This seems misunderstood, so I'll give some more examples.
AAA writing: Tomb Raider, RDR/2, Witcher 3. I can't testify about AC Origins and Odyssey.
Good-writing-Obsidian: PoE, Deadfire, Tyranny, ToW
inXile: Do I even need to list?
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The Outer Worlds: Spacer's Choice Edition - Obsidian's first-person sci-fi RPG set in a corporate space colony
- Thread starter Infinitron
- Start date
AAA writing: Tomb Raider, RDR/2, Witcher 3. I can't testify about AC Origins and Odyssey.
Good-writing-Obsidian: PoE, Deadfire, Tyranny, ToW
inXile: Do I even need to list?
Reinhardt
Arcane
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- Sep 4, 2015
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- 29,872
Not very high bar.
- Joined
- May 29, 2010
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One of the great things about Megan is that she's very thorough about her contributions on her website. https://www.fictivate.com/game-design.html
Bleden Mark is a bit too literally "*teleports behind you* nothing personal kid" and people here hate Kills-in-Shadow but I ultimately found her non-offensive. You can tell when you hit a Starks NPC because they're far more twee than usual. Matt MacLean didn't rein her in enough.
Almost everyone finds Xoti annoying, but Kyl swears by Fort Deadlight. Of course she wrote the infamous, very twee "PS This is not a trap" letter from Aeldys. Sawyer and Patel didn't rein her in enough.
Seems to be Boyarsky's favorite, apparently the first lead to rein her in.
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biggestboss
Liturgist
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- 528
biggestboss
Liturgist
- Joined
- Feb 16, 2017
- Messages
- 528
I've restarted this game like 4 times and haven't even met a companion yet. I don't even know why I'm so hung up on character creation considering the game seems to go out of its way to make sure every build can do everything in every situation, or maybe that just applies to the beginning quests. Also it doesn't help that all the character's faces and writing are horrible.
countrydoctor
Novice
- Joined
- Sep 5, 2015
- Messages
- 19
Parvati and her personal quest made me deeply relate to Jackie Chan when his daughter turned out to be an utter failure.
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- 35,844
I realized my mistake seconds after posting.
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GentlemanCthulhu
Arbiter
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Lol. 131 dead bodies disagree with you. Admittedly i did all that for absurdity's sake and the novelty of RP as a psychopath.
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Hortense "Black Cat" Ingalsbee looks pretty good to me https://rpgcodex.net/forums/index.p...-leonard-boyarsky.130421/page-64#post-6378428
Do all your posts fit your avatar ?
parvati is a precious bun that must be protected
100 hours RPG are overrated shit. (unless you're ELEX or underrail)
surely there's a reasonable amount in the spectrum from 16 to 100
GentlemanCthulhu
Arbiter
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- 1,308
That was the intention, and really the underlying mechanics are non-offenders here. It's the writing team that's the issue.
TheImplodingVoice
Dumbfuck!
I got The Outer Worlds for free and I still feel like I paid too much
Van-d-all
Erudite
Played it for few hours, and damn, this game is so soulless. What's even worse, it's mediocrity is probably finely targeted to the mediocre gamer and all the FNVtards will probably make it into a financial success.
Character stats are as generous as they are worthless, higher values just scale bonus %, so there's virtually nothing significantly lost from not maxing one stat or the other, not to mention having enough points to have 3 of 6 at good, and the other 3 at average anyways. There's virtually no reason to go for physical stats, since even things like Intelligence have corresponding weapon skills.
Skills have some unlockable bonuses, but again, those are mostly fluff and nothing consequential that would make the player miss anything, and even the speech skills aren't an investment, since they give combat bonuses as well. Oh, and companions add their skills to the player, in case there was a chance of missing something.
Perks are so dull, that the first I even picked was increased carry weight to haul all the trash. Go figure.
That said, the entire stat system is a major smoke screen, that is set in place to feel RPG-ish, yet it's irrelevant to a point there's no point in any buildcraft.
