So I take it this game if pretty good? Reviews seen to be saying it's "good but not better than expected", which sounds so strange, like..
What?
I found that weird as well. Mostly those seem to come down to "it's like F:NV, but more polished". Which yeah, do you guys know how long it's been since we had a game of that calibre? Almost ten years! It is a strange criticism to me.
Anyway, I really like this game a lot so far, but I'm not super far in (taking my time, exploring everything, etc)
are only partly because of Reed and the town is pretty much doomed to suffer as long as Spacer's Choice and anybody remotely loyal to the company is in charge of anything.
You're not necessarily wrong, but nothing you can do at that point can fix that, so you have to pick the solution that works best with the resources you have available.
adelaide will run a kinder, gentler cannery... but why bother running a cannery for spacer's choice at all? There's an implication that maybe they will send down more cops to crush the deserters, but they seem more eager to just cut their losses as the cannery has not been profitable in years
I know this is all video games, but the presence of the marauders as endless bands of vicious enemies really stands out to me in this game that otherwise tries to have really detailed, well-developed factions.
They're presumably colonists, you can even read the bounty logs on the sheriff's computer to see the personal history of the marauder leaders! But that doesn't get expanded on, you don't talk to them, the marauders don't get to have any ideology or culture or desires beyond killing anyone they see. Even in new vegas there were different tribes of raiders and you could talk to them sometimes.
The marauders aren't even brought up in arguments between other factions as like, examples of how the corporations drive people to desperation, or how anyone outsids the corporations is destined to become a crazy bandit. They're basically treated the same as the wild animals, just an unavoidable nuisance, except they're humans
It really is unfortunate that theres no 3rd person view. You can't even zoom in on your character in the menu! The outfits are so dope, I want to look at them!
Played this all yesterday, x-posting from another thread:
Nitpicks:
The UI is super limited and annoying in seemingly every possible quality of life design decision. Everything to do with navigating basic components of your entire interaction with the game is ten years out of date - in almost every menu I encounter I feel frustrated towards in its inability to quickly do or find what every player must want to do or find. Inventory management, heal/buff item identification and usage, companion management, looting, even simply toggling from one menu to the next are all less intuitive and easy than what I would expect and oftentimes straight-up frustratingly opaque.
The combat is similarly out of date. It's essentially a "left trigger, right trigger" game: you pull left trigger then pull right trigger towards bullet-sponge enemies (occasionally I'll switch weapons I guess). I have zero need or desire to do anything else (I'm playing on Normal difficulty). The inhaler (heals + buffs), dodge (double-tap A to roll), and companion ability (everyone gets one special ability on a cooldown like doing a stagger attack) mechanics are weak attempts to make the combat something other than a waste of time. It's a downgrade to Skyrim gameplay... in 2019. Playing Control before this really highlighted how poor the combat is: I looked forward to fights in Control, even fights I had to redo, because I was always looking to stretch myself in its fun, dynamic, ability-driven 3D combat. In contrast, I dread the combat, I dread looting afterwards, I'm pissed when there's a new area because all that means is more waves of identical, weirdly suicidal enemies.
However, the actual implantation aside, the existence of combat in games like this is bizarre and always feels like it came down to being included because they're either afraid it won't sell without mandatory fights, or they don't know how else to fill out a game. Throwing twenty marauders (that you can't talk to or sneak past) into a corner of the map and having some quest reward in the middle of them just feels so artificial and tiresome at this point in games that market themselves as RPGs. Really, every single "marauder" and "outlaw" I come across will automatically shoot at me on sight, no matter what, despite the fact that the game constantly tells you that the law they're outside of fucking sucks? Even if you dress up like them (considering how FNV had faction armor this seems like a particularly regressive omission)? Despite the fact that you pretty much have the option to be an outlaw right from the get-go? Every marauder is a psychopathically-insane drug fiend (keep in mind that there are apparently thousands of them, simultaneously coming from and outnumbering the impossible-to-replace colonial population, simultaneously violently insane and also capable of working in groups on a successful-enough level to threaten giant outposts and survive brutal wilderness conditions)? That's weird, because a lot of in-game dialogue and worldbuilding strongly imply they're mostly normal people who just defected at some point... you can even meet someone who just casually walked up to them to sign up! As -Tal said above, it's a shockingly blunt way to implement a faction as just the Chaotic Evil cannon fodder that kind of flies in the face of everything else the game is trying to do and say.
