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More expansive isn't always better. It's a cliché, but it's also the truest way to encapsulate my thoughts after spending five dozen hours with The Outer Worlds 2. The development team added more of each element to the sequel to its prior science fiction role-playing game — increased comedy, foes, weapons, traits, and places, every important component in such adventures. And it works remarkably well — at first. But the load of all those ambitious ideas causes the experience to falter as the hours wear on.

A Strong Initial Impact

The Outer Worlds 2 makes a strong initial impact. You are a member of the Terran Directorate, a do-gooder organization focused on restraining unscrupulous regimes and companies. After some major drama, you end up in the Arcadia region, a settlement fractured by conflict between Auntie's Selection (the result of a union between the first game's two big corporations), the Defenders (communalism pushed to its most dire end), and the Order of the Ascendant (reminiscent of the Church, but with mathematics instead of Jesus). There are also a number of rifts tearing holes in space and time, but right now, you really need access a relay station for critical messaging needs. The problem is that it's in the middle of a warzone, and you need to figure out how to arrive.

Like its predecessor, Outer Worlds 2 is a first-person role-playing game with an central plot and dozens of secondary tasks spread out across multiple locations or regions (expansive maps with a much to discover, but not sandbox).

The initial area and the task of getting to that relay hub are remarkable. You've got some goofy encounters, of course, like one that includes a agriculturalist who has given excessive sugary treats to their favorite crab. Most direct you toward something useful, though — an surprising alternative route or some fresh information that might open a different path ahead.

Notable Events and Lost Chances

In one memorable sequence, you can encounter a Guardian defector near the overpass who's about to be eliminated. No quest is linked to it, and the exclusive means to locate it is by exploring and paying attention to the environmental chatter. If you're fast and careful enough not to let him get slain, you can preserve him (and then protect his deserter lover from getting eliminated by beasts in their hideout later), but more connected with the immediate mission is a electrical conduit obscured in the undergrowth in the vicinity. If you follow it, you'll locate a secret entry to the transmission center. There's a different access point to the station's underground tunnels tucked away in a cavern that you could or could not notice contingent on when you pursue a specific companion quest. You can encounter an simple to miss character who's essential to saving someone's life down the line. (And there's a plush toy who indirectly convinces a group of troops to join your cause, if you're considerate enough to rescue it from a minefield.) This opening chapter is dense and thrilling, and it appears as if it's overflowing with substantial plot opportunities that rewards you for your inquisitiveness.

Fading Expectations

Outer Worlds 2 fails to meet those early hopes again. The next primary region is arranged comparable to a map in the original game or Avowed — a big area scattered with key sites and side quests. They're all narratively connected to the conflict between Auntie's Option and the Order of the Ascendant, but they're also vignettes detached from the central narrative plot-wise and geographically. Don't look for any environmental clues directing you to alternative options like in the initial area.

Despite compelling you to choose some hard calls, what you do in this zone's side quests doesn't matter. Like, it genuinely is irrelevant, to the degree that whether you permit atrocities or direct a collection of displaced people to their death culminates in nothing but a passing comment or two of dialogue. A game doesn't need to let all tasks impact the narrative in some major, impactful way, but if you're compelling me to select a side and pretending like my choice counts, I don't believe it's irrational to anticipate something further when it's over. When the game's earlier revealed that it can be better, any diminishment feels like a compromise. You get additional content like Obsidian promised, but at the expense of complexity.

Ambitious Plans and Lacking Drama

The game's intermediate phase tries something similar to the primary structure from the opening location, but with clearly diminished style. The concept is a daring one: an linked task that spans several locations and encourages you to seek aid from assorted alliances if you want a more straightforward journey toward your objective. In addition to the repeated framework being a slightly monotonous, it's also lacking the tension that this type of situation should have. It's a "deal with the demon" moment. There should be difficult trade-offs. Your association with either faction should count beyond gaining their favor by doing new tasks for them. All of this is lacking, because you can simply rush through on your own and clear the objective anyway. The game even makes an effort to provide you means of doing this, pointing out different ways as secondary goals and having companions advise you where to go.

It's a side effect of a wider concern in Outer Worlds 2: the fear of allowing you to regret with your decisions. It regularly exaggerates in its efforts to make sure not only that there's an different way in most cases, but that you are aware of it. Locked rooms nearly always have various access ways signposted, or nothing valuable within if they do not. If you {can't