Visuals are ok technically, over saturated an uninspired. Conceptually it feels heavily ripped off from Prey's art deco futurism with a splash of generic NMS critters and some surprisingly good Bioshock ingame art.
Sound is ok, the music is forgettable, but voice acting is decent, guns go bang, the usual stuff, nothing fancy.
Even on medium difficulty enemies are bullet sponges, while companions are squishy, which combined with piss poor AI makes both parties either charge into gunfire or just stand there and spray damage until one of them dies. Effectively every combat encounter boils to a race to kill off everyone before they kill your companions. Combat stats don't matter much, since you can pretty much use anything you want, and enemies are exploitable beyond belief. Plus you have bullet time, because bullet time was hip... 10 years ago.
Itemization is one of the worst I've ever seen, even despite weapons being quite nice. Said weapons & armor can be cranked up for money MMO style, modded, sold or scrapped. Scrapped because there's a deterioration mechanic, and it eats through your gear like sulfuric acid, but still, those are the good parts. The bad part is everything else. There are proverbial "nooks and crannies" here as if picked from a popamole checklist, supposedly enticing exploration, but the sheer amount of boxes and containers everywhere else is so abundant it's actually hard to miss them. There's a stealing mechanic, but it's mostly irrelevant, as NPC only care for things in front of them, and don't mind you waltzing in into their private quarters looting everything that's not nailed down, meaning 95% of stuff lying around. But despite the constant loot shower, the whole problem lies in fact there's barely anything worth finding. All the random stuff gets automatically bunched into junk you don't even have to look at, and the useful stuff is streamlined to a point where game barely has anything interesting to give, so you just get shitloads of consumables, tons of ammo an multiple copies of identical weapons and armor. I can't remember a game that made me so completely uninterested in stuff I find.
Lastly there's NPCs. That's pretty much what makes the game feel so absolutely synthetic like a Zuckerberg dream. Only a few of them actually move, most of them just stand there day in and out like creepy mannequins repeating same boring SNES era one liners over and over again, emphasizing their uniqueness with names like "Resident". The talkable ones, have some (mostly 1-3, sometimes more) lines that can be delivered, some requiring skill tests, but being fully voice acted, most lines are really concise, and dialogue takes a rather hilarious turn where having appropriate skill makes ridiculous responses like "I'm the security inspector" magically solve problems like a Jedi mind trick. Those few that actually have a dialogue tree, mostly deliver some uninspired reddit grade fluff, that at it's best made me smirk.
Lastly, quests. The best try to push some hard C&C but it's completely forced. Sure it's nice that some of them make you pick between lesser evil, but often there's really no good reason for set resolutions. The writing is nothing special either, since majority of dilemmas are a choice between caricaturally bad corporations and mildly reasonable alternatives. Aaaand the remaining 70% are fetch quests. Bring me medicine, kill that robot, find a book.
It's a colorful, RPG-themed shooting gallery with bots delivering reddit lines trying to mimic humans like Weizenbaum's Eliza.
Character stats are as generous as they are worthless, higher values just scale bonus %, so there's virtually nothing significantly lost from not maxing one stat or the other, not to mention having enough points to have 3 of 6 at good, and the other 3 at average anyways. There's virtually no reason to go for physical stats, since even things like Intelligence have corresponding weapon skills.
Skills have some unlockable bonuses, but again, those are mostly fluff and nothing consequential that would make the player miss anything, and even the speech skills aren't an investment, since they give combat bonuses as well. Oh, and companions add their skills to the player, in case there was a chance of missing something.
Perks are so dull, that the first I even picked was increased carry weight to haul all the trash. Go figure.
That said, the entire stat system is a major smoke screen, that is set in place to feel RPG-ish, yet it's irrelevant to a point there's no point in any buildcraft.
