Outer Worlds - Massive Disappointment

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.
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From Tim Cain's GDC talk on Fallout:
"I was worried that not only we would lose players when had that but RPGs tend to sit on the shelf for years and I was afraid we'd look dated. So I made a rule and the rule for that was, if you put in a joke or cultural reference if the player didn't get it they shouldn't even know that that joke or cultural reference was being made."
And the slide bit says "Rule for jokes and references: If the player doesn't get them, they shouldn't even notice them."

There's a big difference in how Fallout 1 handled that compared to 2. I played this games in the last decade and while I got a lot of references in both I never felt like I was missing the joke in Fallout 1. I did a few times in Fallout 2 or that it was a joke I could tell and I could see some semblance of humor but I wasn't finding it funny. I don't hate Fallout 2 for it but I think Tim was very wise in his decision about making the joke in a way that if you can't get the humor or reference then you shouldn't even be able to tell you missed something. It really helps the situations not feel left behind in a cultural. I have a feeling games like Borderlands 3 will suffer this too. I've heard it is packed with a lot of the current internet humor that was popular during its development and was already kinda in the "old joke" category by the time it released.
 
Mind you, I'm one of the Fallout players who believes Fallout 2 is the 3rd best game in the franchise and objectively superior to 1 in every way.

:)
 
Borderlands 2 is already example of that. It was loaded with memes and internet humour that was already on the way out of popularity in 2012. Now its just an embarrassment.

Fallout 2 also goes in on reference for the sake of reference with no care how it's fitting to the world. The jacket from the Road Warrior is a reference but makes perfect sense in the context of Fallout, the crashed alien whilst strange and surreal makes thematic sense in the context of Fallout (and IMO I actually think b-movie aliens is basically the only supernatural element that does suit Fallout but only if played correctly).

Star-Trek, Hitchhiker's Guide, Monty Python and the Unwashed Peasants are not only eye-rolling content on their own but they make no sense with Fallout in the context of the setting nor in its themes or aesthetics.

The stuff that's not references is even worse. Seymour the plant and the chess scorpion have no reason to be in Broken Hills and actively detract from the actually potentially interesting and serious core behind the town (Super Mutants, Ghouls and Humans attempting to live in harmony in a town that's on a ticking clock till collapse through resource scarcity or "human" divisions.

Talking Deathclaws come off as farcical and absurd and undermine the story also. Vault 13 could have been occupied by any other type of group. Maybe escapee 2nd Gen Super Mutants from the Mariposa mine (which would serve some irony considering F1's bad ending) or some kind of tribalistic mutants like the Slags that are wary of outsiders. They don't serve to really make the Enclave seem that bad since you have less sympathy for Deathclaws being experimented on in Navarro than you would tribals or other human beings. They're stupid and add very little.
 
SquidVan, Borderlands 2 already has the problem with "dated humor" and I am not even sure if some of it was that funny to begin with. More like people insisting that it was really funny.
At least Fallout never went so far as "zany outrageous" or at least not very much. (something I find a bit disappointing about what I have seen of Wasteland 3)

Edit: oh someone was already ahead of me. Forgot to post this earlier.
 
I wasn't big on BL2 either. I remember liking BL1 when it came out but I was also young. I'd have to revisit BL2 to see the dated humor but I already didn't find a lot of the shit funny and it felt really forced. Enough that I wasn't going to play BL3 because if it was amping up 2, that's just really cringey humor then.
 
I remember being disappointed by the first Borderlands. Premise wise a cynically comedic shooter where you play as an amoral mercenary on a distant forgotten colony that's gone Mad Max sounds really great. Game itself doesn't really live up to that sales pitch since the shooting feels floaty, the guns are boring and the story didn't embrace the potential of the setting.
 
I feel if I had played it initially now, I'd like it a lot less. But for teen me, it was a blast. I was disappointed in the tone of BL2 though. Too in your face trying to be comical. I felt the first one just did it more naturally. But that's rose tinted glasses at this point.
 
