The Outer Worlds's Downloadable Content

On the 1 hand, my expectations for add-on content are understandably low.  On the other hand, the last game whose DLCs I experienced was Pokemon Generation 8, and it’s kind of hard to imagine that even a single member of Obsidian’s team could possibly have cared less about any part of The Outer Worlds than Game Freak cared about their own product.  Hell, I think most of the pedestrians who have happened to walk past the building housing Obsidian’s offices have probably put in more work on The Outer Worlds than any writer in Game Freak’s employ put into Pokemon Generation 8.  So there’s a good chance these things’ll at least be a step up from last time.



Peril on Gorgon: I found this DLC a bit puzzling to me, when I looked back on it.

See, it’s a good, solid DLC, overall.  It’s got a lot of little details that I noticed, enjoyed, and appreciated while going through it.  It starts off in a pretty interesting way.  There’s a fun temporary companion that can give SAM some specific dialogue interactions (which are just way too lacking in The Outer Worlds overall).  I like the moment that the game gives you a persuasion dialogue option to use Parvati’s romance with Junlei to get through an obstacle.  It’s cool that there are several additions to the stuff on the ship that you can find and collect.

And the add-on also has positives that are much more important than the above little details, too.  It’s a sizable venture, with a map the equal in size and exploration of any of the main game’s major areas.  The story is long and involved enough that you could probably get away with calling this an outright expansion.  Companions will all comment on the situations you find yourselves in, the same as they would for the main game’s quests, and as an additional nice touch, you can check in with them at various stages of the adventure to have them weigh in on the relevant developments of the story.  And the story as a whole is a decent one, exploring regrets of past sins, the tumultuous relationship of an emotionally estranged, yet not fully disconnected, mother and daughter, and, as always, the casual cruelty and inherently self-destructive mindset of corporations and the rich.  There are even aspects of the story that are outright elegant, really--I really enjoy the fact that the DLC’s (supposed) antagonist’s failure to stop the Stranger can be seen to boil down to a lack of ability to competently orchestrate their actions and hire adequate subordinates, subtly connecting to the idea, later on, that the antagonist needs the “lesser” mind that they have always dismissed as not brilliant enough, to organize and handle logistics for them.  That probably sounds vague and uninteresting because I’m trying to avoid spoilers here, but it IS cool, really!

But what puzzles me a bit is that while I can objectively say it’s a good DLC, I have to admit that I’m personally only kinda lukewarm on it.  I don’t dislike it or anything, but...I guess that I just don’t connect with it very strongly because a substantial part of this DLC’s emotional essence is rooted in the relationship between Minnie and her mother, and it just doesn’t really speak to me or draw me in.  Maybe Lillie and Lusamine in Pokemon Generation 7 spoiled me, I dunno, but I just don’t feel a lot of what I think I’m supposed to in this story of familial love, regret, resentment, and the divide between mother and daughter.

Additionally, I’m not sure I really get much from the purpose of the DLC.  The basis of Peril on Gorgon is eventually revealed to revolve around the existence of the marauders in The Outer Worlds, with the add-on revealing what creates them, and eventually culminating in the question of what the solution is to them and/or their creation.  And that’s nice, but at the same time, it sort of feels like a question being answered that we as an audience weren’t really asking...I don’t think anyone really questions the existence of raiders in Fallout, because the setting itself is enough of an explanation for them, and we likewise didn’t question marauders in The Outer Worlds, because while the physical nature of the setting may not be anywhere as terrible as the post-apocalypse, Halcyon’s pervasive crushing corporatism is explanation enough for why a number of people might mentally snap and begin to live as violent, feral psychos.  Raiders are raiders in Fallout for a number of reasons, sometimes by choice, sometimes by unfortunate circumstance, sometimes by madness, and the world of Fallout being such that it creates this kind of mindless evil is sensible and consistent with the series’s themes and environment.  That the marauders of The Outer Worlds are to be explained away by a single, overarching reason for their existence, just a single outside factor that eliminates questions of responsibility and limits the scope of their stories drastically...it feels like a rather clumsy and shortsighted narrative decision.

Not helping anything is the fact that the cause behind the marauders, and what it narratively makes them as a whole, strikes me as a case of The Outer Worlds finally going beyond mere homage to Firefly/Serenity, and becoming straightforward plagiarism.

So, my verdict is a muddled one here.  Peril on Gorgon is good--but it’s not as good as it should be, wants to be, and thinks that it is.  Peril on Gorgon might really work for you--but I, personally, couldn’t make enough of a connection to really get into it.  At $15, it’s a pricey DLC, but at the same time, you’re probably going to get around 15 hours out of it, and there’s really nothing about it that’s an outright problem or shortcoming.  I guess I tentatively recommend it at full price, and if you can get it on sale, then my recommendation stands on much firmer ground.


