Outer Worlds - Massive Disappointment

Eumesmopo said:
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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I think this is more the fact that this game was clearly made on a far tighter budget than they admit. It feels like they didn't actually have the money for an open world game so they had to restrict the storytelling pretty tightly. Which is, ironically, what caused the Bethesda games to take so much heat.
 
I tried it.

I just couldn't.

Morality in gameplay is a complicated tightrope to walk, and oftentimes developers will decide to make the player choose an option they want because that's the option they felt was the best. Even though I slaughtered many a Legionnaire in New Vegas, if you bothered to listen to Caesar himself, he makes sense to someone who would buy into the philosophy of what he's attempting. Sure, I'm clearly a "slavery is bad" person, but even the game granted you a chance to understand why he thinks this way, instead of catering the a person's evil desires like in Fallout 3. This was also how you were able to talk down the Legate Lanius, who was one of the strongest enemies in the game; by addressing that the Legion cannot sustain itself forever. He stands firm on his beliefs, so you're required to have maximum conviction (granted, a gameplay mechanic with max speech rather than a roll of the dice) to explain this, or use bartering to placate the needs the faction required in the first place. The older Fallout games also granted you a chance to see what happens with your options; sure, there were genuinely a few sucky choices you could make, but by and large, what influence you allowed to make happen would help the area in some capacity.

The Outer Worlds focused on X, Y, or Z as your choices, and would often tell you to go with Z, even though Z would be the most labor intensive and the emotionally unsatisfying option. "So, I combine both the deserters and the cannery together, but some people are still going to die? How does that make me feel good about myself?"
 
If Obsidian were smart they would pick a setting and write for it like a TV show with multiple installments. Resolving character stories is like giving up a relationship. Solid characters stick around for a while and people care when they are killed off. "Lets resolve multiple broad character arcs in one play-through with a small setting" doesn't work very well for compelling dialogue after a few of these types of games.

Or they could just go "Let's make another fallout that's got more colors and loot and wonder why it sucks."

That being said, that goes with assuming that Obsidian doesn't go the Nicholas Cage direction of greenlighting ideas in the feminist inclusive associative diarrhea brainstorming cuck room before blowing loads of smoke up the interns ass so they can finish all that work, they are going very far in this compan....ohh wait we're retiring you guys need to go find another job.


I predict Obsidian to be a hollowed out shell by Microsoft for IP rights filled with eager college students that identify as whatever thing their mother sat them by when she was off getting fucked somewhere.
 
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I got about 10ish hours in before un-installing it. I didn't like the characters, game world, combat, story, loot, dungeons, enemies, weapons and countless other things. The most disappointing thing for me was that it didn't feel anything like Fallout, particularly New Vegas. I really didn't like Pillars of Eternity and this game had lots of elements from it so maybe I just don't like Obsidian.
 
Obsidian has been changing a lot since its founding.
Many of the people that were there since the start and worked on titles like KOTOR2, Alpha Protocol, and of course Fallout New Vegas have moved on a long time ago.

It sounded very exciting gaming websites brought up that Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky and would be working on a new game.
Many who enjoyed Fallout 1 and Troika's Arcanum and Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines hoped that it would be a spiritual sequel to those games and Fallout New Vegas.
But these two men are also not the same people anymore who worked on those games. For one they had to adapt to the changing game development climate and target audience.

I don't think it is surprising to find out that developers and publishers that you once liked and supported a lot change so much over time that eventually they have little in common anymore with what made them so appealing.
I have for example also had it with Lucasarts and Interplay back in the 90s and early 2000s.
Once Lucasarts solely focused on Star Wars after doing so many new IPs previously I pretty much lost all my interest. Also did not help that I hate the prequels.

I also think Pillars of Eternity (still have not played that despite being gifted a copy) and The Outer Worlds also suffered from hype.
 
I think part of the issue is people had a very fan-made image of Tim Cain as a BIG, DEEP, and SERIOUS storyteller.

That has never been the case as Fallout 1 and Fallout 2 were full of wackiness and FUN for the sake of fun.

