The Outer Worlds: Spacer's Choice Edition - Obsidian's first-person sci-fi RPG set in a corporate space colony

[IHaveHugeNick]

Infinitron give Junta a break. He needs maximize shitposting to bury that part of the thread where "stupid valley girls" tricked him into siding with sweet nice granny who defiles corpses.

Is it strange that I don't see anything wrong with using a corpse for fertilizer? It's definitely not something I'd do(I can just buy real fertilizer, plus contamination…), but it's not like they're being cannibals.
How different is it really from what happens naturally?

There are grave sites left by prehistoric cultures going back to the stone age, so even the most primitive savages respect their dead. Heck, Spacer's Choice prioritizes profit over people to an absurd degree, but even they didn't fell so low as to reuse the corpses.

That's without even going into what happens if you side with the town, ie most deserters are happy to return and you can hook up one of them with a promotion. Talking with Adelaide I had an impression she was more than happy to just let Edgewater starve if you cut the power.

 

[luj1]

even the "official" discord for rpgcodex is filled with SJWs... I got banned for asking why there is a gay porn sharing section of the discord.

There is literally several transvestites on board

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Cut him some slack, he's sustained massive butt injury from how mediocre the game has turned out to be.

Yeah i wonder why he's on Codex in the first place. Why not join something like ResetEra instead of here? I don't mean this as an insult, but it's obvious he's not exactly the right fit for this place. I mean... the freaking first page of the forum says we are terrible people...

you would think this, but even the "official" discord for rpgcodex is filled with SJWs... I got banned for asking why there is a gay porn sharing section of the discord. (even if you argue there should be, to ban someone for asking about it is clear decline)
this site is infested with leftists, don't ever fool yourself

There is literally several transvestites on board

No need to announce your presence.

 

[Infinitron]

Yet when streamers see this, they're like OH GOD, THEY PAY FOR THEIR GRAVES??

If they're American streamers then they just have no concept of having a shortage of land for burial.

Infinitron give Junta a break. He needs maximize shitposting to bury that part of the thread where "stupid valley girls" tricked him into siding with sweet nice granny who defiles corpses.

I'm not trying to own Prime Junta. Something I said last year after the game was announced:

I predict 100% accurate outcome: the game will have good ideas(Tim and Leo) with shit execution(obsidian)

That's an interesting thing to say, because my feeling is that the primary reason some people are unenthused by this game is actually because they don't find its overall "idea" - the whole colorful corporate-branded space colony thing - all that interesting.

I might even agree with that (though I need to see more)

I think in the competition with New Vegas this game was always going to have problems because the topic they chose to make the game about just doesn't have as much gravity.

 

[jf8350143]

Infinitron give Junta a break. He needs maximize shitposting to bury that part of the thread where "stupid valley girls" tricked him into siding with sweet nice granny who defiles corpses.

Is it strange that I don't see anything wrong with using a corpse for fertilizer? It's definitely not something I'd do(I can just buy real fertilizer, plus contamination…), but it's not like they're being cannibals.
How different is it really from what happens naturally?

There are grave sites left by prehistoric cultures going back to the stone age, so even the most primitive savages respect their dead. Heck, Spacer's Choice prioritizes profit over people to an absurd degree, but even they didn't fell so low as to reuse the corpses.

That's without even going into what happens if you side with the town, ie most deserters are happy to return and you can hook up one of them with a promotion. Talking with Adelaide I had an impression she was more than happy to just let Edgewater starve if you cut the power.

Spoiler

If you cut the power form edgewater, she will tell you that she didn't plan to accept the workers from the town. Basically she just try to manipulate you to wipe the town out for her benefit.

 

[Shadenuat]

Yet when streamers see this, they're like OH GOD, THEY PAY FOR THEIR GRAVES??

If they're American streamers then they just have no concept of having a shortage of land for burial.

True but even if land shortage is not a problem there's still a lot of things (which you have to pay for) when it comes to transition of person into afterlife.

In fact, Planescape has whole faction whos job to do this, and does all this better (and actually darker) in just a small side quest.

 

[Shadenuat]

Heck, Spacer's Choice prioritizes profit over people to an absurd degree, but even they didn't fell so low as to reuse the corpses

Perhaps people paying fees is simply more profitable for them.

To me anyway, whole Edgewater thing SUDDENLY CORPSES, similarly to Monarches SUDDENY CANNIBALS left a slightly retardo Bethesda feeling.

 

[Dishonoredbr]

Being a drug adicted is tough.. I need find and buy so much drugs to keep my stats.

 

[jf8350143]

They don't buy the grave, they rent the grave. It's a pretty big difference here. And from the looks of it they need to pay constantly until they die.

