When I first played The Outer Worlds back in 2019, I was really disappointed. As a huge Fallout: New Vegas fan, I was excited for a new game in the same mould, but when I finally got it, its retro style semeed old and tired. It felt like a shadow of what came before, not a celebration—a smaller, less compelling world, and a reminder that the core formula might not have aged as well as I'd hoped.
But a huge part of that feeling was really more about timing. The Outer Worlds released just 10 days after Disco Elysium. That was one of the freshest and most exciting RPGs ever made, itself clearly inspired by Obsidian's glory days but finding brilliant and strange new ways to revitalise old school concepts. With all that still buzzing in my brain, I couldn't help but see The Outer Worlds as a rusty old relic at the time (and I certainly wasn't the only one).
