The Outer Worlds 2’s First Hour Has Layers and Layers of Role-Playing Opportunities

It often takes a sequel to unlock an idea’s full potential. Just look at Assassin’s Creed 2, Mass Effect 2, or Batman: Arkham City – games which erased the imperfections of their predecessors and elevated rough diamonds to all-time-classic status. Based on a new demo I played at gamescom 2025, I’m betting The Outer Worlds 2 is about to join that club. Obsidian’s first trip across its satirical galaxy back in 2019 had plenty going for it, but often felt constricted in scope or fell flat in its delivery. Those are flaws that a second attempt (plus a nice chunk of change from Microsoft’s wallet) could rectify, and it seems that’s exactly what has happened, if The Outer Worlds 2’s hour-long prologue is anything to go by. Its gleaming polish, branching pathways, and rich role-playing opportunities suggest this is the game I’d hoped the original Outer Worlds had been.

The prologue demo – and thus The Outer Worlds 2 itself – opens on a gorgeous CGI cinematic that introduces the Earth Directorate, a task force that hops around the galaxy taking on corrupt corporations, corrupt governments, and the ultra-corrupt alliances of corporations and governments. More importantly, it is your employer, and your job in all this is to investigate the production of Skip Drives – engines that enable interstellar travel, but rip dangerous holes in the fabric of space with each FTL jump. In this first mission, you’re dispatched to the Arcadian System to infiltrate a lab and work out the Directorate’s next steps in bringing the company behind these hazardous machines to justice.

Within minutes of landing at the lab’s dock, the prologue offers up a multitude of ways to handle its first problem. Unlocking the bulkhead doors to the lab activates the area’s defences, and now you need to get past a small army of combat robots and automated turrets. You could, of course, shoot your way through them, or drop into a crouch and sneak past them, weaving through their sightlines. But those are just your base, vanilla choices. The Outer Worlds 2 also provides a much more interesting set of opportunities thanks to its RPG foundations.

For instance, the security booth in which this escapade begins is the final resting place of Cadet Robin Mowry, and rifling through his pockets will reward you with his personnel ID. When the defenses are triggered, you can phone another cadet working elsewhere in the station, impersonate Mowry, and ask for the defences to be shut down. Your new “colleague” will comply… but only if you can navigate a conversation about “mental refreshment.” You see, Mowry recently underwent a chemical lobotomy as punishment for a work misdemeanor, and so you’ll need to perform your verbal coercion without coming across as ungrateful for your life-correcting treatment. A response enabled by using Speech, one of 12 core skills you can build your character around, is the final key to unlocking a safe route to the lab.

Not good with words? Well, maybe you’ve built a character who knows how to breach security software. There’s a service duct that leads out of the security booth and towards the mechanic’s control bay, inside of which you can use the Hack skill to disable the area’s defences. And so, in a single objective alone, I was able to identify four different approaches. This is a prologue, of course, and so they are all easily achieved, but it feels like a statement of intent: each challenge will have multiple methods of approach, with unique pathways catering for a variety of specialised character builds. If Obsidian has been able to deliver on this across the entire length and breadth of the campaign, then that’s something to be very excited about.

The approach to choice differed throughout the demo. While that first area was about demonstrating the multiple methods of solving a single problem, later I was presented with quite literally a branching pathway, with each route leading to an area designed to cater to a specific play style. Heading left to Security Ops would take me to a map built around stealth and silent kills, while turning right and progressing through Central Dispatch led to a showcase for conflict and gunplay. I initially opted for the former and soon found myself in an office complex clearly built on the foundational tenets of Deus Ex. Ventilation ducts provided alternate pathways that led to helpful vantage points, while a knife and throwable distraction devices found hidden behind floor panels allowed me to sneakily dispatch the area’s staff.

Security Ops’ main pathway is designed to cater to simple stealth mechanics, but poking around revealed further opportunities that were much more enticing than a basic backstab. In one office, I was able to use my Hack skill to obtain a key card for the Pump Room, a locked building that provided an alternative route to my final objective in the Skip Drive lab. Built into the walls of that area was another set of ducts, which not only allowed me to bypass a guard patrol but also led to a set of switches that enabled the building’s automatic turrets, which happily poked holes in my enemies following a single button press. The RPG is inherently a pretty good genre for rewarding nosy players willing to look beyond the obvious choices, but The Outer Worlds 2 already feels richer than many of its contemporaries, especially this early in its campaign.

Of course, the original Outer Worlds was never under scrutiny for a lack of role-playing opportunities. It did, however, receive fair criticism for its soft and mushy shooting. Choosing Central Dispatch on a second playthrough of the prologue was an opportunity to see just how far Obsidian has improved its once-damp weapons, and the good news is that the two on offer in this demo – a pistol and rifle pairing with early 1900s detailing – feel fantastic. The pistol is snappy, with a light kick and a satisfying reload, while the repeating rifle packs a much bigger punch at the cost of a long, lever-action cycle between shots. That latter aspect helps cement The Outer Worlds 2’s vintage-futuristic aesthetic, but more importantly demands use of the Tactical Time Dilation Device, which slows time to a crawl so you can more easily score headshots. Back in 2019, this feature admittedly felt like a knock-off of Fallout’s VATS, but with the improved gunfeel of this sequel, TTDD now comes across more like a genuine bullet time system.

Compared to the stealthy, opportunity-filled Security Ops pathway, Central Dispatch was much more limited with what it had to offer. A conversation with the cadet I had fooled with my impersonation of his colleague at the start of the demo turned sour, and he set a squadron of heavy Dragoon robots on me. This did push the combat intensity a little further, but did not come coupled with any inventive approaches that I could identify. Still, the heavier damage the robots inflicted forced me to repeatedly use the Medical Inhaler – a health kit that builds a toxicity meter with every huff. Max out that gauge and you’re forced to wait a duration until you can use it again. It’s a fun riff on Fallout’s drug addiction system, but one that works as a battle constraint rather than a stat impact. It demands you think tactically about when you ingest those HP-restoring chemicals, and while I imagine it could cause a few frustrating deaths in the fiercest battles, I think it’s at the very least an interesting idea worth experimenting with.

I’m always going to take the sneakier or more creative option when it comes to RPGs, and I’ll admit I had a lot more fun in Security Ops than Central Dispatch. But I will say that those short shootouts convinced me that I’ll actually enjoy it when the guns are drawn, something I can’t say about the original game’s underwhelming combat. Like its fantasy sibling Avowed, much of its newfound punch is down to visual polish, and the same level of detail can be felt across the entire prologue. There are bespoke animations for almost every skill – lockpicking sees your character’s hand align a set of pins on a Mag-Pick, hacking sees you arrange the dials on a Bypass Shunt probe before jamming it into a computer terminal, and applying the Engineering skill to a maintenance panel sees you rub your hands in anticipation before twisting and tightening an arrangement of steampunk valves. It feels expensive, but more importantly it connects and anchors you into this fantastical world.

If it’s not clear by now, I’m really into what Obsidian is doing with The Outer Worlds 2. The prologue features so many cool opportunities, particularly when it comes to non-combat or combat-adjacent approaches, and I hope that they are all being served up in this opening hour as something of an establishment of the rules – “This is how you can use your character, and similar opportunities await.”

While I appreciated Obsidian’s prior attempt at this universe, I never totally fell for it, but what the studio has achieved here in this prologue is exactly what I’d hoped for the first time around. And that’s exactly why I’m willing to bet that The Outer Worlds 2 will be one of those sequels. The ones that finally take an idea all the way to greatness. Hopefully, I’ll pass that “prediction” check with a critical success.