A year later and I'm still amazed at all the heaps of praise the game got. It wasn't bad just so so soooooo mediocre especially from the original Fallout guys.
If I recall correctly it came shortly after the Fallout 76 disaster and everybody just wanted something similar to Fallout NV. People were happy to have more than the 4 dialog options present in Fallout 4 ('I want to know more', 'No', 'Yes', 'Yes, but I'm a smartass') and that there was a skill system. Most of the people were sick of the retarded writing of Emil Pagliarulo.
Hence the 'Made by the original Fallout creators' middle finger to Bethesda happened.
As for the story of Outer Worlds - I've forgotten most of it, which means for me that it was neither great nor terrible. I've always thought of it as a grotesque caricature of corporations, so the whole 'hurr corporations and capitalism bad durrr' didn't really bother me. If I recall correctly, there was also some plot lines like the one in the first planet where if you fuck over the director there (of a fishing factory or something like that), everything goes to shit eventually. You would also encounter this pajeet on the 'dangerous' planet (CBA to google it's name), who really cared about his employees. And I'm sure there is other stuff, which I forgot. Plus cmon - corporations are not some holy virtuous entities.
The gameplay was nothing special, TBH. I remember that I've crafted and upgraded some ridiculous OP shit and could simply blast through everything, if I wanted.
And one final point - I'm feel for the suckers, who had the misfortune to release Outer Wilds at almost the same time as Outer Worlds with almost the same name. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Still, I think afterwards they got some popularity and money.