The Last Punbender

The big thing going on in The Outer Worlds is that the Halcyon colony can't feed itself. That is, they can produce food, but they can't eat anything that's native to the planets they've colonised and Earth crops aren't thriving in the local soil, so they're getting far less, and of far lower quality, than people need to survive. And Earth ... has mysteriously dropped out of contact. So the whole population is slowly dying of malnutrition.

And all of this is exacerbated by the fact that the colony is owned and run by a group of megacorporations (really mega, in that they seem to span the galaxy) that have been doing very well for themselves producing and selling junk food that barely qualifies as food in the first place. They don't particularly want the colony to starve but they're also unwilling to make any change that would impact their profit margins, so they're stuck. Their "plan" for resolving this involves putting most of the colony into cryogenic storage so the elite can survive off what resources they can produce.

And this is a deep, dark secret in Halcyon. Your mentor and primary quest giver in the game, Phineas Welles, knows about the situation and has gone on the run from the infamous Board that oversees colony management to solve it. He wants to awaken a group of lost colonists who are, crucially, unaffiliated with any of these corporations at present and get them to, as Mark Watney would say, science the shit out of it.

This works. That's the happy ending to the game. You awaken the colonists and life is something of a struggle, but they work it out and Halcyon survives.

But that's not even the point. The point is the behaviour of the colonists while all of this is going on. They, in one way or another, are already on this problem. No one has told them how precarious their situation is, but they can't help but see the shape of it. You encounter endless shuttered buildings and abandoned settlements across Halcyon as a clear sign of a shrinking population; sickness and drug addiction are rife; banditry is becoming a serious problem. No one in their right mind would think this colony is doing well.

In the very first area you land, you find that a woman named Adelaide McDevitt already has a workaround for the big problem. She's found that if you grow your crops using fertiliser made from organic material from Earth then you get edible food. Her source of "organic material" is undoubtedly a bit grisly (she's been taking corpses from the local town cemetery), but it works, and in any case her discovery should provide a solid blueprint for saving the rest of the colony.

The problem is that her son already died of malnutrition before she started her experiments. She (rightfully) blames the town management for his death and (less rightfully) is only willing to help out her fellow colonists if they actively rebel and join her ... which most of them are too sick and overworked to do. You can force the local manager to take some responsibility for his actions (in fairness he is more incompetent than malicious) and she'll start feeding the town.

Meanwhile, the planet of Monarch is in open rebellion against the Board. One of the local companies has unionised and seized the planet and there are anti-capitalist rebels camped out in the old executive housing blocks. What you're basically dealing with here is some deeply dramatic leftist infighting because these people all know each other. They plotted revolution together. And now they're having a dispute over tactics. There's more than one way to deal with this, but the point is: Monarch knows it's being exploited and is already fighting back.

And on Halcyon's colony-ship-turned-space-station Captain Junlei Tennyson is frantic to keep her people out from under the Board's control. She's just under ever-increasing pressure from them and losing by inches. You can help her out with that.

As the wandering RPG hero, you do get to step in and save the day all over. That's how these sorts of games work. But it's interesting to look at the kind of problems you get to heroically solve. You're mostly there to remove an obstacle that is preventing the locals from actively fighting the Board. They already know they need to do that.

The game has bits of cynicism, of course: you meet plenty of business executives with no morals at all and scientists willing to conduct unethical experiments for profits, and Felix's personal quest is a bit rough since it involves learning that his friend, a supposed workers' rights activist, is in the Board's pocket. But by and large it presents the idea that people en masse are capable of recognising an existential threat and taking action against it in an organised and timely faction. Once you've got the right people in charge it takes very little to get them to cooperate in taking down the board and getting the rescued scientists to work on the food problem.

It's sweet, it's optimistic, and it's fun! You get to storm the space-Bastille at the end, with all your allies.

The Outer Worlds 2 looks at this and just laughs because it's either that or cry.

In The Outer Worlds 2 the big problem is rifts. Rifts are ... not black holes, but they're close enough to them to understand why they might be a problem. They're wounds in the sky that consume anything near to them and reduce it to raw data. Quite unpleasant. They're created through the use of "skip drives", this universe's version of faster-than-light-travel.

Now the key thing here is that they're utterly unmissable. You can look up and see rifts in the night sky. Odds are you can see one in your backyard or living room, because the bloody things are popping up everywhere. Nobody denies the existence of rifts. Every major faction is constantly telling the population that they're not really a problem. We've got them under control! Or at least we're about to! We can profit from them ... somehow! It's all part of the Plan!

You will find people hanging out perilously close to them, poking at them, jumping into them ... generally not respecting the apocalyptic problem they are facing.

And there is, really, no major faction that has the interests of the people of Arcadia at heart. The original colonists were unwitting participants in a massive social experiment focused on the longevity of "utopian" colonies; this particular example of one, the Protectorate, collapsed into an oppressive monarchy within a generation – although it's still using the original founding principles as propaganda. "Auntie's Choice", the big corporation present in the colony, purports to be there to liberate the people from said oppressive monarchy; the truth of the matter is that the company's current CEO, Felicity Karo, is on the run from some pretty serious legal and financial trouble, and is trying to conquer remote colonies to secure enough resources to fight back before anybody in authority catches up with her. The Order of the Ascendant aims to solve "the Universal Equation" and thereby perfectly predict the future and maximise human happiness; this sounds nice, but in practice that means that their interest in solving this ultimate problem are significantly higher than doing anything much about the health and wellbeing of people now – heaven forbid we let the refugees into the monastery where they might disturb the peace, after all.

It takes a massive amount of effort to get everybody to stop doing incredibly dangerous things with rifts – and it comes right down to the wire, we really do almost see the whole colony eaten by a rift – and getting anybody to work with anybody else on literally anything is a colossal pain in the arse.

There are good, kind people in all of these organisations, mind. Often more than you'd expect, even in the especially predatory Auntie's Choice, but they tend to be good and kind within the boundaries set by their faction philosophies. Whereas in The Outer Worlds there was a great impetus toward change, in The Outer Worlds 2 few people genuinely question the way their world works. You find some rattled scientists worried about rifts, but to most people – eh, that problem is nowhere as immediate as the war they're trying to win, or the promotion they're trying to secure.

The ones who do are mostly (not entirely, but mostly) on your crew. Where the companions in the first game were generally feckless nobodies, the ones in the second are highly stressed burnouts. All of them are betrayed by the organisations for which they worked and very often by their own mentors and teachers. They're the ones who will rail with you against the lies and the incompetence and the cruelties. They all potentially had future in the factions from whence they came, but now they've learned how those places really work. Honestly, of all of them Marisol is the best adjusted because she started out the most cynical. It's heartbreaking watching Inez and Tristan work out everything was a lie.

It's not that you can do no good (personally I'm quite proud of having mentored Niles into becoming a scourge to corrupt governments and corporations everywhere – I still adore him), but here you deal much more in harm mitigation. People en masse, factions with entrenched ideologies, won't just behave rationally and do the right thing no matter how much you want them to. So which faction, or which amalgamation of factions, can you manoeuvre into position to mostly protect the people of Arcadia? What deals can you strike to get results you can live with?

You still come out of it okay. I'm happy enough with my endings: Arcadia is still standing, the companions are okay, and I'm pretty sure the faction leaders are having a not-great time. But your wandering RPG hero here is not helpfully getting the right leaders in position to solve a problem ... they're pulling the right levers to force a bad leader to solve the problem.