Game News Outer Worlds Free in a Week

[Saint_Proverbius]

I remember playing it when it was released, an ok but ultimately forgettable experience.
It's extremely soulless.

It was mediocre while riding on the tsunami of hype following the total trainwreck of a launch of Fallout 76. It's announcement fit perfectly with all the news of how many problems there were with Fallout 76. Fallout 76 was just a really bad idea from the start, used an engine not suited for it's purpose much like Descent to Undermountain, rushed to release, piss poor marketing decisions like the canvas bag thing and the life sized helmet with the toxic dust lining, and so on. Then Obsidian announced Outer Worlds made by the guys behind the original Fallout, when the current guys that own Fallout just released a bad idea done with the license as poorly as humanly imaginable. There was a mountain of hype for a game that probably wouldn't have gotten it otherwise.

Was it a bad game? Not really. Was it a good game? It had it's moments. Was it a great game? Absolutely not. Did it ever stand a chance of living up to the hype it had? Not in a million years.

This is also a big problem with the AAA gaming thing. You would think that someone at Private Division, who published Outer Worlds, would have seen this once in a decade event going on where your competition implodes itself and you have something in the works that just might capture the hearts and wallets of everyone pissed off at Bethesda for years to come. Instead of leaning in to the Fallout thing, given Outer Worlds time to rework things, though, they were still pushing for an episodic, consequence free, casual shooter CRPG. They had the best set up to launch a franchise even if it took an extra year, but they mandated a disaster to fit in to their quarterly release schedule.

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

Heroic installer on steam deck lets you install epic without epic's bullshit.

The Heroic Launcher is the only reason I check the Epic Store. I completely ignored the Epic Store it's entire existence until I installed Nobara linux and discovered the Heroic Launcher.

I also like how many people on here haven't figured out that the reason I post something is generally in the last few sentences of the news item as opposed to the first paragraph. I can't stand Epic.

 

[Hell Swarm]

Heroic installer on steam deck lets you install epic without epic's bullshit.

The Heroic Launcher is the only reason I check the Epic Store. I completely ignored the Epic Store it's entire existence until I installed Nobara linux and discovered the Heroic Launcher.

I also like how many people on here haven't figured out that the reason I post something is generally in the last few sentences of the news item as opposed to the first paragraph. I can't stand Epic.

Once I found it I started to grab free epic games. Until then I never paid any attention. They often had games I would have liked but wasn't installing another launcher on my PC.

 

[Sweeper]

for the low, low, low price of absolutely nothing

How does that saying go? If something's free you're the product?
Epic jannies tongue my anus.

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

Once I found it I started to grab free epic games.

I really wish that Heroic Launcher would incorporate Itch.io as another thing they could scrape titles from. I tried Lutris, but it was no where near as easy to use as Heroic Launcher, even though it can technically do just about everything. So, I ended up putting Battle.net and EA's launcher in bottles and attached them to Steam instead.

How does that saying go? If something's free you're the product?
Epic jannies tongue my anus.

It's kind of like when MicroSoft unveiled Windows 10. I got a lot of people telling me, "Why don't you upgrade? It's FREE!" MicroSoft has never done anything out of the kindness of their hearts, a shoe is going to eventually drop. And, it turns out that it was Spyware with a OS wrapped around it. Windows 11 is even worse, since it's live service spyware wrapped in an OS.

 

[unseeingeye]

Heroic installer on steam deck lets you install epic without epic's bullshit.

I dropped Heroic months ago after it repeatedly rendered all my games unplayable between updates at random and immediately after, forcing me to go in and manually fix every single one of them. Last year I would have defended Heroic over Lutris, but it turned out I had no idea what I was talking about. Lutris has functionally the same user-friendly UI but has way more options for getting stubborn games to run, like Wizards and Warriors for instance, probably the most difficult Steam Deck setup I've ever managed to work out.

 

[Zanzoken]

I remember playing this on Gamepass for an hour or two and to say that it is shit-tier is almost giving it too much credit. Even for free it's still overpriced.

 

[unseeingeye]

I really wish that Heroic Launcher would incorporate Itch.io as another thing they could scrape titles from. I tried Lutris, but it was no where near as easy to use as Heroic Launcher, even though it can technically do just about everything.

Sorry for the double post, just saw this. I felt similarly about Lutris until Heroic completely ruined all of my games setup for the third time, it really is not difficult to use once you spend a few minutes with it. If you go into the GOG (*Edit - Epic) panel and login, it is practically identical to the Heroic UI, something I didn't realize initially.

 

[Gargaune]

Should've made it April 1st.

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

I felt similarly about Lutris until Heroic completely ruined all of my games setup for the third time, it really is not difficult to use once you spend a few minutes with it.

I spent more than a few minutes on it. I think I was trying to get the EA Store working first, and it just wouldn't work. At all. In fact, I believe it bombed every single time in the set up phase for the launcher. I've manually gotten the launcher installed and working under just WINE, I got it working under Bottles as well. Lutris just doesn't seem to want to deal with it even though that's what Lutris is supposed to be able to do. At first, I thought it was pissy about me wanting to put it on the external drive. So, I tried putting it on the main drive, and it did the exact same thing. I've actually gone back to it a few times attempting to get this to work and it always fails at the same step.

