As I watch explosions rip enemy soldiers apart before ordering my companion to finish off a hulking mech, it becomes clear just how much of a step up The Outer Worlds 2 seems to be compared to its predecessor.
During my trip to cover Summer Game Fest 2025, I stopped by Xbox for a few appointments. After I watched this year's Xbox Games Showcase, I had the chance to play several games and chat with the developers making them. After playing The Outer Worlds 2 for 30 minutes and chatting with game director Brandon Adler, it's clear there's a lot to like as the team is working to address feedback players had for the first game.
Adler started as a producer at Obsidian before working his way up to game director on The Outer Worlds 2. He's excited about the game, openly saying that there was a lot that the team wanted to improve or fix.
"The Outer Worlds 1 is a great base to work from, I love the IP, I love all that stuff, but I was also like 'Hey, I think there's things that we could be improving that are going to be easy wins for us,'" he says.
Before the first game shipped, Adler made a list of things he thought the press and fans would both criticize. This list included things like the limited nature of the open zones, the frequent loading screens, and the combat.
"Lo and behold, when we did user research, every single one of those things came up," he says.
I echo some of these complaints. While I enjoyed The Outer Worlds as a concise, tightly-paced role-playing game (RPG), it had some flaws. The gunplay felt extremely rote, with combat never really evolving once you'd played for a few hours. That's not the case here at all, as the team has vastly improved how it feels to aim and pull the triggers on an enemy.
Playing on an Xbox Series X dev kit — the team declined to share details on graphics modes for consoles at this time — Obsidian had an interesting setup, with Combat, Speech, and Stealth builds available for the demo. I first chose the combat-oriented build, and I was immediately impressed by the difference.
Indeed, the guns here are almost reminiscent of Insomniac's Ratchet and Clank, with a quad-barrel ice-crusted shotgun becoming a fast favorite of mine alongside a slow, clunky machine gun that resembled a World War 2 anti-air gun.
Adler says that in response to criticism around the first-person shooting, Obsidian hired dedicated combat designers. The team also focused on studying why games like Bungie's Destiny feel good to play, and then went to Halo Studios for further advice, with that team giving Obsidian a list of things they could do to help make shooting feel better.
Exploring the environment in between shootouts, it's also apparent that there are benefits to different types of skills, and there's often more than one solution for solving a problem. My character didn't have the engineering know-how to open a damaged door, but he did have enough sheer muscle to force it open.
If you prefer to sneak around, there are also numerous vent passageways and areas to clamber up. You can also double-jump, which makes platforming far easier.
After stealing an experimental rift device and exploiting it to escape the facility, I immediately restarted the demo with the Speech build.
My limited-time hands-on meant I couldn't capture all the differences, but I did notice some new conversation options pop up, as well as some options that weren't available because I hadn't met the requirements by finding out exactly what was going on.
While the demo ended just as I made it outside, and so I didn't get to play the open world portions, Adler is confident that these open zones are far more satisfying to explore.
Another major point of improvement? Reducing the loading screens. While you'll still get a "hard load" when booting up a save file, you won't have a load screen just because you're entering a building. That means general exploration or going in and out of various places will be a much smoother experience.
It's hard to judge many aspects of an RPG based on 30 minutes of playing, but the clear leap up in gunplay here has my attention. It was easily my biggest concern and question going in. With that solved, I'm fully looking forward to Obsidian's next big game.
The Outer Worlds 2 is slated to launch on Oct. 29, 2025, across Xbox Series X|S, Xbox Cloud, Windows PC (Battle.net, Steam, Xbox PC), and PlayStation 5. Like all Xbox first-party games, the standard edition is also coming day one to Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass.
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