The Outer Worlds 2 Review – Better Than New Vegas?

The Outer Worlds 2 is a clear upgrade over the original, and even learns from the mistakes of Avowed, but can Obsidian finally top their best-known RPG, the classic Fallout: New Vegas?

The concept for The Outer Worlds 2 seems very generic and simple on paper: take The Outer Worlds 1 and expand it. Make it bigger, make it prettier to look at, make the tone even more “Outer Worldsy.” I think Obsidian has done all of those things here in The Outer Worlds 2, but also a lot more, because they’ve been doing this for a while now. There’s a direct progression for this studio now, beginning with The Outer Worlds, releasing Avowed just a few months ago, and now The Outer Worlds 2, with each game getting bigger and better and more refined along the way.

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Character Creation – Locking You In

Character Creation in The Outer Worlds 2 is not particularly interesting from a visual perspective. You’ll create your Commander with the usual array of features: hair, beards, tattoos, piercings. Surprisingly though, you can also customize a set of robotic limbs for yourself, which doesn’t have any story significance that I can tell, but it does play well into the aesthetics of the worlds where several characters you meet—and even your own party’s companions—have robotic or grafted limbs as part of their backstories. We’ll talk more about companions later.

But the real shining star of Character Creation here in The Outer Worlds 2 is the choices you make in terms of Backgrounds and Traits. Backgrounds give your character, well, a background obviously. It’s essentially your origin story in brief, describing what you did before you became a member of the Earth Directorate, which is your current position.

Some background options include the Lawbringer, described as a champion of the people (whether they like it or not), and a Professor who specialized in Archaeology with a high rate of success for finding artifacts. Your background will have limited impact on your playthrough, turning into a handful of speech checks and serving more as headcanon to your own personal history – which is not a bad thing.

What’s more impactful, however, is your selection of starting traits. Here you can select a positive trait to start off with, including options like Brilliant for an early skill point boost, Nimble for increased combat sprint speed, or Suave for a discount with all vendors. These traits have a real impact on your playthrough, so you do want to think about these before moving on.

What I love here is that you can actually choose a second positive trait if you want to, but doing so will force you to also pick a negative trait. Negative traits include Dumb, which reduces the amount of skills you can level up; Sickly, which reduces your base health; and Abrasive, which limits your possible progression with all factions. By choosing two positive and one negative trait, along with your background, you’ve really fleshed out a complete starting character here with an origin and specific set of pros and cons which feels quite nice.

Skills are also a big deal in The Outer Worlds 2, with 12 options in total allowing you to improve your build even further in specific areas such as guns, melee, sneak, speech, engineering, lockpick, and more. I really appreciate the updates they made here to skills over the original game, specifically combining some categories into one such as guns, but also that all skills have primary and secondary bonuses which can improve your build further beyond the basics of what that skill would do.

For example, Speech obviously gives you better dialogue choices but also improves your damage versus human targets. Engineering lets you tinker with things and unlock mechanical doors as its primary purpose but also increases your damage versus mechanical enemies. This adds yet another layer of depth and complexity to character design and builds, which I really appreciated.

The biggest thing about character creation, though, and what Obsidian has leaned into heavily, is that once you create your character and move beyond the tutorial, your choices are permanent. As someone who typically likes to tinker a lot with builds and stats in my video games, this initially seemed like a downside to me, but after a while, I came to like the permanence of my Commander, as I felt more committed to my play through and the path I chose.

Expanding the Universe

After you complete that short introduction mission to the game and are offered your one and only chance to respec your character in The Outer Worlds 2, you’ll be taken to your first planet to explore—a world called Eden. Stepping out from your ship and setting foot on the ground, you’ll finally get a real idea of the sheer scope of the game’s size in comparison to the original.

This first planet, Eden, is quite large—especially when you compare it to the start of the original Outer Worlds game, which felt much more limited and on rails as it were. Obsidian has fully pulled back the rails here, expanding in 360 degrees to give us a massive playable space, just in the first area alone.

I was quickly sprinting through jungles, climbing and mantling onto cliff sides, and exploring every nook and cranny, letting my loot goblin tendencies go fully unhinged. Honestly, I was not expecting the sheer scope and size here, and this is one of the biggest differences between the sequel and the original.

If you played the original and thought it was too small or too limited, I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised here. And Eden is just one of a half dozen huge locations that you can map out. All told, I’d say I spent at least 10 hours alone on this starting planet before progressing to the next planet through the main story, fully seeing everything there was to see—including multiple proper cities, huge cave systems, and many, many secrets.

In particular, I was glad to see that the verticality that we saw Obsidian really start to develop in Avowed was back here. Without spoilers, there is an entire side quest mission on Eden where the whole point of the mission is to climb to the top of a mountain peak, which requires plenty of mantling and precise sprint-jumping. If you played Avowed, one of the best aspects of that game, in my opinion, was the exploration piece and uncovering hidden loot. The Outer Worlds 2 has that same feeling too, which I was very happy to find.

