I'm Not Waiting 5 Years For Everyone To Realize The Outer Worlds 2...

In addition to our main Game of the Year Awards 2025, each member of the PC Gamer team is shining a spotlight on a game they loved this year. We'll post new personal picks each day throughout the rest of the month. You can find them all here.

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.

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.

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 ins

Source: PC Gamer