The Outer Worlds, Edgewater, and the Glorious Rejection of the Third Option
It’s been a while since I had a real chance to talk positively about a video game. Most of my essays and thought pieces are about negative things, games that didn’t quite work, or businesses that did a naughty. But today, in the season of this most Hallowed of Weens, where in Salt Lake City there exists a very annoying cold snap, I get to talk about a game that warmed my heart. Of course, it’s a game made by the same people who made a certain game that I practically worship for its narrative design and overall atmosphere.
The Outer Worlds. I’m talking about The Outer Worlds.
Made by Obsidian, the same people who created my Lord and Savior, Fallout: New Vegas, The Outer Worlds is basically Fallout IN SPACE!!!! but with the satire of Capitalism dialed up to eleven, then turbo-charged, then turnt past 11, then having the dial broken off entirely and thrown to the moon only to burn up in the atmosphere. All I’m saying is that it is an RPG in the style of 3D Fallout games that makes no attempt to hide its theme or its corporate dystopian sci-fi setting.
And, I can’t believe I’m actually saying this, but after playing through its introductory area, I think it might actually better than Fallout: New Vegas. In some regards. It’s definitely better than Fallout 4, and I assure you that that is not my petty spiteful disappointment grudge talking. Fallout 4 tried to be the more action packed version of Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas, and The Outer Worlds is that too, but far better realized. For one, a strategy of stealth is actually mostly an option, where in previous Fallout games, including New Vegas, stealth was merely the means of getting a free critical hit before the inevitable battle started. The Outer Worlds is also better at keeping players on the move and in the action while maintaining the RPG elements that a 3D Fallout is known for. Tactical Time Diliation, The Outer Worlds’ version of the infamous V.A.T.S. System from Fallout 3 onward, sends players into a mode where everything moves at a crawl for a limited time, determined by what actions the player performs while it is activated. If you’ve ever played SUPERHOT, it operates very similar to that, only here there’s the added bonus of aiming at various body parts on the enemy in order to inflict Status conditions. It’s not as flashy as V.A.T.S., but by allowing the player to remain in control and not disorienting their perspective for the sake of flashy camera angles on their glorious kill, it keeps the player in the moment.
But I’m not really here to talk about how much the gunplay is improved. I’m here to talk about the very special way that The Outer Worlds presents its first area, the Emerald Vale, which houses a little settlement called Edgewater and a very, very difficult decision.
I have to admit, I can’t remember the last time that making narrative decisions in video games has been difficult, and by difficult, I mean actually made me question whether or not I did the right thing. Most of the time, whenever a video game has had me make a decision, there’s never any real moral tension, and that’s for several reasons. Oftentimes, the level of moral depth on play with these decisions is a simple binary: do good thing or do naughty thing. Bioshock comes to mind. Do I save the Little Sisters or do I sacrifice them? There’s no ambiguity in these choices because the game never frames them with any, and frankly what ambiguity is there in the choice of whether or not to kill an innocent mutant baby with your bare hands, especially if you don’t get the good ending if you harvest even one Little Sister? It’s so unambiguous that I’ve never had it in me to sacrifice even one Little Sister in any playthrough I’ve done of Bioshock, ever. Where’s the moral dilemma in a very clear decision?
Then there is the Third Option. Third Options are nice and they are awful. They’re often slightly out of the way, but they are meant as rewards for players who put in the effort to find them, and that reward is that they manage to solve the dilemma at hand in a way that pleases everyone. This includes the player themselves, the Third Option often removing the burden of making a difficult decision and living with it. It is also known as the Golden Option for a reason. They are satisfying, yes, but I think maybe we’ve gotten a little too used to having them. I personally would accuse them of effectively priming players into a mentality somewhere in between the Golden Means Fallacy and the Hard Work Fallacy. The Third Option becomes the morally right option by means of it being the best option, and when that happens, bye bye goes moral tension. And given just how common a trope it is, players will always be searching for that Third Option, the easy way out, and sometimes that way out is really bizarre.
