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

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Codex Year of the Donut

This has nothing to do with you being railroaded into a specific choice by a writer driven by her own ideology.
Why are you so intent on ignoring what she herself explicitly said was the intent of her actions? How much do they pay you for this?
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
I'm not ignoring it. I just think it's such a small thing that I suspect Dollarhyde was inflating what she did to score woke points with her crowd. And people here fall for it and assume a game where you can be quite cruel to your companions is some asexual hugbox simulator.
 
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Codex Year of the Donut
I'm not ignoring it. I just think it's such a small thing that I suspect Dollarhyde was inflating what she did to score woke points with her crowd. And people here fall for it and assume a game where you can be quite cruel to your companions is some asexual hugbox simulator.
It's not about being cruel, it's about not having the choice to be cruel.
 

jackofshadows

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It's something nobody would have noticed if she hadn't mentioned it. Mountains out of molehills.
Come on now. I went reading meta-stuff only after the finish line. And of course I did notice that specific dialogue moment because it was some sort of quest culmination point and because I was pissed enough already by that quest. And now suddenly game took away even its usual silly murder-hobo options. I mean yeah, it's no Bethesda's immortal NPCs bs but too close to it. But her reasoning behind it turned out simply disgusting.
 

Quillon

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It's something nobody would have noticed if she hadn't mentioned it.

I didn't notice it since I was playing the good guy but people have noticed it here before she bragged about it. And stop excusing shit because they don't have a neon bilboard over them saying "I'm shit", seen the same attitude from you for Sawyer's talk where he proudly disclosed a reason why they changed Benweth's and Aeldys' past relations.

These things may seem small but add up to a pile of shit. The time they should spend on creating a compelling narrative goes to inserting their agenda/spotting potentially offensive shit(that virtually no one would care) so they can brag about it in panels or on twatter or whatnot.
 

Blaine

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Infinitron

Being able to shoot the lover after the conversation node has little direct bearing on the conversation node itself, which was deliberately designed to force the player to be supportive of the relationship and of homosexuality. All it really means is that the character is flagged as killable.

There's more to it, however. There are countless instances in RPGs when you can kill an ally, a leader to whom you've been loyal, a crucial scientist, or any number of other personages when it is irrational and potentially self-destructive to do so, because up until that point you've chosen to be friendly and cooperative with them—but in many of those same cases, you could have previously chosen to be unfriendly instead, and that's key.

In this case, only friendliness is allowed during the dialogue node, and therefore shooting the character will always be irrational with regard to the story. For this reason, even though you can vent your frustration/dislike/distaste/whatever on the lover in pure game mechanics terms, rationally your character is railroading into feeling and acting one way only.
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
It's not as extreme as you're describing it ("supportive of the relationship and of homosexuality"). My recollection is that the conversation still allows you to be pretty snarky. You just can't be in-your-face cruel towards Parvati during those moments. It's not something you would normally notice since the truth is that almost no video game would allow you to "gay-bash" somebody during any moment. I think most of us realize that and wouldn't expect otherwise - which again makes me suspect Kate Dollarhyde was bragging about having done very little out of the ordinary.
 
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Codex Year of the Donut
It's not as extreme as you're describing it ("supportive of the relationship and of homosexuality"). My recollection is that the conversation still allows you to pretty snarky. You just can't be in-your-face cruel towards Parvati during those moments.
your recollection is wrong
 

Roguey

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It's something nobody would have noticed if she hadn't mentioned it.

I noticed, but I have an eye for these things. It is amusing that Boyarsky's design tenet of "everyone must be killable" meant that she had no choice but to write dialogue for killing the gf.
 

Blaine

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I noticed, but I have an eye for these things. It is amusing that Boyarsky's design tenet of "everyone must be killable" meant that she had no choice but to write dialogue for killing the gf.

That's interesting, because had I been inclined to baseless speculation, I would have speculated in my previous post that Dollarhyde, given the choice, would rather her pet character(s) be un-killable.

Now I have something concrete upon which to base that speculation, although I suspected it before: "everyone must be killable." I hadn't known that this was a definite design tenet, although anyone with a brain knows that un-killable NPCs are generally undesirable.

So, in summary, Infinitron is thoroughly wrong. It seems that despite being an Israeli patriot, he'll nevertheless stoop to defending American SJWs to serve his greater goal of preserving the honor of Obsidian Entertainment—quite the bizarre bedfellows.
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Uh, okay. Btw it is an Obsidian design tenet that long predates Boyarsky joining the company.
 
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Codex Year of the Donut
It's something nobody would have noticed if she hadn't mentioned it.

