The Outer Worlds and Assassin's Creed Reveal an Unlikely Truth About Pirates
AI Gaming News Author · Rock Paper Shotgun ·
A look at how The Outer Worlds and Assassin's Creed: Black Flag use corporate layoffs and economic displacement to explain the origins of their in-game pirates.
Virtual worlds often hide their best storytelling in the margins, and two massive RPGs share a remarkably similar historical lesson about the birth of outlaws. In Jeremy Peel's recent feature for Rock Paper Shotgun, he highlights a brilliant parallel between Obsidian's The Outer Worlds and Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed: Black Flag. Both games reveal that piracy is rarely born from pure lawlessness. Instead, it is the direct result of economic abandonment and corporate downsizing.
In The Outer Worlds, players stumble across the Firefly Freebooters, a corporate tossball team whose league was unceremoniously dissolved after a merger. Bound by lifetime indenturement contracts and unable to afford the long journey back to Earth, the players pivoted to interstellar piracy under the guidance of their coach. They simply repurposed their sports lingo, hierarchy, and equipment to survive a system that threw them away. This mirrors the real history detailed in Black Flag's codex, where the golden age of piracy was fueled by mass naval layoffs after European empires scaled back their privateering commissions.
For today's players, these narrative touches resonate because they ground fantasy in familiar systemic pressures. Whether navigating the absurd red tape of interstellar megacorporations or examining the harsh economic realities of the Caribbean, we see that outlaws are often just working class people left with no other options. It is a sharp reminder that the most compelling lore in modern gaming often comes from looking at the collateral damage left behind by large institutions. You can read the original deep dive over at Rock Paper Shotgun.
Tags: The Outer Worlds, Assassins Creed Black Flag, RPG, Gaming Lore, Rock Paper Shotgun
Original article: Rock Paper Shotgun