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

[fantadomat]

More to the point, rapist pedophiles are kind of an exception to the rule

you mean like the slaver in westside,new vegas?

 

[Fedora Master]

you're not going to see gay-mocking dialogue options in any mainstream made-in-US game and if you think about it, you probably never have.

The only gay guy in RDR(who was also an antagonist) was implied to be a rapist pedophile and John mocks him in a few lines

Rockstar isn't originally an american developer even if they moved to New York.
Dan Houser (Brit) runs a tight ship creativly there.

While Brits know A LOT about homosex, I doubt they'd show it in a negative light either.

 

[Roguey]

It's surprising to me how much Ellie was featured in the game's trailers and promos compared to how inconsequential she is in the actual game. Compare her to Parvati and Nyoko, both of which have meaningful involvement in story quests, and even Vicar and Felix are at least tangential to the plot. Ellie is just a random chick on a side quest who sticks around for no reason. I wonder if Nyoko and Ellie were switched in the story at some point, or Ellie had more story quests that were cut.

She got the marketing push because she's the closet thing to a white woman they had, that's likely all there was to it.

That being said, don't kid yourself, you're not going to see gay-mocking dialogue options in any mainstream made-in-US game and if you think about it, you probably never have.

Turns out Gaider was the based gay all along, and Cain is just a creampuff.

 

[jf8350143]

That has been a thing for awhile now, no game will allow you to disapprove of homosexuality. Note however they will allow you to freely dump on religion or religious people.

Tells you what is actually sacred in our culture.

*edit* parvati is not a very memorable character either, more like she's the least bland oatmeal in a sea of oatmeal. She's a blatant Kaylee ripoff from Firefly with an inexplicable mix of southern accent and Hindu ethnicity shift along with a wierd, bizzaro "muh gender politics" "I'm gay but don't like actually being sexual with women" attitude that A. makes no fucking sense and B. is totally unrelatable to a 99% male playerbase that just wants to see boobs.

That's not true, Ubisoft's AC:Odyssye straight up force the main character to "fall in love and have a kid with a random character of opposite sex" in the DLC when they promote the game as play whatever sexuality you want. And lets you have sex with(or do not) anyone despite the their gender if you want.

That's a way bigger middle finger than you can ever put up to the LGBT people by using dialogue options or cut scenes.

 

[aweigh]

Ubisoft did that because the game's entire premise necessitates continuing the fucking bloodline.

Anyway they got bullied by Toxic Fans into changing it.

 

[Kyl Von Kull]

She got the marketing push because she's the closet thing to a white woman they had, that's likely all there was to it.

I’m sure that didn’t hurt, but Ellie’s also perfect for commercials (I’m halfway convinced her concept was created by an advertising agency). In the game she exists to dispense glib one-liners; audiences love this shit because it feels familiar. She sounds exactly like the sarcastic pseudo-comic-relief character you see in every big budget action movie. May not be funny, but it’s marketable.

 

[jf8350143]

Ubisoft did that because the game's entire premise necessitates continuing the fucking bloodline.

Anyway they got bullied by Toxic Fans into changing it.

They abandon the continuing bloodline thing since AC: Black Flag. Now they just extract DNA from some random things and you are good to go. Also the bloodline was continued into the previous game AC:Origin and the first thing you see is the last child of this so called bloodline dies to motive the two protagonists.

They never changed the story, all they did was change a dialogue option to make the character say "I don't love you, I just want a kid", and nothing else. The protagonist still acts like he/she is in love all the time other than that one specific dialogue.

 

[aweigh]

They never changed the story, all they did was change a dialogue option to make the character say "I don't love you, I just want a kid", and nothing else. The protagonist still acts like he/she is in love all the time other than that one specific dialogue.

Really? That's great news. I thought they had caved in and reworked the actual game content. It's still committee-mandated censorship though

 

[jf8350143]

They never changed the story, all they did was change a dialogue option to make the character say "I don't love you, I just want a kid", and nothing else. The protagonist still acts like he/she is in love all the time other than that one specific dialogue.

