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

Roguey

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The constant "corporations are bad mmkay" commentary in every single quest, lore tidbit, and piece of dialogue definitely started to wear its welcome out after a while. It's one thing to have some meta commentary in the setting, but I guess dangerhairs couldn't keep it subtle and had to slam you over the head with the crowbar of the theme constantly. Commies gonna commie.
Boyarsky is a liberal who cracked down on the commie writers who wanted to write with their commie agenda. They were all mad about it on twitter.
 

Zeriel

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The constant "corporations are bad mmkay" commentary in every single quest, lore tidbit, and piece of dialogue definitely started to wear its welcome out after a while. It's one thing to have some meta commentary in the setting, but I guess dangerhairs couldn't keep it subtle and had to slam you over the head with the crowbar of the theme constantly. Commies gonna commie.
Boyarsky is a liberal who cracked down on the commie writers who wanted to write with their commie agenda. They were all mad about it on twitter.

That's unsurprising. But there's only so much you can do when 90% of the staff are that way. It still comes out.
 

Major_Blackhart

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The constant "corporations are bad mmkay" commentary in every single quest, lore tidbit, and piece of dialogue definitely started to wear its welcome out after a while. It's one thing to have some meta commentary in the setting, but I guess dangerhairs couldn't keep it subtle and had to slam you over the head with the crowbar of the theme constantly. Commies gonna commie.
Boyarsky is a liberal who cracked down on the commie writers who wanted to write with their commie agenda. They were all mad about it on twitter.

Oh god yes, Leon made them cry their eyes out? Please post details.
 

Nano

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Grab the Codex by the pussy Strap Yourselves In
Boyarsky is a liberal who cracked down on the commie writers who wanted to write with their commie agenda. They were all mad about it on twitter.
He cracked down on the communism but apparently didn't care about his gameworld being entirely populated by asexuals and dykes. Cuck.
 

Roguey

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Boyarsky is a liberal who cracked down on the commie writers who wanted to write with their commie agenda. They were all mad about it on twitter.

Oh god yes, Leon made them cry their eyes out? Please post details.
https://rpgcodex.net/forums/threads...me-other-obsidian-developers-disagree.128539/

He cracked down on the communism but apparently didn't care about his gameworld being entirely populated by asexuals and dykes. Cuck.

There's one person like that and that's totally in line with current liberal orthodoxy. :lol: The Boyarsky agenda in practice:
This strange ambivalence, the desire to paint those who oppose the game’s cartoonishly evil corporations as somehow suspect, shows up all over the place in The Outer Worlds. For instance, your most reasonable companions tend to be the most protective of the status quo, while the most radical is also kind of a starry-eyed airhead. One of the most telling details for me is the simple fact that corporate NPCs get names like “guard” and “worker,” while members of the anti-corporate Iconoclasts are called things like “rioter,” even if they’re doing nothing more than standing around a bar or doing clerical work.
 

Cross

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There's one person like that
ImKEpsq.jpeg
 

Roguey

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Cross those women all have terrible haircuts but I do not believe they are all explicitly asexuals and/or lesbians.
 

Nano

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Grab the Codex by the pussy Strap Yourselves In
Cross those women all have terrible haircuts but I do not believe they are all explicitly asexuals and/or lesbians.
The dykeism can be inferred from the way they look. The asexuality is inferred from how the setting is completely sexless.
 

Delterius

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i think it's worse than shitty. it's really... median. it's the pilot of something worth talking about.
What are the worst flaws (not flaws in the game)? Writing, story, characters, gameplay?
The Outer Worlds is just a side project and it shows. It is almost like a proof of concept for Microsoft or something. So right out of the gate you're not looking at 'Obsidian's Fallout 3', like New Vegas was, you're looking at 'Obsidian's Demo for a Fallout 3 in the Future'. That in itself was disappointing.

Speaking about my experience in particular. Well, I didn't go into this thing expecting to fall in love with the gameplay. I never do with shooters. But the place where I grew frustrated was with the world's character. The Outer Worlds has something I like to call the Silly / Quirky Effect. It happens when you go for a comedic setting but your comedy is super uneven. Quirky is when one of your main characters is a scientist that sounds like a Rick and Morty character. Silly is when your setting is slightly manic on the background. I don't mind the former, but I really like the latter.

Throught the game I slowly came to understand that Halcyon is a centuries old human settlement whose culture has been so warped by corporate ethics that people even express love and appreciation in a corporatized way. There's a convo in the first area that goes more or less like this:

'PC: I hear Steve killed himself.

Foreman: Yeah, he did. Bad timing. He was a great employee.

PC: what the fuck? is that what you call your friend who just killed himself? Employee?

Foreman, emotionally: 'Well, fuck you! I'll have you know Steve was an ASSET!'

