Putting the 'role' back in role-playing games since 2002.
Donate to Codex
Good Old Games
  • Welcome to rpgcodex.net, a site dedicated to discussing computer based role-playing games in a free and open fashion. We're less strict than other forums, but please refer to the rules.

    "This message is awaiting moderator approval": All new users must pass through our moderation queue before they will be able to post normally. Until your account has "passed" your posts will only be visible to yourself (and moderators) until they are approved. Give us a week to get around to approving / deleting / ignoring your mundane opinion on crap before hassling us about it. Once you have passed the moderation period (think of it as a test), you will be able to post normally, just like all the other retards.

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

ciox

Liturgist
Joined
Feb 9, 2016
Messages
1,278
has this recieved any good mods? Tweaks?

still holding off for a 2nd playthrough if not
UE4 games are functionally unmoddable sans some graphics tweaks
This is the downside of making games entirely in a programming language that compiles to native assemblies. UE3 games were moddable because most of the logic was written in unrealscript. Unless devs distribute modding tools with their game there will be no mods.
Were they? My experience was people had immense trouble making mods unless the devs went out of their way to facilitate it. Sure you could read ugly obfuscated unrealscript source even for big retail games, but to compile it with your changes was an entirely different matter. This is why Bioshock mods remained incredibly rudimentary .ini mods and even when I tried to push it further it was mostly autistic shit like combing the ugly obfuscated unrealscript for variable names that I could change on the fly through "set" console commands.
 
Joined
Jan 14, 2018
Messages
50,754
Codex Year of the Donut
has this recieved any good mods? Tweaks?

still holding off for a 2nd playthrough if not
UE4 games are functionally unmoddable sans some graphics tweaks
This is the downside of making games entirely in a programming language that compiles to native assemblies. UE3 games were moddable because most of the logic was written in unrealscript. Unless devs distribute modding tools with their game there will be no mods.
Were they? My experience was people had immense trouble making mods unless the devs went out of their way to facilitate it. Sure you could read ugly obfuscated unrealscript source even for big retail games, but to compile it with your changes was an entirely different matter. This is why Bioshock mods remained incredibly rudimentary .ini mods and even when I tried to push it further it was mostly autistic shit like combing the ugly obfuscated unrealscript for variable names that I could change on the fly through "set" console commands.
There are plenty of UE3 games with extensive modding communities(e.g., nuxcom games, BL2)
 

DalekFlay

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Oct 5, 2010
Messages
14,118
Location
New Vegas
I don't remember enemies being spongy whatsoever, I remember them just falling over

They almost all do, yeah. Especially on normal, which I used on my second playthrough because I just wanted to see how the story changes. The game isn't hard in the slightest and again I was just talking about a few instances in the endgame. Maybe I'm exaggerating them in my head because I wanted to get the game over with and it kept throwing prisoners at me. Who knows.
 

ciox

Liturgist
Joined
Feb 9, 2016
Messages
1,278
Enemies didn't seem spongy to me either unless you were going out of your way to visit a higher level area. The game doesn't throw swarms at you either of course so enemy HP levels aren't low, they're just medium. You can of course encounter high level and well armored humanoid enemies who refuse to die to a few headshots, but that's pretty understandable unless you're a very specific type of pedant.
If I had one obvious criticism it's that the damage types didn't seem to add quite all that much, they added something, but less than the number of different damage types would have you believe.
 

Mexi

Dumbfuck!
Dumbfuck
Joined
Jan 6, 2015
Messages
6,811
I keep coming to this. Is this game really that fucking bad!? Damn, what a disappointment if it is. Does it come with a good toolset like Skyrim does where a modding community can fix a lot of the shit? I was hoping for a Fallout: New Vegas game. Seems that team behind New Vegas just can't be reproduced.
 

Diddlepants

Barely Literate
Joined
Jan 4, 2020
Messages
2
Honestly? I really don’t hate this game. Sure, it isn’t the greatest nor innovative RPG, but the world/lore is interesting enough to keep me playing. I think with some good dlc and (hopefully) a good moding scene, this game could be great. As it stands, it’s ok. Like I said, nothing groundbreaking, but I’m generally enjoying my time for the most part. Hopefully, thanks to the positive reviews this game has gotten, we can see more proper RPGs in the future.
 