Gizmojunk said:
I have not encountered the 'Ghoul In The Fridge' event.... But I have to mention (though I agree with Norzan about the Necropolis)... that this exists not once, but at least twice in Fallout 2.

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I was going to bring these up as examples but technically you can handwave it by saying we're never explicitly told how long they're in that state for, so I didn't. Whereas the Fallout 4 quest makes it explicit that the ghoul child has been trapped inside the fridge for over 200 years.
 
CT Phipps said:
Mind you, I'm one of the Fallout players who believes Fallout 2 is the 3rd best game in the franchise and objectively superior to 1 in every way.

:)
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Aside from mechanical UI changes, and obvious bug fixes... I cannot think of anything except Marcus, that is objectively better in Fallout 2. Fallout 2 is bigger, that's a plus. That is in fact the only reason that I'd choose FO2 over FO1 if I had to choose to have just one or the other. Fallout's story and world credibility beats out Fallout 2 in spades.

*Side note: FO2's new character and talking head assets do not blend well with the original sprites. None of the heads are as well done IMO.
 
Its one of those things for me where I think on a technical level Fallout is a superior game but I have in truth found myself having more fun in Fallout 2.
 
Gizmojunk said:
I have not encountered the 'Ghoul In The Fridge' event.... But I have to mention (though I agree with Norzan about the Necropolis)... that this exists not once, but at least twice in Fallout 2.

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I made my statement fully aware of those two examples, or else i wouldn't have made it if they actually broken the rule established in Fallout 1. Both of those cases show no hard evidence that either ghoul have been in their specific situation for a very long time, to the point they would die of hunger or thirst.

The thing that makes the Kid in the Fridge quest much worse than the wacky quests in Fallout 2 (and not just barely) is the fact that it's actively harmful to the lore. The wacky quests in Fallout 2 as far i'm aware don't have huge ramifications that destroy the legimitacy of past events like the Kid in the Fridge.

I wouldn't have minded much the retarded shit in Fallout 3 and 4 like i do with the stuff in Fallout 2 (i still think an handful of quests go a little too far for my taste) if either games were actually any good at all. Both being utter turds that take a dump on the series make this so much worse.

Plus, like mentioned already here, Fallout 2 was rushed to shit and they had to fill several areas with content no matter how much sense it made. Meanwhile Fallout 3 and 4 wacky bullshit was deliberate. I'm willing to bet that it went through different stages of production, meaning they must know the quest from front to back and yet decided to add it to the game. There was no deadline, they had all the time in the world to make fine tuned, well written quests.

Making wacky shit is easy and quick because it doesn't take much work, and it's usually a very last resort if you have to put some content in some areas of the game. Making well made quests is far harder and takes much more time, and it's not something you can't have, or it's made much harder to have, if your deadline is far too strict.

And the last thing about the Kid in the Fridge: ghouls need water and food to be in a settlement, and there's a fucking ghoul that needed food and water to survive or else he would have died according to him. And, there's a quest of a guy stealing food to feed feral ghouls. So it's not consistent within the same game.
 
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Norzan said:
Both of those cases show no hard evidence that either ghoul have been in their specific situation for a very long time...
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Agreed.

...to the point they would die of hunger or thirst.
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But here... I think these count as strange events, and in weird keeping with their [almost accursed] lot, I think that they just might not die, and be wretchedly miserable for the duration. I do not think that this should be normal, or expected of ghouls in general. But then I don't think there should BE ghouls in general, and that they are all result of a singular freak event.

*Woody was just asleep though; presumably he could have left anytime on his own.
Coffin Willie was trapped in a grave... outside of town; on an isolated map that many players might never see.

The thing that makes the Kid in the Fridge quest much worse than the wacky quests in Fallout 2 (and not just barely) is the fact that it's actively harmful to the lore. The wacky quests in Fallout 2 as far i'm aware don't have huge ramifications that destroy the legimitacy of past events like the Kid in the Fridge.
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You are not wrong [IMO]. But consider that the Necrolpolis is a settlement too; they too must live in a grounded reality that is different than finding a lone ghoul in a box out in the wastelands.