Dishonored is a game that equates killing with badness through the design of its Chaos System and its multiple endings, but it is based around objectives that involve you, the player, eliminating targets. So, to solve this little dilemma, the game gives you the option of non-lethal eliminations, which are basically seven levels of Fates Worse than Death wrapped in Cruel Mercy. The game presents this as the golden option, and the golden options lead to the best ending, so the ambiguity dissolves back into a binary choice of good and evil. Plus, even though you are sending people to horrible fates regardless, the people you are hunting down are never framed as anything but unsympathetic, which further lessens the dilemma. Dishonored is fun, and a well designed stealth game, but as a setting it undermines its own Grey on Black Morality by trying to paint the Grey several shades lighter through game design.
The Outer Worlds does not give you an easy way out. It’s amusing too, because with a game as dedicated to one-upping itself on ways to make the corporate culture look absolutely dystopian and hellish, one would think that there would be clear sides to take here. But that’s part of the beauty of how The Outer Worlds crafts Edgewater, no side is perfectly sympathetic to the point where there is a clear right and wrong, and in order to really demonstrate just how well designed this entire narrative is, I kind of sort of definitely have to do a play by play of the entire experience, so if you really want to experience this spoiler free, stop reading and go play the game right now, because from here on out, it’s spoiler season. I won’t be upset, you’ll have properly witnessed a rare moment in gaming where every piece falls perfectly into place.
Let’s begin right at the very beginning.
The conflict surrounds the fact that you, the player, need to fix your newly acquired ship, the Unreliable, in order to make it off the planet. Your ship AI, ADA, informs you that you need a power regulator, and that one could be found in Edgewater. You travel to Edgewater, where upon arriving at the front gate you meet a rather peculiar man alongside a couple of guards. His name is Silas, and he’s a gravedigger. He happily points you in the direction of Reed Tobson, the manager of the Edgewater Cannery and de facto leader of Edgewater, and also offers you an errand to do. See, Silas has a list of people who need to pay off their debts to him — their gravesite fees, to be exact. See, in order to have a gravesite in Edgewater, you need to have a plot of land, and everything in Edgewater is Spacer’s Choice property, ergo, by having a gravesite, you are renting land from Spacer’s Choice and that ain’t free, you see. So in order to have a gravesite, you have to pay the gravesite fee. Silas would collect the fees himself, but Marauders have been looting the graves, and if Silas allows another grave to be looted, Spacer’s Choice will dock his pay, hence why he needs a guard detail and why he needs you, the player to run his errands.
There’s a lot of genius design packed right into this one simple character. First of all, from a game design standpoint, it gives the player several breadcrumb trails to follow right off the bat, and those breadcrumb trails inevitably lead to the player exploring and interacting with Edgewater and its inhabitants in a way that feels organic and not forced. Secondly, it serves as the establishing moment for just how oppressive the corporate culture of Edgewater and Spacer’s Choice really is. One corporation has an entire settlement by the balls to the point that it actually prevents people from doing their jobs effectively out of fear of incurring the wrath of the company, and they are so focused on the bottom line at the expense of everything else that everyone has to pay a fee to have a place to be buried.
As soon as you step inside Edgewater, you are greeted by a town that at first glance, looks like a modest factory town in space. Everyone is in worker uniforms, there’s a Cantina that people go to after work to unwind, and everyone knows each other and gathers around to socialize. But then almost immediately you start to notice that something is… off. Closer inspection of the buildings and surroundings reveals them to be in poor care. The streets are uneven and have numerous cracks, the buildings have rust in various locations, and the overall atmosphere feels less like idealistic space frontier town and more brutalist. You overhear people complain about various grievances, only to be tersely told by their friends to pipe down less someone from corporate hears them. Any attempts to interact with random NPC’s are met with annoyed grunts of “I don’t have time for this.”. There’s also guards throughout the city, and they are in full out riot gear. You even get to witness one guard harassing a worker, telling him to get back to working for the company or else, you guessed it, his wages will be docked and he’ll be sorry.
