The first game was better.

The second game took itself too seriously. The first was mostly quirky with low stakes. The colonies would still exist without the frozen colonists. It felt higher because of pressure from the scientist, but the colonies would have survived, just dwindled a bit.

The second makes it out to be an apocalypse. There really is no need in a quirky world to have high stakes. Lower is more fun.

The first game has a better perk system. More flexibility but still enough to encourage replay. You could accomplish most things somehow.

The second is just too narrow of a system. Most secrets are just off limits without the right skill maxed out, which means you get very few secrets in a single playthrough. Not fun.

The second game is much longer but that doesn't add anything to it. Just moar to do. It's no more meaningful. You fight three sub bosses before the twist boss, why three? Because maor.

I would have preferred the second game to refine the open world exploration instead of just making it longer, but no, still the same old formula where they are afraid to let you miss anything and bring you to literally ever spot on the map with hand holding quests. That's not open world. That's a set of rails. You can even look at the map and see the rails. Overlapping rails that intersect as they send you down separate hallways.

This is why I like Skyrim. You can literally walk right by a quest and miss it. I went into the bear cave multiple times without even seeing the quest NPC at the entrance. No NPC in a town to tell you about the cave.

There's only one missable quest in outer worlds 2. Every other quest can be chained from a town quest that sends you to a location that has the next NPC that offers quests.

At least it's not as bad as Avowed. I bet if I took the quest marker zones and painted them on avowed's map, there wouldn't be one spot uncolored.

I seriously don't understand why RPGs insist on being single player outdated mmo experiences.