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

Duraframe300

Arcane
Joined
Dec 21, 2010
Messages
6,395
You can kill the asexual lesbian strong independant engineer self-insert mid-date. This is great and fuck you for thinking otherwise.
It's so weird that they especifically mentioned that they decided not to add any denigrating dialogue options regarding Parvati's sexuality but left the option to do stuff like this enabled on the game. Not that I'm complaining, being a complete monster's always fun games like these.

They didn't decide *not to add*. It was Dollarhyde deciding to bastadize the charachter/quest line after taking over from Chris L'Etoile because *muh discrimination*.
 

KVVRR

Learned
Joined
Apr 28, 2020
Messages
594
You can kill the asexual lesbian strong independant engineer self-insert mid-date. This is great and fuck you for thinking otherwise.
It's so weird that they especifically mentioned that they decided not to add any denigrating dialogue options regarding Parvati's sexuality but left the option to do stuff like this enabled on the game. Not that I'm complaining, being a complete monster's always fun games like these.

They didn't decide *not to add*. It was Dollarhyde deciding to bastadize the charachter/quest line after taking over from Chris L'Etoile because *muh discrimination*.
Railroading the player's speech options is a deliberate option regardless of reason.
 
Joined
Jan 14, 2018
Messages
50,754
Codex Year of the Donut
There’s another interesting wrinkle to the conversation with Parvati, when she opens up. In most RPGs like The Outer Worlds, players are granted a wide range of responses to every situation. You can be nice, you can be an asshole, you can be indifferent. In this moment, when Parvati chooses to be vulnerable, the game explicitly limits your range of responses.
“I want that conversation to feel like a safe space for the players who are playing it and identify with it,” she said. “I don't want to pull the rug out from under them and say, ‘Haha, actually you're a joke,’ or ‘other people think you are a joke.’ [...] I don't want to write a homophobia simulator. [laughs] That's not what I got in the game writing for.”
— Kate Dollarhyde, Obsidian Entertainment, 2019
 

Duraframe300

Arcane
Joined
Dec 21, 2010
Messages
6,395
You can kill the asexual lesbian strong independant engineer self-insert mid-date. This is great and fuck you for thinking otherwise.
It's so weird that they especifically mentioned that they decided not to add any denigrating dialogue options regarding Parvati's sexuality but left the option to do stuff like this enabled on the game. Not that I'm complaining, being a complete monster's always fun games like these.

They didn't decide *not to add*. It was Dollarhyde deciding to bastadize the charachter/quest line after taking over from Chris L'Etoile because *muh discrimination*.
Railroading the player's speech options is a deliberate option regardless of the reasons.
What?

Of course its deliberate, but you found it weird that the option to shoot it still exists and this is a possible answer. Not enough time for Dollarhyde to prevent it as its related to gameplay. Planned or potentially already written dialogue (After all we know that L'Etoile had at least already written a first pass of the whole quest line) is much easier to adjust.
 

ciox

Liturgist
Joined
Feb 9, 2016
Messages
1,278
You can kill the asexual lesbian strong independant engineer self-insert mid-date. This is great and fuck you for thinking otherwise.
You can kill everyone, you also want to, just so they'll shut the fuck up already.

Seems like a double-edged sword.
 

KVVRR

Learned
Joined
Apr 28, 2020
Messages
594
You can kill the asexual lesbian strong independant engineer self-insert mid-date. This is great and fuck you for thinking otherwise.
It's so weird that they especifically mentioned that they decided not to add any denigrating dialogue options regarding Parvati's sexuality but left the option to do stuff like this enabled on the game. Not that I'm complaining, being a complete monster's always fun games like these.

They didn't decide *not to add*. It was Dollarhyde deciding to bastadize the charachter/quest line after taking over from Chris L'Etoile because *muh discrimination*.
Railroading the player's speech options is a deliberate option regardless of the reasons.
What?