The Outer Worlds and Edgewater may look quite aesthetically pleasing, but its true beauty lies in the fact that every detail in the setting is designed to accent the story being told, the story of an oppressed working community struggling to stay afloat. There’s an attention to detail that immediately gives the player a sense that everything that they have come across right now is a facade that is showing its cracks. Another piece of the puzzle is revealed, not through overt exposition, but storytelling through environmental design.
And then you have a choice, explore the town or go straight to the Cannery and get straight to business. Choosing to go to the Cannery will take you past a mysteriously vacant reception desk and up to the office of Reed Tobson, who is busy discussing maintenance issues with the resident mechanic, Parvati, AKA the sweetest little muffin ever created and person who deserves all the hugs. Parvati meekly and fruitlessly attempts to explain the problems with the machines to Tobson, who keeps badgering her to explain it to him in plain English, without the technical mumbo jumbo or the names that Parvati has given each of the machines. Parvati points out your presence, and Tobson proceeds to chastise her for speaking out of turn. Tobson then turns to you, puts on the most pleasant persona possible, and proceeds to chastise Parvati further for not pointing out your presence. He then tells you how you will be acquiring the power regulator that you seek, take one out of the Botanical Gardens that have been mostly abandoned.
Key word, mostly.
The botanical gardens is home to a group known as the Deserters. The Deserters are a group of people who abandoned working at the Cannery in order to strike it out on their own. Problem is, without their help, the Cannery is struggling to make its quotas and therefore the entire settlement of Edgewater is in danger of facing the wrath of Spacer’s Choice. He admits that he really doesn’t have a choice in the matter since Spacer’s Choice has been absolutely unwilling to send in new blood to replace the Deserters, and there is absolutely no convincing them otherwise. Desperate times, desperate measures. He offers you Parvati’s assistance in the matter, and she agrees to accompany you, but only if you want her too. And honestly, why would you not want her to?
There are masterful establishing character moments at work here for both Parvati and Tobson. Parvati is instantly sympathetic and likeable as a socially awkward but deeply personable mechanic who genuinely cares about everyone she interacts with despite her self esteem issues, while Tobson is a walking war flashback for anyone who’s dealt with incompetent micromanaging middle management. But while Tobson’s attempts at affability are very transparently bullshit, he is still somewhat sympathetic given his position as being the captain of a sinking ship that’s truly run out of options. It also sets up the moral ambiguity of the situation nicely as well. You are essentially being roped into destroying an entire settlement for the benefit of another, but the motivation behind it is not entirely unsympathetic. Edgewater is reliant on their corporate backers to exist, but their corporate backers make everything needlessly hellish through their greed and micromanagement, and therefore are kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place. Speaking from personal experience, having a bunch of your coworkers walk out with no easy replacements absolutely screws everyone over, and you can’t help but wish that things would be better if they didn’t. Toil shared is toil lessened, as it were.
So you go on your way, Sweetest of Muffins Parvati most certainly at your side, and you might just start to explore the town of Edgewater itself. Parvati being your companion actually allows her to give commentary on most of the places you visit. She even gets to interact with the townsfolk. Parvati’s lived here her entire life, and through her connection to the town, you get to learn more about her and the town at the same time. While you’re exploring the town, you might just begin to collect those gravesite fees Silas was looking for. You go speak to Phylis, one of the workers over at the cannery. She coughs up the gravesite fees, but through conversation, we realize that they are not her gravesite fees, but rather those of a former worker named Eugene. Eugene was the former receptionist, and he committed suicide — or, as Spacer’s Choice policy views it, vandalism of Spacer’s Choice property.
I did say that Spacer’s Choice owns everything in Edgewater.