But those are all complaints that are so common in this genre that they're basically expected features. You suffer through the UI and unnecessary, illogical combat to get to the rewards of the writing and the sense of adventure. I'm too tired to say anything about the good stuff other than platitudes but yes it's good
Eddy on
"and the morning stars I have seen
and the gengars who are guiding me" -- W.S. Merwin
+3
JedocIn the scupperswith the staggers and jagsRegistered Userregular
So I take it this game if pretty good? Reviews seen to be saying it's "good but not better than expected", which sounds so strange, like..
What?
I found that weird as well. Mostly those seem to come down to "it's like F:NV, but more polished". Which yeah, do you guys know how long it's been since we had a game of that calibre? Almost ten years! It is a strange criticism to me.
Anyway, I really like this game a lot so far, but I'm not super far in (taking my time, exploring everything, etc)
"Good but not better than expected" rings very true to me. I'm happy with it, because I bought it expecting a polished-up version of F:NV, and that's exactly what I got! And I'm happy that they didn't include radiant quests or deep crafting or settlement building, and just kept to a very pure rendition of a 2010 first-person RPG.
What would have been better than expected is if they'd have implemented some of the quality of life innovations that the genre has seen over the past decade. To pick one example, The Witcher 3 and Metal Gear Solid V both came out in 2015. You don't have to replicate the in-depth physicality of Geralt or Big Boss in every single game you make, but having a character who can't use their arms to climb onto a chest-high crate seems like a deliberate choice at this point. Similarly, the ladders are straight out of Half-Life 2, rather than the nippy auto-climbing ones you find in most modern games.
The game is full of metaphorical chest-high crates like that. Not unexpected, but just a little bit unwelcome.
all these games saying they have "New Vegas Style" survival mechanics
they don't, really
in New Vegas, the need for drinking, eating and sleeping were completely unrelated to enemy difficulty, permadeath or any of that nonsense
and that's what I want
I want to have to consider subsistence survival in the wilds without worrying about my companions getting slaughtered or a hostile NPC turning into a bullet sponge
So I take it this game if pretty good? Reviews seen to be saying it's "good but not better than expected", which sounds so strange, like..
What?
I found that weird as well. Mostly those seem to come down to "it's like F:NV, but more polished". Which yeah, do you guys know how long it's been since we had a game of that calibre? Almost ten years! It is a strange criticism to me.
Anyway, I really like this game a lot so far, but I'm not super far in (taking my time, exploring everything, etc)
"Good but not better than expected" rings very true to me. I'm happy with it, because I bought it expecting a polished-up version of F:NV, and that's exactly what I got! And I'm happy that they didn't include radiant quests or deep crafting or settlement building, and just kept to a very pure rendition of a 2010 first-person RPG.
What would have been better than expected is if they'd have implemented some of the quality of life innovations that the genre has seen over the past decade. To pick one example, The Witcher 3 and Metal Gear Solid V both came out in 2015. You don't have to replicate the in-depth physicality of Geralt or Big Boss in every single game you make, but having a character who can't use their arms to climb onto a chest-high crate seems like a deliberate choice at this point. Similarly, the ladders are straight out of Half-Life 2, rather than the nippy auto-climbing ones you find in most modern games.
The game is full of metaphorical chest-high crates like that. Not unexpected, but just a little bit unwelcome.
I wonder how high the budget for this game was. Witcher 3 and especially MGS5 were probably way higher, and a different scope. I do agree that the ladder mechanic is hilariously outdated, but I don't think this game was designed with scaling objects and buildings in mind.
I do miss Witcher 3 quality facial animations though, that would really elevate everything happening in dialogues.
0
JacobkoshGamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderatormod
So I take it this game if pretty good? Reviews seen to be saying it's "good but not better than expected", which sounds so strange, like..
What?
