The Outer Worlds goes a lot further, at least attempting to grapple with the same idea. Source: Private Division (Image credit: Source: Private Division) It's never been a series about the foundation it built but rather the indifference it causes. The series is about the gameplay, the looting, and, occasionally, the characters. The emphasis is on crass jokes that are sometimes funny but almost always elicit reactions from the player. The problem with Borderlands is that it never grapples with its socio-economic foundations enough. Atlas has a horrible history, and no amount of goodwill can change that. There isn't anything more profound than that concerning how Rhys grapples with his past as a lackey at a similar corporation or the morality of its existence in the first place. You help Rhys out, and you move on to another corporation. That's nice in theory but doesn't sway the story in one direction or another. His mission statement is about how not all corporations are bad because Atlas is nice now. The one exception to the one-note 'corporations are evil' foundation in Borderlands 3 is the story of Atlas and how Rhys is trying to turn the company around. These games tackle the idea in different ways - some more successful than others - but they suggest that the issue is at the forefront of a lot of people's minds.

The last couple of months brought us three games that utilized capitalism as the villain in one way or another: Borderlands 3, The Outer Worlds, and Disco Elysium. That extends, of course, into video games. Ready or Not tells the story of a lower-class woman who becomes the target of a group of upper-class weirdos who want her dead only so they can keep living their cushy lives. Us, the horror movie that came out in early 2019, posits a world where the subjugated lower class rise up from the underground, where they were tucked away from the privileged up above, and take out those with the lives they deserve. However, the system of capitalism, the structure of class inequality, has never been at the forefront of the media we consume so consistently. Class revolt is a tale as old as modern history. That isn't to say that a version of the rich hasn't been the antagonist before.

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