![]() It is not laden with the one-sided condemnations of Western thought, politics or economics some may have expected (and are already criticizing it for not containing the game lacks “an awareness of the sickness of the world and society” it depicts, “strips out the burgeoning class awareness” of its historical inspirations to the chagrin of the Marxists at Vice and commits the mortal sin of “requiring the player select a male or female character”, oh my!). Business isn’t the enemy in The Outer Worlds, just bad business”). If you want to see The Outer Worlds as a paean to individualism, there is little in its text that could challenge that interpretation. It should be noted the game treats the ideas it handles with impressive objectivity (thus Vice laments that The Outer Worlds is not a propaganda text denigrating capitalism: “So many of these workers are just accepting of their lot, so unable to see the forest for the trees, that Horatio Alger could be as helpful to them as Marx. The level of detail to discover is impressive and thorough, extending from the metaphysical level (in the OSI) to wild-life (detailed anatomical drawings overlay loading screens), scientific ideas (of ftl, holography, or terraforming, parodical or authentic sci-fi) and the means of production/flow of wealth (tensions are rife due to expropriation of docking fees by the Board on a space station which has retained independence from the colonies). Corporate governance of civil society by the Board as necessary to maintain law and order in the colonies, indentured work and productivity are presented to the masses as divinely mandated aspects of the universe, as natural as gravity, evolution or photosynthesis. By becoming content with one’s role in the Grand Plan, big or small, one imitates the Architect and assists the OSI and society in discovery of “the Equation". Possessed of such knowledge men will be as the grand architect. Enlightenment and human perfection, teaches the OSI, will consist in thorough human knowledge of the Equation (of an m-theory, a fundamental equation underlying the universe, presumably unifying quantum theory and relativity string theory is one such “equation"): knowledge (via the Equation) of “the nature, location and trajectory of every atom in the universe”. Since “the body is a collection of atoms” and “the mind is a consequence of chemical reactions”, “our lives are predestined along a path that is only visible in retrospect” (according to a soliloquy of Vicar Max) every sequence of cause and effect is reducible to the determinate and predictable interactions between material components of a system. The player explores a stratified society with corporate chairmen enshrined as instruments of a distant divine “Architect" (a personification of cosmic forces according to vicar Max), who structured the world down to the tiniest atom in accordance with “the Equation", or “Grand Plan” as the priests deem it before the masses. This deistic metaphysics/religion and the feudal society of corporate lords and indentured serfs it is used to justify (replete with propaganda in the form of widely-disseminated entertainment “serials", personality cults around CEOs and Soviet-style propaganda posters) is the real vision and novelty of the game beyond its artistic style. Back on earth, these corporations banded together into a space-faring conglomerate known as the Board and procured terraforming and colonization rights to the locales which would become the colonies, bringing with them state religion in the form of the OSI (the “Order of Scientific Inquiry”, proponents of the Scientist religion). The protagonist is an interstellar colonist roused from hyper-sleep in a distant intergalactic duchy under the control of mega-corps. Like Bioshock before it (wherein Rapture is presented as an elaborate promethean attempt to determine identity, nature, good and evil by human volition), The Outer Worlds does not cobble tropes, influences and concepts together into a dysmorphic composite, but interprets them (along with characters and competing social visions) in relation to a “cosmic perspective” or metaphysics. Obsidian has achieved a special and unusually intelligent feat of worldbuilding. ![]()
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