It's evolutionary rather than revolutionary. It does exactly what you would expect out of a cleaned-up, more stable F: NV, but not more than that. If we'd been getting a steady stream of choice-driven, first-person, semi-open-world RPGs between New Vegas and now, each with some minor incremental improvements or changes a la Assassin's Creed, then Outer Worlds would be a solid B. But instead, in the past decade we've only gotten three games in that genre, one of which had the element of narrative choice so drastically curtailed as to be nonexistent (Skyrim), one of which handled its narrative elements incredibly clumsily (F4) and one of which was Fallout 76. So Outer Worlds is the beneficiary of people's pent-up desire for more of this sort of thing, sort of like when a good space sim comes along and people leap on it like ravening wolves because they just haven't had a good one of those in forever.
+11
JacobkoshGamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderatormod
None of which is to suggest that Outer Worlds is secretly a bad game getting a free pass or anything like that. I love it! It's just that the feeling I have when I play is a comfortable return to familiarity, like sinking into grandpa's armchair, than an exhilarating rush of novelty.
None of which is to suggest that Outer Worlds is secretly a bad game getting a free pass or anything like that. I love it! It's just that the feeling I have when I play is a comfortable return to familiarity, like sinking into grandpa's armchair, than an exhilarating rush of novelty.
I like this comparison because Outer Wilds felt like an exhilarating rush of novelty to me so the names of these two games are perfect yet again
0
Librarian's ghostLibrarian, Ghostbuster, and TimSporkRegistered Userregular
I actually thought about doing supernova difficulty but I hate permanent companion death in games. If I could turn just that off I'd do it!
There's been a single single player rpg where open world worked great for me, and that was Witcher 3. I'm totally okay with not having an open world for a good single player rpg
There's been a single single player rpg where open world worked great for me, and that was Witcher 3. I'm totally okay with not having an open world for a good single player rpg
AC: Odyssey also makes it work, because Greece feels like a fantasy setting. Of course, that game is practically a Witcher 3 clone with some legacy AC systems bolted on.
There's been a single single player rpg where open world worked great for me, and that was Witcher 3. I'm totally okay with not having an open world for a good single player rpg
AC: Odyssey also makes it work, because Greece feels like a fantasy setting. Of course, that game is practically a Witcher 3 clone with some legacy AC systems bolted on.
I'd argue it's the other way around. It's a vast, mostly empty AC world with some Witcher 3 finish, without any of the depth.
So I take it this game if pretty good? Reviews seen to be saying it's "good but not better than expected", which sounds so strange, like..
What?
I found that weird as well. Mostly those seem to come down to "it's like F:NV, but more polished". Which yeah, do you guys know how long it's been since we had a game of that calibre? Almost ten years! It is a strange criticism to me.
Anyway, I really like this game a lot so far, but I'm not super far in (taking my time, exploring everything, etc)
What I think is unfortunate is that it doesn't seem to have learned all that much from the intervening ten years. For instance:
The menu system is horrid
The controls still feel very much like F:NV; they have a bullet time because the game is too hard to control cleanly to have everything happen in real time
There's very little visual indication other than a tiny health bar in the corner that you're about to die
I spent like 20m making my character into an adorable punk rock bartender girl with matching pink eyes & hair and now I'll never see her again outside of the inventory screen
I'm going to keep playing because so far the characters and story are compelling, but I absolutely understand why "it's like a polished New Vegas" amounts to a criticism. I want to sit the devs down in front of, like, the Just Cause games, or Saint's Row, or heck for a 1st person only Far Cry Primal, and be like "see how the combat in these games is really fun? You should aspire to that."
I also don't see the Firefly comparison. In Firefly, the people who live on the core worlds are actually wealthy and comfortable. They've accepted their corporate servitude because it makes their lives easier. The colonists of Outer Worlds have accepted their corporate servitude because the alternative is you can't even pay for your own grave. It's a very different sort of comment.
Talking with someone about this at work today and I came to the horrible realization that they don’t have Fallout 3 to compare it to because Fallout 3 came out when they were eight years old
There's something deeply amusing to me that, while everyone else seems to be running fine, I'm running into bugs constantly. Especially considering New Vegas ran almost flawlessly for me when I played it at launch.
I've had my gun just decide not to come up when hitting the button to draw it, bodies not be lootable, boxes fail to display the UI when I open them, audio logs not play, stuck in a jumping animation for two minutes until I managed to finagle my character out of it (also fun fact, this was where an autosave was created, which I found out about after I died and it loaded me back there), got stuck on the geometry when climbing an area outside of Edgewater (I wasn't doing anything crazy, I was literally following a path), etc.
