Conclusion

The Outer Worlds was released just yesterday and has the potential to become one of the big RPG gems of this year. The game uses the first-person perspective to put you into a futuristic world in which corporations have taken over everything. Before interstellar travel was even possible, these companies bought rights to star systems and then set out to explore them using faster-than-light colony ships. Promising systems are terraformed, colonized, and then exploited for their resources. One such example is the Halcyon system in which you are stranded, being a member of a colony ship that couldn't reach its destination due to a failed hyperdrive. Instead of launching a costly rescue mission for the hundreds of thousands of passengers, the Board decided to abandon your vessel, cover up the whole thing, and focus on profits generated from your sister ship, which did make it to its destination just fine. Thanks to a rogue scientist who revives you from stasis, it becomes your quest to rescue your crew mates and find out what's going on at Halcyon.

Outer Worlds' main story is captivating, interesting, and well-written. Characters are interesting, and many of them have a lot to say through plenty of dialogue options. Narratives are well thought out even though some can't be taken seriously. This seems to be inspired by Borderlands 3, but sometimes fails to impress because you end up being torn between quirkiness or genuinely feeling sorry for the poor soul.

Game-play wise you have some stealth elements paired with classic run-and-gun options—I felt the "shooting" approach was the way the game is intended to be played. Could be that things are different on the highest difficulty. When interacting with NPCs, your character's skills and perks do make a difference in the conversation options available, which can lead to different outcomes of quests. While the developer hails that "choices matter", in the big picture they don't really make a difference. The main story and main quests always progress the same way, which is good in a way: failure is not an option.

Side missions are well engineered, not Witcher-good, but solid even though most turn out to be "fetch" or "rescue" quests. Still, I felt the urge to pick up every mission I could find and complete it. Unlike other recent releases in this genre, the game does feel "complete"; you're not thinking, "oh I could see how they'll add a DLC here". Quest rewards are mostly uninteresting, with the bulk of the good loot coming from enemy drops and containers that are sprinkled all over the world. Some of these are locked, so you better invest in your lockpicking skill. Lockpicking is straightforward, though; I hate games where it is not. In Outer Worlds, it's just a skill check, optionally consuming one or multiple lockpicks, of which there are enough in the game, also on vendors, decently priced.

There are a lot of weapons in the Outer Worlds, and crafting using "sockets" exists, too. It's not Borderlands-style-gun spam, but the variety is good. I also like that there's A LOT of character build styles available. Want a space ninja? No problem. The Han Solo type? Sure. You prefer sniping from a distance? That's possible too. The skill tree has meaningful choices that make a difference for playstyle. For example, there are several options to increase your carrying limit—perfect for pack rats like me.

Since you're traveling between multiple worlds, each with its own biome, enemy variety is good, even though their combat AI could definitely be improved. The same kinda goes for your companions, too, but they can be given instructions during gunfights and don't block your way when out of combat. Companion characters are varied in their abilities, have their own backstory, and bring up requests from time to time, similar to concepts found in previous RPG games.

As you've seen from our screenshots, graphics are hit and miss. Some indoor areas remind you of titles from a decade ago, whereas the outdoor scenery looks great, almost stunning. Given this is not a AAA title with a huge budget, I feel that the choices made are reasonable. I rather have good gameplay than top-notch graphics that are not fun. What stood out very positively to me was how well designed some of the GUI sections are, with lots of quality-of-life improvements. You can skip dialogue with the space key, exit nested in-world computer menus with tab, and save the game whenever you want. Fast travel is well implemented and doesn't feel like the developer wants to waste your time to bump up the total playtime.

Based on Unreal Engine 4, the game offers good lighting, shadows, and reflections. Nearly all of that lighting is pre-baked, a method which renders light effects on to textures during development so that they no longer have to be generated in real time during gameplay, which of course helps with performance, but limits flexibility. What's annoying, though, is the constant pop-in of geometry; it seems draw distance/occlusion settings haven't been chosen optimally. Textures are of decent resolution—an optional high-res texture pack would have been a nice option given the total game clocks in at only 35 GB. In-door levels usually have a completely flat and bland floor—this should have been solved better; it's 2019. Just look at how Gears 5 does it using Unreal Engine 4.

Our performance testing shows that The Outer Worlds is demanding on hardware. Especially AMD cards are struggling to deliver good FPS. The fact that Outer Worlds only supports DirectX 11 doesn't help the red team either. For example, the Radeon RX 580, which is usually a decent 1080p card, reaches only 40 FPS (at highest settings though). On the AMD side you do need a Vega card to achieve 60 FPS at Full HD. What's surprising is how bad AMD's Radeon VII flagship does. While it should be a bit faster than the Radeon RX 5700 XT, it falls behind quite a lot here, to around RX 5700 non-XT levels. The new Navi RDNA-architecture cards do better, but even the RX 5700 XT only gets you 56.9 FPS in our outdoor benchmark test scene. Indoor locations do run higher frame rates, but a significant portion of the gameplay happens outside, so we wanted to test that. Things do look better for NVIDIA, Full HD 60 FPS is achievable with the GTX 1660 Ti, 1440p@60 is in reach with RTX 2060 Super, and the mighty RTX 2080 Ti gets 51 FPS at 4K.

Both companies have released game-ready drivers for Outer Worlds, even though I suspect AMD didn't really put much work into it given the performance numbers we're seeing. Gears 5 has demonstrated that UnrealEngine 4 can indeed run very well on AMD hardware, but with Call of Duty Modern Warfare releasing yesterday, too, I suspect AMD's developers focused their efforts on that title. We'll have a Call of Duty Performance article up very soon.

Overall, the hardware requirements feel high considering the visuals on offer, but you have to consider that we picked the highest available preset. Slightly reducing details for higher FPS is very much possible thanks to the settings options, of which there could be a few more, possibly with more fine-grained control. Graphics memory usage is very reasonable and seems well-tuned for the capabilities of the various graphics cards powering specific resolutions.

Overall, I really like The Outer Worlds. If you liked Mass Effects, Fallout, KOTOR, or Skyrim, then definitely check it out, and don't give Bethesda any money for Fallout 76.