The employee logs in Edgewater also point to this background mania. You can sort of re-structure the history of the settlement and see how and why it couldn't recover. Edgewater was built as a manufacturing town. It was only supposed to process goods from another planet. The proverbial 'grown in argentina, packaged in thailand, shipped to the US' type of deal. Once that monopoly was lost at the source Edgewater started collapsing. Some of the particulars are amusing:

  • First the settlement tried to become self sufficient. It failed due to the conditions of the soil and the sea.
  • At one point they started using frankenmeat instead of tuna from planet Monarch.
  • Locally sourced Frankenmeat is rather poor in nutrients. It can barely keep you going.
  • Realizing this the head of marketing wanted to create new unique versions of canned ''''tuna'''' that would be fortified and/or seasoned to be a better product. The response from corporate was 'we are a vertical monopoly and we are not gonna compete with ourselves. Also you're fired and re-hired as a janitor'.
  • After quarterly reports collapsed for too long corporate activated it's exit strategy: departments would covertly sabotage one another, causing terrible accidents and triggering insurance claims. Win-win.
  • After the town was effectively abandoned to it's luck the middle managers started cannibalizing it. Both metaphorically and literally. The mid-boss in charge is making sure workers punch clock until they die since he's not even aware that frankenmeat is not nutritious. He is mentally incapable of disbelieving the ads about how great they are for your health. The mid-boss who was exiled from town is using the bodies of the dead to fertilize her farms, feeding her followers however she can.

While you can't reconstruct the entirety of Edgewater's history you can feel this progressive decline as you explore the first area. You see each part of the colony that was abandoned. The laboratories that were once used to try and regenerate the soil, the department where the middle managers and marketing people used to live, the sabotaged power plant, the social centers that didn't make sense anymore since the town was dead, and so on. Exploring Edgewater is like walking into Generic American Coal Town That Couldn't Gentrify Itself To Survive.

There's one more instance of this sort of thing later in the game and I enjoyed it as well. But that's it. Edgewater was my high note and it's the first goddamn town. If these sorts of background mysteries were more common then Outer Worlds would have been a very fun game. Or at least one that would be entertaining all the way through.
 
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Bad Sector

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Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
spoiler stuff

These are some nice details that i need multiple playthroughs to notice myself in games (despite not really rushing games - if anything it is the opposite, my playtimes tend to always be much longer than what you'd see in howlongtobeat :-P), so aside from the obvious in-your-face stuff, i missed most of that. Too bad ToW never made me feel like i want to replay it. Perhaps after i buy the addons at some point in the future i might try a second playthrough.
 

gurugeorge

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Strap Yourselves In
There's also an inconsistency in the artistic tone, it seems to be all over the place. It can't decide whether it wants to be standard s-f, late 19th century cowboy or neon-lit 50s Fallout. The olde-timey, slightly Bioshockish design of the backgrounds to the settlements, it doesn't really fit the setting all that well. I suppose the connection is to Firefly, but does Firefly really have so much emphasis on late 19th century American art design? The most you get in Firefley is ramshackle buildings on the frontier, not 50s-style neon lit stuff (did they have neon in the late 19th century?). Firefly's built-up aesthetic is more like Mos Eiseley or Bladerunner - some neon but more futuristic.

The music (one tune in particular that's got synth/string lines reminiscent of Eric Brosius' angular melodies in Terra Nova) actually sets the setting a bit more for what the art design should have been like in this game - it should have been more like Lost In Space, the tv show. Clean-lined early 60s design. That would have blended better with the wood-paneled stuff, because we're already familiar with the mix of sleek 60s s-f and Edwardian looks from the 1960s themselves.
 

Starwars

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It's an observation that's been made before but the problem is how much Outer Worlds feels like... yes, a product. The idea of the setting isn't all that bad, not something that greatly excites me but you could do fun stuff with it. But the game is just so mindnumbingly on the safe side that it becomes a boring slog to go through. There are good ideas here and there, some choices to be made to be sure, but there is just no edge to it. Nothing that stands out. The combat / character system is so bland, as is a lot of the encounter design (especially on the big combat planet, can't recall the name of it now).

And then the characters and writing, which... again, are just boring. And it's supposed to be a funny game.
I'm usually a "story person", I like to take my time through conversations, read everything etc. But in the Outer Worlds I constantly found myself zoning out and wanting to just click through everything because it just didn't grab me.

There was potential in the setting but it's all so crushingly mediocre.
 

purupuru

Learned
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Nov 2, 2019
Messages
414
I think the commie faction Iconoclasts actually feature some of the better writings in the game. Graham's terminal entries recounting his revolution feel realistic with ups and downs, passion and doubt, and a healthy dose of moral grayness, and were certainly a breath of fresh air among mountains of tongue-in-cheek corporate-bad jokes. But I suppose that also makes it deviate from the overall narrative tone in the game and more of it may not be a good thing.
 

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