She’s responsible for paying Eugene’s gravesite fees because as the closest living relative (read: she was the closest living person in relative distance to his body at the time because she was the one who discovered it), corporate policy demands that she be accountable for their outstanding fees… weeeeeeeeeee! Oh, and you can’t say Eugene’s death was a suicide. Further digging reveals that Tobson and the town covered up that it was a suicide because otherwise the entire settlement would have to pay a fine for vandalising Spacer’s Choice property, and they can’t afford that, so it’s much easier to say that Eugene died of the plague. Yes, on top of corporate being dicks, this poor town has to deal with rampant sickness, and because Spacer’s Choice is the paragon of slimy cheap skeezeball companies, they don’t send enough medicine to help everyone, just the most important people. Medicine is a privilege, not a right, you see, and one has to earn that privilege by being a good worker and towing the company line. If one is not a good worker, or they end up not adhering to company policy by, say, skimping out on gravesite fees, then they end up being condemned to sickness and tossed aside by both the community and the company. But towing the company line only really has one outcome, death. Parvati’s father died in service to the company, while never really achieving anything aside from raising Parvati.
It’s important to note that the majority of these side quests that have the player interacting with the world are, in fact, fetch quests, because a lot of people complain about fetch quests and how fetch quests are the most uninspired of quest types, and it’s easy to draw the wrong conclusion from that criticism and label the trope of fetch quest itself as a bad thing that should be retired. What makes a fetch quest tired and uninspired is not the fetching itself, but whether or not the act of fetching has any meaning behind it. There’s a world of difference between fetching something for the sake of experience points and fetching something and learning and interacting with a world in the process. You, the player, are doing mostly errand work in Edgewater, but that errand work is building a world organically, and encouraging the player to interact with the world more by doing so.
And so, after doing more errand work and discovering just how awful the situation really is in Edgewater, you finally make your way over to the Deserters, run by a kindly old botanist named Adelaide. She left Edgewater after getting fed up with everything, and came out to the old botanical gardens to perform what corporate scientists said couldn’t be done — make the soil workable. She succeeded, and with that success, she has managed to tempt many a worker away from Edgewater. They can grow crops, and they aren’t getting sick! You inform her of what you intend to do, and after seethingly calling out you for being a snake, she presents you with an alternative. Divert power from Edgewater to the Botanical Labs, to the Deserters, and pull the plug on the awful corporate culture that keeps everyone trapped in servitude to an uncaring overlord. Sounds like a very agreeable alternative!
Except, something about all this seems a little too good to be true.
You press Adelaide for more details. Why should we choose the Deserters over Edgewater? Isn’t that unfair to the people of Edgewater who will be thrown to the wolves by doing this? Adelaide’s answer, very spiteful in tone, is because Edgewater is awful and really, people like Parvati should know this because her father died of a heart attack in service to it! After spending the next several minutes talking yourself down from burning Adelaide alive where she stands for attempting to use Parvati’s trauma as a weapon, you do some more digging. Turns out the “miracle” that allowed Adelaide to get the soil to be liveable was a special ingredient she put into the soil.
That ingredient is dead bodies.
Marauders, dead Deserters, you name it. The Deserters survive solely due to a rather morbid recycling scheme. Adelaide even takes bodies from the Edgewater cemetery! Maybe those grave robbings that Silas was talking about weren’t marauders after all… *shiver*. And there’s more! Not only does Adelaide rely on an unsustainable resource to have her independent colony, but she also needs the power from the geothermal plant in order to power refrigeration, and she’s screwed without it. The same geothermal plant owned and operated by the corporate overlords that she so despises.
As you make your way to the power plant, fighting off rogue security robots that have murdered mostly everyone inside, you begin to think, suddenly, it’s not so black and white, isn’t it? As you approach the terminal that controls the flow of power, all of a sudden, Parvati meekly asks if she can have a word with you. Of course, you oblige her, because you value Parvati, and only a true monster would not allow Parvati, the Sweetest of Muffins, to speak, for she is kind and smart, and you want her to know that. After she expresses excitement at the prospect of someone valuing her opinion, she tells you that she thinks that you shouldn’t shut off power to Edgewater.
This is a very compelling moment, and also a very evil moment from a design standpoint. You care about Parvati, Sweetest of Muffins, and the designers trust that you care enough about her to use her opinion to sway yours and further establish the moral ambiguity of what you are about to do. This probably will give you pause even if you hate Spacer’s Choice and their shitty policies as much as Adelaide does, because you expect that someone like Parvati would be totally in the camp of “Fuck Corporate” given that she suffers A LOT due to the corporate culture of Edgewater. But she’s not, she’s in the camp of “What will happen to the people that I care about?” despite everything, and that thought process leads her, and by extension you to doubt what you are about to do. It reinforces the fact that neither of your choices are ideal.
