I'm not waiting 5 years for everyone to realize The Outer Worlds 2 is another Obsidian classic—I'm giving it its flowers now

The Outer Worlds 2 is not the best RPG of 2025⁠—that's Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2. Depending on who you ask it may not even be Obsidian's best game this year—at least one PCG editor thinks it was Grounded 2, and I almost couldn't choose between it and Avowed. It speaks to the studio's deep bench and catalogue that in a year Obsidian launched two other games, The Outer Worlds 2 is still a standout.

Obsidian's games rarely seem to get the praise they're due at launch, for one reason or another. Pillars of Eternity, Pentiment, and the first Outer Worlds strike me as notable exceptions. Otherwise, KotOR 2, Mask of the Betrayer, New Vegas, Alpha Protocol, Tyranny, and Deadfire are all games that took years to achieve cult classic status, let alone the couple that have finally become universally acknowledged classics.

Deadfire and New Vegas launched in the shadows of more immediately lauded RPGs⁠—Divinity: Original Sin 2 and Mass Effect 2 respectively⁠—and I distinctly recall reviewers and commenters discounting them in favor of those more polished or mechanically innovative competitors, a situation that rhymes with TOW2's comparisons to KCD2 this year.

Those Obsidian contenders haven't supplanted their competition, but they've had long tails, and these days they're shown more respect in RPG sicko circles than they received at the time. So I'm putting my chips on The Outer Worlds 2⁠—and fuck it, Avowed too⁠—right now.

Skillful play

My favorite aspect of The Outer Worlds 2 is how its skill system weaves into dialogue and quest resolutions. I am an easy mark when it comes to character build-based dialogue options in RPGs, especially when they rise above just slamming the "persuade" button every time you want to avoid a fight. At its heart, this was the core design of Disco Elysium, and one of my favorite moments in New Vegas is the Legion Centurion interrogation at McCarran where a high Intelligence stat lets you freak him out by speaking Latin.

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Every quest and sequence in The Outer Worlds 2 has at least one variation or branching option based on how you've built your character, and most have a smorgasbord of possibilities. While the speech skill remains, as ever, the GOAT for doing non-combat stuff in an RPG, it isn't always an instant win button. When I spoke to TOW2 director, Brandon Adler, and design director, Matt Singh, earlier this year, they told me that was a major priority in development.

I'm replaying Fallout: New Vegas at the time of writing, and I've already maxed out almost every skill with a ton of game left to play. That's a fun power fantasy in its own right, but TOW2 goes in the opposite direction: You can comfortably invest in and get close to maxing out four of 12 skills on a single character, five if you carefully optimize your build.

TOW2 does a great job delivering this feeling that your character build has its own, unique path through the game, without making you feel some kind of FOMO for all the choices that aren't available to you. There are a few memorable quests where I just didn't have the skills to pursue the resolution I might have preferred, but other, equally interesting paths were still available to me.

Elsewhere, locked doors and terminals can be bypassed by pickpocketing the right key. Many difficult speech checks can be circumvented via dialogue options unlocked by your prior choices, or even information you got from talking to the right person.

I had a great moment along those lines with the final boss: I'd managed to spoil for myself that the classic 'talk the bad guy down' option required a maxed-out speech skill, while my build was based on, but also restricted by, one of the game's flaws⁠—special perks with negative trade-offs⁠—preventing me from hitting the final level of the skill. I'd resigned myself to getting a slightly less than perfect ending, but my careful sleuthing and completionism throughout the game actually unlocked another, easier speech check to talk him down.

All of these options and choices result in genuine consequences, both while you're playing the game, and when you kick back to watch that classico 'where are they now' slideshow at the end. This is a smaller game, with fewer quests, locations, and outcomes than New Vegas, but TOW2 boasts a proportional level of complexity. I was shocked at how much it keeps track of, how many moving parts it has, and how they all influence each other.

The Outer Worlds 2 is not to be slept on: It is another great RPG in a quiet hot streak from Obsidian. In 2030, when everybody decides this game was always a heater, I will look back on this article with a feeling of smug satisfaction⁠—hopefully I'll have been made First Citizen/President for Life by then, too.