‘The Outer Worlds’ Gets Patch to Increase Very Tiny Text Size to Just Tiny

The Outer Worlds is, in many respects, a good game. One of its big problems, though, is the interface. It’s a mess to sort through the game’s largely pointless loot, you can’t set custom waypoints on the map, and perhaps most annoying of all, in a game where you spend the vast majority of the time reading, the text size is unbelievably small and there are no options to increase it. Thankfully, Obsidian issued a patch for The Outer Worlds today fixing a number of issues, including the option to “increase the font size.”

But what does that mean? Not much, unfortunately.

In the “UI” tab under the game’s settings, there’s now a large text option, but it’s a binary choice. There is no customization for the text, nor any indication what exactly it changes.

The biggest increase comes during conversations, a huge part of The Outer Worlds:

But there’s lots of dialogue that happens ambiently throughout the world, and that text has seen a bump, too, though it’s hardly what I’d call “big.” My mom’s vision is getting worse, and so she recently asked me to alter the text size on her iPhone. Do you realize how big you can make the fonts? It’s unbelievable. You could read the text from space. The Outer Worlds needs those options, or at least something in the ballpark, and this isn’t anywhere close:

Terminals don’t seem to have changed at all, though that text was already pretty readable:

Even more frustrating, though perhaps understandable because it would require a substantial amount of UI work, is how this new option doesn’t impact the inventory menus. The Outer Worlds is full of little lore bits attached to every item and every weapon, but it’s basically impossible to read the dark, borderline transparent font everything’s written it, and so I’ve largely given up on trying to parse it. It’s the status quo with the new patch:

This is all a step in the right direction, but hardly enough. It’s unclear if Obsidian has plans to further enhance the game’s text options. No doubt, it’s a technical challenge for the developer, but it underscores what happens when basic obstacles to accessibility go unaddressed when a game’s interface is in its foundational stages. It’s a lot harder to bolt on later.

I don't know how feasible this would be, but I'd love to see one of the hardware manufacturers make increasing in-game text, on some level, a requirement for publishing. It's a complicated ask because games use text in all sorts of ways, but even if was just subtitles, that'd be an improvement.

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