And when you start to think about them, they are definitely so far from ideal.
Divert power to the Deserters, and congratulations! You’ve put up a big middle finger to the awful, awful corporate culture of Edgewater! No more gravesite fees! No more dying of plague! We can live as one with nature… except, for how long? Adelaide’s miracle soil work relies on dead bodies in order to work, and eventually those will stop coming. Plus, they rely on the Geothermal Plant in order to power their refrigeration, and eventually that will stop working too, either when it eventually breaks down due to no one in Emerald Vale being a competent engineer (sorry guys, you can’t have Parvati back), or when Spacer’s Choice inevitably decides to pull the plug on it. You also managed to completely up-end an entire town’s way of life on your own personal whim. The non-deserters stayed in Edgewater for a reason — it was safe(r), there was the guarantee of a future, and they had each other, and just because they lived under a truly hellish corporate culture doesn’t mean they’re appreciative to you for essentially forcing them into the wild and most likely condemning them to a slow death. Don’t you feel proud, hero?
Divert power to Edgewater, on the other hand, and you’ve saved both the town and everyone who lives in Emerald Vale from an uncertain future, but have you really? You’ve seen just how bullshit life under Spacer’s Choice is, you know exactly what you’re forcing the Deserters back into, and they make sure that you know that they absolutely resent you for destroying their dream. You can slightly soften the blow by reasoning with Reed to step down and let Adelaide take charge of the cannery, which also allows her to introduce her cultivation methods so that the population is suffering slightly less, but there’s no guarantee that the same corporate greed that caused Edgewater’s predicament won’t rear its ugly head again and lead everyone back to where they started. As long as Edgewater is reliant on the corporate system that founded it, there will never be true freedom or true happiness, there will only be a life of toiling away in fearful servitude until death. Honestly, no matter how ultimately unsustainable a life in the wild may be, at least people would die free…ish.
It is said that there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, and maybe that’s the point The Outer Worlds is trying to make in having you make this difficult choice in Edgewater. It is a difficult choice because there is no ethical choice in this Capitalist Dystopia. With either choice you make, lots of people get affected through no fault or action of their own, and somebody’s goal gets squashed to further someone else’s goals, and that someone else is you, the player who needed to get off the planet. It shows that even those who hate exploitative corporations can turn out to be no less selfish when the chips are down. This aesop and this deeper meaning is not achieved through a forced author tract, but through a designed experience to have the player make the same kind of decision a corporate leader with many, many lives attached to their decisions would have to make, in a situation and environment where Third Options and Golden Choices are a luxury.
There is no choice that allows you to united all the disagreeing factions, because their differences are irreconcilable, and the game makes no pretense to the idea that there is some sort of magical leader that can change that. You are simply a person who was in the right position at the right time to end the stalemate — that position being outside any dependency on the corporate system and therefore the only one with the power and freedom to truly be able to do what they wanted, at no real downside to themselves. Even with the arguable Golden Option of having Adelaide become the plant manager, the game does not present this as the perfect or moral option to the point that it even outright mocks you if you think that it is. You did squash an entire group’s dreams and aspirations in order to achieve your supposed “best outcome”, and the game lets you know that you did through a blunt memento of Edgewater that will hang up in your spaceship forever.
Ooooooouch. It hurts so gooooooooooooooooooood. This is only the very beginning of the game, and already I’m gushing. I can’t wait to experience the rest of what Obsidian has put out to offer with The Outer Worlds, but even if I end up being massively disappointed by the rest of the game, I would still hold Edgewater up high as an example of how you design a compelling, morally complicated choice in a video game, by getting players to care and understand two sympathetic sides of the same coin, and then forcing them to choose a side to spite. No sadistic glee, no fanfare, no moral posturing, just living with the cold blunt reality that in order to progress with their own agenda, they had to make an imperfect choice and sacrifice something and some people they genuinely sympathized for.