Yup, you guessed right: the sarcastic teaser trailer for The Outer Worlds 2 got me to try out the first one. Is this more of that Fallout/Bioshock stuff many of us love so much? And if so, does it differentiate itself enough?

Full written version for the video-allergics: https://zyro-eg.com/2022/01/13/the-outer-worlds-backlog-review/

Indeed, my hope is the budget is big enough that they can bring the graphics and content up a notch.  It doesn't have to be THE AAA FPS RPG experience, leave that to Starfield and/or Elder Scrolls, but just one more notch would make it better justify being a full price game in the same vein as its competition!

i felt levelscaling was a bit out of balance, which slowed my progress and hand me killed quite a few times on the planet with all the bugs. outside that and it being reasonably thin on sidequests compared to elder scrolls/ fall out, I enjoyed it and hope it becomes a mainstay

It was fine but the lack of exploration really was an dissapointing experience with a lot of talking.

Haven't got around to watching the review attention span of a gnat and all that, but my take on outer worlds after finishing the game was it had excellent  writing and great characters but all of that was let down by being wrapped inside a very average game, it gave me the sense that apart from the already mentioned spot on and up to date writing and characters the rest was stuck in a previous gen time warp.

I really enjoyed this one, in fact I would probably pick it as my GOTY for 2019.
I was really impressed by the sheer range of choice available to the player, as well as by the superb writing and just how polished it was compared to a lot of games of its kind which tend to be rather buggy.

I have yet to finish the game after two attempts but, relative to the parts I did play, I thought it was bland and generic with a lot of superfluous dialogue. It was like a Borderlands without the elements that make those games unique and fun. Combat was nothing, exploration was a big fat nothing, and the fetch quests felt meaningless. I would see a group of buildings, get there, and find out it was exactly that--just a group of buildings. None of the characters I met were memorable and they really should have hired a good editor to make the script less tedious. It also seemed to lean on "choices" just being to help Side A or Side B with nothing in the middle. In terms of giving you an interesting and entertaining world to explore, this isn't even in the same solar system as Fallout 4, so I don't see them as being directly comparable.

It was an aggressively average experience.

Some other complaints are that character creation was absolutely horrible and I had to download a mod to keep from getting sick with all the visual "effects". Oh, and I've heard it has a slideshow ending, which makes me far less enthusiastic about finishing it. Slideshow endings for this kind of game are flat-out unacceptable.

There just isn't much to the game one way or another. If it had been developed and published by Ubisoft or EA, the meta-score would have been significantly lower.

Hopefully, Microsoft's money will address all or most of these issues and not just end up funding more voice acting that I'm going to skip through anyway. There is the foundation for something here but it needs a LOT of work. Otherwise, they'd be better off going the Disco Elysium route and dropping traditional combat.

I think budget is basically a core issue, though a lot of the times... money is, indeed, the factor in how long it takes and how much effort is put into games lol

I can't disagree that the maps felt much smaller than I had anticipated, especially with the genre giants it's up against.

I think a large part of that is because of the lack of complexity.  It's been brought up many times before, but a large part of the reason "old" games weren't as buggy was because they were also far simpler than what we do and expect in modern gaming.

I can't argue with most of what you're saying even if you're leveraging some heavy criticism, especially the ending and lack of world consequences.  But the "this or that" decision-making is really something I wouldn't say is the issue: sometimes things are like that in life lol... In FACT, the reason The Witcher 1 was so enthralling to me was because it put you in a lot of "this or that" grey area situations and decisions...  Making the hard choices, I think, is something lacking in today's games.  While I appreciate the "always a way out" thing (mentioned in the review, even), I also feel like forcing this-or-that better enforces the ability to understand both sides of the equation before coming to said choice.