Obsidian already gave us the best Fallout sequel possible

This gem closed off a great decade for RPGs

The recent massive Xbox layoffs have not spared even established studios such as Bethesda and Obsidian Entertainment. While the developer working on The Elder Scrolls 6 lost a relatively small number of employees — but still enough to warrant fear and mistrust among the remaining staff — Obsidian was hit hard, losing 25% of its staff and getting saddled with a mandate to make more Fallout games.

While it may seem impossible to justify the loss of so many people's livelihoods, the internet obviously disagrees. I’ve seen quite a few loudly incorrect people eager to insist that the only games Obsidian has put out in the past eight years are the Outer Worlds series, so Microsoft was right to scale down the studio and give it a new direction. (Never mind that Obsidian released three games — Avowed, Grounded 2, and The Outer Worlds 2 — in 2025 alone.)

That sentiment is wrong for too many reasons to list here, so I’ll focus on one: The Outer Worlds is a pretty amazing game.

Released in 2019, The Outer Worlds closed out a great decade of RPGs that began with The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim and continued with Fallout 4 and The Witcher 3. However, The Outer Worlds chose a peculiar approach to compete with these titans. Instead of pushing further toward open worlds, sandbox design, and endless gameplay hours, The Outer Worlds chose tightness. A standard playthrough takes 20-30 hours, which can be reduced further by sticking to the main quest. That’s the length of The Witcher 3’s act 1…if you skip all the side quests.

The Outer Worlds trades the illusion of getting lost in an endless world for one of the most vibrant and original settings I’ve seen in an RPG, a poignant story about society, capitalism, and the things we do to survive, and a cast of NPCs that’s impossible not to care about.

The game takes place in the year 2355 in the Halcyon system, which has been colonized by a loose alliance of Earth-based megacorporations. The majority of the colonists live miserable lives as the corporations are both the only sources of work and the only providers of goods, trapping the Halcyon masses in an endless cycle of work and consumption that we all know too well. When the lost colony ship Hope is found seventy years after its disappearance, a single passenger is brought out of cryogenic sleep by a mad scientist/revolutionary who wants to topple the corporations’ rule on Halcyon.

Despite this premise, the game eschews the bleak, often hopeless aesthetics of cyberpunk and dystopian sci-fi, opting instead for a blend of Art Nouveau and Western false front, with some steampunk injections. Every corporation also has its own vibe: from the ramshackle Old West of Spacer’s Choice to the cozy cheerfulness of Auntie Cleo. The system’s planets also look very distinct, and positively weird, with lush flora and fauna that is almost always out to kill you.

The irony that pervades The Outer Worlds is the perfect counterweight to the harsh reality of corporate exploitation. The idea of mega-corps colonizing the stars wasn’t invented by Obsidian, of course. We’ve seen it explored in science-fiction works for a long time, from Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy, to Peter F. Hamilton’s Fallen Dragon, to The Expanse. However, The Outer Worlds gave an original contribution to this vein, with a game that’s constantly dancing on the thin border between tragedy and satire.

Having a focused story helps bring that setting to life. In The Outer Worlds, the choices you make truly matter, perhaps because there isn’t a near-infinite array of them. Don’t get me wrong, The Witcher 3 has a fantastic story, and I even enjoyed Fallout 4’s main narrative, but the tale of the Stranger (The Outer Worlds’ main character) just feels different: more personal. Maybe it’s because you’re not wasting time collecting Nirn roots, exploring every building in the Wasteland, or butting into the business of every person from Velen to Novigrad.

The NPCs play a big role in making The Outer Worlds feel the way it does. The companions are deep and well-written, and offer so much good banter that sometimes it feels good to just sit in a place for a while to hear what they have to say. I cared even for the ones I found annoying (I’m talking about you, Felix!). I wanted to find out why they were so annoying and whether I could change them, which made me want to play their quests. The Outer Worlds treats the companions cast with a respect I’ve rarely found in an RPG. They’re not tools for your entertainment: You can help them get over some bad stuff, sure, but their stories always feel uniquely theirs, not merely a branch of yours.

The best example is the lack of romance, a feature that I wish were present in more RPGs. There is only one romance quest in the game, and it doesn’t involve you. You can help Parvati, one of the recruitable companions, overcome her shyness and insecurity so she can ask The Groundbreaker’s engineer, Junlei, out on a date. It’s sweet, it reveals details about Parvati’s past and personality, and honestly a thousand times better than gaslighting Shadowheart into having sex with you in front of her goddess.

I am aware that The Outer Worlds has its shortcomings. The gameplay is a tad too basic, and the variety of enemies and weaponry is a bit lacking. The sequel, The Outer Worlds 2, apparently fixed these things but it was also criticized for leaning too much into the open world genre and for having a less impactful story and characters. It got bigger, but often at the expense of depth. (It’s worth mentioning that this opinion isn’t universal and many players find the sequel superior.)

I didn’t care too much about the repetitive gameplay and the easy gunfights in The Outer Worlds. The setting, story, and characters completely pulled me in, resulting in the immersion that so many games try to achieve. I loved the short runtime too, as it meant I could explore different choices and endings without having to commit a few hundred hours to the game. I also liked many gameplay aspects. The flaws system, which provides extra points in a stat in exchange for a permanent debuff, is great because it ties organically into your gameplay experience. The weapons are a blast (literally) thanks to their wacky designs (apparently Obsidian got some of the ideas for them from gameplay bugs).

I don’t know what the future holds for Obsidian under Microsoft’s controversial stewardship. If the studio has to make a sequel to its stellar 2010 game Fallout: New Vegas, one of the most beloved RPGs of all time, I’ll be among the first to buy it. But to me, The Outer Worlds already felt like a sequel to the best Fallout games: an imaginative, funny, and sarcastic sci-fi RPG with a great story to tell and an unforgettable cast of characters. And unlike Fallout, it didn’t need an open world to achieve those heights.