 

[MrBuzzKill]

I remember playing it when it was released, an ok but ultimately forgettable experience.
It's extremely soulless.
There is no vision behind it, just a checklist of things that should be fun according to some algorithm.
I tried replaying the definitive edition but could not do it.
Everyone is yapping about irrelevant stuff, the game itself is hidden under tonnes of meaningless filler content.

Interesting fact: it's Tim Cain's best selling game of all time.

 

[luj1]

Was it a bad game? Not really

Fuck you

 

[Ryzer]

Under CCP leadership, such gayme would have been purged.

 

[lvl 2 Blue Slime]

Outer Worlds is one of those "not even worth a pirate" type of games

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

Interesting fact: it's Tim Cain's best selling game of all time.

That's not shocking considering it was also his only game that was released on PC and a bunch of consoles.

Fuck you

'Sup, bitch.

 

[Kev Inkline]

I am ashamed to admit it, but this is the worst game I've ever played through.
IIRC good music score, and the spaceship - that does not feature in game play in any meaningful way - has a nice design.

Nothing can fix the writing.

I also asked chat gpt for a more codexian version of my mini-review:

Let me tell you straight: this game is a flaming pile of dogshit. Yeah, the music's not bad, and the spaceship looks kinda cool, but that's where the compliments end.
The writing? It's absolute fucking garbage.

Playing this shitshow is like willingly jamming a rusty nail into your eyeball. Save yourself the agony and steer clear.

Trust me, you'll be fucking grateful you did.

Who said AI cannot be of any assistance?

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

I am ashamed to admit it, but this is the worst game I've ever played through.

I can name quite a few games worse than Outer Worlds. Redneck Rampage comes to mind, especially the maps with keys and locked doors on the opposite sides of the map or in locations that don't make a lots of sense. And this wasn't just one or two levels, it was quite a few of them. The remaster of Startopia where they redid the aliens and it might be that they didn't change the UI at all, but it feels way, way more clunky than it used to be. I loved the original, the remaster killed my fond memories of the original. Fuck, Mass Effect Andromeda was worse. I'm not sure I got as far in Outer Worlds, but I know I left Mass Effect Andromeda feeling pretty pissed off about purchasing it. I guess you could say that it at least elicited a strong emotion, whereas Outer Worlds was pretty mediocre. Shaq-Fu for the Genesis was pretty bad. It was $3 new in the bargain bin at Toys R'Us, which should have tipped me off that it was horrible, but I figured it was only $3. In hindsight, it was worth buying just to put on the shelf because of the meme value. Ever play Godus? Molyneux is the king of marketing, but I think I'd rather stare at a screensaver than play that game ever again. Is it even a game? I can't really tell.

Oh, and you clearly missed out on StarForge. This game was supposed to be THE Minecraft Killer. The problem is, it didn't really work. Ever. They kept releasing early access builds, which were almost like different variations of the general theme but was like they couldn't figure out how to scale back their original design goals to make something someone might like. You know, as opposed to just make what they originally said they were making. And it was never optimized. Or polished. Even the description of the game at the bottom of the page isn't what they actually dumped out as a release. This was CodeHatch's first game, and they've done a few now which all seem to result in similar results. They get tired of working on something, or there's too many problems with the development, and they move on to something new. But hey, at least they eventually released StarForge for free. And it's really not worth checking out. If only the Greeks had invented a letter before "alpha", because that's the state this game is in.

There's been a lot of indie games I've played that were worse, but I generally don't like to shit on games made by one or two people just trying to make something they enjoy, but I'll make that exception for CodeHatch.

 

[Kev Inkline]

Yeah there are numerous worse games for sure, but the emphasis was on the completion, for which I have only myself to blame . My excuse I was on a $1 Game pass month, and thought why not. It's an insidious mechanism, drawing a deadline within which you have to finish a game, baits fools like me.

I remember getting interested in Starforge, glad I dodged that bullet

 

[Fargus]

I wouldn't even play if they paid me to do it.

 

[MerchantKing]

It was always free if you knew where to look.

 

[Crispy]

I don't think it's fair to compare to or pick on Redneck Rampage because it's not an RPG. Besides, it had the Cuss Pack!

 

[Cheesedragon117]

Might be worth a second playthrough, if I actually get to go through with my plan to blast the Asian dyke engineer's head off in the middle of her dinner date with my shipwright, just to see how she reacts. That bitch had a sexy voice, she should have chosen me instead, dammit!

And also, to see how many different ways I can screw over the annoying Doc Brown character, that says the same damn shit every time you talk to him. Honestly, I don't know how I deluded myself into thinking the writing was good enough to finish the game in the first place. My thought process at the time was something like "Hey, at least it's not Bethesda..." In truth, this slop is only a few cubits higher than your average Bethesda game... It had been so long since New Vegas, I thought Obsidian might have actually been cooking something good over all this time. What a fool I was.

And that was already...... no fucking way, half a decade ago?!?! And the sequel's still not out?!

 

[Vaeltaja]

I heard a rumour this game was the first commercial experiment to create entertainment for the masses using only AI and judging from what RPGs are these days, it was a great success unfortunately.

 

[Taxnomore]

Imagine, for a second, paying for video games.

 

[Lord_Potato]

Well, it's better than Starfield. So that's something.

And much shorter, which in this case is also a plus.