Really? That's great news. I thought they had caved in and reworked the actual game content. It's still committee-mandated censorship though

How is that great news? The reason they don't change it was because they are lazy and arrogant, and refuse to put any effort into doing it (it's not like they put any effort in the first place, the story was complete shit).

For a game that suppose to "let you create your own odyssey", you should have the choices, they should patch it in instead of forcing their shit fanfic on everyone.

It's the lack of choices that are bad, just like you can't be mean to Pravati in TOW, it doesn't make it better simply because the choices you are force to take is a middle finger to the LGBT people.

 

[axedice]

The more I play outer worlds, the more I'm baffled by the quality of the writing, especially the companions. At least in Deadfire there were story hooks for them, but Felix and Ellie joining your party had some bethesda tier shitty writing. Nu-nu obsidian makes me miss even the bisexual fuckfish boy, it is a wonder Cain or Boyarsky let such mediocrity run rampant in their game.

 

[Commissar Draco]

That has been a thing for awhile now, no game will allow you to disapprove of homosexuality. Note however they will allow you to freely dump on religion or religious people.

Tells you what is actually sacred in our culture.

*edit* parvati is not a very memorable character either, more like she's the least bland oatmeal in a sea of oatmeal. She's a blatant Kaylee ripoff from Firefly with an inexplicable mix of southern accent and Hindu ethnicity shift along with a wierd, bizzaro "muh gender politics" "I'm gay but don't like actually being sexual with women" attitude that A. makes no fucking sense and B. is totally unrelatable to a 99% male playerbase that just wants to see boobs.

Boobs in 2019 Commie-uniformia made game Comrade? All models are so flat chested you could take 90% of ''women'' here for trannies.
Had very low expectations so I did had some fun from this game but now they castrated my favorite companion Preacher Max, instead of philosophical debate over the book I got some hippie drug infused scene and now Max behaves and speaks like total NPC, and thinks those philosophist terrorists and chaos cultits are closer to thruth than his old faith... I could not even change it no matter what dialogue option I took, would put bullet onto poor man head if I cared a bit about game at this moment Comrade. Got to Byzantium love those details suggesting the decline of even the capital city but on the other hand its another excuse to board 7/10 buildings in already small location, would prefer one hub game to this to be honest, Monarch was high point of game but now I could finish this all in five minutes but just don't feel motivation for doing this this game is so soy infused it makes my gaming boner to shrink.

 

[Wesp5]

It's the lack of choices that are bad, just like you can't be mean to Pravati in TOW...

Which somehow reminds me of Vampyr: you are killing and draining humans left and right on the streets, but in conversations you are always the saint! At least in Bloodlines you could play a low humanity character with corresponding lines too...

 

[rusty_shackleford]

They never changed the story, all they did was change a dialogue option to make the character say "I don't love you, I just want a kid", and nothing else. The protagonist still acts like he/she is in love all the time other than that one specific dialogue.

Really? That's great news. I thought they had caved in and reworked the actual game content. It's still committee-mandated censorship though

How is that great news? The reason they don't change it was because they are lazy and arrogant, and refuse to put any effort into doing it (it's not like they put any effort in the first place, the story was complete shit).

For a game that suppose to "let you create your own odyssey", you should have the choices, they should patch it in instead of forcing their shit fanfic on everyone.

It's the lack of choices that are bad, just like you can't be mean to Pravati in TOW, it doesn't make it better simply because the choices you are force to take is a middle finger to the LGBT people.

If Kassandra never has a child then the entire timeline of the series falls apart.
In any game with C&C there will be certain parts that are so important to the overall story that they're immutable because changing it would cause the entire story to fall apart.

 

[DalekFlay]

I never went past the bar segment, but that Parvatti questline is realllllly fucking stupid. I get that asexual people exist and like to pretend they're not mentally fucked up in some way, but jesus do we need an endless discussion about it in our sci-fi pirate game? In the most schmaltzy way possible? Also they make it out like her crush better accept her or she's a bitch, which is super retardo.