And then it will run perfectly fine again for an hour before hitting a bug. The lootable stuff just not displaying the UI is the most common error I get.
Posts
I found that weird as well. Mostly those seem to come down to "it's like F:NV, but more polished". Which yeah, do you guys know how long it's been since we had a game of that calibre? Almost ten years! It is a strange criticism to me.
Anyway, I really like this game a lot so far, but I'm not super far in (taking my time, exploring everything, etc)
They're presumably colonists, you can even read the bounty logs on the sheriff's computer to see the personal history of the marauder leaders! But that doesn't get expanded on, you don't talk to them, the marauders don't get to have any ideology or culture or desires beyond killing anyone they see. Even in new vegas there were different tribes of raiders and you could talk to them sometimes.
The marauders aren't even brought up in arguments between other factions as like, examples of how the corporations drive people to desperation, or how anyone outsids the corporations is destined to become a crazy bandit. They're basically treated the same as the wild animals, just an unavoidable nuisance, except they're humans
Nitpicks:
The UI is super limited and annoying in seemingly every possible quality of life design decision. Everything to do with navigating basic components of your entire interaction with the game is ten years out of date - in almost every menu I encounter I feel frustrated towards in its inability to quickly do or find what every player must want to do or find. Inventory management, heal/buff item identification and usage, companion management, looting, even simply toggling from one menu to the next are all less intuitive and easy than what I would expect and oftentimes straight-up frustratingly opaque.
The combat is similarly out of date. It's essentially a "left trigger, right trigger" game: you pull left trigger then pull right trigger towards bullet-sponge enemies (occasionally I'll switch weapons I guess). I have zero need or desire to do anything else (I'm playing on Normal difficulty). The inhaler (heals + buffs), dodge (double-tap A to roll), and companion ability (everyone gets one special ability on a cooldown like doing a stagger attack) mechanics are weak attempts to make the combat something other than a waste of time. It's a downgrade to Skyrim gameplay... in 2019. Playing Control before this really highlighted how poor the combat is: I looked forward to fights in Control, even fights I had to redo, because I was always looking to stretch myself in its fun, dynamic, ability-driven 3D combat. In contrast, I dread the combat, I dread looting afterwards, I'm pissed when there's a new area because all that means is more waves of identical, weirdly suicidal enemies.
However, the actual implantation aside, the existence of combat in games like this is bizarre and always feels like it came down to being included because they're either afraid it won't sell without mandatory fights, or they don't know how else to fill out a game. Throwing twenty marauders (that you can't talk to or sneak past) into a corner of the map and having some quest reward in the middle of them just feels so artificial and tiresome at this point in games that market themselves as RPGs. Really, every single "marauder" and "outlaw" I come across will automatically shoot at me on sight, no matter what, despite the fact that the game constantly tells you that the law they're outside of fucking sucks? Even if you dress up like them (considering how FNV had faction armor this seems like a particularly regressive omission)? Despite the fact that you pretty much have the option to be an outlaw right from the get-go? Every marauder is a psychopathically-insane drug fiend (keep in mind that there are apparently thousands of them, simultaneously coming from and outnumbering the impossible-to-replace colonial population, simultaneously violently insane and also capable of working in groups on a successful-enough level to threaten giant outposts and survive brutal wilderness conditions)? That's weird, because a lot of in-game dialogue and worldbuilding strongly imply they're mostly normal people who just defected at some point... you can even meet someone who just casually walked up to them to sign up! As -Tal said above, it's a shockingly blunt way to implement a faction as just the Chaotic Evil cannon fodder that kind of flies in the face of everything else the game is trying to do and say.
But those are all complaints that are so common in this genre that they're basically expected features. You suffer through the UI and unnecessary, illogical combat to get to the rewards of the writing and the sense of adventure. I'm too tired to say anything about the good stuff other than platitudes but yes it's good
and the gengars who are guiding me" -- W.S. Merwin
"Good but not better than expected" rings very true to me. I'm happy with it, because I bought it expecting a polished-up version of F:NV, and that's exactly what I got! And I'm happy that they didn't include radiant quests or deep crafting or settlement building, and just kept to a very pure rendition of a 2010 first-person RPG.
