The Outer Worlds 2 Made Me Feel Dumb—And I Need More of It…

With The Outer Worlds 2 dropping on October 29, Obsidian Entertainment is releasing its third game this year after Avowed and Grounded 2 (in Early Access). Obsidian has always excelled in narrative-driven compact RPGs, offering something easy to digest in a world where it seems like open-world AAA RPGs are everywhere. And while it has experimented outside that formula a time or two, it's clear that's where its specialty lies.

Courtesy of Microsoft, I've played the prologue of The Outer Worlds 2 three times now. I typically find prologues hard to judge because they tend to be little more than essential onboarding for players, and I get that, despite whatever grievances I may have. Coming out of The Outer Worlds 2, though, I had no real grievances and am looking forward to actually playing the prologue again come release. I always enjoy seeing all the available paths in a game, and to my surprise, this prologue had quite a few. I could have kept playing to discover these, but I do want to save a few directions for launch. Even the menu is pretty fun, but I'll leave that for players to discover for themselves.

One of my favorite things about an RPG is when the dialogue options magically line up with what I'm thinking, and there was a big story moment where this happened. I thought it as the NPC spoke, it popped up in my dialogue options, I gasped out of excitement, and there it was—marked with my Dumb trait dialogue. Which. Well.

Character Creation is Fun

The Outer Worlds 2 is not going to make a play for the best character creator in an RPG ever, but it's more than serviceable. The oddest part of it (in my opinion) is how moles and mole placement get their own slider, while a lot of other facial features (scars, burns, bags under eyes, etc.) Are dumped into a single one. Otherwise, there are plenty of slides and options for everything from hair options to backgrounds. On my first character, I found myself flicking through all the available options until I came upon the single greatest hairdo to ever manifest in a video game: the mullet. And thus, DurtE—my first Outer Worlds 2 character, who notably could not spell "dirty"—was born.

Near the end of character creation, players can either choose one positive trait OR take two positive traits with a negative one. I love the unfortunate consequences of my own actions, so I chose the Dumb negative trait for DurtE, of course, because I intended to Joe Dirt my way through The Outer Worlds 2's Arcadia galaxy. One of my positive traits was being persuasive, so I could just dumbly talk my way through stuff, and I just now realized I made a himbo. I chose the Gambler background for him and joked to myself that he'd say "Never tell me the odds," simply because he would not understand the odds.

My second character had the Professor background and was dedicated to the Earth Directorate, while DurtE was just there more or less. She had the Sickly trait, which made her a little more fragile in combat, and that was not a smart choice given that I played aggressively with her. My third was an Ex-Convict who was as anti-Earth Directorate as a Commander of the Earth Directorate could be, and he was appropriately abrasive. I also chose to play on Very Hard with my Ex-Convict to see how that changed the gameplay. With characters locked in, it was time to delve into the prologue proper.

No Backup was Coming - Story Impressions

The cinematic cutscenes of The Outer Worlds 2 were quite impressive and nothing like I expected, yet they fit the retro sci-fi stylization of gameplay quite well. Players are treated to a cinematic of the Earth Directorate that promises to protect everyone from corrupt governments, evil megacorporations, and corrupt governments teaming up with evil megacorporations*. I would soon learn that my team and I arrived in Arcadia on an important mission around Skip Drives, the tyrannical Protectorate (which act under very strict rules, threat of re-education, and are very nationalistic) ((galacticistic?)), and rifts in time/space. The problem? We were meeting up with Forward Agent DeVries, but otherwise had no support on this mission.

*NOTE: The Earth Directorate's response time is 6 months - 10 years, which was probably the most realistic aspect of the organization.

While there were some obvious tutorial markers once I was playing The Outer Worlds 2, they passed super quickly, and I found myself infiltrating a Protectorate Space Station. I did get the chance to meet two of The Outer Worlds 2's companions, the Earth Directorate agent Niles and the automech support drone Valerie, and see my skills come into play quite early. For example, two of my characters were able to get through a certain door. DurtE? He doesn't know how doors work, so he had to go in through a vent. There were also tutorial mission pop-ups, but by and large, The Outer Worlds 2 gets players straight to the gameplay with minimal handholding.

