Outer Worlds Review

It's not the Wurst unless it's Boarst Wurst

There's something special about the Fallout style of CRPG ending slideshow.

It seems so basic, almost like it's cheating. Just putting a big list of endings together with some half-hearted and occasionally buggy notes about the players actions. You know, ask the playtesters if they find a solution you didn't think of and squeeze it in at the last minute sort of energy. Maybe add some fun final notes on the lore and tie up whatever loose ends are left as the credits roll. Backed by nothing more than pure text, images, and the occasional pre-rendered cutscene.

It's not even necessarily as an excuse for accounting for some hundreds of player choices you've hypothetically put in the game. Oftentimes each ending scene only has a handful of options, all pre-determined by the quest endings and 90% of the time the player will just be getting the good ending to everything, not even necessitating a difference in animation or image. Hell, I loved Baldur's Gate 2 and the characters in that literally didn't even have alternate finale slides. It was as simple as getting an extra blurb about them if they were in your final party, Enhanced Edition characters excluded.

But when I finish the Outer Worlds, having taken a year long hiatus on it halfway through, knowing the gameplay and basic structure is so influenced by New Vegas I haven't even bothered to go into detail on it on a mechanical sense. I hit that slideshow, I know that there are so many what if's, but at the exact same moment. The game goes so light on details, that it does.... something. It's hard to describe.

I first got the feeling playing Dragon Age back in the day. I hit the end, got to talk to everybody and see how the characters were responding to the new place they found themselves in. It had all these talks of epilogues and options to let your character agree or disagree to join them on their new adventure. But at the time, I knew it didn't. I knew that no matter what I said, everything was now set in stone, and it was all just set dressing for the imagination. Yet, it still mattered. I still made those choices with purpose and to this day I distinctly remember how I imagined my character went  in the aftermath. I had a good friend at the time who was disappointed by the lack of extensive epilogue, but made solace with the mental note that I believe they worded: "And after this game, my character had a big super epic quest with Sten in his homeland, but they couldn't afford to add that as DLC so we'll just pretend it's true."

Sure it has issues, why do you think Fallout is having such a big stink with possible retcons with the show. You need to keep the sequels seperated by a large enough margin so as not to tread on existing player choice, but if you don't acknowledge it you start to wonder why even bother making a sequel in the first place. Even save importing isn't a solution, Mass Effect 3 almost pulled it off but suddenly ran into it's own issues when it came to wrapping up the entire story. Meanwhile the individual quests are often loved by those who played it.

But I finish Outer Worlds, get a brief final boss and dialogue tree. And immediately I just appreciate all the closure on these characters I absolutely loved, the simplest "yes this ended well" or "yeah that ended about as you thought it was going to." Some hints of characters future plans and schemes. Even an acknowledgement in a manner that I don't actually know how the game figured it out, but I finished a quest in the perfect manner using an exploit, and despite clearly triggering other quest progression it still gave the perfect ending to me. (At least, perfect in my eyes)

Now I'm sitting here, thinking about this epic space adventure, everyone I met along the way, questlines and choices I forgot about. It doesn't matter how many options there actually are for these slideshows, it doesn't matter that it's "tell don't show" and kind of tacky as an ending where are they now sort of thing. What does matter is that suddenly finishing this game, more than ever in the entire ending sequence, feels like the finale to a truly epic journey.

I don't care how many of these sorts of endings I see in my time playing RPGs, I never want that feeling to end. And to be honest? I'm genuinely not sure it will. Since by rights, I've already seen enough of these for it to be so cliche, that I spent my entire Outer Worlds review talking about it.

Oh, right, review. Uh, did you play New Vegas? No?... Go play New Vegas. Good, now. Do you want more New Vegas? No because you just played 100+ hours of it? You know what that's fair. But give it a year or more and I'll bet that urge will come right back for ya. When it does, Outer Worlds is an instant recommend. Cause in the ever lovely words of Yahtzee Croshaw: It's just the New Vegas Sequel with a finger under it's nose going "I can't be a Fallout game, Fallout doesn't have a mustache!"

You've tried the best, now try the rest. Spacer's Choice!

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