DalekFlay

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Oct 5, 2010
Messages
14,118
Location
New Vegas
I keep coming to this. Is this game really that fucking bad!? Damn, what a disappointment if it is. Does it come with a good toolset like Skyrim does where a modding community can fix a lot of the shit? I was hoping for a Fallout: New Vegas game. Seems that team behind New Vegas just can't be reproduced.

It's more a mediocre low budget New Vegas than outright bad.
 

Immortal

Arcane
In My Safe Space
Joined
Sep 13, 2014
Messages
5,062
Location
Safe Space - Don't Bulli
I keep coming to this. Is this game really that fucking bad!? Damn, what a disappointment if it is. Does it come with a good toolset like Skyrim does where a modding community can fix a lot of the shit? I was hoping for a Fallout: New Vegas game. Seems that team behind New Vegas just can't be reproduced.

This is basically the gaming community today.

"Guys is there a modding community of endless free labor to fix this trash for me?"

Give corporations their 60 - 80 bucks for a steaming pile of shit and wait around for a modding community to sprout up and fix it.


EDIT
Sorry buckaroo.. The character models all look like ugly potato dykes so no neckbeards are gonna write modding tools.. In case you didn't know, all modding communities are born from nude mods.
 

Diddlepants

Barely Literate
Joined
Jan 4, 2020
Messages
2
Actually, come to think of it, maybe this was Cain and Boyarsky’s plan all along. Introduce a new IP with barebones RPG mechanics, get normies hooked on to the series so they can have full control of future projects, then when the inevitable sequel comes out we will get a true RPG. I think the dlc coming out this year will be a good indication as to wether or not this is the case, but I remain hopeful.
 

orcinator

Liturgist
Joined
Jan 23, 2016
Messages
1,704
Location
Republic of Kongou

DalekFlay

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Oct 5, 2010
Messages
14,118
Location
New Vegas
Maybe because of mod support, but not in any other way. One of the coolest things about The Outer Worlds is actually that it shows you can make that kind of game without the awful Gamebryo engine. Though if Bethesda ever did and cut out mod support as a result, people would lose their shit.
 

ciox

Liturgist
Joined
Feb 9, 2016
Messages
1,278

paperjack

Literate
Joined
Jan 5, 2020
Messages
24
I didn't particularly enjoy the combat. It felt... average. I found the setting novel, but the story uninteresting and I could easily see where it was going. I'm feeling ambivalent - but honestly I was pleasantly surprised with this game as I expected much worse.
 

LESS T_T

Arcane
Joined
Oct 5, 2012
Messages
13,582
Codex 2014
https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news...progression_with_Outer_Worlds_flaw_system.php

Breaking linear character progression with Outer Worlds' flaw system

I was fighting for my life against a group of giant, acid-spewing lizards on the outskirts of Edgewater. I wasn't far from my ship and had already dealt with dozens of other Raptidons while spending time in this cannery colony. I finished off the last one with a few swings of my tossball stick and started walking up to my companions when a prompt popped up.

Spacer's Choice, one of The Outer Worlds' fictional megacorporations, had found a flaw in me. They think I have Raptophobia or the fear of Raptidons due to repeated encounters with the beasts. I can choose to accept the penalties associated with the flaw in exchange for a point--one I can use to unlock one of the several perks that give my player character things like more health or bag space. Or I could just decline the choice altogether and move on.

"The flaw system was an intersection of two different goals," Tim Cain told me. He's co-director of The Outer Worlds and also the game design legend known for creating the original Fallout. "One of our goals was to not do all the character creation upfront. We wanted the player to pick a few things about the character and then other things get decided later...We also wanted to combine it with the reactivity of the game."

"Character creation is the player telling the game how they want to play," he added, mentioning that Cthulu board and computer games helped inspire this system. "The flaws are the game telling the player 'here's what you did, do you want to react to it? You got hit by a lot of plasma, do you want to be plasma susceptible? You fight a lot of robots, do you want to be scared of them?'"

acrophobiaflaw.PNG


A character that isn't just a list of cool powers
The Outer Worlds' flaw system reacts to how the player chooses to advance through the story. If you fight a lot of robots you can get robophobia and lose dexterity and perception points when near mechanical enemies. You can also get addicted to drugs after taking too many and some stats will be lower when you go through withdrawals. You can choose to accept or reject a flaw when they come up, though each one is permanent once accepted.

