RPG about space from the authors of Fallout New Vegas – what could go wrong? I came to Outer Worlds like I was going to a party: with a clean shirt, a bottle of wine uncorked, the whole evening booked for the game. The first half hour was a total delight: I savored every line of dialogue, peered into every alien tree, carefully studied every nook and cranny. And then the holiday was suddenly over, and I reluctantly, as if working off a number, raced through thevillages of the Alziona about to the finale.
The hype on the occasion of Outer Worlds was frankly unhealthy, too much was expected of the game – to put Bethesda in its place, to remind Electronic Arts of the Mass Effect fiasco, to shock the fat cats of gamemaking. But it’s impossible to live in a vacuum, the result always corresponds to the imaginary image of an ideal game in your head, whoever says otherwise is either lying or not human. So my expectations are, of course, my problem, but there’s no reason to shut me up either.
In Outer Worlds the lyrics are perfect – you can’t go wrong here, of course. Clever wordplay, subtle irony, well-written speech characteristics – and it’s all adequately translated into Russian, too. The characters in Outer Worlds are better written than drawn, and their characters are better revealed through language than through actions. Also, the dialogues in Outer Worlds are as varied as possible, many lines are locked to the character’s characteristics and skills, and still: no matter how you go through the story, the dialogues sound natural, logical, fun, and original. Awesome.
The visual choices are worse. At first, of course, the unnatural colors with exaggerated saturation make you realize: hey, this isn’t Earth, this is another planet, everything here is so strange and alien. But then you understand that there is no sensible logic in world design, instead of living, solid, convincing ecosystem we see some scattered here and there models of trees or animals that are not connected to each other. It is the same with the architecture of space stations or terrestrial settlements. This is just a collection of objects that are carelessly scattered over the maps, with objects plus or minus the same, because of which you can get lost in the game literally in three pines. Or in three wrecks of spaceships.
Of course, Outer Worlds also has great visuals, such as corporate posters. But there’s a nuance here, too. When I said good lyrics, I was referring to the quality of execution, not the actual content of the story. Outer Worlds makes a good mockery of modern (or rather, yesterday’s) capitalism, but it does it so monotonously that it overfeeds the humor – until you start throwing up. The posters, in fact, do, too.
Outer Worlds is a short game, it’s quite possible to get through in twenty hours, and it doesn’t feel crumpled at all. On the contrary. In fact, Outer Worlds feels like an extremely stretched out sidequest from Fallout New Vegas, which could well have been packed into two hours. Seriously, Fallout has separate settlements scattered here and there in the Wasteland, each of which is a separate world, mocking something different – from the Scientologist sect to vampire horror stories. The important thing is that they are all different. Outer Worlds is just like the hypothetical world from Fallout (which is not there, but could have been), making fun of corporations in deep space, which for some reason has been stretched to the size of a separate world and a separate game. And inside the game, everything is plus or minus the same.
Yes, and the mockery, in general, fails. The game doesn’t say anything new about capitalism, it doesn’t try to redefine anything, and it doesn’t dump morality (even gray, even red-green) on the player. It’s enough to compare the Tenpenny Tower quest from Fallout 3 with the quest from Edgewater in Outer Worlds. Both are basically the same in structure: you have to make a decision in favor of one of two groups: either the inhabitants of the city (the building) or the outcasts. Except that in Tenpenny Tower the choice is not easy to make, and the consequences of this choice are very clear (especially good are the consequences of the compromise option, when everyone starts living together in friendship). In Edgewater, by and large, the player (okay, me) doesn’t care about anyone, and the skeletons in the parties’ closets are also so-so skeletons. Outer World is hard to believe – even as a metaphor, even as an ironic statement. It’s just an anecdote, a Tom and Jerry cartoon, and there’s no point in even worrying about the inhabitants of the anecdote.
Another problem (which is probably only apparent to me) is how much of the game’s load-bearing walls of gameplay design and all the ropes and cogs that put Outer Worlds in motion are visible. During the walkthrough, I felt like I could see all these block diagrams, and I could unmistakably figure out that here’s where we’re going to branch out, and here’s an option for those who pass with an over-pumped hacking skill. At some point I just stopped reading the descriptions of quests, went by the markers, the dialogues chose lines, locked to skills (if locked – then it opens access to something good), and very quickly moved forward. If, for example, Kingdom Come: Deliverance surprised with possibilities, intrigued, made you believe in the reality of the fictional world, then in Outer Worlds even all the surprises are actually predictable.
There’s more to write about the shooting (which I liked), the loot (there’s too much of it, and collecting it is infuriating) and the architecture of the levels (awful). You can praise the game for the theme (space, jump engines, artificial intelligence – it’s great) and once again praise the lyrics. But the main thought goes something like this: Outer Worlds is worth the money spent on the game, if you just get all the inflated expectations out of your head. And the secondary thought adds: it’s still better to make such games either really expensive and cool, or cheap and simple. The middle is not golden, it’s dull.