narrative frustrations, various, Part 2: The Outer Worlds

[freckles_and_doubt]

The Outer Worlds is a first-person sci fi rpg, kinda what you'd get if you did a mash-up of Mass Effect (particularly Andromeda) with Firefly and had the results infused with something of the bleak post-captitalist sensibilities of Blade Runner and Fallout. With particular emphasis on the Fallout, because (a) black humour is very black, and (b) those nihilistic sods at Obsidian made it, and they did New Vegas.

Outer Worlds is another beautifully made thing, stunning worlds and visuals, good gameplay design, interesting political threads running through the whole thing, and character and companion options almost Bioware-level. The Firefly-style ship that's your home base is particularly nicely done, with a sarky AI who clearly shares code with Portal's GLaDOS. The setting is similarly frontierish, although a far more developed frontier than Firefly posits: mostly, it's an outer-space version of the Fallout dark-capitalism-gone-wild ethos, where giant corporations have settled this corner of space with the intent of Making Money out of it, and out of its hapless inhabitants. This has, of course, Gone Wrong, so it's failed/decaying capitalism still trying desperately to wring money out of things.

The planets themselves are often beautiful, full of weird and dangerous creatures, and spectacular vistas and skyscapes.



The worldbuilding is interesting: the way that people try to live in the post-capitalist hellscape, and the various resistances and escapes they devise, are well imagined. The capitalist hellscape part is often blackly funny, when it's not appropriately maddening or horrifying. And the very early intro to the black humour, apart from the poor cannon-fodder dweeb tiredly reciting corporate slogans, is a beautiful re-enactment of the glee I felt during this moment, it made me laugh in a way that forces me to realise I am occasionally not actually a good person.

But. There's a but here, could you feel it coming? I haven't finished the game: I stopped after failing the final boss battle a couple of times, because I was so bloody annoyed that it was the final boss-battle that I didn't feel sufficient impetus to power on through. Thing is, the worldbuilding is so rich, and the potential so vast, the main experience of the bulk of the gameplay is almost expectant: you want to see where all this goes. And the answer is, apparently, nowhere. You are perpetually starting up plotlines and implications which desperately want to be followed, and aren't. And I don't think it's just because I missed bits: I had recourse to walkthroughs in sheer frustration, and nope, that's all she wrote. I said to jo&stv at the time that it felt like a very specific brand of bad sex, where the partner is flashily into really good foreplay that builds and builds until suddenly they roll over and ask if it was good for you while you're still hanging there, unsatisfied. There really isn't anything the game could do with that bloody boss battle and its outcomes which would address that sense of anticlimax.

I don't, in short, enjoy the feeling that a game is a setup for sequels. It's what maddened me with the second Dragon Age the first couple of times I played it, and however much DA2's value was proven only by Inquisition, it's still a more satisfying play for me than Outer Worlds was. Which sad, because it's a rich and entertaining thing they almost finished building.