Outer Worlds - Massive Disappointment

Yeah that game wasn't anywhere near as good as one would expect from the company who gave us New Vegas. The writing really wasn't that good and the setting and tone are off: It's aesthetics and design had a Saints Row felling in that it was cartoonish, silly and zany, but at the same time it lacked a sense of humor and irony, making it unfunny and incongruent. And as you said yourself, it's hard to take a world like that seriously and care about the fate of it's characters when the aesthetics scream at you not to take it seriously. The corporations where nothing but evil and stupidly incompetent and there was absolutely no reason to side with them, making the ability to choose sides pointless. The choice and consequence aspect of the game is pretty mild and weak when compared even to something like The Witcher 3. I did a mostly pacific and average playthrough where I sided against the corporations and wondered how different an ending I would get if I had gone full genocidal and killed everyone in the game, so I watched a youtube video for the ending of someone who did a playthrough exactly like that and overall it wasn't much different from the ending I got myself. Overall the experience I had with this game was comparable in quality with Fallout 3; not outright terrible, but not fulfilling either and it left a sour aftertaste.

Also, 75% of all characters in the entire fucking game are butch lesbians. What the hell is up with that? I'm pretty lefty and progressive myself, but that is just retarded. And they didn't even gave us the courtesy of at least letting us experience some lesbian romance either, Parvati's sidequest centers around her romance for some other woman and if you try to confess your feelings for her yourself (even if you are playing as a woman) she will just bluntly reject you. A whole companion sidequest where the point is that you get rejected and have to act as the supporting friend for a girl while she is falling in love with someone else... Wow, thanks Obsidian, awesome gameplay right there, 10/10, that's not the kind of miserable experience I play video games in order to escape from at all!
 
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Eumesmopo said:
Yeah that game wasn't anywhere near as good as one would expect from the company who gave us New Vegas. The writing really wasn't that good and the setting and tone are off: It's aesthetics and design had a Saints Row felling in that it was cartoonish, silly and zany, but at the same time it lacked a sense of humor and irony, making it unfunny and incongruent. And as you said yourself, it's hard to take a world like that seriously and care about the fate of it's characters when the aesthetics scream at you not to take it seriously. The corporations where nothing but evil and stupidly incompetent and there was absolutely no reason to side with them, making the ability to choose sides pointless. The choice and consequence aspect of the game is pretty mild and weak when compared even to something like The Witcher 3. I did a mostly pacific and average playthrough where I sided against the corporations and wondered how different an ending I would get if I had gone full genocidal and killed everyone in the game, so I watched a youtube video for the ending of someone who did a playthrough exactly like that and overall it wasn't much different from the ending I got myself. Overall the experience I had with this game was comparable in quality with Fallout 3; not outright terrible, but not fulfilling either and it left a sour aftertaste.

Also, 75% of all characters in the entire fucking game are butch lesbians. What the hell is up with that? I'm pretty lefty and progressive myself, but that is just retarded. And they didn't even gave us the courtesy of at least letting us experience some lesbian romance either, Parvati's sidequest centers around her romance for some other woman and if you try to confess your feelings for her yourself (even if you are playing as a woman) she will just bluntly reject you. A whole companion sidequest where the point is that you get rejected and have to act as the supporting friend for a girl while she is falling in love with someone else... Wow, thanks Obsidian, awesome gameplay right there, 10/10, that's not the kind of miserable experience I play video games in order to escape from at all!
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My assumption on the whole Butch lesbian thing was that their engine couldn't really do long hair so they gussied it up with trendy modern cuts.
 
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Even Morrowind can do a ponytail. I hope this game at least did a pony tail. In the future pony tails will be preferred due to space age hair scrunchies that don't give you a headache after wearing for long hours.
 
I really, really need to finish this...but I don't wanna? I dunno, I get the whole mercantilism gone amok thing but at the end of the day it is no New Vegas and I would just rather play that. Hell I think this is just my current opinion of playing games these days I just don't wanna, I mean I have been sitting on these Wasteland games forever but since I don't want to make a party that doesn't suck these stay unplayed and I vaguely remember seeing a thing about how the M14 shoots 5.56 bullets(or did) and I recoiled in horror.
 
Outer Worlds is fine as it is, but it's more disappointing in the genre and flavor I guess. Not for me personally, but if I wanted to play games with my kids sure. Grounded is their next coming title, but they hired Jason D Anderson back just last year, so it's the beginning of a development cycle for a new project with the original team.
 
AlphaPromethean said:
My assumption on the whole Butch lesbian thing was that their engine couldn't really do long hair so they gussied it up with trendy modern cuts.
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Long hair isn't really hard to do. Modders make long hair mods for New Vegas and Skyrim all the time. There is even a mod that adds long hair for games such as Neverwinter Nights 2. Also, just because you can't do long hair doesn't mean you can't make cute and feminine short hair. No, this is something me and many female gamers have noticed from Western games. The female characters today look butch and androgynous. From what I have heard from ex-developers, it's because they don't want to offend trans women. I find that to be insulting to trans women. You're basically saying to them; "Yeah, you gals are never going to be as pretty or feminine as biological women so we are going to make the women in the game ugly and androgynous so you won't feel intimidated." That is kind of insulting and a little transphobic.
 
Regardless I thought the "modern" approach to the characters with dyed hair and pixie cuts, both male and female, betrayed the retro-aesthetic. It didn't suit the victorian workhouse look and it didn't suit the blue-collar abandoned space frontier approach either. Either of those could have worked.
 