Visuals are ok technically, over saturated an uninspired. Conceptually it feels heavily ripped off from Prey's art deco futurism with a splash of generic NMS critters and some surprisingly good Bioshock ingame art.
Sound is ok, the music is forgettable, but voice acting is decent, guns go bang, the usual stuff, nothing fancy.
Even on medium difficulty enemies are bullet sponges, while companions are squishy, which combined with piss poor AI makes both parties either charge into gunfire or just stand there and spray damage until one of them dies. Effectively every combat encounter boils to a race to kill off everyone before they kill your companions. Combat stats don't matter much, since you can pretty much use anything you want, and enemies are exploitable beyond belief. Plus you have bullet time, because bullet time was hip... 10 years ago.
Itemization is one of the worst I've ever seen, even despite weapons being quite nice. Said weapons & armor can be cranked up for money MMO style, modded, sold or scrapped. Scrapped because there's a deterioration mechanic, and it eats through your gear like sulfuric acid, but still, those are the good parts. The bad part is everything else. There are proverbial "nooks and crannies" here as if picked from a popamole checklist, supposedly enticing exploration, but the sheer amount of boxes and containers everywhere else is so abundant it's actually hard to miss them. There's a stealing mechanic, but it's mostly irrelevant, as NPC only care for things in front of them, and don't mind you waltzing in into their private quarters looting everything that's not nailed down, meaning 95% of stuff lying around. But despite the constant loot shower, the whole problem lies in fact there's barely anything worth finding. All the random stuff gets automatically bunched into junk you don't even have to look at, and the useful stuff is streamlined to a point where game barely has anything interesting to give, so you just get shitloads of consumables, tons of ammo an multiple copies of identical weapons and armor. I can't remember a game that made me so completely uninterested in stuff I find.
Lastly there's NPCs. That's pretty much what makes the game feel so absolutely synthetic like a Zuckerberg dream. Only a few of them actually move, most of them just stand there day in and out like creepy mannequins repeating same boring SNES era one liners over and over again, emphasizing their uniqueness with names like "Resident". The talkable ones, have some (mostly 1-3, sometimes more) lines that can be delivered, some requiring skill tests, but being fully voice acted, most lines are really concise, and dialogue takes a rather hilarious turn where having appropriate skill makes ridiculous responses like "I'm the security inspector" magically solve problems like a Jedi mind trick. Those few that actually have a dialogue tree, mostly deliver some uninspired reddit grade fluff, that at it's best made me smirk.
Lastly, quests. The best try to push some hard C&C but it's completely forced. Sure it's nice that some of them make you pick between lesser evil, but often there's really no good reason for set resolutions. The writing is nothing special either, since majority of dilemmas are a choice between caricaturally bad corporations and mildly reasonable alternatives. Aaaand the remaining 70% are fetch quests. Bring me medicine, kill that robot, find a book.
It's a colorful, RPG-themed shooting gallery with bots delivering reddit lines trying to mimic humans like Weizenbaum's Eliza.
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"The world was getting too small for comfort. Too many coincidences"
- Joined
- May 8, 2009
- Messages
- 321
Because like most good games New Vegas was a lightning in a bottle. A few talented but flawed people came together and managed to cancel out each others creative deficiencies. Sadly, these dynamics never last, which is why half of the people responsible for New Vegas don't even work at Obsidian anymore and the other half seems to be determined to crawl right up their own ass.
But even if these people got together again they wouldn't be able to make another New Vegas. It was a product of its time, when politics were something people in Washington were busy with, not a popular way to spice up your twitter feed. Just imagine a modern day take on Mr House or Legion.
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Reinhardt
Arcane
- Joined
- Sep 4, 2015
- Messages
- 29,872
95-99
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- May 29, 2010
- Messages
- 35,844
Unlike New Vegas, they had to make everything from scratch. This is how we end up with a Dragon Age Inquisition-esque world. Bethesda gets a great deal of benefit from reusing everything they've put into Bethbryo (e.g. look at Morrowind).
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