The Outer Worlds wants you to know what it is almost immediately. Obsidian Entertainment’s 2019 action RPG drops you into Halcyon, a colony run by megacorporations, and hands you a simple question: who do you want to be in a system built to make that choice for you. The answer is messier and better than the setup suggests.
Trailer, via Obsidian Entertainment.
A Colony Ship Called the Hope
You wake from hibernation on a colonist ship lost in transit to the edge of the galaxy. You are decades late. The colony has moved on without you, and a conspiracy threatens to destroy it. A scientist named Phineas Vernon Welles revives you and tasks you with rescuing your fellow colonists and taking down the corporations responsible for the colony’s impending doom.
That is the frame. What The Outer Worlds does with it is the reason to play.
Halcyon and the Corporations That Own It
The setting is an alternate future that split from ours in 1901, when U.S. President William McKinley was never assassinated. Theodore Roosevelt never succeeded him. The great business trusts were never broken up. The result is a hyper-corporate, class-centric society dominated by megacorporations, and eventually a colonized star system called Halcyon.
Halcyon holds six planets: Hephaestus, Tartarus, Terra 2, Olympus and its moon Monarch, Typhon, and Eridanos. The Charybdis Cluster adds the colonized asteroids Scylla and Gorgon. Two colony ships, the Hope and the Groundbreaker, left Earth in 2285. The Groundbreaker arrived. The Hope did not.
The colony is governed by the Halcyon Holdings Corporation, a coalition of ten megacorporations that bought and settled the system as a network of company towns. Travel from Earth requires faster-than-light travel and a ten-year cryosleep. The game’s art and architecture mix Art Nouveau, Old West, steampunk and dieselpunk. It is a specific look, not a generic one.
The Unreliable and the Stranger
You create your character, called the Stranger in-game, and distribute six attribute points across strength, dexterity, intelligence, perception, charm and temperament. Those attributes set your baseline in combat, stealth and talking to non-playable characters. Strength buys inventory space. Charm and perception buy dialog options. You also pick one of 15 aptitudes for minor bonuses. Attributes and aptitude lock after creation, though you earn more attribute points as you go.
Your hub is a spaceship called the Unreliable, where you select fast travel destinations across the Halcyon system. Each location is a large open space you can explore freely. NPCs hand out side quests and optional objectives and pay in experience and bits, the currency for weapons and other goods from vendors.
Players make numerous dialog decisions which influence the game’s branching story.
Talking Your Way Through It
Combat, stealth or dialog — persuasion, lying and intimidation — are all viable against potentially hostile NPCs. The writing supports all three. If your character’s intelligence attribute sits below average, you can respond to people maniacally or even moronically, and the game treats that as a real path rather than a joke with no follow-through.
Reputation with factions is a running resource. Helping a faction raises it. Committing crimes or killing its members lowers it. High reputation brings benefits. That system gives weight to decisions that could otherwise read as flavor text.
Tim Cain, Leonard Boyarsky and What Inspired Them
Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky, the creators of the Fallout series, led development, which began in April 2016. Firefly, Futurama and Deadwood shaped the world and characters. The team used striking color and drew on Art Nouveau, Alphonse Mucha and Moebius.
The scope was deliberately narrower than other role-playing games. Locations and characters were still cut, due to time and budget constraints and the team’s unfamiliarity with the game’s engine. That restraint mostly helps. The Outer Worlds is dense where it matters and does not pad.
It was announced in December 2018 and released for PlayStation 4, Windows and Xbox One in October 2019, with a Nintendo Switch version following. It is single player, first person, and does not pretend otherwise.
Where the Colony’s Equation Breaks Down
The pitch line is that in the corporate equation for the colony, you are the unplanned variable. That is a good pitch, and the game mostly earns it. The factions are legible. The satire lands because the corporations are petty as well as powerful.
The cost is scale. A narrower scope means fewer places to go and fewer people to meet than the genre’s biggest names offer. The cuts show at the edges. Some systems, reputation especially, do less than their setup implies.
None of that undoes the core. The Outer Worlds is confident about what it is: a sharp, player-driven RPG with real choices and a clear point of view about who profits when a colony is a business.
An 8.6 Out of 10
The Outer Worlds is the best version of a specific thing — a mid-sized RPG that trusts its dialog and its setting more than its map size. Obsidian built a colony worth arguing about, then let you argue with it. The unplanned variable is you, and the game means it.
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