• Tag Archives Outer Worlds
  • the Outer Worlds: PERIL on GORGON

    The Outer Worlds‘ first major DLC offering, Peril on Gorgon, adds quite a bit of content to the game. Practically equivalent to the amount you find on Monarch.

    There is however a catch: Only the environments and quests/flavor text is new. The weapons and enemies you’ll find over the course of the DLC are (essentially) the same as those in the base game. Meaning it’s more of the same.

    That in and of itself isn’t necessarily a problem if you greatly enjoy the core experience (here shifted a bit more toward Bioshock thanks to the introduction of audiologs), but it ends up dampened by some technical issues. Parts of the DLC feel unfinished… as though a final QC pass or playtesting session was skipped. Relatively minor things like the club added to Terra 2 not having the loot flagged as theft, enemies on Gorgon respawning quite often, and some of the main quest dialog not being responsive to sequence breaks all stand out.

    And while exploring Gorgon itself something just felt missing/off…. As though I were walking through a setpiece, or like the companions were unnaturally silent or something. I can’t quite pinpoint it.

    Anyway, is the DLC worth the money? Absolutely. So long as, again, you don’t mind getting a whole lot more of what the base game already provides.


  • the Outer Worlds

    A combination of New Vegas and Bioshock with a No Man’s Sky aesthetic, this game takes place in a hellish corporation-first reality quite similar to our own.

    While shorter than it looks based on the navigation map (you’ll spend the vast majority of your time on Terra 2 and Monarch), there’s plenty of stuff to do (despite missing the entire Roseway section I still managed to hit max level at the start of the last area) and quests to complete. Quests which are good at giving choices (you can play as a savior, a money-hungry mercenary, a corporate bootlicker, or any combination thereof), with even combat-centric ones often being accomplishable through stealth.

    There’s not much reason to skip the combat though. It’s pretty fluid with a more active iteration of the VATS system, only really stumbling when it comes to dodging… which is not implemented well at all. The companions are also pretty good at killing things while not suiciding themselves.

    The loot situation is a definite low point however, bogged-down as it is with innumerable junk items/consumables and tied to an equipment degradation system. See, you have repair your equipment (fairly often) with parts acquired from breaking down equipment. This leads to finding a massive number of generic guns laying around which clog up your inventory until you take the time to manually break them down; they should’ve just increased the durability rather than flooding areas with dreck. The ‘unique’ items aren’t very exciting either.

    All-in-all a perfectly fine RPG worth checking out if you’re a fan of Bioshock-like messaging or/and happen to see it on sale for $20 or so.