Obsidian Entertainment is a name that RPG fans are very familiar with, with the studio being responsible for iconic releases from Fallout: New Vegas to Pillars of Eternity. It has definitely been a busy year for the Microsoft-owned studio. So far in 2025, the studio has released Avowed and Grounded 2. And now, somehow sticking to all its release targets, Obsidian has brought out The Outer Worlds 2.
The 2019-released The Outer Worlds was Obsidian’s first first-person RPG to come out since Fallout: New Vegas in 2010. The relatively short sci-fi RPG went for a humor-filled story set in a megacorporation-owned star system. Despite its smaller scope and rather meh combat, I enjoyed my time with the interesting companions, fun quests, and ample amount of satire. Now, with Microsoft by its side, Obsidian is back with a sequel that’s promising everything to be bigger and better, and with several dozen hours now under my belt, I can definitely say that it has delivered on that. As for whether that has translated into a better game, you’ll have to read on to find out.
New system, same universe
Gone are the days of randomly stumbling into being a captain of a space vessel, a la the original RPG. The sequel is set up in a new corner of the same hyper-consumer galaxy, but this time as an official agent of the Earth Directorate, a faction that is supposed to be the voice of Earth in human colonies in distant systems. Arcadia is the new playground, and a fantastic intro sequence that serves as a tutorial, quickly gets me hooked into this mildly absurd universe.
Despite the multitude of face, hair, body, and other customization options, the appearance part of character creation goes by fast. Third-person perspective is an option this time, but loot-hunting and first-person shooting are more my thing. The real meat of any RPG is in the aspects we can choose to shape the protagonist, and The Outer Worlds 2 does not disappoint here. Backgrounds, Traits, and Skills all come together to make my own prospective hero that could probably save the day by saying the right things if he’s lucky.
Usually in RPGs, if I choose to go with a character build that’s not focused on beating speech and hack checks, I feel like I lose out on a lot of content and ‘good endings’ that are just out of reach. The Outer Worlds 2 is where I felt that same stab, even while playing a character that could talk his way out of anything.
I came across jammed doors that needed strength or engineering, peculiar mixing machines requiring medicine or science knowledge, and plenty of questlines that wanted bizarre skill checks to have a more delicate ending. For the most part, there were still multitudes of ways to get inside locked buildings or find solutions to quests, but I think this is one of those rare RPGs where I could role-play as somebody or a nobody and still feel like the game didn’t forget about catering to my playstyle.
A certain catastrophe or two later, the wider world of the RPG quickly opens up, revealing the massive explorable areas that each planet receives in place of having a single connected map. It’s a good approach that fits in well with the space sci-fi nature of the title. I should say that I couldn’t connect with this zone system when Avowed used it, making the transitions jarring, but here, it feels more natural.
Setting the wildly important main questline aside for later, I dived headfirst into this system’s history and current happenings. War has decimated most of the livable areas here. Auntie's Choice is one of the biggest factions I quickly run into, a megacorporation that lives and dies by its consumerist rules and is easily the funniest of the bunch. Almost everyone, from its foot soldiers to its leaders, is obsessed with increasing profits, listening to advertisements for the latest food-adjacent snacks, and making up cutthroat schemes to rise through the ranks.
On the other end of this boxing ring is the Order of the Ascendant faction. Possibly one of the most unique groups I’ve faced in an RPG, these highly religious folks are attempting to find a grand equation that can solve the universe and get rid of its random possibilities, ultimately making the future predictable via math.
If you’re familiar with The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy’s Ultimate Question or Psychohistory from the Foundation, you should see where this is going. The ongoing war between the two factions is a major part of the RPG, one where I could help either side or not give a care about it. There are also multiple other groups involved in the solar system that are playing their own games while vying for power or simply making profits. To keep spoilers to a minimum, I won’t go into detail on these or the wider plotline.