Of course its deliberate, but you found it weird that the option to shoot it still exists and this is a possible answer. Not enough time for Dollarhyde to prevent it as its related to gameplay. Planned or potentially already written dialogue (After all we know that L'Etoile had at least already written a first pass of the whole quest line) is much easier to adjust.
You're assuming that the first pass of her quest line already had such options in place when as far as we know he stopped writing Parvati fairly early on.
I don't think Dollarhyde has enough pull to actively betray one of the core ideas the game was developed with in mind - which both Cane and Boyarski heavily emphatized on - simply because she wanted the conversation to be a safe space. So she changed - or wrote from scratch, really doesn't matter - what she could to make it what she personally wanted. I don't see what you're arguing about, we both think it's a bad thing.
 

The Dutch Ghost

Arbiter
Joined
May 26, 2016
Messages
681
Yeah, I had similar impressions. I cannot even point at a single thing and say "THIS is what's wrong with it", here it's sort of an all-encompassing feeling of boredom. The game technically has every system such a game should have, but is just so damn dull; it's like it's lacking anything fun in it. Kind of like eating an unflavoured tofu – it doesn't taste bad, it just doesn't taste at all.
Yeah, I had similar impressions. I cannot even point at a single thing and say "THIS is what's wrong with it", here it's sort of an all-encompassing feeling of boredom. The game technically has every system such a game should have, but is just so damn dull; it's like it's lacking anything fun in it. Kind of like eating an unflavoured tofu – it doesn't taste bad, it just doesn't taste at all.

Yeah it has the overall feel of game-design-by-numbers. There's a cool idea struggling to get out, but the gameplay is irredeemably average, and so anxiously stuffed with things for the player to do and notice that it doesn't feel like an adventure so much as a theme park ride, with obsequious servants ushering you along to some POI wherever you're standing. None of the places feel like real places, they all feel like a bundle of Pavlovian levers for "the player" to press and get a reward. It's overwrought, it doesn't have any breathing space.

And the writing, though interestingly context-aware at times (in terms of NPC responses), is just a whole bunch of stuff-that-people-would-never-actually-say (i.e. it's student-level writing).

Yes there is this overall sense of blandness and not just specific parts. I get the themes the designers were going for, but it seems to be all done in a very underwhelming way.
I should like the old style sci-fi serial theme, going out into space for adventure and mystery, but I don't as there is not really any of this to find. Just more places to shoot things and collect stuff and occasionally a little bit of lore with most of it being fluff as most of the people's logs records don't tell us anything we didn't already know.
And gameplay wise as I mentioned before this game is not impressive as we have seen the mechanics before. There is the flaw system but how many of us were going to take one for the sake of roleplaying? At no point I felt like taking a flaw in order to unlock a perk as a lot of the perks don't feel worth it. I would much rather have that the game would give me extra skill points instead if I took a flaw as later on some skills checks require high skills. (BTW I am not sure if replacing dice rolling with skill checks was such a good idea, it could perhaps have made a good addition)

So it is really the content of the game it needs to bank on and it fails at that. Settlements for one.
I wanted to go into detail about the content but most of you already know about it and I don't want to waste people's time with unneeded rambling.

Right now I am doing Peril at Gorgon. It has one thing in common with the Fallout New Vegas DLCs in that most of the content consists of just shooting and collecting stuff. I like the FNV DLCs but their major flaws IMO was the excessive filler by making people go through long stretches of land with little real content, and the focus on fetch quests.

There’s another interesting wrinkle to the conversation with Parvati, when she opens up. In most RPGs like The Outer Worlds, players are granted a wide range of responses to every situation. You can be nice, you can be an asshole, you can be indifferent. In this moment, when Parvati chooses to be vulnerable, the game explicitly limits your range of responses.
“I want that conversation to feel like a safe space for the players who are playing it and identify with it,” she said. “I don't want to pull the rug out from under them and say, ‘Haha, actually you're a joke,’ or ‘other people think you are a joke.’ [...] I don't want to write a homophobia simulator. [laughs] That's not what I got in the game writing for.”
— Kate Dollarhyde, Obsidian Entertainment, 2019

(not meant at your Rusty)
Or you could have made it 'nothing special' instead of inflating it to the level that you did. Opposite from a 'homophobia' simulator you did not need to make it a 'homosexual praising' simulator. (I know it doesn't really do that but I can't feel that this was one of the writer's personal investment parts)
Like it or not Dollarhyde, not everyone shares your opinion regarding 'different sexuality' and creating 'safe spaces'. Most of us don't hate it but also simply don't care .
The only reason I went through this quest was in order to get the perk for the character and I would much rather have done a different quest as these 'shopping for a companion' quests always feel like filler.