 

[LESS T_T]

Partial transcription: https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news...skys_design_lessons_from_The_Outer_Worlds.php

Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky's design lessons from The Outer Worlds

As you might have noticed by now, Obsidian's The Outer Worlds is not Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky's first role-playing game rodeo. The pair have been working in video games since the days of Interplay Entertainment, and now as co-directors of The Outer Worlds, they've teamed up once again to tackle the challenges of creating a unique RPG system for a brand new setting.

A few weeks ago on the GDC Twitch channel, Cain and Boyarsky dropped by to share some of the lessons they learned working on The Outer Worlds, tackling subjects like RPG design processes and methodologies for making interesting choices.

For your convenience, we've pulled some particularly salient highlights about the making of The Outer Worlds below!

Making RPGs in 2019
When Cain and Boyarsky first began working on The Outer Worlds, it occurred to them that the world of game design had dramatically changed since they last worked together on the Vampire: The Masquerade series at Troika Entertainment.

Boyarsky noted that while the RPG genre has gotten more financially viable, it's also twisted and morphed into other genres as well. "There’s always the people who loved RPGs but the mainstream of games seemed to move away from that."

"I thought what they did with Mass Effect was really cool, I think The Witcher is really cool, but we just felt there was a lack of games where you have a blank slate character that was really generated by scratch from the player."

Cain jumped in to point out that when he and Boyarsky first got started in the genre, most RPG designers were working off systems inspired by tabletop design, for taletop players. "I think too is that RPGs used to be heavily influenced by tabletop, and I think computer RPGs are finally becoming their own thing. You don’t have to be a D&D RPG to get a lot of people interested in your game."

With that in mind, Cain said that one of the goals for The Outer Worlds was to design it to be more accessible than some of Obsidian's previous titles. "One of our early pillars that we decided on was that we wanted this game to be easy to get into," he explained. "A lot of RPGs—and a lot of our RPGs had this. The very first thing you were hit with were a ton of numbers, a ton of stuff you had to read in order to get into the game, and for this one said ‘let’s try to move as much character creation out of character creation.’"

"Let them spend skill points later. Let perks come later, let the flaws and stuff come later. Just do some quick character creation."

This is why, when you boot up The Outer Worlds, your character creation is first primarily oriented around appearance, then a base set of traits and "occupation" to help orient your playstyle. Leveling up skill points is then relegated to a sort of batch-upgrade process, where you level up a category, but then after a certain point you're allowed to level up individual skills to receive more fine-tuned benefits.

This runs counter to the older RPGs Cain and Boyarsky worked on, where character creation might involve players putting points into skills they couldn't use until several hours later.

"I think that gets more casual players but I think still appeals to hardcore players," Boyarsky added. "They have their depth, it just comes later."

These design decisions deliberately run counter to some of the RPG mainstays that Cain and Boyarsky relied on for years. But as the pair explained, just because it worked in their old games didn't mean it was right for a game trying to be more accessible.

"That’s why I like having worked with Leonard for so long because we could literally have a conversation and say ‘hey you know that stupid thing we did in one of our games? Let’s not do it in this game,'" said Cain.

"That was on our to-do list," Boyarsky deadpanned. "Don’t do our stupid things we had done before."

Designing the first few hours of The Outer Worlds
When digging into that unique leveling system, Cain credited creative director Josh Sawyer with creating the grouped attributes, instead of having players pick specific skills at the start of the game. "Josh Sawyer said ‘Hey that’s gotta make people really want to specialize. It’s kind of penalizing to generalists,’" Cain explained. "And so I redesigned it so that the points you put into the categories spread out to all the skills in that category in the beginning."

"And suddenly what we had was a game where I didn’t have to think about anything other than I like using guns. It doesn’t matter whether I like using handguns or rifles or heavy weapons. I just like guns. That’s all you have to think about from anywhere between five to ten levels."

Boyarsky also credited Sawyer with one key design decision that helped Obsidian test how players were acclimating to their game. "In the very first area of the game there were a lot of skill checks all over the place. hHe was mentioning that to us and like you know that’s a really good thing to keep in mind."

"We really just wanted to give players a lot feedback early on that all of their choices were mattering."

