The Outer Worlds Has Two Advantages Over Starfield

And I hope the sequel can lean into them

This remaster has received some great patches since it launched earlier this year. Xbox Series S screenshot taken by the author.

The release of Starfield killed my personal hype for The Outer Worlds 2 — even though Obsidian’s 2019 original is still one of my favorite games. Bethesda’s new game is cut from a similar cloth, with both games leaning heavily on the design lessons of past first-person open world RPGs made by each company. Both development studios are now also owned by Microsoft, meaning that there’s only so much room in their portfolio for space games about shooting things and getting loot.

The Outer Worlds 2 is still a way off from launch, so there’s time for me to build excitement again — but man. Bethesda really took some of the same fundamental concepts and ran much further down the proverbial road with them thanks to the magic of money. Starfield has more scope, more mechanical complexity, more loot, and even has an excellent implementation of the jetpack concept from Outer Worlds 2’s wonderful ancient teaser trailer.

How then do you market a sequel to the smaller budget Outer Worlds when your sister studio has come in and dropped one of the largest, coolest RPGs of all time? Perhaps by playing into Obsidian’s strengths! Their games are some of the best examples of the RPG genre ever made, even in the face of this new essentially endless behemoth of a…