The Outer Worlds was his desire to do Futurama meets Firefly. The Futurama part being every bit as prominent as the Firefly.

They wanted The Road/Mad Max in Space.
 
CT Phipps said:
I think part of the issue is people had a very fan-made image of Tim Cain as a BIG, DEEP, and SERIOUS storyteller.

That has never been the case as Fallout 1 and Fallout 2 were full of wackiness and FUN for the sake of fun.

The Outer Worlds was his desire to do Futurama meets Firefly. The Futurama part being every bit as prominent as the Firefly.

They wanted The Road/Mad Max in Space.
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Fallout 2 was full of pop culture references. Fallout 1 was not. Also, even in Fallout 2 it was still filled with dark, sarcastic and ironic humor not "Wacky and Zany". Also the "Wackiness" stuff was usually just inside jokes for those that have a high Luck. Kinda like the "Wild Wasteland" perk instead of it being shoved in your face.
 
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CT Phipps said:
I think part of the issue is people had a very fan-made image of Tim Cain as a BIG, DEEP, and SERIOUS storyteller.

That has never been the case as Fallout 1 and Fallout 2 were full of wackiness and FUN for the sake of fun.
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Both Fallout games were already addressed by RangerBoo in the previous post, but I would like to expand on the Fallout 2.

Fallout 2 wackiness was not made for the sake of fun. It was made because they were pressured to fill up a wasteland at least twice as large as the first game and they run out of time. So they accepted anything anyone came up with to quickly fill the locations with content. Also, those wacky things were not written by Tim Cain, they were invented by anyone on the team who came up with any idea to make content.

This was all talked about by the devs during all the years since FO2 was released. I'm sure I already posted quotes from them explaining stuff like this several times around here. So I don't know if I should bother looking for those posts and re-post them here. I don't have much time or patience today to do stuff like that. :shrug:
 
I do (or did; and do still) believe that part of it was due to an inconsistent understanding between the devs as to what content was acceptable, and in what sense and context. Some assumed anything goes, I'd bet.

For instance... even the chess master scorpion fits in the deep wastes, but not within Broken Hills.
 
The chess master scorpion is one of the things in Fallout 2 that I never considered as "crazy wacky". The first time I played FO2 I always had the feeling that the scientist was just a scammer and all the chess and lockpicking and whatever else was all staged by him and not actually being done by the scorpion. IIRC the Chosen One even mentions something like "How did you managed to pick that lock with your pincers?". Always sounded to me that the locker was rigged to sprung open instead of the scorpion being the one opening it. :roffle:

Yeah, it's me just making stuff up, but the dialogue and the ridiculousness of it all always made me think that was a scam and not a real super scorpion. And to be honest, there is nothing in the game that really shows it was the scorpion doing all of those things by itself. >_>
 
Imagine thinking the first Fallout game is full of "wacky fun" when it's arguably where the series is at its most serious.

And no, mutant monstrosity making green hulks out of goo is not wacky fun, that's the world's rules. Things not matching our reality doesn't mean they aren't serious in the world they are in.
 
Risewild said:
Both Fallout games were already addressed by RangerBoo in the previous post, but I would like to expand on the Fallout 2.

Fallout 2 wackiness was not made for the sake of fun. It was made because they were pressured to fill up a wasteland at least twice as large as the first game and they run out of time. So they accepted anything anyone came up with to quickly fill the locations with content. Also, those wacky things were not written by Tim Cain, they were invented by anyone on the team who came up with any idea to make content.

