For nearly three years The Outer Worlds carried a quiet little secret on Steam: there were two of it. The original 2019 release sat next to a 2023 reissue called the Spacer's Choice Edition, a higher-priced, supposedly better-looking remaster that arrived broken and stayed that way. Obsidian moved on. Halcyon's awkward second life seemed to be the company's last word on a project the studio had clearly outgrown. Until last week.
On May 27, 2026, the original Outer Worlds will be removed from Steam, the Epic Games Store, GOG, and the Microsoft Store. After that day, the only PC version on sale will be Spacer's Choice Edition — and Obsidian is finally fixing it. The studio's first real patch for the remaster in nearly three years is already out, with a second, larger one in the pipeline. And in the move that's making everyone do a double take, anyone who already owns the base game on PC, PS5, or Xbox Series X|S will get the upgrade pushed to their library for free.
An Edition Nobody Liked Becomes the Only One You Can Buy
The Spacer's Choice Edition has had a rough ride. When it launched in March 2023, the "definitive" tag set expectations the game couldn't meet — stuttering frame pacing on PC, lighting that lost the original's retro-future glow, and a pile of bugs that Obsidian seemed in no rush to address. Reviews were savage. The product page held a Mostly Negative rating for most of its life. Players who bought it usually went back to the 2019 build.
The new approach reframes that history. Instead of trying to convince anyone that Spacer's Choice was always the better version, Obsidian is rebuilding it into the version everyone deserved the first time. The April patch — version 1.4.0 on Steam — already cleans up dozens of long-standing crashes and a memory leak that hit harder on Windows 11. Cutscene framing has been corrected, weapon switching no longer eats inputs at high frame rates, and ultrawide support has finally been added without distorting the HUD.
The Bigger Patch Is the One That Adds Grenades
The second patch — confirmed by Obsidian community manager Kaylie Mathews on the official forums and dated to follow the May 27 transition — is the one that actually changes how the game plays. It introduces a feature The Outer Worlds shipped without: throwable grenades. The decision to skip them in 2019 was always strange given the game's loose Borderlands inspiration, and the team has now slotted them into the existing weapon wheel without rebalancing encounters around them. Frag, plasma, and N-ray variants are all listed in the patch preview, with each tied to ammo crafting recipes that already existed in the game's vendors.
The same patch reworks the in-game lighting pass that drew the most complaints in 2023. Volumetric fog has been pulled back to closer match the 2019 aesthetic, and the bloom values that flattened Halcyon's neon signs have been cut by roughly half. There's also a new Photo Mode that lets you decouple the camera from Captain ADA, plus belated DLSS 3 and FSR 3.1 support for PC.
Free Upgrades, Quietly
Here's the part that's actually generous: nobody has to do anything. If you bought the base Outer Worlds on Steam in 2019 — even on a $9.99 weekend sale — your library entry will swap to Spacer's Choice automatically when the delisting goes live. The same applies on PS4 (with a free PS5 upgrade), on Xbox One (with a free Series X|S upgrade), and on Switch, which keeps the base game and gets the bug fixes back-ported over the next month.
Console owners outside the upgrade window won't be left out either. PS4 and Xbox One copies will continue to sell, and Switch owners keep the version they already have. The May 27 cutoff only governs new sales of the base PC edition. Anyone trying to gift a copy after that date will be steered to Spacer's Choice at its post-delisting price of $39.99, with the full game and the two existing DLC chapters — Peril on Gorgon and Murder on Eridanos — bundled in.
The Quiet Goodbye to a Game That Was Never Quite Done
The Outer Worlds was always going to be the awkward middle child of Obsidian's resurgence. It launched the same week as Disco Elysium, two months before Outer Wilds (a different game that Obsidian had nothing to do with and got tired of explaining), and it leaned into a satirical tone the studio has since refined in Pentiment and Avowed. The Outer Worlds 2 — released in October 2025 to a much warmer reception than the original — has set the bar for how this universe should feel, which is exactly why a polished version of the original now matters.
Wrapping up the first game with one cleanup patch and one feature patch reads like the studio finally getting closure on a launch that never quite landed. Spacer's Choice is unlikely to suddenly review well after three years of being the worst way to play the game. But it's about to be the only way, and for once Obsidian seems to be treating that responsibility seriously rather than letting another contractor handle it. With The Outer Worlds 2 already out, this is the cleanup pass the original always deserved.
The patches go live on May 27, the original Outer Worlds disappears from PC storefronts the same day, and anyone who picks up the sequel and wants to backtrack to where it all started will at least find a version that runs the way Halcyon was always supposed to look.