It's all part of Obsidian's plan to have new types of gamified role-playing elements in their Fallout-esque first-person RPG. You can play as a charismatic gunslinger who hates robots or a tossball stick-swinging lockpicker with paranoia. You create your character as you play and not just in the character creation screen and when you level up. That's why perks unlock throughout the campaign and why you assign skill points to categories until you reach a certain threshold and specific skill categories open up. It's all part of an effort to have your character change as you hop from planet to planet.

"What I like about this makes the character creation a lot deeper. People think of character creation as all these cool things you can do," Cain says. "It's really just something that makes your character different and unique. There's something really cool about having a character that isn't just a list of cool powers and extra things they can do that normal people can't."

The flaw system wasn't originally designed to have to pay out perk points if a player accepted negative attributes. Cain and co-director Leonard Boyarsky told me they wanted to have specialized perks for each flaw that you couldn't obtain any other way. That would entice players to try different things, but time and budget restraints prevented them from fully implementing anything other than what we see in the final version of The Outer Worlds.

owperks.jpg


"The specialized perks were more related to the flaws," Cain said. "There were a whole bunch of flaws that we never implemented, but we had things like if you'd take more damage from robots you could also give more damage to them. I think we had one where your aim would go down but your fire rate would go up if there was a robot around. It was like 'ok I'm terrified and I'm just spraying bullets.'"

Cain and Boyarsky wanted flaws to force player to adopt different play styles when special situations come up. They didn't want players to exploit the flaw system in a way that simply reinforced or entrenched them in one play style. "Picking a difficulty setting makes the whole game hard," Cain said. "Flaws are supposed to make it situationally hard."

Dialogue flaws that didn't quite make it
Since The Outer Worlds launched in October 2019 Cain and Boyarsky have been listening and reading all sorts of feedback around this new system. One piece of criticism that hit home is the fact that the majority of flaws come into play during combat and not during dialogue or stealth sections. They had originally planned more non-combat flaws but they didn't make it in time for the final release.

"One of the flaws we wanted [in the game] was to be impulsive," Cain said. "When dialogue options come up there would be a little timer. When it ticked down to five seconds one of the response options disappears, just greyed out. Then another one after another five seconds until there was only one option left."

"The game wasn't saying you had to be impulsive," Cain added. "It was saying unless you play impulsively we're going to pick your options for you. So it had you picking really quickly." This flaw didn't make it into the game as the team was already having trouble keeping up with their AI demands and an individual flaw was low on the development team's priority list (players also wouldn't be reading most of the text if they had to rush through it).

owellie.jpg


They also wanted to add a pathological liar flaw where the player would have to choose to lie if one was available while in conversation. They found it wasn't as effective with how forgiving the dialogue system was in the game. They had a number of other non-combat flaws that didn't make it into the game, including a "hotheaded" one that forced players to attack whenever the dialogue system gave them that option.

The Outer Worlds does have a handful of non-combat perks including the drug addiction, farsighted, fear of heights, and a few others although most are dependent on combat. The development team brought the list of flaws and perks to the programmers on the team to see which ones would be the easiest to implement. "We ended up with a lot of susceptibilities, phobias, and addictions," Cain said. "Those were the main categories."

While we don't know much yet, Obsidian has talked about a possible sequel to The Outer Worlds. Cain hopes to build off the flaw system and incorporate some of the ideas that didn't make it into this game. He also hopes other role-playing game developers try their hand at something similar.

"I'm hoping this idea catches on, that character advancement isn't always linear. It isn't always about getting better," Cain said. "It's really about getting different. I'm making a character that doesn't always mean good things. I'm hoping that catches on outside our game."
 

Parabalus

Arcane
Joined
Mar 23, 2015
Messages
17,432
The flaw system is total Sawyerist incrementalists garbage - I picked like 5 flaws and it had zero effect on gameplay.

The non-combat stuff is sounds cool OTOH, that'd have definitely been something you'd feel and notice while playing.
 

As an Amazon Associate, rpgcodex.net earns from qualifying purchases.
Back
Top Bottom