Remove from myFT Crushed by capitalism? There’s a video game for that ‘The Outer Worlds 2’ is set in a galaxy ruled by greedy corporations — but can a game made by a Microsoft-owned studio critique the system effectively? Creating characters is a key element of ‘The Outer Worlds 2’ Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. Greetings, consumer! Since your last visit to this galaxy, things have changed a little around here. You may recall the powerful corporations you encountered on your last adventure, Spacer’s Choice and Auntie Cleo’s. Well, while you were dozing away in cryo-sleep, there was a historic merger between the two, and we all now live under the benevolent gaze of a single mighty company: Auntie’s Choice. All you need is an unswerving commitment to the free market and you’ll fit right in. Welcome to The Outer Worlds 2, a new sci-fi RPG set in a distant future ruled by greedy corporations with scant regard for human life and dignity. While the setting is intergalactic, this fiction often feels eerily close to the world we live in today. That’s not because the satire is so smart (if anything, it’s rather crude), but rather because the developer, Obsidian Entertainment, is owned by Microsoft, a prime example of the type of mega-corp lampooned in the story. Among the many questions the game poses, perhaps the most interesting is: can you effectively critique capitalism when you’re operating deep within the system? The game casts you as an employee of the Earth Directorate, sent to the star system of Arcadia which has just been colonised by Auntie’s Choice, spreading its creed of unregulated commerce. It’s classic first-person RPG fare, reminiscent of Fallout or The Elder Scrolls: you create a character down to their hairstyle, eye colour and perhaps a prosthetic limb or two, then invest points in skills ranging from gunplay to stealth to hacking in order to determine how you’re going to play. You then race across four planets shooting alien monsters, solving problems for locals and navigating alliances between ideologically opposed factions. ‘The Outer Worlds 2’ offers choices that immerse the player deeper in its fiction The first few hours of the game are its weakest, as the story takes a while to build its stakes. Meanwhile the visual aesthetic, with chunky shapes and garish colours inspired by pulp sci-fi, is coherent but not particularly beautiful. As you continue, however, the mechanical pleasures of the game begin to emerge. This is an experience that’s all about choice: you can fine-tune your character’s abilities to create your own play style, and there are always multiple interesting ways to solve a problem. In an early mission, an emissary of Auntie’s Choice asks you to bring a group of religious outcasts into the capitalist fold. You can convince them using charm and conversation, sneakily undermine their infrastructure until they’re forced to flee, or decide that you actually want to side with the rebels and help secure their autonomy. Being able to make such choices and impact the game’s world immerses you more deeply in its fiction. But does this fiction have anything substantial to say? The game opens with the disclaimer: “Any similarities to real-world dystopian corporate branded hellscapes are purely coincidental.” This lays out the target of the game’s satire, but also the general calibre of its humour: broad and silly rather than incisive. There are good laughs along the way, but the writing is often too on the nose, such as when a character cheerily suggests that you “have a profitable day” as you say goodbye. While the game contains some individually interesting characters, its factions are rather thinly drawn. Choose between the Protectorate, an authoritarian monarchy obsessed with brainwashing and new technologies; the Order of the Ascendant, a shadowy cult who worship mathematical formulas; or Auntie’s Choice, which fits the tired cliché of a heartless, profit-hungry corporation. The visual aesthetic of ‘The Outer Worlds 2’ is inspired by pulp sci-fi It’s Auntie’s Choice that brings to mind the current state of Microsoft, in that both are companies that are unfathomably wealthy and control many aspects of our daily lives, but still style themselves as one of the good guys. Microsoft trumpets its focus on sustainability and accessibility, while its leaders keep a lower profile and court less controversy than some of its rivals. Yet beneath this veneer, the company’s gaming division is hardly a standard bearer for the glory of capitalism. Following its $75bn acquisition of Activision Blizzard in 2023, the biggest deal in gaming history, the company has laid off thousands of employees, resulting in studio closures and game cancellations. There have also been calls for a boycott by activists because of claims that the Israeli army used Microsoft tech tools in Gaza, while a recent 50 per cent price hike in its Game Pass subscription service led Lina Khan, former chair of the US Federal Trade Commission, to comment: “As dominant firms become too-big-to-care, they can make things worse for their customers without having to worry about the consequences.” Read it aloud in a psychotically upbeat tone, and it could be a line of dialogue from The Outer Worlds 2. What does it mean for a game to criticise corporate culture and capitalism if sales go right back into keeping those very machines running? Games about evil corporations allow players to feel radical without truly questioning anything. Their anti-capitalism is merely an aesthetic and its critique rings hollow. When a company is presented as a cartoon villain — whether it’s Auntie’s Choice, Resident Evil‘s Umbrella Corporation, BioShock‘s Ryan Industries, Final Fantasy VII ’s Shinra Electric Power Company or Fallout‘s Vault-Tec — the story doesn’t have to grapple with this system’s more insidious harms. Real critique might move on from villainous CEOs and jokes about corporate jargon and explore the gig economy, for example, or how tech bosses spinelessly defer to political leaders, or how a company stacked with well-meaning corporate execs can still end up crushing the people at the bottom, because the system is rigged against them. There are games that have offered more sophisticated critiques of capitalism, mostly in the indie space. Titles such as Kentucky Route Zero , Norco and Night in the Woods offer eloquent, elegiac portraits of rural American poverty and life on the periphery. Disco Elysium ’s critique of both capitalism and communism is lacerating and written with flair. This has also already been done well in sci-fi: Citizen Sleeper 2 offers a far more nuanced critique than The Outer Worlds 2 of how corporations might colonise the galaxy. In Hardspace: Shipbreaker, you work disassembling dangerous spacecraft and even death doesn’t get you a break: your bosses simply clone your body, transfer your consciousness, and make you finish your shift. It’s not hard to imagine certain real-world companies employing this technology if they could. ‘Kentucky Route Zero’ offers an eloquent portrait of rural American poverty The Outer Worlds 2 gets better as it goes along. Its factions may lack subtlety, and most of their members are fanatical ideologues, but the game presents you with some genuinely interesting, even philosophical, choices to make. When choosing which faction to side with, you are forced to reckon with the fact that, whether it’s a mathematical formula or the free market, each side has its own god. The game ultimately leads you to a place where there are no “right” decisions, and every path forward is ethically compromised. All you can do is pick your poison. It’s bleak, yes, but unlike so much of this cheap corporate satire, at least it seems honest. ‘The Outer Worlds 2’ is available now for PlayStation 5, Windows and Xbox Series X/S Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2025. All rights reserved. Source: https://www.ft.com/content/5b223e7a-3161-4f03-a577-557e9947618b