Factions and Story

The other standout feature for me in The Outer Worlds 2, in addition to the amazing exploration and world size, is of course the game’s story, characters, and factions. Obsidian is well known for their story-driven RPGs, and The Outer Worlds 2 puts those skills on full display. The story is meaty enough on its own but also accounts for a pretty small portion of what you can actually do in the game in terms of side quests, faction quests, and companion quests.

If you liked the juxtaposition of sarcasm and corporatist vibes from the first game, The Outer Worlds 2 definitely expands on that language, especially through its faction system.

I actually loved the factions in this game, and it’s one of my favorite parts of the game, which was surprising to me. In my opinion, the factions in The Outer Worlds 2 are some of the best designed, most complete factions I have seen in a first-person RPG like this. It’s clear to me that so much time, care, and precision went into designing the three main factions of The Outer Worlds 2, beyond just visual design (which is fantastic), but also culturally, each faction is different, down to the specific words they use, leadership structures, even food and weapons.

Everything is specifically tied to faction in this game. And even one of my favorite perks in the game, Brand Enthusiast, rewards you for using all your gear tied to one specific faction. It’s honestly incredible the level of detail here, which probably not everyone will care about or appreciate – but I do. Obsidian nailed it.

I love how different each faction is, and there really is no “good” faction here other than your starting faction, the Earth Directorate, but even they might have a few secrets hidden and shades of gray.

Auntie’s Choice has this sort of amalgam of corporate greed with spacer/scrapper vibes, cobbling together different pieces of tech to make a mishmash of something just to survive in space. Then you have the Protectorate, a hardcore military faction with this sort of divine-rights belief that they are the only ones good enough to control the universe. Finally, you have the Order, which has their own religion based on mathematical calculations and an obsession with predicting future events.

Each faction feels distinct, with its own aesthetic, tone, and philosophy, and I fully intend to explore all of them in future play throughs.

Companions

Companions are another system that Obsidian has worked hard to level up in The Outer Worlds 2 versus the original and even previous titles like Avowed and New Vegas. The companion system here is deep, both in terms of emotional connections and companion missions, and also customization and combat style.

In total there are six unique companions, each with backstories and faction ties. Companions can leave you at any time for multiple reasons – if you don’t side with them, or if you attack someone from their faction. You don’t have to use them, but you should, because their quests are great and their combat abilities make a real difference.

Each companion has a focus (DPS, crowd control, healing, or tanking), and with up to two companions on your team plus yourself, you can develop some really strong team synergies. For example, Niles can taunt enemies from range, while Inez, your combat medic, throws med packs.

Companions can gain new abilities every five levels up to level 30, and their gear can be upgraded through mod packs found in the world. These upgrades also change their visual appearance over time, which is a nice touch.

While I wish the upgrade system had more options, Obsidian nailed the personalities and balance of the companions overall. Combining companion abilities with your own to form a strong team is one of the most fun parts of The Outer Worlds 2.

Combat Upgrades

Combat is another area where The Outer Worlds 2 really shines. The amount of weapon and armor variety has increased significantly versus the original, but more importantly, weapons just feel better. Obsidian reportedly worked with former Halo developers to improve combat feel, and it shows – every weapon feels weighty and responsive.

From pistols to rifles to blades, everything hits hard and feels good to use. I played a pistol-wielding gunslinger my first time through, eventually transitioning to a unique sniper rifle I obtained from one of the game’s factions, which completely changed my combat approach. You can now check out our full Builds List too!

That said, melee builds can feel disadvantaged in open spaces due to snipers and heavy gunners, so I’d recommend a mix of pistol for medium range and sniper rifle for long range if you’re new to the series.

Performance and Criticism

Performance was excellent throughout my 60-hour playthrough on PC. I had only one crash (pre-review patch), and loading times were nearly instant once in-game. You’ll only see load screens when traveling between planets or major structures such as indoor factories or bases.

I did encounter a few small bugs like a few missing voiceover lines and an annoying map issue where quest markers overlapped fast travel points, but nothing game-breaking. The one thing I’d improve is faster interplanetary travel; currently there are too many steps between the ship and surface maps. A simple “Travel to Ship” hotkey would fix it.

Otherwise, the game is smooth and technically impressive.

Obsidian Living Up To Their Past

To wrap things up, let’s talk about Obsidian as a studio and how they’ve evolved. Many players still compare every new Obsidian RPG to Fallout: New Vegas, but I think that’s unfair. New Vegas was lightning in a bottle, a product of its time.

The Outer Worlds 2 is the studio’s definitive answer to that criticism. Its scope is huge, its dialogue and systems are deep, and its world and faction design are top-tier. Backed by Microsoft, Obsidian has finally achieved a modern vision of a truly interactive, choice-driven RPG in a beautiful first-person setting.

It took three games to get here, The Outer Worlds, Avowed, and now The Outer Worlds 2, but it was well worth the wait. Barring any huge technical issues on consoles, this might be their best-received RPG yet. Hopefully, the DLCs will match this quality too, because there’s so much more they can do here.

It’s going to be hard for them to top this game – but I can’t wait to see where they go from here. Until then, I’ve got more exploring to do.