![]() ![]() ![]() The Outer Worlds Expansion Pass includes two story expansions. ![]() In the corporate equation for the colony, you are the unplanned variable. As you explore the furthest reaches of space and encounter various factions, all vying for power, the character you decide to become will determine how this player-driven story unfolds. Lost in transit while on a colonist ship bound for the furthest edge of the galaxy, you awake decades later only to find yourself in the midst of a deep conspiracy threatening to destroy the Halcyon colony. The Outer Worlds is the award-winning single-player first-person sci-fi RPG from Obsidian Entertainment and Private Division. Even the handful of new weapons on Eridanos don’t spruce fights up much at all, and the enemies are very much more of the same but with more splash damage.The Outer Worlds: Board-Approved Bundle, now with 100% less packaging! This bundle features The Outer Worlds and The Outer Worlds Expansion Pass, which includes both story-based expansions for the game. This kind of thing is exactly what fast travel was invented for.I didn’t feel bad about taking that shortcut in part because by the time you’re at the required level 30, The Outer Worlds’ combat doesn’t hold up and feels obligatory, even on hard difficulty, so skipping it felt inconsequential. This kind of thing is exactly what fast travel was invented for. The only obnoxious thing about it is the long bridges that connect the islands where you do nothing but walk straight ahead for about 15 seconds at a time, and how eagerly the main quest sends you back and forth across them. There’s the scene of the crime at an upscale hotel, the distillery Helen was there to promote, a crime boss’s lair, vast fields of purple flowers, weird caves, and more – this doesn’t have the feeling of a map that’s cobbled together from existing parts. But since you never leave, it’s a good thing that the map is impressively diverse, with each of the connected floating islands containing one or two distinctive areas. That makes Murder on Eridanos feel more self-contained than any other adventure almost like its own game. You never actually leave Eridanos as part of the main quest, or even need to return to your ship – you’re given a temporary base of operations where your whole team hangs out and a billboard is automatically filled out with photos of suspects and crazy-person string connecting them so you can visualize everything without taking too many of your own notes. And the combat, character, and companion systems have enough new spins on existing ideas to make it feel like an homage with its own personality rather than a copy. It’s not as explorable as one big open world but it still packs in a large portion of flexible quests and conflicts within its series of smaller ones. And considering that new RPGs from either of those influential developers are still years away, this game couldn’t have been timed any better. With The Outer Worlds, Obsidian has found its own path in the space between Bethesda and BioWare, and it’s a great one. And of course, then you have to decide what to do when you discover what really happened and the secret Halcyon Helen was killed to protect, and you’re given some justification to go either way. Sure, no matter who you accuse, the final confrontation is effectively the same, but it feels great to be given the chance to make a call and then find out if you’re right or wrong about it, which is a lot more than Peril on Gorgon did. It feels great to make a call and then find out if you’re right or wrong about it.As far as I can tell there isn’t a significant effect on the story based on your roleplaying dialogue choices, but there are a couple of big decisions to make once you close in on a suspect: for one, you get to actually guess at who killed the actor, which is a refreshing breath of fresh air when so many detective games are on rails. Depending on how thorough you are, that can be over 10 hours – which is not bad at all for an expansion to a 25-hour RPG. It’s a bona fide murder mystery, and there’s a lot of dialogue here since so much of the sleuthing is climbing every branch of their conversation trees, and between that and reading emails on terminals, going through every detail for evidence it can take a while. The crime boss, the jilted lover, the weird self-help guru, the arrogant co-star, and more are on the list of people of interest, and most of them are in fact interesting people to talk to. ![]()
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