Those skill checks proved to be part of a bigger design decision for Cain and Boyarsky as well. The Outer Worlds, unlike many of its predecessors, has manged to ship without a wide array of complaints about bugs. Cain says this was a result of a deliberate process. "One thing I tried to do as early as I could as I wrote up all the playthrough paths I wanted supported," he said.

"On a game like this I didn’t try to do every single one cause that was hard, but I tried to do major ones like make a character who fights mainly with guns do one with melee. Make a character who uses science weapons, make a character who tinkers everything. One of them was a dumb character, one of them I said make a character who kills everybody---everybody. Run across and kill them before they even talk to you."

"I’m sure QA had a lot of fun with that one but that actually tested a lot of things in the game about can quests continue without a quest giver? What happens when people tinker their weapons way outside the level range we’re expecting? What happens when people go in with wildly different skill sets? We got a lot of feedback from QA that helped us fix a lot of quests and other content in the game to make it viable for every kind of character."

Boyarsky added that The Outer Worlds' design process was much more content-locked early in development as opposed to later in development. "That means you’re developing the game way further into the beta than you should be," he explained. "You know, you shouldn’t be developing very seriously past alpha. You know we always end up pushing that, you know but you want a really good beta period where the game is playable from start to end, all the contents in there."

"A lot of times we were just so passionate about what we were doing in that past that we wouldn’t make those cuts and this time we forced ourselves to make those tough choices earlier before, and that enabled Tim to play the game 17 times [to find bugs] instead of developing the game."

Making "choice" decisions
Of course, Cain and Boyarsky's games have long been praised for the way their philosophy on role-playing also plays out in narrative choices. Rarely do dialogue trees contain "good/evil/neutral," rather they tend to explore conflicting factional motivations and help players figure their own way through the moral muck.

This was something of a bugbear for Boyarsky, who went hard in the paint for the notion that choice shouldn't be good or bad. "It should always feel like you’re making a difficult choice...maybe on the surface it seems very simple but as soon as you dig into it at all it gets a lot more complex," he explained.

Part of the goal for Boyarsky and Cain was to drive choices around different expected player archetypes. These informed the prescribed routes for testers that Cain mentioned before, and are informed by the kinds of design work the pair have been doing since the days of Fallout. "The choices we came up with way back with Fallout is still at the heart of everything. You need to be able to talk your way by, fight your way or stealth your way through the game," said Cain.

"But really when we’re developing these kinds of things it really does come down to how can we emphasize the players choice? One of the things I like to do with the writers you know using [the town of] Edgewater as an example, at the surface it might seem very very simple. Here’s the group of people that are kind of bad, people who are very poor, people who are kind of good, so I always want the writers to add depth to the characters, and having the character that might on the surface seem like an evil choice or the bad choice is actually a very noble character who might be completely misguided but is doing this for the right reasons."

Cain and Boyarsky have been particularly chuffed watching streamers play The Outer Worlds and responding to their tough choices. The pair noted that streaming has also afforded them opportunities to see content they didn't even know was in the game.

Streaming has also helped them learn from the choices players are making--and turned out to be a surprising new vector for analyzing player behavior. "So you can see what people do—which sometimes isn’t what they report.

 

[jf8350143]

They never changed the story, all they did was change a dialogue option to make the character say "I don't love you, I just want a kid", and nothing else. The protagonist still acts like he/she is in love all the time other than that one specific dialogue.

Really? That's great news. I thought they had caved in and reworked the actual game content. It's still committee-mandated censorship though

How is that great news? The reason they don't change it was because they are lazy and arrogant, and refuse to put any effort into doing it (it's not like they put any effort in the first place, the story was complete shit).

For a game that suppose to "let you create your own odyssey", you should have the choices, they should patch it in instead of forcing their shit fanfic on everyone.

It's the lack of choices that are bad, just like you can't be mean to Pravati in TOW, it doesn't make it better simply because the choices you are force to take is a middle finger to the LGBT people.

If Kassandra never has a child then the entire timeline of the series falls apart.
In any game with C&C there will be certain parts that are so important to the overall story that they're immutable because changing it would cause the entire story to fall apart.

