I’ve really enjoyed exploring The Outer Worlds 2, but there’s one persistent annoyance: the in-game maps are frustratingly poor.
On the plus side, the minimap works reliably and its waypoints generally guide you where you need to go. You can add custom waypoints, although they don’t clear themselves when you arrive — you have to delete them manually. The trouble is the full-screen map: its iconography and color choices make navigation harder than it should be.
Fast-travel nodes are easy to pick out in blue, but waypoints, vendors and workbenches all share nearly the same yellow hue. Selecting a quest doesn’t meaningfully change its appearance — the only hint is a faint pulsing on the selected icon. Early on, when you first arrive in an area, active quest markers are visible enough. But that clarity doesn’t hold up in busier regions.
The biggest headache comes when a quest requires you to talk to an NPC. Their map markers shrink to near-invisibility and can be obscured by overlapping icons for fast-travel points, merchants and workbenches at the default zoom. If you don’t already remember which neighborhood an NPC lives in, finding the nearest fast-travel site becomes a tedious exercise in trial and error.
Walking by the minimap’s guidance is usually possible, but when an NPC is a few hundred meters away it’s far faster to fast-travel to the closest node — assuming you can actually spot it on the main map. As it stands, NPC waypoints are small, the same yellow as everything else, and easy to hide behind other icons.
Fixes would be straightforward: make NPC waypoints match the size of other quest icons, give the tracked quest a distinctive color, or bring the selected marker to the front so it isn’t buried beneath unrelated map symbols. Any of those changes would make finding people and planning routes much less frustrating.
Look, Arcadia Colony may be falling apart, but I’m packing a gun that erases corpses, a mask that reveals circuitry through walls, and a gadget that slows time. A usable map feels like a reasonable request.
Source: Polygon