However, not every person I meet in these conflicts is crazy or a warmonger. Through work, smooth talk, or straight-up blackmail, I was able to make individuals see how their company or belief system is failing to bring about peace. At the same time, I could also go full maniac and wipe out entire sides completely, a la Megaton, or have everyone hate me equally instead. There’s not much that the game doesn’t let you do.
Obsidian’s writing shines the most when there’s humor involved, making even random quests and interactions with minor NPCs memorable. I could be bargaining for a top hat as the reward, whilst the fate of an entire town hangs in the balance, and at the next moment, convincing a plumber to help perform surgery at a nearby refugee center. I have lost countless hours scouring the world just to talk to more people.
Immersive and Reactive
Thanks to having multiple planetary bodies and massive complexes, there are drastic changes between biomes and locales. There are black market smugglers working out of a dead husk of a space station, soldiers fighting out of bio-weapon poisoned trenches, gorgeous cave systems crawling with alien crabs, stretches of desert wastelands that have been sucked dry of resources, and so much more to explore.
Even 30 hours into the game, I was running into new companions and vital new gameplay abilities. This might be because I didn’t realize just how much time I was spending exploring every nook and cranny or talking to the dozens of NPCs I came across. Even still, the quality of writing and quests did not dip throughout all these hours. I cleaned up war crimes, bribed officials, helped with prison breaks, and solved countless mysteries while having a delightful time. All of this may sound standard for an RPG of this size, but it’s the Flaws system, returning from the original game, that adds some spice to the gameplay loop.
When the game detects I am doing something often or falling prey to some gameplay mechanic a little too much, it presents a choice: accept it as a flaw with negative and positive side effects or ignore it completely and keep going as usual.
As an example, since I like to sneak around a lot to assassinate or break into places, I was offered the Bad Knees Flaw. This involves making a horrid, and accurate, crunching noise when crouching, alerting people nearby, but also makes sneaking around much faster than usual. Another favorite involved my habit of reloading too much, which gave me increased magazine capacity but lower damage if I finished firing a magazine. Of course, it’s all optional, but who wouldn’t want to live on the edge a little?
As the space adventure continues, companions can slowly fill up the rooms of my small space vessel. Some are individuals who don’t have anywhere else to go, some have their own goals in life and want to use my resources to get there, and a few are just outright crazy. It’s a fun little mix, and I found myself switching around who I was taking into the wild often to match situations or factions I’d be facing.
They interject often into conversations with their opinions and sometimes propose new solutions that might be against the values of the original quest-giver, or even my own. My favorite companions, a Judge Dredd-type executioner and an undercover superspy old lady, were favorites because they were simply fun and immersive to be around. The duo would often banter in the background and comment on what’s happening with ongoing quests.
Speaking of immersion, one aspect that modern Fallout games utilize to great effect is the in-game radio. Trekking across giant wastelands on foot, ducking into random structures to find loot and looking through every drawer for an hour can be fine with background music, but with a radio, that suddenly became an hour of immersive gameplay that just slips by without a worry.
The Outer Worlds 2 radio doesn’t have a DJ or classic songs of that caliber, but it comes close. Custom-made jingles for various products of this universe, musical numbers, and announcements regarding current war efforts are just a few programs that run on the three primary stations.
Jingles about the bottom line being the most important and advertisements for food-adjacent snacks from a certain corporation had me stop combat just to listen in. Soothing gospels about how many digits are in Pi and the love letter to the Pythagoras theorem had me in stitches when I paid attention to the lyrics.
All this combines to make The Outer Worlds 2 an extremely immersive universe to melt into. However, I do recommend playing it on a lower difficulty, and that’s to keep the bullet sponginess to a minimum.
Combat and stealth as a whole is deeper than I thought it would be, with bullet time, shields, body dissolving to hide tracks, various status effects, and wild weapon types available. But even wild animals I came across can eat up magazine after magazine of fiery bullets and get stomped on by two companions, just to shake it all off.
It’s an RPG, so I understand that having more powerful weapons is the answer, but it seemed like each area had foes that were just a tad too powerful for the latest and greatest weapons I’d be looting, crafting, or receiving as rewards. I am hoping Obsidian can tweak this a little.
