The Outer Worlds was Obsidian's gutsy attempt at a spiritual successor to its lauded work on Fallout, but the game couldn't completely hide the developer's roots. The spacefaring retro-future was recognizable as a continuation of Obsidian's earlier game, though it had enough of a distinct setting and its own gameplay systems to feel fresh. The Outer Worlds 2 builds on that sturdy foundation, and while it's largely more of the same, it is also a confident and expansive sequel that suggests a bright future for The Outer Worlds as an ongoing series.
In Outer Worlds 2, you play as "the Commander." Whereas the first game had you play as a random colonist, this new role inherently imbues you with more authority as an Earth Directorate agent. In short, you're a fixer, dispatched to the Arcadia region that's being ripped apart by a factional war, corporate takeovers, and the emergence of rifts that have been cutting the colony off from communications with Earth. From the very beginning, you have your badge and gun, so to speak, along with your own fledgling crew and a spaceship base of operations called the Incognito. Of course, your very first mission goes terribly wrong (as these things tend to) and when you regain consciousness some time later, you set out to find the persons responsible for the botched mission, while also investigating the increasingly dire rift problem. Without getting into spoilers, it's a strong opening that propels the story forward with momentum and mystery.
When you're creating your Commander, you can select a number of different backgrounds like a disgraced gambler, a disgraced professor, a disgraced freelancer, or an ex-convict. You get the sense that most people become agents in the space FBI for lack of other options, except for the Lawbringer background, which is pure and straightforward Lawful Good. I chose Roustabout, which is a friendly way of saying "disgraced idiot."
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