A first person action RPG set in a distant cluster of the Milky Way called Halcyon, The Outer Worlds showed original developer Obsidian at their creative best when it released almost four years ago. A campy sci-fi romp through multiple different conspiracies, lots of lock-picking, and, of course, shooting countless alien creatures, it earned plenty of plaudits, and there’s plenty of interest to see where the sequel might take us. The Outer Worlds: Spacer’s Choice Edition brings it natively to the current generation of consoles with a few updates to the game’s graphics, a higher level cap, and a few new performance issues of its own.
We’re a bit late to the party, but this straight up remaster of The Outer Worlds by third party studio Virtuos was met with strong criticism for the lacklustre performance that it was able to get out of the PS5 and Xbox Series X. The original release had already been patched to add 60fps support for the new generation, but the graphical changes made for Spacer’s Choice Edition led to poorer performance. A post-launch patch has managed to rectify or help with some of this, but there are still frame rate stutters.
This is particularly common on the asteroid Scylla, which looks rather nice thanks to being in space and all, but as you wander around the frame rate will just stutter occasionally from the Cinematic Mode’s 30fps target. If you go near the large blue barriers that keep all the oxygen in (maybe?) around the edge of the play area then the game noticeably stutters until you move away again, which isn’t great when there’s a firefight around there. The other environments have fewer issues of this nature than Scylla does, though the fancy, rich city of Byzantium has more than its fair share as well.
The reason for this, of course, is the graphics enhancements and changes. Spacer’s Choice Edition usually looks quite nice compared to the original. There’s noticeably more luxurious volumetric lighting effects in many places, where wandering through certain caves with luminescent plant life mixed with torches of different colours looks really gorgeous. There’s also more reflective surfaces for the screen space reflections to make use of. Then again you’ll spot there’s plenty of low resolution textures as you explore the game, the most obvious being on the “comically” long lift ride up to Byzantium from its docking area, because you’re staring directly at the blurry grime on the doors while waiting for them to open. Character faces now look dated to say the least, with some of them being downright distracting.
The changes in lighting effects also have unintended consequences in that some scenes now look poorly lit and dark in Cinematic mode. It can be almost too dark to see even in some settlements at night, whilst out in the wilderness away from the lit roads and buildings it can be hard to see at all. This issue isn’t completely fixed by switching to Performance mode, but it’s definitely better.
Performance mode comes with its own issues. It has many of the same graphical changes as Cinematic mode, but lacks screen space reflections entirely. That’s particularly odd when the original game had SSR, but just used reflective surfaces less often. And when you generally expect 60fps from a Performance mode, it’s disappointing to see this come up very short, especially since playing the original release with the PS5 and Xbox Series X enhanced patch would get you a pretty solid 60fps.
Outside of these changes, for better or for worse, this is still The Outer Worlds, a witty and charming RPG with a unique and creative sci-fi story to uncover. It is still a lot of fun uncovering the wealth of conspiracies you’ll be confronted with and it comes with both DLCs built in as well, for some extra spacefaring. It bends over backwards to accommodate the player choice throughout and, four years after release, I feel my opinions have shifted from praising this aspect to perhaps being a bit less sure. Playing through again it feels a bit like NPCs lack strong convictions of their own since they can be so easily moulded by the player character. Then again, the openness to change is charming in its own way.
It also comes with the gameplay flaws intact as well. Combat is generally too easy, so you’ll definitely want to turn the difficulty up immediately, while areas are small enough that there just aren’t enough unique places to encourage exploration. In fact you’re often punished for exploring ahead by missions that take you through each notable location anyway, or by simply finding a sealed door that you can’t open until you have a particular mission. This heavily discourages exploration, with you only really heading out into the wilds when you have a mission. Twice I’ve been sent back to the exact same cluster of buildings for different missions, ensuring there was very little to do in the area and making the mission feel like a fetch quest.
Of course, it’s very funny, whether from amusing contributions from companions in conversation, or the sheer absurdity of the Spacer’s Choice jingle – “It’s not the best choice, it’s Spacer’s Choice!” It’s actually kind of fitting that this remaster leans into that branding, considering the point is that the Spacer’s Choice is a cheap, low quality option. Maybe a little more love and care would have avoided the comparison for this remaster.