*I assume (but don't know offhand) that the fridge ghoul was not isolated out in the wild, but was found in a settlement?

Plus, like mentioned already here, Fallout 2 was rushed to shit and they had to fill several areas with content no matter how much sense it made.
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It was, and it was a miracle that it all fit; cobbled together last minute. I do think that it was not just rushed, but a truly differing sense of the appropriate from each developer.
 
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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Tim Cain didn't write the story for the first, much less the second game. He was the director and lead programmer for the first game and had a much smaller role in the second one. Both games had their own dedicated teams dealing with the art design, game design, writing and musical score. Reducing the responsibility for the tone of the game down to one individual, specially one that had a very minor part in the actual composition of the atmosphere and narrative of the game, is a gross simplification that is completely ignorant of how the process of game development works.

With that detail aside, another important thing to point out is that you are mistaking wackiness and silliness for funniness. The original Fallout games had a sense of humour that was rooted in dark irony and absurdity. A lot of the jokes ran around themes of the miserable misfortune of several of the characters in the wasteland: Such as the highly unlucky denizen of Vault 13 at the second game, or the human meat trading on The Hub, or Tor the mentally handicapped cow herder, or the countless jokes surrounding drugs, prostitution, pornography, promiscuity, ring fighting and other immoral and decadent themes we see on New Reno, etc... Even one the best running jokes across the two first games was the fact that a player character with low intelligence could barely speak and was treated with comical derision and condescendence by the NPCs. It was, for the most part, a kind of humour that was both genuinely funny and that highlighted the overall dread and cruelty of the world the game was set in. In other words, Fallout was funny and witty in a way that not only did not exclude it's more serious themes, but enhanced them. The Outer Worlds, on the other hand, is not funny nor witty; it is just wacky and silly. It has an over-the-top aesthetic that emphasizes the silliness and ugliness of retrofuturistic design as if it where morbidly terrified of being genuinely appreciated and taken seriously. But the actual substance of humour is thoroughly absent of it, there simply wasn't any moment in the game that took any actual laughter out of me. Thus managing to both have an anti-somber tone and not even being slightly funny for it.
 
That is the crux of the issue yes. Outer Worlds puts corporatist satire as the forefront of its objective as a story rather than creating a believable world with that as a thematic backdrop, but it fails because it satirizes an extinct form of corporatism and what satire it does just isn't funny.

As was said previously in the thread, if the "Gilded Era" steampunk aesthetics of the corps were juxtaposed with a more grounded, space-trucker reality much like Fallout's mad max future against the rusted backdrop of Forbidden Planet and the satire was instead something that threaded the tapestry of a wholly original setting, it could have worked. Instead it has the presentation of a bad political webcomic.
 
I'm confused by the fact that this game hasn't gotten any DLC yet. As far as i'm aware it was a success, not a 20 million copies in day one success but success nonetheless, and sold well enough (met publisher's expectations), but i find it very odd that it hasn't had anything announced DLC wise.

New Vegas got Dead Money two months after release. Outer Worlds came out 8 months ago and hasn't gotten anything yet.
 
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From what I briefly remember of interviews they mentioned there was content that was cut or didn't make it that they were explicitly keeping for a sequel. So for whatever strange reason it looks like DLC was never on the cards from the beginning.

Which IMO was the right call since I can't imagine DLC for the game would sell very well now. The game has been largely forgotten. Hell it's even possible one of the pencil-pushers higher up predicted that would be the case, or something to that effect.
 
Honestly, the game is just cyberpunk with a Bioshock: Infinite flair.

The megacorporations that own EVERYTHING show up in cyberpunk all the time and future stuff. They just made it retro-futuristic than modern futuristic.

Bright and shiny dystopian Steampunk.

Because the game is desperate to be Firefly as much as Futurama. That's why you're flying the Not-Serenity with Callie, Zoe, and Shepherd Book.
 
Yeah that's another thing, the game tries to paint your character and their quests into the broadstroke of some gallavanting adventuring space captain journeying across the stars, but it never feels like that at all.
 
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