10 Things You Didn’t Know about The Outer Worlds

The Outer Worlds

The Outer Worlds is the newest release from Obsidian Entertainment. As a result, interested individuals should have no problems guessing that it is a RPG of some kind. To be exact, The Outer Worlds is an action RPG, which explains why some parties have been making comparisons to the Fallout series as well as the Borderlands series. Here are 10 things that you may or may not have known about The Outer Worlds:

1. First-Person Perspective

The Outer Worlds uses a first-person perspective. This isn’t the first time that Obsidian Entertainment has made an action RPG with a first-person perspective, seeing as how Fallout: New Vegas let interested individuals use either first-person perspective or third-person perspective.

2. Expect Companions

Of course, The Outer Worlds has companions, who can be expected to pitch in when it comes to combat as well as chime in when it comes to conversations. Please note that players have a two companions limit when they are out and about, meaning that the rest of their recruited characters will have to remain on their ship.

3. Tactical Time Dilation

The player has something called “Tactical Time Dilation” in The Outer Worlds, which can be summed up as the ability to see enemy HP while their perception of time has been slowed to a crawl rather than a walk. Amusingly, the story provides interested individuals with an explanation for this phenomenon. In short, the player character has spent too much time in cryosleep, meaning that their brain now perceives time in a rather unusual but nonetheless very useful manner. Considering that too much cryosleep can have much more explosive consequences, “Tactical Time Dilation” was a pretty lucky outcome to say the least.

4. Not a Microsoft Title

The Outer Worlds is being published by Take-Two Interactive’s Private Division. This might come as a surprise to people who know that Microsoft bought out Obsidian Entertainment in November of 2018. However, Take-Two Interactive managed to beat Microsoft to the publishing rights for The Outer Worlds. Still, it seems safe to say that a successful release will ensure stronger backing from Microsoft in the future, which could prove interesting because Obsidian Entertainment has been known to struggle with uneven finances from time to time.

5. Romance Was Considered

It isn’t uncommon to see romances with companions in RPG titles. However, interested individuals shouldn’t expect romances in The Outer Worlds because while they were considered for inclusion, they were cut from the eventual vision for the finished product. This is wholly unsurprising because Obsidian Entertainment has never been too keen on writing romances, which is why they can’t be found in most of its RPG releases.

6. Alternate History

Technically, The Outer Worlds can be considered an example of alternate history. Apparently, what happened is that President William McKinley was never assassinated by a second-generation Polish-American anarchist, meaning that he was never succeeded by his Vice President Theodore Roosevelt. Due to this, Roosevelt never engaged in trust-busting, thus resulting in much, much stronger corporations than in real life. As a result, megacorporations have become so powerful by the start of The Outer Wilds that they are capable of terraforming planets as well as settling them, which speaks of incredible power in more than one sense of the word.

7. Mega-Corporations Are Mega-Corporations

Perhaps unsurprisingly, super-powerful corporations with either nothing or next to nothing keeping a watchful eye on them tend to be pretty terrible. The exact extent of their bad behavior remains to be seen, but even the first hour of The Outer Wilds reveals things such as forbidding their soldiers from accepting healthcare from anyone other than one of their healthcare providers. This is one of the factors that cause people to make comparisons between The Outer Worlds and the Borderlands series because the latter is famous for the bad behavior of its mega-corporations, which are permitted to run unchecked because they have overthrown the government that once existed in said setting.

8. The Ship AI Isn’t Supposed to Be Sentient

Apparently, AIs aren’t supposed to be sentient in the setting of The Outer Wilds. However, the first set of interactions with the ship’s AI ADA suggests that said rule might not be 100 percent applicable. In short, ADA isn’t supposed to listen to the orders of anyone but the captain of the ship, which is very inconvenient when said individual has been squished by an escape pod. As a result, ADA chooses to recognize the player character as the dead captain of the ship in what looks like the exploitation of a loophole to get around hard limitations in her programming, which definitely doesn’t seem like something that she should be capable of doing unless she is a lot smarter than she is supposed to be.

9. Plenty of Humor

By this point, it should be clear that The Outer Worlds has a lot of humor packed into it. Some of the humor can get pretty dark, but there are also other examples that are more reliant on a sense of silliness. Of course, there are cases that mix the two with no issues whatsoever, as shown by the man wearing the mascot costume who is obligated by his contract to continue mouthing corporate slogans even though it is clear that he loathes his job.

10. Won’t Launch on Steam

The Outer Worlds is set to launch on October 25 of 2019. However, it will be launched on just the Epic Games Store and the Microsoft Store. Meanwhile, the Steam version won’t be coming out until a full year into the future, which was met with a fair amount of fan grousing when the news came out. On the one hand, this means that Steam purists won’t be able to play until then; on the other hand, they can always interpret this as a chance for Obsidian Entertainment to iron out any bugs and other potential issues before they get their hands on the game.

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