Early on, we were given the option of convincing a Protectorate Agent that we were allies to shut down the Space Station's automech defenses. DurtE managed to sweet-talk his way through; my professor didn't even complete this option, jumping straight into the fight; and my ex-convict was a bit too abrasive to convince the agent of the shutdown, all of which did slightly matter a little later in the prologue. Noticeably, there were a couple of chances for each of my characters to lean into their traits or background, which was really fun. For example, there was a chalkboard that DurtE couldn't understand, but my professor understood it all.

As we made our way through the space station, there were a few surprises and another choice or two that were before us, but I'll spare you the spoilery details. Suffice to say, I saw little of Niles and Valerie, but every encounter with them had some interesting and fun options. And, of course, DurtE being dumb was a highlight of my time with The Outer Worlds 2. One of my favorite things about an RPG is when the dialogue options magically line up with what I'm thinking, and there was a big story moment where this happened. I thought it as the NPC spoke, it popped up in my dialogue options, I gasped out of excitement, and there it was—marked with my Dumb trait dialogue. Which. Well. The Outer Worlds 2 took me down by a few pegs, as it does everything it satirizes, but I am afraid I will never recover from this burn. What's worse? I'm going to give it more chances to do so when I return on release day, Dumb Mullet Himbo remade. The fact that my roleplay options swung from one extreme to the other, all while giving me incredible moments like this in its prologue, has me really excited to see what the full game does.

Just A Case of the Mondays...

The Gameplay Had Options

Overall, The Outer Worlds 2's gameplay isn't exactly revolutionary. Across my playthroughs, depending on some choices, I began with a pistol and could later get a shock rod, a knife, or a repeating rifle. I could slow down time with the returning Tactical Time Dilation feature and could heal up when my inhaler had meds for it. I did not get to experience how the companions work, and there was obviously a lot of room for the gameplay to grow. Again, I was in the tutorial, but it doesn't try to fix something that isn't broken—and for that, I am grateful.

Where it did shine was in my possible avenues, even in this tutorial. There were story-related choices that impacted gameplay, including one diverging path, but there was also a lot of nooks and crannies beyond that. Because DurtE had good observation, he saw a few out-of-left-field vents and paths that my other characters couldn't access. My professor went in guns blazing, and it differed entirely from DurtE who talked through everything he could. And of course, my ex-convict had to take everything slowly because the enemies were more challenging thanks to the difficulty spike. With each of my characters, I managed to find different paths and avenues that made each playthrough feel distinct. It was probably more like 2.5x different approaches than 3 full-on different approaches, but that's not even the impressive part. There were at least 2-3 different areas I came across, but could not access, because none of my characters fit the requirements. I obviously can't say that they offered unique paths or avenues through the area, but at least one of them had the potential to do so. That has me really excited for the full experience.

On my Very Hard playthrough, I had to be more tactical and pick my fights more so than I did with DurtE or my professor. It can probably be simplified to enemies becoming more like bullet sponges, but it still impacted the way I had to interact with the various combat encounters. On Normal with DurtE and my professor, it probably took 2-3 shots to kill most enemies. In the case of The Outer Worlds 2's hardest available difficulty, I had to get the jump on everyone and essentially magdump them to get the kill. But this made me lean more into its serviceable stealth options instead of just brute-forcing my way through. It doesn't reinvent the wheel, but it sure does know how to make a spinning wheel fun.

The Outer Worlds 2 is a Lot of Fun

If we boil down my first impression into something simple, it would be that The Outer Worlds 2 is a lot of fun out of the gate, has some really fun story and gameplay options, and otherwise feels like the continued excellence of Obsidian Entertainment at its finest. It has put out several great games over the years, with some of my favorites including KOTOR 2, Fallout: New Vegas, South Park: The Stick of Truth, Pillars of Eternity 1+2, Grounded, and Pentiment—and I foresee myself adding The Outer Worlds 2 to that list if it keeps the trajectory I saw in its prologue.

The Best War Games received a Steam code from Microsoft for the purposes of this preview. The Outer Worlds 2 releases on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X on October 29.

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