Thoughts on The Outer Worlds?

marzopup

marzopup

First time out of the vault
I played through Outer Worlds and all its DLC and was curious what other people thought of it. Considering it's made by Obsidian and feels pretty obviously made with FNV as its inspiration, it seemed like a game a lot of people on this forum might have checked it out.

Personally it felt pretty well polished. I play on PC and it worked great with no bugs or crashes, and graphically it was really nice. The companions are all extremely well done, and the writing is generally really solid. In comparison to New Vegas, my one major gripe is that a lot of the choices don't feel as 'roleplayable.' The main antagonists are over the top cartoonishly evil and don't really give you anything to grab onto to justify making the decision to side with them. Doing an evil run through in TOW feels like something you only do just to see what the bad endings are. And the stat system has a similar problem--by splitting skills into 'categories' that you can spec into to raise all the accompanying skills at once, you're forced to spec into skills that don't fit your character.

For example, speccing into charisma options gives you skills in speech, lying, and intimidation. If I'm playing a meek coward who talks themselves out of any situation, I am forced to also make them intimidating if I want to pass regular speech checks. It's a game design decision that just doesn't make sense to me.
 
It's a fancy dress party with guns. Ultra modern ,helping your lesbian engineer get her gal. The usual go here, follow me there, fight the corporate villains and annihilate those pesky monsters.

All in all a wonderful game. In techno colour, not that grubby, dirty, hepatitis piss colour.
 
Combat is damage sponge ass.
Perks are boring minor % bonuses.
Skills and stats are badly designed.
A lot of useless fluff loot in the game.
A lot of useless fluff combat for the sake of combat.
UI is dogshit.

I like the characters, story, setting, themes, art design, writing and quest design.
Narratively the game is really good. It has some cringe parts but mostly it is really good.
But gameplay wise the game just feels like FNV-lite-lite. And I don't like the gameplay of FNV in the first place.
 
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* Never dares to be poignant, ambitious or philosophical. Will most certainly not ask you what can change the nature of a man or tell you that war never changes
* Entire concept and premise of the setting is silly and hard to take seriously
* Horrible aesthetics that are downright painful to look at
* Visual design is ultra goofy, gay, ugly and repulsive on purpose
* Color palette looks like an M&M bag
* Burps "Hey Morty we have to save Halcyon's minorities from gentrification by WallStreet or something!"
* Went in with zero expectations
* Somehow still got disappointed
* Bland ass combat and boring gameplay
* Worthless items spread everywhere just acting as clutter
* Too much inventory management due to limited carry weight and excessive loot
* Awful shitty interface completely devoid of any soul or charm
* Poorly written plot contorts itself super hard while trying to present some moral ambiguity, but the story is clearly black and white and one side is clearly bad and wrong
* Tries to be funny sometimes and pretend it is cheeky and shouldn't be taken at face value
* Fails miserably
* Did this game even have any music? It was so unremarkable that I don't even remember if it did
* Every single female character looks like a butch lesbian and probably is one too
* Forced gay-ass woke bullshit crammed at every corner
* "Hi. I'm your first companion. Did I mention that I'm an asexual romantic lesbian? My pronouns are she/her. Could you do this fetch que..." (Get's face liquefied with plasma)
* Entire point of the plot is that corporations are evil and exploitative, but somehow the "happy" ending for each area is the midway compromise rather than radical reform
* Writing never gets edgy or dark except when it needs to make the corporations appear even dumber and crueler than they already do
* Every planet is filled with the same 2 or 3 species of bullet-sponge alien animals with uninspired designs that are just imitations of earthling animals
* All companions and characters are uninteresting and have dull backstories and motivations
* Every new character I meet just makes me want to shoot them
* Meaningfulness of making choices rendered null by the fact that one side is clearly evil and stupid and you can't be bothered to care about any of the characters
* Vomits "Ah! Morty, I killed 1 trillion people because even though I'm a giga-brained Mary Sue I don't know how to thaw an popsicle. Sorry, I fucked up!"
* Makes you glad in retrospect that Obsidian didn't make more Fallout games after NV, else the lore would include pansexual deathclaws on top of the Emil's retarded shit
* No dialog options for being mean or cruel to any of the characters
* No one ever says anything truly offensive or rude to you either. No characters like Metzger despite the plot trying hard to be bleak lol
* RPG system is lobotomized. Feels like one of those nu-RPGs that are super dumbed down and simplified so that zoomers and normies can understand the rules
* Dumb skillchecks that actually show their pass requirements and don't know how to be subtle and seamless like in the classics
* Twirls toothbrush mustache "You have made it into mein lair, but you can not save zhe orphans. Give up! Join me instead, I will make you rich! Will you take zhe offer?"
* Almost no difference between "good" and "bad" endings no matter what you do. Zero reasons to replay the game
* Every location feels hollow and uninteresting
* Very little reason to explore since the loot is excessive and unrewarding
* No complexity or depth to the simulation. NPCs just idle around and act as quest dispensers
* You can tell Obsidian traded Avellone for purple haired hipsters from California even if you didn't knew Obsidian traded Avellone for purple haired hipsters from California
* What lore even is there to this? Why is there nothing besides 'this is the future and we are in space and corporations rule everything'?
* There's a priestly character in the first level that hints at a deeper religious and spiritual complexity to everything, but it never gets delved into or expanded upon in any way
* Most pointless "crafting" and "upgrade" systems I have ever seem
* Even users of reddit and twitter agree that the game is shockingly bad despite being the target demographic
* Tries to be a critique of capitalism
* Completely misses out on the irony that it is a prototypical example of a generic and soulless corporate product of the post-social-media american middle-class cultural zeitgeist
 
