Advertising on a drink designed to make you more productive is a good bit ngl
Anti-capitalism dollar, big dollar, huge dollar.
I didn’t get off the starting planet in the first game. Does the second game suck too?
I read the reviews on Steam yesterday. It seems if you didn’t like the first you’ll hate the second one.
It’s actually pretty good
Nothing revolutionary, but a serious step above the first game
The combat is much improved, as is stealth
And the sheer number of options that open up to you based on both your chosen character traits (both positive and negative) and your skills and perks gives you an incredible amount of flexibility when it comes to problem solving
Now, as for the game's politics...
The game correctly points out that capitalism is a scourge on society, but just like the first one, pushes the falsehood that all it needs is a correcting force to make it better
The game pushes you towards a path where you align the Corporatist Auntie’s Choice with the Intellectual Humanist Order of the Ascendant in order to achieve “balance” in order to stop a war between them, so that they can better fight against the Authoritarian Monarchy that is the Protecterate
While the game does showcase that Auntie’s Choice is full of cutthroat libertarian vampires (in fact, in nearly every ending where Auntie’s Choice is left to proliferate, they basically use every underhanded means available to take over the entire system) and the Order is full of do-nothing dithering eggheads, there isn’t a meaningful way to encourage a revolution amongst any of the factions
Which, of course, sucks
All in all, I definitely recommend it if you’re like me and enjoy RPGs with meaningful choices and lots of replayability
It’s so, so, so, so much better than Starfield
Now, as for the game’s politics…
That sounds even worse than the first game, which at least had its space trots splitting over whether to do revolutionary direct action or focus on their newspaper (which was a funny bit, and tipping the balance of power towards revolution did end up obviously good), for all that it was deeply lib too with its cynicism about revolutionary leaders and the vapid elitist lib conclusion that all the system really needed was for the bad business guys to be replaced with smart science guys and they could fix everything.
God, Trots really never do change. You could drop these people into literally any time and place and they’d still waste resources on a newspaper and have a zillion party splits and fail to accomplish any revolutionary action.
the bad business guys to be replaced with smart science guys and they could fix everything.
i think it was more like that they needed them to fix the environment because everybody was starving from biological incompatibility with the native ecosystem, if everything has the wrong chirality and you eat meat and die of protein deficiency anyway you kinda need some science up in there
That part of the problem was definitely “yes you need trained experts to solve this ecology/chemical engineering problem”, it’s the broader elite liberal assumption that all the smart academic types will then just naturally make a better and humane society than those vulgar, short-sighted business school types instead of just immediately becoming the latter or putting the latter back into power once they’ve gotten materially entrenched in the ruling class themselves.
Like there were fundamentally two crises going on in the game: the chemical incompatibility of the local environment to long-term human habitation, and the brutal rule of a capitalist society that was additionally incapable of addressing the looming catastrophe because of its lack of relevantly skilled personnel. The narrative kind of pulls a bait and switch of making you think the problem is just that the corpo-state sucks and is brutal and dysfunctional, but then revealing there was actually a more fundamental ecological problem at work exacerbating it. The game’s ultimate solution is then just this wide-eyed idealism of “well once the smart science guys fix this problem that requires their relevant training and knowledge, surely they will then also create a more human and equitable world instead of falling back on the systems they know and were raised under and which would materially benefit them personally once they’re in power” that also doesn’t grapple with how the business school cultists are also regarded as “trained experts” in their given field and that this sort of technocratic ideology largely exists to launder rule by businessmen.
I think for my 2nd playthrough, i’m going to kill everyone who isn’t just a worker bee for Auntie’s Choice and see where that takes me
It’s so, so, so, so much better than Starfield
The bar is under Hell then lol
Starfield was one of those games where even though I didn’t pay for it, I still felt ripped off
Played for an hour after the tutorial ended, dropped it like a hot potato and will never touch it again
The Outer Worlds 2 is a genuinely good game, regardless of what that chud what makes those Kingdom Come games says
Some not really spoilers but maybe so I'm going to hide it anyway
To me the Protectorate felt like you asked your average burgerlander what Communism is like, just a pure propagandized idea of what life in the Soviet Union was. Hell the Consul was definitely supposed to look like Stalin.
That’s exactly what I felt and it was hard to play through it. I also wanted to side with them as a fuck you to the people who made it but you literally can’t lol
the Authoritarian Monarchy that is the Protecterate
yeah, that governmental force that explicitly exists to combat corporate overreach? that’s called authority, sweaty
Yeah, it’s funny because people will point that out to you in the game and it’s shown as a sign that they’re hopelessly under the sway of the Protectorate
What little we know of the Earth Directorate is that they’re basically just Starfleet if they used bullets and cut bad deals for warp drives
oh sorry I had the protectorate and the earth directorate confused (wow that’s bad naming)
Tim Cain has said a few times that Outer Worlds 1 was always pure liberalism, to the great disappointment of all of us who wanted them to go much harder on capitalism.
it was the most tepid bullshit imaginable, like an incredibly heavy handed caricature of capitalism with all outcomes being miserable right up until just before the end where surprise the problem was that meritocracy got subverted
edit: I’m still mad, apparently