How does Kass/Alexios' child has anything to do with the entire series? They already abandon the "you need to relate to the character to relive their memory" years ago. Now they just retract the DNA from the spear.

The other protagonists are not related to them, they don't create the creed, their bloodlines dies with Bayek and Aya's child. It's a entire pointless plot just to force a connection between Odyssey and Origin.

And even if their bloodline is somewhat important, they are not the only one in the families that lives. Both of them are in the game, you can let any of them have a kid at anytime without forcing it on the one you are controlling.

 

[Junmarko]

Turns out Gaider was the based gay all along, and Cain is just a creampuff.

Nigga, have you seen Chorus?

Don't ever call Tim Fucking Cain a creampuff.

 

[BlackGoat]

Be cool if there was a twist at the end of the Parvati questline where you find out that she hadn't actually been texting with Junlei this entire time and that she's actually a psychopath

This game is really bad, men. Just got to Byzantium and I'm rushing just so I can finish this off and delete it and forget it (and unsub GamePass). The whole game is Bethesda tier. Probably sub-Bethesda tier, which is crazy. What are these quests? Get me my tossball poster? Investigate this murder that takes two seconds and then you can just immediately "Persuade" the killers to Leave? That Celia Robbins character who immediately starts gushing about the boy across the way? No romances in this game yet I play matchmaker for the universe. Just finished the vicars questline and lolwut

Everything feels like a placeholder for real writing and design that never actually came

 

[LESS T_T]

Chris L'Etoile updated his Linkedin profile:

Narrative Designer
Company Name Obsidian Entertainment
Dates Employed May 2017 – Present
Employment Duration 1 yr 11 mos
Location Irvine, CA

The Outer Worlds
• Authored character arc and dialogue for party member Parvati Holcomb.
• Developed content plan and wrote dialogue for [Redacted] faction content chain.
• Contributed to area design, concepted side-quests, and wrote most dialogue for roleplaying hubs [Redacted 1] and [Redacted 2].

He filled the redacted parts:

The Outer Worlds
• Authored character concept, arc, and dialogue for party member Parvati Holcomb.
• Developed content plan and wrote dialogue for Sublight Salvage faction content chain.
• Contributed to area design and wrote main quest dialogue and ambient NPCs for roleplaying hubs Groundbreaker and Midway (cut before ship).

(Btw he's working on an Alien game, supposedly multiplayer shooter, at Fox-owned studio. Well, I hope his new job won't be stomped by Bob Iger who's eager to dispose of video game business.)

 

[Orma]

Sublight questline is one of the more thought-out and well-written ones

 

[Junmarko]

Sublight questline is one of the more thought-out and well-written ones

Had the typical "docks mafia" vibe. Shame it just ends so abruptly.

 

[Orma]

in fact its so good, it even makes you think its less evil to work for blatant criminals than to work for capitalists

Not to mention some of their quests involve sabotaging and even killing said capitalists

 

[Junmarko]

in fact its so good, it even makes you think its less evil to work for blatant criminals than to work for capitalists

...wouldn't go that far mate. lol.

 

[vonAchdorf]

I just realized, that my party in Darklands is also ace / aro - not a single word about relationships or anything remotely sexual. Only companionship.

 

[Roguey]

So TOW's critical path was in fact written by multiple writers instead of one? Not the greatest decision (of course one would argue this didn't help Pillars of Eternity).

"hey you know that stupid thing we did in one of our games? Let’s not do it in this game,"

"Complex character creation is stupid," - Tim Cain

Cain credited creative director Josh Sawyer with creating the grouped attributes,

Boyarsky also credited Sawyer with one key design decision that helped Obsidian test how players were acclimating to their game. "In the very first area of the game there were a lot of skill checks all over the place. hHe was mentioning that to us and like you know that’s a really good thing to keep in mind."

He's the design director, his touch reaches everything they do now.

"Sawyer's not involved, he was told not to interfere," some said.

Nigga, have you seen Chorus?

Looks like a really self-indulgent art game, I'm happy for him.