. But I liked her best, her mixture of naivete and kindness, so I soldiered through her fumbling attempts to woo that engineer.

All the companion quests involve going somewhere and either finding a thing, killing a thing, or talking to someone. Whichever one it is usually sends us along to some other place, to find, kill, or talk to more things. But that's all the missions in the game, so I can't be too irritated. At least with companion quests, I knew what I was working towards and why.

Typically when I played FallOut games, I have a strong sense of who I want to help, and who I'm willing to backstab. Here, I felt like I was basically out for myself, and no one outside my crew got benefit of the doubt. Everyone blurred into a barely-distinguishable mass of people who might try to shoot me at any moment.

Part of it was the game itself, where one of the groups that could like or dislike you is "The Board", but you hardly deal with them. You deal with specific officials who run specific companies that are or were part of "The Board," but I never felt like those companies were tightly knit enough where one would care if I helped another or not. Since they end up being either your ultimate foe, or your new partners, it seems like "The Board" should stand out or be a more notable presence in my life during gameplay. Like the Legion in New Vegas. There's a distinct person you deal with, you know where to find him, you know when you're dealing with his people or not. Instead, "The Board" is just a thing people mention, like a boogeyman. When I was directly contacted by the person in charge, my reaction was, "Who's this lady, and why does she think she can scare me?"