The Outer Worlds is one of those Obsidian RPGs in the style studios like it and Bioware make like nobody else and for that reason alone, it was an easy sell to me. I even looked past the fact that unlike many of those type of RPGs, there was no “romance” option for the player character; not a huge loss, they can be kind of corny and forced anyway.

But I was also drawn to the politics of TOW. To come out of the US, it stands out as a game that sharply mocks corporate shenanigans and even gives a sliver of light to the perception of alternatives. Though it doesn’t explicitly name capitalism or communism, you can still play it for some mild catharsis on the subject, especially if you’re new to “left” politics.

So, it’s a good game overall. But I wanted to go back now that it’s been some years since I first played it, and since I replayed it recently and felt somewhat differently, or more sharply, about how it presents things.

This will contain spoilers! Ye have been warned.

spoiler

From the start, the player character (PC) is written more like a mercenary than anything else. You have the options at times to try to be more ethical or pacifistic about it, but nevertheless, you’re basically a hired gun, who in RPG fashion, grows in power level far beyond that of a normal human. And as a result, you can have a far greater impact on things than any one person should be able to have.

Already, this is fundamentally at odds with revolutionary messaging. A power fantasy merc is not a RL thing and has little or nothing to do with liberation. And, in fact, the first major objective is getting a power regulator for the ship you wound up with, so it can fly properly. This means taking a power regulator from one of two areas people are already living in. Yikes? Of course, we can’t have an RPG like this and force you to be a selfish baddie, so it lets you resolve this more ore less “peacefully” if you want. Since one area is deserters, you can effectively make the deserters go back or make the deserter place the new town, and even resolve some tensions between the two in the process. All because one person needs a ship. But it’s for a good cause! You need a working ship in order to properly work with somebody who is trying to save the Halycon solar system or whatever (you don’t actually have to side with him in the end though - you can be a selfish merc all the way through).

From here, it goes in… various directions. You get to help an independent orbital station with some problems (it’s trying to maintain its independence from the corporate Board - the big bads of the game).

Then you need a navkey thingy to land on a particular planet, which sends you chasing after a potentially lucrative opportunity, so you can sell what you find to a fence, who can then sell you the navkey. This whole part is merc merc merc and you can also guilt a selfish scientist if you want to, one who is obsessed with climbing his way up the ladder but seems to have a conscience about it too.

Now you have the navkey, finally you get to the most revolution-coded place in the game. There’s a divide between a painfully naive and laughably short-sighted corporate leader who wants to “reform the board from within” (and I mean the game portrays him as naive, not just my political analysis). And an ideologue leader of an anarchist-ish splinter group who goes their own way and opposes the corporate Board.

This anarchist-ish group is co-led by another leader and immediately you see the tension between them. Main leader is pointlessly callous for no apparent reason (like caring about a printing press over people) and co-leader is more compassionate (prioritizes medicine and such). This culminates in a side quest reveal that main leader was complicit in the slaughter of some corporate people some time back (along with, gasp, their families and random workers who happened to be there). From here, you can choose to depose callous leader and replace him with compassionate leader.

Then go to war with naive corporate leader there, who has been escalating tensions as time goes on. Or try to work it out and do joint power.

Anyway, this is the part of the game I remember having the highest opinion of originally, but in retrospect, I think it’s pretty shoddy. The drama surrounding the leader of the anarchist-ish group is pretty contrived and reeks of “socialism leads to something something bad and corrupted leader” mentality.

In other words, the closest thing to a group of revolutionaries has a suped up merc solving their problems and possibly helping out with a coup. Very CIA-coded. Ideologically it’s… okay. It’s not like it’s having you side with the Board to do it. But the framework is still there.

From here, there’s a relatively brief rich people city part of the game with some good mocking humor of how out of touch and dysfunctional they are.

And when it comes down to it, depending on the path you took, you can side with the Board, or with Phineas, who is trying to save the colony without being a complete psychopath about it. The ending blurb that talks about the consequences of things feels very great man theory, as does Phineas’s plan in general; he wants to bring “top minds” (like scientists and such) out of stasis to figure out how to save the starving colony.

Overall, it’s a fun enough game, but it falls far short of actual revolutionary messaging in my view. It is largely anti-corporate without even being explicitly anti-capitalist. It’s kind of like Cyberpunk 2077 that way, though The Outer Worlds at least has an ending that is approximating liberation from capitalism, even if it doesn’t say it in those words. Still, the fact that you get there by being a “great man” merc-like figure who shapes the world around you may be more of a joke than any of the purposeful jokes written into the game.