What would have been better than expected is if they'd have implemented some of the quality of life innovations that the genre has seen over the past decade. To pick one example, The Witcher 3 and Metal Gear Solid V both came out in 2015. You don't have to replicate the in-depth physicality of Geralt or Big Boss in every single game you make, but having a character who can't use their arms to climb onto a chest-high crate seems like a deliberate choice at this point. Similarly, the ladders are straight out of Half-Life 2, rather than the nippy auto-climbing ones you find in most modern games.
The game is full of metaphorical chest-high crates like that. Not unexpected, but just a little bit unwelcome.
I do not understand
Now one of my companions looks like ass, and I won't turn off Parvati's fresh new goggles
I wonder how high the budget for this game was. Witcher 3 and especially MGS5 were probably way higher, and a different scope. I do agree that the ladder mechanic is hilariously outdated, but I don't think this game was designed with scaling objects and buildings in mind.
I do miss Witcher 3 quality facial animations though, that would really elevate everything happening in dialogues.
It's evolutionary rather than revolutionary. It does exactly what you would expect out of a cleaned-up, more stable F: NV, but not more than that. If we'd been getting a steady stream of choice-driven, first-person, semi-open-world RPGs between New Vegas and now, each with some minor incremental improvements or changes a la Assassin's Creed, then Outer Worlds would be a solid B. But instead, in the past decade we've only gotten three games in that genre, one of which had the element of narrative choice so drastically curtailed as to be nonexistent (Skyrim), one of which handled its narrative elements incredibly clumsily (F4) and one of which was Fallout 76. So Outer Worlds is the beneficiary of people's pent-up desire for more of this sort of thing, sort of like when a good space sim comes along and people leap on it like ravening wolves because they just haven't had a good one of those in forever.
I like this comparison because Outer Wilds felt like an exhilarating rush of novelty to me so the names of these two games are perfect yet again
AC: Odyssey also makes it work, because Greece feels like a fantasy setting. Of course, that game is practically a Witcher 3 clone with some legacy AC systems bolted on.
I'd argue it's the other way around. It's a vast, mostly empty AC world with some Witcher 3 finish, without any of the depth.
Oh yeah, I took every weight limit increase, item weight decrease, etc perk I could get so far. Currently at a 210 max, which seems good for now
Steam - Talon Valdez :Blizz - Talonious#1860 : Xbox Live & LoL - Talonious Monk @TaloniousMonk Hail Satan
You can do it from your inventory.
That perk exists in Fallout 4.
What I think is unfortunate is that it doesn't seem to have learned all that much from the intervening ten years. For instance:
I'm going to keep playing because so far the characters and story are compelling, but I absolutely understand why "it's like a polished New Vegas" amounts to a criticism. I want to sit the devs down in front of, like, the Just Cause games, or Saint's Row, or heck for a 1st person only Far Cry Primal, and be like "see how the combat in these games is really fun? You should aspire to that."
I also don't see the Firefly comparison. In Firefly, the people who live on the core worlds are actually wealthy and comfortable. They've accepted their corporate servitude because it makes their lives easier. The colonists of Outer Worlds have accepted their corporate servitude because the alternative is you can't even pay for your own grave. It's a very different sort of comment.
my life
I saw someone say that the robot is just HK-47.
I thought my brain couldn't feel pain, but here we are
Yeah, she grew on me as soon as her "oh-sorry-I-spoke-senpai" shtick subsided some
sidenote (companion spoiler):
Though, again, I basically have not seen Space Serafinowicz since the character creation screen.
It's a large part of why I'm using Parvati+SAM
I've had my gun just decide not to come up when hitting the button to draw it, bodies not be lootable, boxes fail to display the UI when I open them, audio logs not play, stuck in a jumping animation for two minutes until I managed to finagle my character out of it (also fun fact, this was where an autosave was created, which I found out about after I died and it loaded me back there), got stuck on the geometry when climbing an area outside of Edgewater (I wasn't doing anything crazy, I was literally following a path), etc.
And then it will run perfectly fine again for an hour before hitting a bug. The lootable stuff just not displaying the UI is the most common error I get.
Steam // Secret Satan