He knew he would die soon after he was exiled, and had already begun to make peace with that. In a moment of sobering honesty, Tobson told me he would maybe survive a week in the wild. I envisioned an Edgewater where people were better fed and happier, even if I wasn’t the regime toppler I expected to be when I sauntered into town five hours earlier. I did my best to welcome them back by convincing Tobson to step down, placing Adelaide and her green thumb into power as a successor. Still, those townsfolk were not going to have a better life if I made them leave, and my hope was for the deserters to return to camp with the promise of a better life. The Outer Worlds is pitched as a game that takes capitalism to task, but here I was siding with Big Saltuna. It felt messy and as soon as I hit the button, my choice paralysis was replaced with a sort of buyer’s remorse. The questline’s final choice staring at me from my computer screen, and all I could do was stare back, even turning off the Xbox for a night and allowing myself to sleep on it, before coming back to it with a fresh pair of eyes the next day. The Outer Worlds Edgewater or Deserters: Should you redirect power to Reed Tobson or Adelaide McDevitt?Īfter I had spoken to everyone, read every document, and failed to find a happy medium, there was no more room to squirm out of the inevitable decision. In reality, the game only ever seemed to suggest the opposite - that the townsfolk would be ruined without their jobs, and the little agency they still had would evaporate once the Saltuna factory was shuttered. Corporate overlords would be driven out, and a new, freer society would rise from its ashes. I had hoped the game would hint to me that, should the town fall, Adelaide would embrace them with open arms and everyone would be better for it. The deserter’s leader, Adelaide, is a skilled gardener who managed to resuscitate the soil and provide for her band of dissenters, but takes some pleasure in watching Edgewater suffer, and that could mean doom for any future displaced townsfolk. Worse, this time none of them would be living in the woods on their own terms. He admitted his town’s health and safety concerns, but assured me that without the energy they needed, Edgewater would disappear completely, and then I’d have a heck of a lot more refugees on my hands. Tobson seemed like a decent person, a hapless labourer caught up in the same machine as those who worked for him. I was hopeful to learn more about each group to inform my inevitable, though oft-delayed, decision. Does the happiness of 12 people outweigh a town of miserable drone-like workers? The decision left me frozen with choice paralysis. Freed from their never-ending menial jobs and eating well for the first time in years, they were content to live outside of Edgewater for the rest of their days. Utilitarianism doesn’t just instruct us to do what helps the most people in a mortal sense it’s about life satisfaction too, and in that regard, the deserters are much better off. But The Outer Worlds’ first major decision point is an affront to the utilitarian school of thought, operating so fervently in greyscale it becomes nearly impossible to measure which choice benefits the most people. It’s regularly a joy to play RPGs and choice-driven games with the Utilitarian worldview, and it makes some finales, like those that dovetail Life is Strange and Mass Effect 3, pretty easy to navigate. If ever you’ve toyed with the famous trolley problem, that’s a good place to start. If you’re unfamiliar with the concept of utilitarianism, it’s a philosophy and ethical theory which argues that the correct and moral choice in any situation is always the one that affects the most people positively. But in The Outer Worlds, it’s not nearly so clean cut, and it took only a few hours before Obsidian’s game challenged my entire worldview. Side with the underdogs, the folks who flipped off their corporate overlords and ditched to the woods, where they could rewrite their own rules for how to live - maybe even thrive - and reject their winner-takes-all hellscape. What was I supposed to do? At first glance, and in lesser RPGs, the decision is obvious. Tobson needed his workers back, but the deserters have no plans to return. "The directive of big-picture problem solving is usually not to save everyone, but to do the most good you can."įrom there, a classic RPG scenario began to unfold.
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