If you have played The Outer Worlds, you are no doubt aware that it bears many similarities to Fallout: New Vegas, both having been developed by Obsidian Entertainment. While New Vegas is a nine-year-old game at this point, it has recently been added to Xbox Game Pass and is also available with PlayStation Now.
These are both definitely big games, so the investment of your time might be a problem, which one would be a more worthwhile time sink?
Story
Both Outer Worlds and New Vegas have a similar starting framework: you are a character with a mostly unimportant past given one important goal to strive towards while meeting characters along the way to help you accomplish it.
For New Vegas, the character you play as is a mystery, a (mostly) blank slate. All you know is that you were ambushed while on the way to deliver a package. You were shot in the head and left for dead, the injury robbing you of your memory. You are then informed that someone in the nearby bar might be able to help. Your main goal is to figure out what happened to you, and who took the package.
In The Outer Worlds you are awoken from cryo-sleep, having been one of many aboard the Hope, a colony ship headed for a new world. The problem is that the Hope never made it, and has been drifting for so long it has become urban legend. Phineas Welles, the scientist who awoke you, says that its dangerous to pull anyone out of cryo-sleep for as long as you have been, but has the right chemicals.
Problem is, Welles used all of the chemicals to bring you back and now needs you to find more. You are tasked with heading down to a nearby planet and linking up a smuggler hired by Welles.
While both games have the same ‘you are person, now go do thing’ attitude, New Vegas doesn’t offer quite enough in comparison. You are dropped into just about the middle of nowhere with a vague idea what your actual purpose is. There aren’t any stakes. With The Outer Worlds you are completely ignorant to this new corporate world order, but you know that your purpose is to save your people, and time is very much of the essence.