The first one failed at that, and is a rather revealing look into the retarded minds of the creators.
by fail, I mean that the plot can't be about Capitalism, the Corps are essentially States/Dictatorships, they have slaves, that are paid entirely in company scrip, and can legally ONLY buy products from their own company, mind you in game basically 99% of people are slaves to a Corp, so might you ask, how exaclty do they make money on making commercial goods, products and services? they don't say, it should be impossible, all the shit they are making has no one to buy it but their own people, where does the MONEY fucking come into play?
Also, despite how brutal they are about the rules, all the Corp leaders are friends, its a baffling fucking critique of ""Capitalism"" written by people who only think about and know pop-communism/socialism.
Since Halcyon is such a lightly populated solar system, only really having two livable planets(if we count Monarch) plus a few asteroids or artificial facilities like Eridanos, there isn't as much industry as you would think. One company makes pretty much all of one kind of product, for example all medicine and drugs are made by Auntie Cleo, all sweets are made by Rizzo's all energy weapons are made by Joch ect. with Spacer's Choice being the dollar store brand that makes a knockoff of everything but it's super cheap. This monopoly means that essentially everybody buys the same thing with little to no competition, unless you count Spacer's Choice. I'm not sure if it's true that people only buy stuff from company stores, that might be true in frontier or isolated towns like Edgewater but in "civilization" like Byzantium or Stellar Bay there is definitely choice. We also know there is sports, trading card games ect. so there is definitely some sort of independence as far as what people can spend their money on. I don't know where you got the idea that the corps all love each other, they hate competition and constantly try to screw each other over or steal confidential secrets just like real companies do, there is even a quest in the Eridanos DLC where a pissant Spacer's Choice agent has you sabotaging the hotel so that Rizzo's stocks drop due to bad PR or something. The corpos do work together, but that's because they're on The Board, that's what it is, a loose conglomerate of all the biggest companies that essentially run Halcyon. They have an uneasy alliance with one another at best, which isn't helped by the fact that UDL(weapons and security company) has the highest stake in The Board and therefore has turned the solar system into a military dictatorship. Still, the game definitely has a confused tone and doesn't really seem to know what it wants to be, so it's critique on capitalism falls flat if it wants to be taken seriously either way.
The worst part is that the corpos are just plain stupid, so "le capitalism bad" falls flat when you, the player, look around and see blithering incompetence and apathy instead of any actual plans.
That's kind of the point, with the solar system isolated from Earth, it lead to nepotism like you wouldn't believe. Essentially, retards took over and without proper educational facilities, it lead to even bigger retards replacing them and workers staying uneducated their entire lives, outside of whatever they need to know for their trade. Conveniently, anyone who had any critical thinking skills was either killed or locked up, when you think about it this is more in line with communism than anything but with a brand friendly face. I don't know how many people here actually finished the game, but the actual plot twist is that everybody in Halcyon is retarded, as in so stupid that they can't make crops grow anymore. We know that's not a problem since the very first area of the game has a woman who can grow proper nutritious crops(using human flesh as fertilizer, but still). The whole point of trying to unfreeze Hope colonists is because they are the last few non-retarded individuals left in the whole solar system and without them everyone will starve to death. It might not be a good plot twist, but everyone in the game being slackjaw stupid, from the mindless worker drone to the big CEOs, is not a coincidence. People tend to overthink this, just treat the story like a Twilight Zone episode, where you and Pickle Rick are the only competent people left in the world. Or an unofficial tie-in to Idiocracy if you prefer, either way the story isn't far fetched since places like India or Africa exist and they more or less have most of the population so stupid and incompetent they can also barely have any industry or feed themselves. Imagine an entire solar system ruled over by indians and you get a similar scenario(fun fact, shampoo is banned for the worker class and can lead to prison time if they are caught with it. This is not a joke, it's clearly stated in-lore).
I think the OW1's problem was the wacky tone didn't match the grimdark story
Yup, tone was a big problem to nail down, and the game had massive re-writes in the last stretch of development, of the reddit soyboy type. From what I can gather, the game had a darker tone and made capitalism a bigger focus rather than a punchline(for example, there is an abandoned plotline regarding Hephastos corporation mining strike, those are the guys who make the big bulky suits for Iconoclasts in the final game. Seeing an active miner rebellion would be a breath of fresh air) and there were also more obvious globohomo themes(cut tutorial where you would be a fish out of the water, kind of like Gordon Freeman in Half Life 2 in City 17, shows that everyone who came to Halcyon had to more or less shed their national and racial identity to conform to "Halcyon Etiquette" for example). All of that was cut because it hurt fee fees of focus groups and QA testers, and so "humor" was added into nearly every conversation of the game to make the game less dark and more accessible. The results speak for themselves.
...and if they are so dumb then how did the corpos become that big? It's one of the things that I didn't like in the world building of TOW1.
Most of the corpos came from Earth, so they have their main established headquarters there. Others are up and comers local to Halcyon who have some sort of a monopoly. See my post above, if you are sick you will have to give your money to Auntie Cleo, if you are hungry you only have a handful of choices there as well, so all the money goes one way. Lack of choice and nepotism means that these companies will always fail upwards and it's unlikely anyone will replace them, especially when we're dealing by Idiocracy's rules where everyone is a moron.
Anyways, I see that the game is available to download now if you know where to look. I won't bother, I've been kept busy and haven't even made my annual Fallout 4 playthru, let alone Outer Worlds 1 playthru. I will wait a few weeks, make sure to download the up to date version that all the patches. Hopefully it was worth the wait, the bar isn't exactly high here but I will be disappointed if it can't even be better than the first game.