It's pretty good. The budget limitations show in a lot of things. The SKill system is good but the Perks are really bad on the player character, I like that you can choose and personalize your party members but the perks themselves are still too basic.

Story, characters and setting is really good, lots of branching and choices, not on par with New Vegas tho, more in line with Fallout 1 as far as available endings and choices goes, which is more than what a lot of AAA Crpgs offer.

Solid 8/10 if yo uaren't too hung up on there being lesbians in the game like some weirdoes do lol , hoepfully thye sequel improves on the points where the game was lacking.
 
Walpknut said:
It's pretty good. The budget limitations show in a lot of things. The SKill system is good but the Perks are really bad on the player character, I like that you can choose and personalize your party members but the perks themselves are still too basic.

Story, characters and setting is really good, lots of branching and choices, not on par with New Vegas tho, more in line with Fallout 1 as far as available endings and choices goes, which is more than what a lot of AAA Crpgs offer.

Solid 8/10 if yo uaren't too hung up on there being lesbians in the game like some weirdoes do lol , hoepfully thye sequel improves on the points where the game was lacking.
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/modedit: Removed pointless copypasta. I mean... Why?
 
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marzopup said:
by splitting skills into 'categories' that you can spec into to raise all the accompanying skills at once, you're forced to spec into skills that don't fit your character.
Click to expand...
That has long been a major flaw in RPG design. :(
In Fallout, making a hammer specialist is also making a fencing expert; a boxing champ is also a karate master. A computer tech is also a chemistry wiz.
 
@Eumesmopo okay, I'll bite, if only a little.

There is a lot there--some I agree with, some I don't--but you did bring up one thing I absolutely agree with: the female character designs all look weirdly masculine, save for Parvati, I guess. I found it pretty off-putting. It was one of those things that once you noticed you can't not notice.

I do remember there being opportunities to be a dick to your companions though, but I usually play nice characters anyway, so I never looked that closely on if there were mean options.

Gizmojunk said:
That has long been a major flaw in RPG design. :(
In Fallout, making a hammer specialist is also making a fencing expert; a boxing champ is also a karate master. A computer tech is also a chemistry wiz.
Click to expand...

That's fair, but I find it especially noticeable in Outer Worlds. Like, to go back to the example I used--in New Vegas you could spec into Black Widow, which made you specifically able to persuade men in dialogue; you could also take the perk terrifying presence that you could use to intimidate. You could also just spec really high into speech to say the right things.

Whereas in Outer Worlds, if I spec into speech, I have to also be taking terrifying presence and black widow by default.
 
Outer World is a game full of potential but ruined by weakened writing department.
Specifically, without Avellone~
 
i personally found it to be yet another derivative of the corporate "sandbox" model, as Charwo elegantly explained:

"I will tell you why all modern games suck
Because the corporate mentality is that a game setting is playground for manchildren no matter how grim the setting or serious the character. And Bethesda is the worst in the fuck off do anything you like sandbox open-world shit."
​
what denoted that immediately to me was the new-age floaty camera bs which i find absolutely fucking insufferable but no one else seems to notice.. i remember how before the year ~2013 games always took raw mouse input and it just felt like a 1:1 input output during rasterization, now it feels like there is all this vaseline bs on my screen and the protagonist swings the gun around like its on a giant protracted dildo or something...
 
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