My family’s excitement about Outer Worlds 2 was short-lived – but at least we bonded over the disappointment games

IIt’s been an exciting November for the Diamond family: one of those rare games we get to do everyone Love the sequel was coming out! The original Outer Worlds dazzled eyeballs with its art nouveau palette and charmed our ears with witty dialogue, drawing us into a classic mystery-unraveling story in one of my favorite “little guy versus evil corporate overlords” worlds since Deus Ex. It didn’t have original combat, but that didn’t matter: it was clearly a labor of love from a team wholly invested in telling this tale, and we all fell under its spell.

Well, when I say all of us, I mean myself and the three kids. My wife didn’t play The Outer Worlds, because none of those worlds included Crash Bandicoot. But the rest of us dug it, and the kids especially enjoyed my exit from the final boss battle after half a day of trying, declaring that I had lost. Pretty much I completed the game and that was good enough for Dad to do other things.

My son completed The Outer Worlds 2 first. “How did you find him?” I asked.

“You’ll hate him,” he replied.

What? How dare he predict my tastes in games! If not, none of these hedgehogs would be playing a video game in the first place. It’s bad enough they ruined me in Mario Kart. Now they’re robbing me of the potential fun of playing. I was now determined to enjoy The Outer Worlds 2 just to prove him wrong.

Reader: I didn’t enjoy it.

While the combat is top-notch, the character skill trees are sophisticated, and the speed and fluidity (in the Xbox Series

The first hour of gameplay hits you with so much boring party politics that it makes The Phantom Menace’s opening crawl feel like Serious Sam. Most of the dialogue revolves around people complaining about their bosses or those who accuse them. Everything is broken. People are starving and miserable, deprived of doctors and medical supplies. It’s basically the year 2025 but in space, expressed in words so boring and trite that you feel like you’re reading LinkedIn comments.

“I was right, wasn’t I?” My son said smugly, when I gave up after 20 hours, on the third planet I’d been to.

“How can you tell?”

“I haven’t heard you curse a game so much since I played FIFA online.”

“How did they get it wrong, son?” I asked.

“There’s no real heart and soul to the game. They just connect with the story.”

Then we talked. along. About role-playing games in general; What works and what doesn’t; What makes some great and others boring. We agreed that RPGs require the commitment of the narrator to make them believable. The genre has its roots in Dungeons & Dragons, which at its core is just people sitting in a basement conjuring up great stories. If the dungeon master isn’t good, it’s just a number crunching and dice rolling effort, but with a storyteller in charge, it’s magic. Worldbuilding is also crucial: the lush highlands of Skyrim, the dark, conspiracy-poisoned streets of Deus Ex, the technological and magical dystopia of Gaia in Final Fantasy VII.

And like tabletop D&D, the graphics don’t really matter. Decades ago, I spent a wonderful month inside the horrific, crazy satanic faith-fest that is Shin Megami Tensei, this entire world conjured up from tiny pixels on the Game Boy Advance screen.

This world should contain characters you care about. My weak bladder and uncomfortable need for sleep were the only things keeping me away from the denizens of The Witcher 3. But I couldn’t care less about any of the characters in The Outer Worlds 2; I felt like I’d seen them all before. I get into needlessly dense, gray dialogue and I wasn’t able to focus on the game for longer than five minutes outside of battles.

In a real world where we have less control than ever before, where the “truth” is exactly what the richest liars claim it to be and justice has been eliminated, it is becoming increasingly difficult to win in life through hard work. This is what makes the true merit of role-playing games so attractive to me. In all video games, if you have a skill (or develop it), you can advance. But in RPGs, even if you’re not talented, you can work hard, level up and get more skills that lead to more rewards. In contrast to the terrible world that has 3,000 billionaires yet still leaves most of its population living in poverty, RPGs are a model of what a just world would be like – with the addition of armor and shields, and hopefully fast travel points.

The Outer Worlds 2 was a letdown for me, but instead of escaping into an immersive RPG like I had hoped, I instead escaped into a great conversation with my son about it. Once again, I realized how important games are in our lives, and how they have deepened our relationship with each other. And I realized that sometimes terrible dialogue in a game can spark great dialogue in the real world.