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Larger doesn't necessarily mean improved. It's an old adage, but it's also the truest way to describe my impressions after spending 50 hours with The Outer Worlds 2. Developer Obsidian added more of everything to the follow-up to its 2019's sci-fi RPG — increased comedy, adversaries, arms, characteristics, and settings, everything that matters in such adventures. And it operates excellently — initially. But the weight of all those ambitious ideas leads to instability as the game progresses.

A Powerful First Impression

The Outer Worlds 2 establishes a solid opening statement. You are part of the Planetary Directorate, a altruistic agency dedicated to restraining unscrupulous regimes and businesses. After some serious turmoil, you end up in the Arcadia sector, a settlement splintered by conflict between Auntie's Selection (the outcome of a combination between the first game's two major companies), the Protectorate (collectivism pushed to its most dire end), and the Ascendant Brotherhood (similar to the Catholic faith, but with math in place of Jesus). There are also a series of tears causing breaches in space and time, but currently, you urgently require reach a transmission center for urgent communications reasons. The challenge is that it's in the heart of a combat area, and you need to determine how to reach it.

Similar to the first game, Outer Worlds 2 is a FPS adventure with an central plot and dozens of optional missions distributed across multiple locations or regions (big areas with a lot to uncover, but not open-world).

The initial area and the task of getting to that comms station are spectacular. You've got some goofy encounters, of course, like one that features a rancher who has overindulged sugary cereal to their preferred crab. Most lead you to something useful, though — an unforeseen passage or some additional intelligence that might open a different path onward.

Notable Moments and Missed Opportunities

In one notable incident, you can find a Guardian defector near the viaduct who's about to be eliminated. No quest is tied to it, and the only way to locate it is by exploring and paying attention to the ambient dialogue. If you're swift and sufficiently cautious not to let him get slain, you can save him (and then rescue his defector partner from getting slain by creatures in their refuge later), but more relevant to the current objective is a electrical conduit hidden in the foliage in the vicinity. If you follow it, you'll locate a secret entry to the communication hub. There's a different access point to the station's sewers tucked away in a cavern that you might or might not detect depending on when you undertake a particular ally mission. You can find an simple to miss individual who's essential to preserving a life 20 hours later. (And there's a stuffed animal who implicitly sways a team of fighters to support you, if you're considerate enough to save it from a explosive area.) This initial segment is rich and engaging, and it seems like it's overflowing with deep narrative possibilities that rewards you for your curiosity.

Waning Expectations

Outer Worlds 2 never lives up to those opening anticipations again. The second main area is structured like a location in the initial title or Avowed — a large region scattered with points of interest and side quests. They're all story-appropriate to the conflict between Auntie's Option and the Ascendant Brotherhood, but they're also vignettes detached from the primary plot narratively and location-wise. Don't expect any contextual hints leading you to alternative options like in the initial area.

In spite of forcing you to make some difficult choices, what you do in this region's secondary tasks has no impact. Like, it genuinely is irrelevant, to the point where whether you permit atrocities or guide a band of survivors to their end leads to nothing but a casual remark or two of conversation. A game isn't required to let all tasks affect the story in some big, dramatic fashion, but if you're forcing me to decide a group and giving the impression that my selection matters, I don't think it's irrational to hope for something more when it's over. When the game's earlier revealed that it has greater potential, any diminishment appears to be a compromise. You get additional content like Obsidian promised, but at the expense of complexity.

Bold Ideas and Missing Tension

The game's middle section attempts a comparable approach to the main setup from the initial world, but with distinctly reduced style. The concept is a courageous one: an related objective that extends across multiple worlds and encourages you to seek aid from assorted alliances if you want a more straightforward journey toward your objective. Aside from the recurring structure being a somewhat tedious, it's also just missing the drama that this kind of scenario should have. It's a "pact with the devil" moment. There should be hard concessions. Your association with each alliance should be important beyond making them like you by completing additional missions for them. All of this is lacking, because you can merely power through on your own and clear the objective anyway. The game even makes an effort to hand you methods of accomplishing this, highlighting alternate routes as secondary goals and having allies inform you where to go.

It's a side effect of a wider concern in Outer Worlds 2: the anxiety of letting you be unhappy with your choices. It regularly overcompensates in its attempts to ensure not only that there's an different way in frequent instances, but that you are aware of it. Locked rooms practically always have multiple entry methods indicated, or nothing valuable within if they do not. If you {can't