Performance and Visuals
The Outer Worlds 2 is a beautiful RPG, and it’s clear that Obsidian has paid attention to even the smallest details. Every piece of machinery, propaganda poster, rubble, and office desk has a huge amount of detail close up, and these are the things that not many would even bother to look at.
The massive number of available weapons has the same quality, with the added bonus of intricate animation work to make them feel like actual sci-fi killing machines. Obsidian has piled on almost every effect it can think of for these weapons, so prepare for a fireworks show.
The animations as a whole are a joy to look at. Things like the manual computer hacking, lock picking with shaky fingers, and engineering doors our character opens up to crank and twist random things in, all have a humorous but deliberate feel to them, as if my character is saying with a posh accent, “Why of course, plugging a giant shaft and revving it is exactly how I hack computers.”
Voices, sound effects, and music have also been top-notch. NPCs love talking to each other about the latest happenings in their lives or the actual game world, and numerous times I’ve waited around in areas just to see what hilarious nonsense they come up with. I already mentioned the radio being a highlight, but the regular music that plays in the background has been smooth to listen to as well. The new orchestral score mixes with the series’ main theme to great effect.
The Outer Worlds 2 is an Unreal Engine 5 game, so it does have that look to the environment and NPCs. It’s not a bad look, just something familiar. Thankfully, stutters were nonexistent during my time with the game, as the rather extensive shader compilation session took care of that with the first start handily. It’s a small price to pay for having a smooth gameplay experience.
However, if there is one thing I am disappointed by in Outer Worlds 2, it’s the performance. I have an AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT 16GB paired with an eight-core Ryzen 7 3700X and 32GB of RAM, with the game running at 1440p resolution. Just to hit 60 FPS, I had to utilize the Balanced upscaling option on FSR 4, coupled with a mix of High and Very High options. I’m essentially putting up with some minor shimmery edges, thanks to the upscaling, instead of having blurry shadows, less vegetation, and crowd density. The ray tracing option is something I would steer way clear of until either there are massive optimization updates or graphics cards from a few years in the future.
Now we come to the RPG’s bugs. Sure, there’s the standard jank you can expect from large games such as this. I’ve seen NPCs walking half in the ground, bodies stuck in the air, and occasional disappearing loot.
However, I also encountered a weird bug that broke things heavily. This involved losing the ability to save my game completely. Neither quick save nor manual save would function, with only the load option available. By the time I realized this was happening, I had already spent over an hour exploring and finishing quests, so even though it fixed itself when I reloaded the last save, it could have been a much larger loss of progress and my time. Thankfully, the bug hasn’t resurfaced since then.
Conclusion
Coupled with great RPG design and solid writing, The Outer Worlds 2 is one of the best RPGs I have played in the past few years. The decisions I have made have led my character through twists and turns that have ended entire towns and given power to the craziest of corporations. Like in iconic classics of the past, the game does not pull any punches when it comes to choices, where sometimes, there’s just no easy way out or a scenario where everything works out.
The less-than-ideal performance on PCs running modern hardware is something I keep seeing in AAA games lately, and The Outer Worlds 2 is not breaking that tradition. Thankfully, except for the aforementioned save-related bug, my experience has been relatively smooth with no stutters to speak of. One other negative is the bullet sponginess of enemies, which can drag down the cool feeling of coming across special weapons only to realize they need two magazines just to kill one random enemy.
Immersive companions with actual opinions, the hilarious radio stations, and the returning Flaws system are all brilliant and deeply immersive. This might be the most New Vegas-feeling RPG since New Vegas. As long as your system can handle it, or if you’re on a console, I highly recommend any RPG fan to check out The Outer Worlds 2.
The Outer Worlds 2 is available now on PC via Steam and Microsoft Store, as well as Xbox Series X|S and PlayStation 5, with a $69.99 price tag. It is also a part of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass subscriptions.
This review was conducted on the PC version of the game provided by Microsoft.
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