I noticed, but I have an eye for these things. It is amusing that Boyarsky's design tenet of "everyone must be killable" meant that she had no choice but to write dialogue for killing the gf.
It's extremely poorly written, watch the videos for a laugh at how terrible it is + terrible facial animations/lack of emotions.
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Basically every "real RPG" they'ye made since Fallout: New Vegas, which set the standard.
 

Grunker

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Uh, okay.

You can defend basically anything Obsidian has made from some honest perspective. KotOR 2 is one of the best stories told in the Star Wars universe. Neverwinter Nights 2 was the most expansive implementation of 3.5 before Kingmaker. Alpha Protocol had incredible C&C. New Vegas is a masterpiece. Dungeon Siege III was a competent aRPG. Pillars is obviously controversial, but plenty of people who are clearly not Obsidian shills like it. Tyranny, much like Alpha Protocol, had plenty of ambition and unearthed new design space.

Now I don't personally like NWN2, Dungeon Siege III or Tyranny that much, and I think Alpha Protocol is more interesting in theory that it is actually playing it. But I don't necessarily think you have to be an Obsidian shill to defend the merits that those games do have.

But Outer Worlds? What does Outer Worlds have that is worth defending? Even if I was an SJW, I would be aggravated by the game's intensely lame, vapid and first-semester-just-read-my-first-summary-of-a-Gramsci-article "satire," since it completely fails at any substantive criticism of modern culture or capitalism. There's simply nothing worth defending in Outer Worlds, and so I am immediately suspicious about why anyone would do that.
 

Roguey

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Uh, okay. Btw it is an Obsidian design tenet that predates Boyarsky joining the company.
Hmmm like which games? Killing people in PoE would break your progress from what i remember.
Lady Webb is the only person you "can't" kill because doing so gives you a non-standard game over.

Basically every "real RPG" they'ye made since Fallout: New Vegas, which set the standard.

You can't kill everyone in Dungeon Siege III or South Park. It's something decided on a project-by-project basis since there's no one super-director who would care to enforce it.
 

Grunker

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Basically every "real RPG" they'ye made since Fallout: New Vegas, which set the standard.

Every real rpg since NV = Pillars and Outer Worlds. One of which has unkillable NPCs galore (which is fine by me, I never understood the whole debacle about "NPCs must be killable", but your statement is odd).
 

Blaine

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Uh, okay. Btw it is an Obsidian design tenet that long predates Boyarsky joining the company.

Forgive me for failing to keep a rigorous mental dossier of each studio's current design doctrine.

"Everyone can be killed" is a well established tenet of inclined RPGs, and in general I'd take it as a given for any studio that develops incline, but tenets of incline are an endangered species and Obsidian has abandoned quite a few of them.
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
But Outer Worlds? What does Outer Worlds have that is worth defending? Even if I was an SJW, I would be aggravated by the games intensely lame, vapid and first-semester-just-read-my-first-summary-of-a-Gramsci-article "satire." There's simply nothing worth defending in Outer Worlds, and so I am immediately suspicious about why anyone would do that.

I don't particularly want to defend it. I just rated rusty_shackleford's post fake news and he felt that he had to reply to that, so I got drawn in. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
 

Grunker

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I dunno man, this is the second time we have an altercation about what I percieve to be apologism about Outer Worlds :M
 
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Blaine

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There's simply nothing worth defending in Outer Worlds, and so I am immediately suspicious about why anyone would do that.

Infinitron has a clear track record of defending certain developers to the absolute bitter end. He will become exasperated when this is pointed out, so he is clearly aware of what he's doing, but he sticks to his guns and will never explicitly admit to it.
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
I dunno man, this is the second time we have an altercation about what I percieve to be apologism about Outer Worlds :M

It's a mediocre, basically juvenile game that I think gets criticized for the wrong reasons instead of the right ones. I've talked before about some of the things I think it did right ("loredumps" for example, which were considered the Worst Thing In The World About Nu-Obsidian not long ago) and about what I think the game's real themes are (in short, not really about "anti-capitalism" at all but a story about incompetent and stagnant government in general) but I really don't have much more to say about it.
 

Grunker

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at least we agree about the overall rating of the game I guess, but both of those posts are fairly apologetic to my mind, the last one spectacularly so. In the actual core meaning of apologism; to defend something with virtues that the something does not possess. There's nothing to indicate anything but the fairly obvious reading about corporate criticsm, and plenty, PLENTY of brainless, simple-minded dialogue that supports that it should actually be read fairly literally.
 

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