This was all talked about by the devs during all the years since FO2 was released. I'm sure I already posted quotes from them explaining stuff like this several times around here. So I don't know if I should bother looking for those posts and re-post them here. I don't have much time or patience today to do stuff like that. :shrug:
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There's a particular video essay I always like to show people when I have a beef with Bethesda's take on the Fallout franchise, and he compared the humor of the first two games to that of a Coen Brothers film; the comedy is situational and based mostly off of things spiraling out of control into absolute chaos in the end. I mean, people sure love to quote "The Big Lebowski", but the gist of the movie was "some toker gets his rug pissed on and just happens to share the name of a rich person", and this just happens to head into a series of events culminating in a gunfight at the bowling alley. There's dark comedy designed to highlight the absurdity of a situation or to present the possibility that something bad is about to happen and it's your own doing, dumbass. Compare that to the Bethesda Fallout, where he compared it to the "Naked Gun" movies, where everything is just wacky and irreverent because it needs to be. There's no setup for the jokes; you're just meant to laugh at the absurdity. It should be noted that the comedy stylings of "Naked Gun" draw inspiration from self-deprecation humor associated from the Midwest (given it was a Zucker, Abrams and Zucker series), but at the same time, the Coen brothers are also Midwestern yet went a different approach towards self-depreciation. I don't know why I'd bring this up other than to highlight the evolutionary paths both filmmakers took from a similar philosophy on humor, and how the same franchise has used both in their games.
 
Risewild said:
The chess master scorpion is one of the things in Fallout 2 that I never considered as "crazy wacky"...
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One of the challenges is an eye test. The Scorpion has spectacles and multi-tool pliers in its inventory; items that the PC can steal, and actually use.

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My yardstick for Fallout's encounters is that the game is generally harsh and grounded within the settlements, while all bets are off within the deep —deep wastelands. These isolated encounters are one-shot moments that cannot be returned to, cannot [in theory] be independently verified (unlike The Brain's cult in GECKO), and could even be (total or partial) hallucination on the part of the PC (as a dehydrated, drugged out wanderer in the wastes).

(Yeah... where DID that velvet Elvis painting, and zapper gun come from? The gun doesn't hallucinate killing enemies...it's real enough~sort of).

The crashed UFO could be real, could be a (long abandoned) movie set location, could be a forgotten military hoax; something Vault-Tec did to scare the populous... Any number of reasons—anything at all. But Anna's Ghost in the Den is proof of the occult, and is adjacent to the Brotherhood bunker, the museum, and local kids; all of whom would have discovered it.

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The Dead Whale on the other hand (super specific pop-culture reference that it is) works out in the deep wastes... it would not work in the middle of Vault City or the Den.... though...perhaps—maybe it could work deadpan on the Shi-Town docks map; who's to say if it is as it appears, or was it setup that way as a joke, after the whale washed up dead, or was eaten. (?)

The context matters, and IMO there are several good enough encounters that are just in the wrong place—for their degree of surrealness.
 
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Yeah you make a good point, I 100% agree. The Special Encounters in Fallout capture a certain kind of surrealist madness or strangeness that suits perfectly to being lost in an endless desert. I think Fallout 1 also handles the Wasteland encounters better than Fallout 2 and IMO the more direct/on-the-nose references to existing media like the TARDIS were the worst ones in Fallout, which unfortuantely (as far as I recall) is the majority of them in Fallout 2.

In my Fallout PnP campaign for example, Special Encounters were stuff like human-shaped cacti that if cut open revealed flesh and blood with no other explanation, implicitly supernatural mirages that distantly fucked with the party or led them astray, or a distant flying Thunderbird with the wingspan of a bus, disappearing as quickly as it appears. The only one that I had as a direct reference as far as I recall was them stumbling across a large cargo ship that was somehow in the middle of the Nevada desert, half-submerged into the sand and named the Borealis in reference to Half-Life.

The supremely weird shit being normalized in Fallout 2 like the ghost, Keeng Rat or the chess playing scorpion are on par with "Ghoul in the fridge" or other nonsense Bethesda crap. The only difference is that there's enough quality content immediately surrounding that stuff in Fallout 2 that my brain can do a sort of auto-correct ignoring of the stupid stuff whereas you don't get that privilege in Bethesda games. But that's about the only difference since they're equally mind boggling crap that is presented in a canonical, straightforward manner.
 
The original Fallout games are full of references that many fans took seriously but were meant to be fun. The Mad Max Uniform, Dogmeat, Robbie the Robot, and other movie references. I think its meant to be a silly reference-filled world.