 

[Prime Junta]

I think in the competition with New Vegas this game was always going to have problems because the topic they chose to make the game about just doesn't have as much gravity.

It's not just the flawed premise. Every premise is flawed and the FONV is ... kinda dumb if you look at it too closely. It's where they went with it. felipepepe in particular has had some really strong insights into what's wrong with it.

What they could have done is not just treat this corporate dystopia thing as a running wink-wink-nudge-nudge joke populated with larpers, but taken the absurd premise and really run with it wherever it wants to go. They could even keep the post-racial, post-gender, post-sexual thing if they want to, it's in fact not at all incompatible with a "brave new world" type of dystopia. They could have considered questions like

• What particular sociopathologies would each of these corporate cultures develop?
• What different methods would the corporations use to keep their drones under control?
• What coping mechanisms would the drones develop?
• How would all of this manifest, in the way corpodrones from different corporations think, feel, talk, act?
• How would all of this manifest visually? Totalitarian systems are inherently aesthetic, and they quickly develop their own variants of it. How would these develop in their different ways? As things currently stand, the game is painfully uniform in its visuals, every corp location uses the same design language, just a different jingle and different logo.
• What kind of cultural baggage would each of these corps start with?

As Felipe said, they could've gotten more insight into corporate dystopia by interviewing an Amazon warehouse worker from next door. They could've made a serious stab at writing genuinely brainwashed corpodrones. They could have made acts of rebellion against the system genuinely terrifying. And they could have done all this while maintaining the Brazilesque absurdity of the whole thing.

But they didn't. They just treated it as a running joke, and proceeded to run it into the ground while wrapping it in completely safe, completely standard game mechanics. Again: Tim Cain has talked a lot of smack about innovation in RPGs. Where did it all go? Why was this even worth doing? Was it really worth for Boyarsky to quit his safe, solid potboiler job at Blizzard to turn out this safe potboiler?

I do not understand, and it makes me sad.

 

[Roguey]

The decline of Tim is worth reposting

They desperately need a good lead writer.

Megan! (with a strong director to keep her in line)

The main problem is that right after these situations you have the game do a lolsorandumb moment and it loses all impact.
It would be like if right after talking to Hanlon in FNV you turned around and there was a wild wasteland joke.

The game equivalent of an MCU movie, huh? Makes sense.

 

[Shadenuat]

I believe it's called Flanderization (of a setting). It's like Bioshock. Doesn't have that realistic feelz to it which even lulzy Arcanum had.

 

[Dedicated_Dark]

The fact that you can't loot everything off a dead-body is pathetic, the fact that there are no naked models or the fact that you can't even remove equipment and can only replace them is just lame. The game drops loot like a fckn MMO. The game is the very thing the game is trying and failing to critique, a soulless product made to please the masses & make money.

I am finding the game so dreadfully bland. Edgewater was meh~ it's the generic quest of people who can't think up a better one & neither even presented proper arguments to try and convince me. I wish I could divert the power to nowhere and let both of these shit-holes die. The Moonheaded vendor.. .Martin I think was the quite frankly the only one interesting so far, Vicar is fine too I guess. That pushed me for a while more seeking better things, now I just finished the Laboratory toothpaste quest and I am so dreadfully bored.. . The portrayal of capitalism is cartoony, true evil is hidden under a facade of happiness not in misery, this game is lifeless..

 

[Infinitron]

I think in the competition with New Vegas this game was always going to have problems because the topic they chose to make the game about just doesn't have as much gravity.

It's not just the flawed premise. Every premise is flawed and the FONV is ... kinda dumb if you look at it too closely. It's where they went with it. felipepepe in particular has had some really strong insights into what's wrong with it.

What they could have done is not just treat this corporate dystopia thing as a running wink-wink-nudge-nudge joke populated with larpers, but taken the absurd premise and really run with it wherever it wants to go. They could even keep the post-racial, post-gender, post-sexual thing if they want to, it's in fact not at all incompatible with a "brave new world" type of dystopia. They could have considered questions like

• What particular sociopathologies would each of these corporate cultures develop?
• What different methods would the corporations use to keep their drones under control?
• What coping mechanisms would the drones develop?
• How would all of this manifest, in the way corpodrones from different corporations think, feel, talk, act?
• How would all of this manifest visually? Totalitarian systems are inherently aesthetic, and they quickly develop their own variants of it. How would these develop in their different ways? As things currently stand, the game is painfully uniform in its visuals, every corp location uses the same design language, just a different jingle and different logo.
• What kind of cultural baggage would each of these corps start with?