Murder on Eridanos: Oddly enough, I feel like Peril on Gorgon had greater ambitions and tried much harder to be a meaningful story...but I personally enjoyed Murder on Eridanos more.  The premise of this one is a fun change of pace, as the Stranger signs on to investigate a murder and figure out whodunnit, against the backdrop of a fancy hotel on a resort planet with a corporate-controlled fruit plantation and a spaceport run by basically the mob.  It’s a decent little story of investigating leads, finding oneself being drawn into a larger plot than was previously expected with a shadowy figure lurking just behind the entire time, culminating in a big plot twist and a final showdown.  It’s basically The Outer Worlds taking a lighthearted stab at Film Noir, except without the Noir at all because everything’s about colorful cereal berries.  Even got a Femme Fatale and everything.  Who, BTW, I won’t be naming, because spoilers, and whatnot.

What’s weird, though, is that Murder on Eridanos is as enjoyable as it is.  Oh, sure, there are plenty of moments and details that are unequivocally good and great--Felix as Bad Cop with Bertie is an absolute treasure, and once again I’m very pleased that the companions’ presence is as strong in this adventure as it was in Peril on Gorgon and in the main game, for example.  But there’s a lot about this add-on that falls flat, too.

For starters, it never really feels all that much like an actual murder mystery kind of adventure...the investigations and interrogations of suspects are pretty underwhelming stuff that’s obviously just fodder for providing more sidequests than actually building a murder mystery narrative.  There’s no intrigue, no one seems like a legitimate suspect but the perpetrator himself (and even then, it’s more for it being the most likely “twist” than anything related to deduction), there’s no strong central detective entity to tally up and ponder over the evidence and alibis and such...hell, not that this is all that important in and of itself, but even the aesthetic of the DLC gets in its own way, with its vaguely garishly colorful setting being quite good for the sci-fi adventure parts of the story, but not the promised detective premise.  If Obsidian was sincerely trying to create a murder mystery DLC here, then they were clearly completely and totally out of their element...and if they didn’t actually consider the murder mystery aspect of the DLC to be all that important to it, just a starting point, then unfortunately, they devoted way too much of the adventure’s time to the quests that are theoretically related to sleuthing.

Next, it is, frankly, really disappointing that when the Femme Fatale I mentioned enters into play on your side, all she does is stay in the hotel room while you do all the remaining legwork.  I mean, for real, what is with that?  For the first 70% of the DLC, she’s pursuing her own investigation, out there running down her leads and doing the work, with you always a step behind...and then when you finally do catch up with her, and join forces, she just retires to the suite and lets you do all the rest.  She isn’t even doing a commenting-from-afar thing like, say, Sylens in Horizon 0 Dawn, or the navigator in a Shin Megami Tensei: Persona title.  Considering her behavior before you caught up to her and the way she’s personally invested in the murder mystery, for the Femme Fatale not to be out in the field with you is a case of insanely poor writing.  Like, Anders-in-Dragon-Age-2-contrasted-to-Anders-in-Dragon-Age-1 levels of antithetical character behavior.  

She isn’t even there for the climax, for Norgorber’s sake!*  The entirety of Femme Fatale’s character is based around her emotional connection to the deceased, and yet she just passively sits out the showdown with [SPOILER]’s killer in a hotel room a mile away!  What the actual fuck?

Lastly, the conclusion of this add-on is rushed as all hell.  Once the main quest is finished and you’re on your way out, there’s little interaction to be had with Femme Fatale and Sederick (who are (potentially) the 2 remaining major figures of the DLC’s plot).  There’s no dialogue changes for almost any other important characters to reflect that the situation has been resolved (which, for Bertie and Spencer Woolrich, is especially neglectful if Femme Fatale made it out of this DLC alive).  The spaceport area of the map remains infected, even if you followed the story path of fixing that issue.  I can only assume that the developers were working on a harsh deadline, and man does it show.

With all that said, I reiterate that Murder on Eridanos is generally pretty fun.  It doesn’t have ambitions of significance the way Peril on Gorgon did, so I do respect the first DLC more, but at the same time, Murder on Eridanos manages to rise well enough above its flaws to be an enjoyable romp that will deliver a fairly satisfactory hit of more Outer Worlds fun for fans.  Now, it is flawed enough, and to less enough purpose, that I definitely don't recommend it at its $15 asking price, the way that I kind of did for Peril on Gorgon.  But if you can get it on sale for half off, maybe even at $10, then Murder on Eridanos is probably worth it.



And that’s all, at least for now--I’ve heard some people theorize that there might be more add-ons in The Outer Worlds’s future, but all reliable accounts I can find indicate that this is wishful thinking.  So, then, how did this game do?

Eh.  Okay, I guess.

Which still is something of a win, when it comes to add-ons, particularly considering that my last experience with a DLC was Nintendo extending the unworthy life of Pokemon Generation 8 further.  Peril on Gorgon and Murder on Eridanos each represent some of the lower moments of The Outer Worlds, and one might have hoped for far better from Obsidian just on principle, but there’s no denying that these content packs are better than average DLCs, at least.  No doubt I’ll reflect quite fondly on them when I play whatever terrible add-on I next encounter.








* And don’t go trying to tell me that there are any gameplay considerations that would rationally prevent her being involved.  It might’ve been too tall an order to coder Femme Fatale in as an actual party member, but as PAM in Peril on Gorgon demonstrates, it’s possible to have a non-party ally hanging around in any given interior location.  Easily could’ve done that here for at least the last dungeon of the DLC.