The Outer Worlds is what happens when you try and cash in on your earlier successes and then promptly fuck it up because you realize you don't have half the talent or creativity you once did so you try and lean on your wit which has since decayed from dry black humor to the wacky and saturated brand of humor that has graced us with great works like Rick and Morty or the Borderlands series.
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Aurelius Of Phoenix said:
The Outer Worlds is what happens when you try and cash in on your earlier successes and then promptly fuck it up because you realize you don't have half the talent or creativity you once did so you try and lean on your wit which has since decayed from dry black humor to the wacky and saturated brand of humor that has graced us with great works like Rick and Morty or the Borderlands series.
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Yeah, this is kinda what happens when something gets popular. Every fucking corporation or brand tries to copy it to mirror the success of the original only to not see the same results. Also, I am getting sick and tired of the humor seen in Rick & Morty and Borderlands. They are past their prime now. I want more mature, black and sarcastic humor instead of the wacky and zany shit that only pleases low IQ 12 year olds.
 
Some of the things I've been reading here makes me think of how I feel about Pillars Of Eternity 1. It's hard to put my finger on it but the entire thing just feels so... Meh... Like, they are taking it so serious that it feels like they want to treat the world too mature. Everything has to be so overly believable. So overly well written. Like they wanted it to be as mature as you could make it but kinda forgot that... It's a fantasy game. It needs some elements that would make a kid go "cool!" Like someone you try to get along with and maybe crack a joke to but they are so damn serious that it just feels uncomfortable as nothing quite clicks between the two of you.

It doesn't have any pizzazz or fantastical beyond the concept of souls and quite frankly it isn't enough to carry the game. Most of the characters I come across I just don't care about as they feel so dull. Most of the conflicts I come across are too morally ambiguous. Everyone has a reason for what they're doing and it all has to be really well written to make sense and it just.. I dunno, it feels artificial.

Despite being well written and making sense and everything it's just so damn bland at the same time.
Sounds like the same for TOW.
 
RangerBoo said:
I am getting sick and tired of the humor seen in Rick & Morty and Borderlands. They are past their prime now. I want more mature, black and sarcastic humor instead of the wacky and zany shit that only pleases low IQ 12 year olds.
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And that is why The Venture Bros will always be the superior Adult Swim show. Borderlands was never funny to begin with and has somehow become negative funny from what little I've seen from the series after the first one.

I get it TOW. Corpo Cult-ure is fucking weird and there is something about the walmart chant that they have to do every day that is kind of unsettling.
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But what else do you got besides everybody is an idiot. I get, in the real world everybody is an idiot, but you can do more than just Hey this guy is an idiot.
 
TheGM said:
And that is why The Venture Bros will always be the superior Adult Swim show. Borderlands was never funny to begin with and has somehow become negative funny from what little I've seen from the series after the first one.

I get it TOW. Corpo Cult-ure is fucking weird and there is something about the walmart chant that they have to do every day that is kind of unsettling.
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But what else do you got besides everybody is an idiot. I get, in the real world everybody is an idiot, but you can do more than just Hey this guy is an idiot.
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Thank you! I too also believe that the Venture Bros is a great and underrated show!
There is so much dark humor you can do that pokes fun at corporate culture. Like how Amazon treats their employees as expendable or the cult like mentally that Google instills in their employees. RoboCop did a perfect job of using dark and sarcastic humor to make fun of corporations and consumer culture. However, the flavor of the month with millennials and zoomers on social media is "Wacky and Zany" humor. As both Mike and Jay pointed out a lot in their reviews on Half in the Bag and re: View, a lot of stuff is made by committee. They go on social media sites like Twitter, Twitch and Instagram (the banes of humanity's existence) and see what is trending and force the creative teams to add all that trending crap into the product they are making. This is why creativity and art is dead in entertainment.
 
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AlphaPromethean said:
Regardless I thought the "modern" approach to the characters with dyed hair and pixie cuts, both male and female, betrayed the retro-aesthetic. It didn't suit the victorian workhouse look and it didn't suit the blue-collar abandoned space frontier approach either. Either of those could have worked.
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It kinda harkens back to Fallout, which merged a retrofuturistic environment with a very 80s punk style in some characters that doesn't really fit with the world.
Except that it doesn't really work in TOW. Still plan on playing it tho.
 
Fallout—before the war was retro 50's; Fallout after the war had new cultural aspects that emerged many decades later.

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Gizmojunk said:
Fallout—before the war was retro 50's; Fallout after the war had new cultural aspects that emerged many decades later.

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Exactly. As I like to say, Fallout was Mad Max' societal collapse (and fashion) happening in the World of Tomorrow as envisioned in the 50's. It's a bit of a clash, but it works and adds to the strangeness of the world.
 
And I could agree with that if the aesthetic looked good like Fallout's punk wasteland one did. As I said, if they went for some Cowboy Bebop style "space blue collar" look to contrast the absurd corporate look but the look they chose was visually unappealing.
 
Man, I do love me some space blue collar/trucker aesthetics. Alien, Dark Star, Cowboy Bebop, Space Truckers, Outland...
I also enjoy Steampunk and the Golden Age SciFi aesthetic, but from what I've seen of TOW, it just doesn't quite mesh together.
Hands down, Alien: Isolation did the best grimy corporate look in SPEHSS so far. So good.
 
There were male earrings and goths in the 50's. It was also a crime to show them on TV. Fun fact.
 
It could meld in the same way Fallout's aesthetics do. Halcyon Colony is implied to be cut-off/abandoned so having all the gilded era victorian posters and glimmer that's rotting away in the face of a space frontier that still has to keep up the facade.

Instead actual Outer World's has a saccharine aesthetic that's unfocused and bland when it's not being etsy steampunk
 
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