As Felipe said, they could've gotten more insight into corporate dystopia by interviewing an Amazon warehouse worker from next door. They could've made a serious stab at writing genuinely brainwashed corpodrones. They could have made acts of rebellion against the system genuinely terrifying. And they could have done all this while maintaining the Brazilesque absurdity of the whole thing.

But they didn't. They just treated it as a running joke, and proceeded to run it into the ground while wrapping it in completely safe, completely standard game mechanics. Again: Tim Cain has talked a lot of smack about innovation in RPGs. Where did it all go? Why was this even worth doing? Was it really worth for Boyarsky to quit his safe, solid potboiler job at Blizzard to turn out this safe potboiler?

I do not understand, and it makes me sad.

Well the idea of the game isn't just a corporate dystopia - it's a corporate dystopia combined with a "space western". The latter element is what allows the game to remain in the framework of a Fallout-like shooting, looting and questing RPG. And it's also silly of course. A pure corporate-dystopia-in-the-far-future game would probably be set on some sort of heavily populated city-planet and would be a rather different sort of thing.

On the frontier, governments aren't really that powerful. Anybody who is dissatisfied can just go off into the wilderness and start their own thing, as they indeed do. If you look at Edgewater it seems to be held together by a cultivated semi-religious sense of duty towards the "Spacer's Choice family" more than anything.

 

[CyberWhale]

In other complaints, I've found that the bodies of Marauders can blend too easily into the high grass in Emerald Vale and it's sometimes hard to find them for looting. Art direction screwup.

Nothing to do with art direction (which is top-notch and in-line with all other Cainarsky games) but with simple logic - spotting things (organic or inorganic, static or moving) in high grass is much tougher than in plain sight (or a Fallout desert). Shocking, I know.

Actual criticism instead of edgy rationalizations for stupid opinions:

• roaming NPCs like to repeat the same lines over and over. Corporate/religious catchphrases are understandable, but opinions are not. Couldn't they have them tell the same thing, but at least in a different manner? F:NV and Underrail suffer from the same thing, but it's still annoying to experience it all over again. Could have hired a cheap copywriter to retype the same sentence slightly differently.
• UI is Witcher 2/3 console-garbage-like. More soulless than Bethesdian Fallouts, even if somewhat better organized and easier to use (grid instead of a list)
• character creation - attributes, skills and perks aren't the worst things ever, but they are an unnecessary downgrade compared to the previous Interplay/Obsidian titles. Attributes are pretty much what you would expect, but having Charm and Temperament seems unnecessary and like a poor effort to have a couple of them for every category (Body, Mind and Personality). Similar Skills being batched together is also problematic. I understand what they were aiming for - it's much more logical that someone who knows his way around assault rifles knows a thing or two about handguns as well, but Age of Decadence (if I remember correctly, played a demo long ago) found a much better solution for this problem half a decade ago - when you invest in a single particular skill multiple points, other related skills get raised in a smaller ratio as well. Perks are also slightly too boring and should have been more impactful overall.
• technical problems - loadings last too long, especially on regular HDD. If the game had bustling cities with hundreds of roaming characters and no exterior/interior transition this would be understandable, but the way it is? Texture loading is also ubiquitous, it feels like I'm playing an Unreal 2.5 game like BioShock or Alpha Protocol and not something in 2019. Game settings for the PC version are also pretty barebones and don't enable you to turn off/on effects as you desire. Gears 5, a primarily console release is better in the last two aspects for pitty's sake.

I was wondering what happened to MUH TRIANGLES AND SHIIIEEET? Such a revolutionary idea, who knows, maybe it would have satisfied PrimeJunta's pretentious needs and tastes?

 

[Prime Junta]

I was wondering what happened to MUH TRIANGLES AND SHIIIEEET? Such a revolutionary idea, who knows, maybe it would have satisfied PrimeJunta's pretentious needs and tastes?

At this point I'd be cheered up by any innovation, but the main issue with the game isn't the mechanics. The gameplay and systems are okay for a modern mainstream game, no worse than Twitcher 3. It's just so bland and shallow that none of it matters.

 

[Terenty]

I predict 100% accurate outcome: the game will have good ideas(Tim and Leo) with shit execution(obsidian)

That's an interesting thing to say, because my feeling is that the primary reason some people are unenthused by this game is actually because they don't find its overall "idea" - the whole colorful corporate-branded space colony thing - all that interesting.

I might even agree with that (though I need to see more)

Wow, turns out i'm a real oracle n shit

 

[luj1]

Nothing to do with art direction (which is top-notch...

top-notch

This game's art direction is not bad. This game doesn't have an art direction, a feat previously assumed to be impossible. It looks like a mixture of Overwatch, Bioshock, Fallout 4, Guardians of the Galaxy and Borderlands.

