The Outer Worlds: Spacer's Choice Edition Review (danielg)
What happens when a psychopath, a queer engineer, and an atheist space priest walk into a corporate board room?
Despite the quality of the original game, its very hard to recommend this "expanded" and "definitive" edition.
The old definitive version (Non-Mandatory Corporate Sponsored) was going for $33-$38 last I checked. Now they are resetting the price to $48 on sale. They are charging preexisting owners $8 for a patch. So, this patch should be something substantial.
Is it? Not really.
First of all, the new graphical updates are not that impressive. If you're going to release a remaster 3 years after a game came out, the remaster should be making the game comparable to recent releases, and its not. The bigger issue is the performance. You charge $8 for a graphical remaster, and in 2023 we don't even get DLSS? For an Unreal Engine 4 game, which is one of the easiest engines to add DLSS to? No RTX either, obviously, not that this game could handle it.
Sure, I managed to make it fairly smooth, by compromising the graphical settings in a large number of areas. It was not, by any means, an unplayable experience. But immersion-breaking stutters were fairly frequent. I'm rocking an RTX 3080, i7-12700kf, and 48 GB RAM, so make of that what you will. Personally, I don't think the game looks as good as Hogwarts: Legacy, Sony's Spider-Man ports, Hitman 3, maybe even Stray.
The biggest change is the level cap (which is practically doubled), but Outer Worlds is... not really a game I can imagine grinding to that extent. Its not like any content was added with that increased level cap.
Overall, this really feels quite greedy, and I pin it squarely on Private Division. They won't get to publish The Outer Worlds II, so they decided to squeeze some quick cash out of the game they did have control over (Outer Worlds) by putting out a cheap "remaster." Its really a shame; The Outer Worlds deserved better.