Which I think The Outer Worlds is in the spirit of.

It's a comedic Raygun Gothic action adventure like Flash Gordon. The Queen version.

 
CT Phipps said:
The original Fallout games are full of references that many fans took seriously but were meant to be fun. The Mad Max Uniform, Dogmeat, Robbie the Robot, and other movie references. I think its meant to be a silly reference-filled world.

Which I think The Outer Worlds is in the spirit of.

It's a comedic Raygun Gothic action adventure like Flash Gordon. The Queen version.

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Yes and they were done subtly. If it was The Outer Worlds it would have been shoved in your face with the developer going "See! Isn't this funny? Don't you get that references?!" Difference between references humor then and now. I blame Family Guy and Ricky & Morty.
 
Atomic Postman said:
"Ghoul in the fridge"
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There's a difference between something wacky and nonsensical, and this. This quest flat out destroys the Necropolis event in Fallout 1 by making so ghouls don't need water (or food for that matter) to survive.

I can accept some wacky fun to lift up the mood, because everything being uber serious all the time gets tiring. I will not take bullshit that destroys some of the most memorable past events in the series.

So i think it's unfair to compare the wacky stuff in Fallout 2 with arguably the most destructive quest in the series.
 
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Gizmojunk said:
But Anna's Ghost in the Den is proof of the occult, and is adjacent to the Brotherhood bunker, the museum, and local kids; all of whom would have discovered it.
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Yeah, I understand what you mean about these things not being in the deep wastes.
Although, even the ghost can be explained with a little mental gymnastics. The Chosen One tells Anna to "turn off your Stealth Boy". So it could just be someone using a Stealth Boy to trick passerbys into bury the bones. It could even be a hoax by Ananias to make people believe in the supernatural. Or maybe he wanted Anna's Locket but since a thug has it now, he can't just take it, so he uses a "ghost" to convince someone to get it instead.

Yeah, these things are stupid and shouldn't be done in the first place. But there is still enough (or maybe not enough) things that make them mundane if we think about how it would be possible without being supernatural or wacky.
 
RangerBoo said:
Yes and they were done subtly. If it was The Outer Worlds it would have been shoved in your face with the developer going "See! Isn't this funny? Don't you get that references?!" Difference between references humor then and now. I blame Family Guy and Ricky & Morty.
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I don't know. Fallout 2 has a lot of cringe-worthy direct references that if they were in a 3D game would be extremely excessive. Star-Trek, Hitchiker's Guide, et cetera. Even with what you might assume to be subtle one's like the Road Warrior jacket, you still get directly called a "Mad Max rip-off" in Fallout 2. There's plenty of good humor in Fallout 2 too which is why they're not equal but good does not wash away the bad, it just makes it easier to swallow.


Norzan said:
There's a difference between something wacky and nonsensical, and this. This quest flat out destroys the Necropolis event in Fallout 1 by making so ghouls don't need water (or food for that matter) to survive.
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Only barely. Ghoul in the Fridge is a particularly repulsive example because its absolutely retarded shit that also happens to oppose previously established/existing stories. Better examples might be brain-numbing retardation that is original then, Little Lamplight, The Mechanist, Arefu Vampires, the psychic aliens of Cabbot House. All of these things are on-par in terms of being absolutely retarded as the talking psychic Rat and his brother, the literal lost ghost, the hyper-intelligent chess playing scorpion, Seymour the talking, intelligent plant et cetera.

I'd like to believe better in you than to accuse you of "It's just wacky and lighthearted fun when it's from a game I like, but retarded and shit when it's from a bad one". Of course, Fallout 2 is a far better game than whatever Bethesda has or could shit out. The fact that there is so much quality content in Fallout 2 helps drown the bad stuff, but that does not change the absolutely mind-bogglingly retarded shit that Fallout 2 presents in a manner that is meant to be explicitly woven into the existing world and not suitably thrown into the wild desert of dubious canonicity like the equivocal stuff in Fallout 1.
 
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