 

[Alpan]

From the day this game was announced, it was marketed as a slapstick, humorous game. There is no way to look at the announcement trailer and reasonably expect that corporate greed and exploitation would be examined with any gravitas. That seems to be wishful thinking to me. Sure, Obsidian could have interviewed Amazon warehouse workers -- but why would they, when that was never the game they intended to make?

It is justified to criticize the game for being bland and unfunny (which certainly seems to be the case), but criticizing the game for not being well-researched or grave enough seems to be a rather misplaced take. I think part of it gets conflated around the hype of The Outer Worlds supposedly being Cain and Boyarsky's dream game -- it is rather inconceivable (and traumatic to the average old time Codexer) that their dreams would have resulted in such banality, but here we are. Was it mere marketing buzz, or have the duo revealed themselves as a pair of tired, old men? Probably the latter.

 

[AW8]

Also fun fact, "Muslim" is a banned word, so I guess we could probably sue Obsidian on hate-speech grounds.

Muslim is also a given name, just like Christian is. Of course, that's not an appropriate name for your character in a singleplayer game. Because that would be... bad, somehow.

 

[Prime Junta]

It is justified to criticize the game for being bland and unfunny (which certainly seems to be the case), but criticizing the game for not being well-researched or grave enough seems to be rather misplaced take. I think part of it gets conflated around the hype of The Outer Worlds supposedly being Cain and Boyarsky's dream game -- it is rather inconceivable (and traumatic to the average old time Codexer) that their dreams would have resulted in such banality, but there we are. Was it mere marketing buzz, or have the duo revealed themselves as a pair of tired, old men? Probably the latter.

But there's the rub: for this type of comedy to work you have to play it straight. The comedy comes from the contrast between the premise and the characters inside the game to whom it is a reality. You might spice it up with the occasional wink or fourth-wall breaking joke, but you can't keep that up for the 15-30 hours or more it takes to play this kind of thing through.

 

[Prime Junta]

Muslim is also a given name, just like Christian is.

Someone I know has a son named Jihad. She got some funny looks at an airport once when he ran off and she yelled at him to come back. "Jihaaad!"

 

[Longshanks]

From everything I've seen and read this game looks decent. The seeming focus on reactivity gives me some cause to think of maybe playing it at some point, but the writing and gameplay looks to be a cold shower with lack of open world being the only positive. Best recent actiony-close-to-RPG I've played is RDR2 and this game looks nowhere near that level.

Think I might give FO:NV a second go instead. Not my style of RPG at all and previously managed no more than 0.5 hrs but after filtering out agenda and idiocy the general view seems to be it's at least good for what it is.

 

[Shadenuat]

Also fun fact, "Muslim" is a banned word, so I guess we could probably sue Obsidian on hate-speech grounds.

Muslim is also a given name, just like Christian is. Of course, that's not an appropriate name for your character in a singleplayer game. Because that would be... bad, somehow.

So is Islam btw, I had a schoolmate with that name from Dagestan.

 

[Trashos]

Thoughts after my first day of playing:

Interesting to me that Prime Junta ranks Fallout: New Vegas as "peak Obsidian writing" in comparison to this game. As I was saying yesterday on Shoutbox, most of the writing in New Vegas is actually pretty basic. There isn't some gaping chasm of quality separating Sunny Smiles and Easy Pete from Goodsprings from the characters of Edgewater. Anybody who tells you that the moment-to-moment writing in The Outer Worlds is like, radically different stylistically from Fallout: New Vegas ("Everybody in The Outer Worlds sounds like an SJW cuck! Everybody in Fallout: New Vegas sounds gritty and awesome!") is only remembering the best parts of that game. In fact, I think there's little in the FO:NV base game that Obsidian's current writers couldn't have done. There's a reason the Avellone-written Dead Money DLC feels so different.

So the question is, does The Outer Worlds have those "tentpole" elements that elevate the entire experience in retrospect like New Vegas does. The great characters like House, Caesar & Chief Hanlon, and the strong setting. Very likely it doesn't, but I need to play more.

* * *

New Vegas indeed has certain peaks in its writing (although I didn't like Hanlon's writing that much), but the moment-to-moment writing was also very well done. Such a thing, to write simple serviceable dialogue that sounds good enough and fits the situation, is something we used to take for granted in the case of old Obsidian, but it is not the case any more. The moment-to-moment writing in PoE1 was often painful to read, even when there was nothing particular going on. It is not that easy. It may be easy for good writers, but nuObsidian doesn't have good writers.

In a nutshell: Writing something simple and natural may not be the hardest thing ever, but it still requires some basic skill.