The most damning thing is there's potential in the setting. The problem is the setting doesn't make for interesting characters when everyone is tense or high trying to forget they're just cogs in a machine. I like the idea of a colony without support trying to fend for itself in a hostile-to-human-life galaxy. That's compelling in itself you don't need death worshiping cartoon robber barons to be characters in it. There's no moral justification you could come up with that would be a good enough answer. It's two-dimensional as fuck to write characters like that, but maybe that's part of "the joke" Why would I wanna work for people like that? Cause I wanna get paid? There's already no food left and lack of proper nutrition is making every successive generation dumber, weaker, and dependent on drugs. Have fun being the richest pile of bones the next lucky idiot stumbles upon.
It's a non-choice unless you're gunning for a "fuck everything and everybody run" in which case you'll be incredibly fulfilled, I reckon. Do what I did roleplay as a rogue geneticist with a bent towards homegrown Eugenics and every time you hear something stupid open fire. Yeah you'll probably be hurting for ammo, but damn if you don't see the bottom of the gene pool after you're done.
We never find a Vault-Tec director of the board (maybe in Tactics it's in my backlog, I swear) who spills his guts and the reasoning behind the vault experiments. They were in bed with the government trying to make a buck and got blowed up like everyone else, good. That's exactly how you should write it not only is the mystique in tact, but it gives you more wiggle room to write. I'm aware that you can figure out the Vaults were never meant to save anyone, but it's heavily gated off and hidden nobody ever comes out and spoon-feeds the answer to you. You draw your own conclusions about the value of their experiments and the miseries left in their wake.
What is every character in the Outer Worlds? Hungry, dumb, and desperate to hold onto to their place in society. Okay now imagine that's what every npc talks about, none of them have dreams, none of them have aspirations, they're all just drones dancing to the corporate jingle, because that's all they have. It's fucking creepy. Everyone outside of your companions feels like half a person. There are a shockingly low amount of npcs that are memorable or have memorable quests.
There's old ship captain of an independent ship who's more than willing to let a freelancer poke around her ship's innards unsupervised, even though you could easily sabotage the ship and the lives of everyone on board. But wait there's more how about paranoid salvage/crime boss lady who reveals she believes in an extraterrestrial conspiracy only for her to send you into a REAL conspiracy, she gives you a cool helmet you'll need after playing this game. Oh that didn't do anything for you? Wait where are you going? Okay how about hardass military lady who just wants to cut through the bureaucratic red-tape and become a bare-ass fascist regime already?
For quests there are few exceptions the one where you can skill check your way through a Flash Gordon-esque movie scene got a chuckle out of me. Another is where you gumshoe for a socialite to discover what the true nature of the closed-off "retirement district" is. Problem being most of those quests are found on the last colony (possibly second depending) you'll visit. Man fuck this rant, I forgot what the point was... err I mean just like the Outer Worlds did!