It's probably the most reactive dialogue in any RPG,
I hope they take the dialogue and put into much better game. It's quite impressive how the player , companions and NPCs play off each other
If you mean the idea behind the dialogue then I also think it would be interesting if it is more expanded on. But not this level of writing.


On another note; yeez Vicar Max really lets other people walk over him if he allows people to call him whatever they want.
If his presence in my team did not boost my hacking skills I would have left him on the Unreliable.
 

The Wall

Dumbfuck!
Dumbfuck Zionist Agent
Joined
Jul 19, 2017
Messages
3,018
Location
SERPGIA
301 pages. Three hundred and one. Spent on being surprised that bunch of angry tattooed blue haired trans-feminist lesbians are bad at writting believable and relatable characters to non-angry tattooed blue haired trans-feminist lesbians. Also, army of mediocre and cucked programmers who work as their slaves designed RPG systems so that angry tattooed blue haired trans-feminist lesbians wouldn't find it hard. Because hard reminds them of penises. And penises are Evil

Now let's write for next 700 pages whether company (Obsidian) that's owned by company (Microsoft) that rises WOKE flag high and donates to BLM and LGBTQ++ organisations will have bunch of niggers and trannies in their next product. Itz a Mystery worth spending your life on
 

The Wall

Dumbfuck!
Dumbfuck Zionist Agent
Joined
Jul 19, 2017
Messages
3,018
Location
SERPGIA
Outer Worlds is by far unironically BEST RPG that the most powerful nation on Earth, that is A-ME-RI-CAAA, produced in past 5 years. Ameriiiicaaaa, FUCK-YEAH! *Explosion*
 

Drop Duck

Learned
Joined
Dec 22, 2020
Messages
687
There’s another interesting wrinkle to the conversation with Parvati, when she opens up. In most RPGs like The Outer Worlds, players are granted a wide range of responses to every situation. You can be nice, you can be an asshole, you can be indifferent. In this moment, when Parvati chooses to be vulnerable, the game explicitly limits your range of responses.
“I want that conversation to feel like a safe space for the players who are playing it and identify with it,” she said. “I don't want to pull the rug out from under them and say, ‘Haha, actually you're a joke,’ or ‘other people think you are a joke.’ [...] I don't want to write a homophobia simulator. [laughs] That's not what I got in the game writing for.”
— Kate Dollarhyde, Obsidian Entertainment, 2019
If they make children invulnerable in games then they should make minorities so too, physically and emotionally. Outer Worlds was a bad game though since it was anti-free market. Capitalism managed to put man not just on the moon but colonized the stars and despite everyone being diverse and you got BAMEs everywhere everyone is depicted as stupid except for white Rick Sanchez who is allowed to be a smart commie.
 

The Wall

Dumbfuck!
Dumbfuck Zionist Agent
Joined
Jul 19, 2017
Messages
3,018
Location
SERPGIA
If they make children invulnerable in games then they should make minorities so too, physically and emotionally. Outer Worlds was a bad game though since it was anti-free market. Capitalism managed to put man not just on the moon but colonized the stars and despite everyone being diverse and you got BAMEs everywhere everyone is depicted as stupid except for white Rick Sanchez who is allowed to be a smart commie.
This is all YOUR fault. JEW
 

BlackheartXIII

Educated
Joined
Mar 18, 2022
Messages
86
I found the description of the working class people interesting, although they are diverse they all have the same homogenous culture, they all have perspectives and ambitions that are inline with middle class Americans then blue collars ones. which in an ironic way descript the monolithic homogenous culture of the creatives themselves (in some way it's a unintentional criticism).

