I’ve had a great time with The Outer Worlds 2, with the exception of one small detail: The game’s maps absolutely suck.
Now, for the most part, things function okay. The minimap is fine, and its waypoints work the way they should. You can even place custom waypoints (though, annoyingly, they don’t disappear when you arrive at your destination, and must be manually removed). The big problems are located on the main map screen.
Fast-travel points are blue and easy to see, but waypoints, vendors, and workbenches are all the same shade of yellow. You’d think that tracking a specific quest might change the color of its waypoint to make it easier to see, but no. A selected waypoint remains the same color as the rest of them, the only difference being that the icon of a selected quest has a very subtle pulsing animation when selected. Still, it’s not too hard to suss out where you need to go, and when you first arrive at a new destination, you’ll be able to see waypoints for any active quests pretty easily.
The real problem arises when a quest requires you to speak to an NPC. Even if this is part of a main story quest, the waypoint on the map screen becomes downright microscopic. Even worse, that waypoint will be covered up by icons for fast-travel locations, vendors, and workbenches when you look at the map’s default view without zooming in.
Now, the good news is that it’s usually fairly easy to remember what general area an NPC is in, and the minimap’s waypoint will always point you in the right direction. But if a quest requires you to return to an NPC, and you don’t remember where they are, it’s difficult to find the nearest fast-travel point because you can barely see the location of the NPC’s waypoint from the main map screen. And god help you if you put the game down for a few months and forget where certain NPCs are located. Sure, you can just walk in the direction the minimap is telling you to go, but when the NPC you need to speak to is 700m+ away from you, it’s much easier (and far more time-efficient) to just find the fast-travel point that’s closest to that NPC. Unfortunately, this can be difficult because the NPC’s waypoint is tiny, yellow (like everything else), and easily covered by other map icons.
It would be so easy to make NPC waypoints the same size as regular quest icons, make sure the selected quest’s waypoint is automatically visible (instead of allowing it to get buried under other map icons), or simply make it a different color so it stands out from the rest of the quests’ waypoints.
Look, I get it: The Arcadia Colony is going through a rough patch. But I have a gun that can make dead bodies disappear, a mask that lets me see circuitry through walls, and a gadget that slows down time. I don’t think a functional map is too much to ask for.
