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Since 2018 when I booted it up for the first time, I have played Fallout: New Vegas around 11 times. Not all of these playthroughs reached the credits but most of them involved tens if not hundreds of hours of playtime.
This was partly because I played it when I was at university and it was one of the few games in my Steam library that my pack-mule of an old laptop could actually run. The game still crashes frequently but anyone who has played it can tell you that that's just New Vegas.
Beyond practicality though, I also played it because I was a huge fan of the action-RPG gameplay and the strong story focus. As a result of this history with Obsidian's first-person action-RPGs, their new game, The Outer Worlds, was an easy purchase me when it released in 2019. I bought the game around new year 2020.
However, if we fast-forward to the present day, I have still never beaten the game. I have tried twice and, on both occasions, found myself putting the game down upon reaching Monarch, the third hub-world. To try and amend this problem, I've been playing the game recently and, have been really enjoying the world and characters the game creates. That being said, almost as soon as I reached Monarch, it happened. I found myself reaching for my Switch instead.
“What the hell is wrong with me?” I thought, not for the first time. How is it that I’ve almost given up on a game that I consciously like three separate times at the exact same point? Thankfully, I’ve been theorising and I think I know why and it all comes down to gameplay loops and how they're supposed to feed into a game's narrative.
The Broken Loop
For anyone not in on the action of pretentious games-journalist jargon, gameplay loops are another way of talking about what you do in a game.
The core loop is what you do moment-to-moment. For The Outer Worlds, that’s walking, dialogue exchanged with NPCs and shooting. Supplementing that is the secondary loop. This loop is about your medium-term gameplay like completing the quest(s) that you’re currently on. Finally, there is a tertiary loop which is about your overarching mission in the game. The tertiary loop, as a result, is often closely linked to a game's narrative.
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The problem, the thing that has stopped me sticking with the game longer, lies within the game’s tertiary loop where this solid gameplay connects to the game's overarching narrative. It's the lack of a strong connection between the narrative and the gameplay, a strong tertiary loop, that has caused me to step away from the game multiple times.
Creating a Compelling Narrative
The Outer Worlds’ plot centres on the lost colony ship, Hope. Your character is rescued from the ship by the anti-corporate rebel Phineas Welles who sends you to find the materials you need to un-freeze your fellow colonists. There’s also the implication that the corporate Board that rules the colony don’t want the ship to be found.
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Almost as soon as you reach the first planet, you’re swept up in a parade of side quests which, while they all link to the Board being nightmarishly incompetent, have almost nothing to do with the Hope. As a result, the tertiary loop feels disconnected from the others, meaning that I’m only jogged into remembering what the hell I'm supposed to be doing when a loading screen offhandedly references the Hope.
In addition to it falling into the background, the game also has a problem with the design of main quest. It’s too slow. I don’t mind games having a slower pace and letting the story build but when I’ve travelled across three different planets and my main quest is still to just find some anti-freeze chemicals, I can’t say that I want the rollercoaster to slow down.
For contrast, look at Fallout: New Vegas. The game starts with you being shot in the face, rescued and then your main quest becomes murdering and dismembering the smug douchebag responsible. It’s a strong motivation and the quest for revenge drives forward the pacing in spite of the myriad of side quests distracting your attention.
When my main mission, my sole purpose, is to just find some chemicals, it doesn't offer me the same amount of energy. It’s hard to work up the enthusiasm for hunting down shiny blue mouthwash when there’s a load of smaller quests available that supply much more interesting things for me to murder my way across the colony for.
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Drive to Survive
On reflection, motivation really does feel like the core of The Outer Worlds' early-game retention issue. It’s not just the actual quest objectives that leave me feeling cold, it’s the main quest full stop in the first half of the game. The game's tells us that the Hope’s colonists are capable of saving the colony from the evil, incompetent Board but, at the time, it's not adequately explained how.
What’s worse is that your odyssey around the corporate McGalaxy takes you through multiple planets that have been so thoroughly soiled by the Board that it makes you wonder what possible difference one ship's worth of people could make to such a screwed up situation? The conclusion that you're left to draw is that, unless they’re all anti-corporate guerrillas who also happen to hold masters degrees in infrastructure maintenance, then there's probably not much they can do.
I’m again reminded of New Vegas where your character’s motivation is very personal, seeking revenge for your attempted murder. For me, The Outer Worlds sorely lacks that element of intrinsic motivation.
Your interactions with Phineas Welles amount to a simple tutorial and you don't meet your fellow frozen colonists so there’s no personal attachment driving you to free them. It makes it very hard for the main quest to keep me interested when the game’s other quests provide me with actual characters for whom I can sympathise and want to help.
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Concluding thoughts
The problem then, seems to go like this:
Once you've completed your side quests and move onto the next planet, the only gameplay loop in effect is the tertiary loop. This is because you haven't unlocked the new planet's side quests yet and so there is no more core or secondary gameplay loops to engage with. At this point, the game has to fall back on its overarching plot. However, as mentioned, that struggles to properly motivate engagement. This, I believe, is how I ended up quitting the game at the same point, conveniently around the time that I was starting Monarch, almost three, separate times.
Part of me wonders whether part of this is deliberate. Maybe in a game about the dangers of corporate greed and rampant self-centred individualism, the message is that it’s actually quite hard to be a good person when there’s no tangible benefit to you. Maybe I should feel motivated to rescue the colonists because it's just the right thing to do and the fact that this isn’t enough to motivate me shows just how far we’ve fallen as a society.
I’d like to think this was intended, it would certainly be a creative bit of narrative design. Something tells me though that the developers’ intention probably wasn’t to try and get people to stop playing their game, even if it is for an interesting point.
Overall, I am enjoying The Outer Worlds. I enjoy the writing, the gameplay and the world design. My concern is that by writing this article, people will take it as an attack. It isn’t. If anything, I’m writing this primarily because I do really like the game and because that makes it all the more fascinating to me that I struggled to finish it multiple times. Fans of the game can rest easy knowing that, this time, I have no intention to give up again. At least not on Monarch, anyway!
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