The Outer Worlds is a first-person RPG from Obsidian
Entertainment out Oct. 25 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC. In the distant
future, humans are a space-faring species, and a cabal of corporations have
exclusive rights to colonize a system of planets called Halcyon. The Hope was a
colony ship, originally part of the first wave of settlers, that was lost along
the way. The playable character is from that vessel, awoken after 70 years of
cryo-sleep by a mad scientist who wanted help taking down the corporations and
waking up the other survivors.
This Obsidian’s newest game, adds
a new wrinkle to the debate. It’s not a Fallout game — it’s a spacefaring RPG set in a
galaxy controlled by private corporations that are also the government — but it
owes a great debt to the Bethesda framework of game design. It’s played in first-person;
it cribs Fallout’s
time-slowing VATS system (known as Tactical Time Dilation, or TTD, in this
case), and it does that thing where when you talk to an NPC it zooms in on
their uncanny-valley face.
But Outer Worlds also tacks away from the Bethesda
models in important ways. It’s not incredibly glitchy, for one thing. And
rather than take place on a single, enormous landmass, the game’s handful of
outer-space locales are smaller, discreet areas with their own flavour and
charm — an elitist urban stronghold, an isolated farming colony, a
space-freighter shopping mall. On a narrative scale, the story is smaller as
well, and tighter and more resonant as a result.
It’s at these points when Outer Worlds strays from the previous formula,
when you really see how limiting Bethesda’s intentionally huge game-design
style — with its sprawling environments, lengthy quest lines spanning hundreds
of hours of game time, and frequently glitchy technology — actually are.
Because it operates on a smaller, less unwieldy scale, The Outer
Worlds blends all of the player’s abilities and choices
seamlessly to make it feel more like the player is driving the story, rather
than simply reacting to binary decisions at prescribed story beats. There is a
soulfulness to it that similar Bethesda titles lack by compensating for lower
quality with higher quantity. It’s a game that feels like it is constantly
adapting to the choices you make.When is the Outer Worlds coming to steam?
Thanks to an announcement from Epic
Games – which contains information on more than a dozen storefront exclusive releases – we know that The Outer Worlds wouldn’t
be launching on Steam. Thanks to a tweet from Obsidian, though, we do know that
it’s coming to Steam one year after its launch on “other exclusive digital PC
platforms”.
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