I guess that why when i played the game Edgewater felt like a poorly managed Starbucks then an actual industrialized town.
 

gurugeorge

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Aug 3, 2019
Messages
7,437
Location
London, UK
Strap Yourselves In
A game about working class people and their struggles written by people who have never worked a day in their lives.

It would be interesting to draw up a list of authors, artists, film-makers, etc., who are working class, and/or have had broad life experience and compare and contrast with those who have come from coddled middle-class and upper-class backgrounds and never ventured out of them.

Re. people with broad experience of life, I'm thinking of, say, Orwell and Hemingway in straight literature, and Heinlein and Vance in s-f.

I've often thought that our heads are filled with impressions of the world from books and movies made by people who never really experienced it. At best, if you get (e.g.) a middle-class person expatiating about middle-class life that's ok, that's what they know; but when you don't, I think that often coincides with ideological propaganda. When I was a kid, my stepfather used to mock my view of the world being taken from books - "what do they know of life?" he would say. At the time I looked down on his attitude, but these days (having now experienced a bit of the world myself) I think he was right, and I was the one building up a fantasy about the world in my head from books.
 

Nano

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Mar 6, 2016
Messages
4,647
Grab the Codex by the pussy Strap Yourselves In
I've often thought that our heads are filled with impressions of the world from books and movies made by people who never really experienced it. At best, if you get (e.g.) a middle-class person expatiating about middle-class life that's ok, that's what they know; but when you don't, I think that often coincides with ideological propaganda. When I was a kid, my stepfather used to mock my view of the world being taken from books - "what do they know of life?" he would say. At the time I looked down on his attitude, but these days (having now experienced a bit of the world myself) I think he was right, and I was the one building up a fantasy about the world in my head from books.
Did your stepdad ever spank you?
 

gurugeorge

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Aug 3, 2019
Messages
7,437
Location
London, UK
Strap Yourselves In
I've often thought that our heads are filled with impressions of the world from books and movies made by people who never really experienced it. At best, if you get (e.g.) a middle-class person expatiating about middle-class life that's ok, that's what they know; but when you don't, I think that often coincides with ideological propaganda. When I was a kid, my stepfather used to mock my view of the world being taken from books - "what do they know of life?" he would say. At the time I looked down on his attitude, but these days (having now experienced a bit of the world myself) I think he was right, and I was the one building up a fantasy about the world in my head from books.
Did your stepdad ever spank you?

A few times, maybe 3 or 4 in total. Why?
 

Silverfish

Arbiter
Joined
Dec 4, 2019
Messages
3,068
I picked this back up after some time away and what the fuck is up the pickpocket skill? If it's just me being a retard, that's cool, but I can't even get through the "wait this long to see the other character's inventory" bit, much less actually take anything.
 

kangaxx

Arbiter
Joined
Jan 26, 2020
Messages
1,385
Location
Atop a flaming horse
I picked this back up after some time away and what the fuck is up the pickpocket skill? If it's just me being a retard, that's cool, but I can't even get through the "wait this long to see the other character's inventory" bit, much less actually take anything.
It's ages since I played it, but from memory the skill isn't that useful anyway. The game showers you with limitless items, key cards, disguises etc. just from basic exploration.
 

Silverfish

Arbiter
Joined
Dec 4, 2019
Messages
3,068
I picked this back up after some time away and what the fuck is up the pickpocket skill? If it's just me being a retard, that's cool, but I can't even get through the "wait this long to see the other character's inventory" bit, much less actually take anything.
It's ages since I played it, but from memory the skill isn't that useful anyway. The game showers you with limitless items, key cards, disguises etc. just from basic exploration.

Can't argue there. I played a bit further and just from staling from chests, I'd horded thousands of rounds of ammo and more money than I knew what to do with, since the early game shops aren't all that great. I had hoped there would be some equivalent to Bethesda's "drop a grenade in the guy's pants" thing, but it looks like it's just theft.
 
Joined
Jan 5, 2021
Messages
403
I still remember when people were praising this game as the "game that's going to topple Bethesda" and "do the Bethesda formula but good!" and here we are 3 years later. People still talk about Bethesda games (for better or worse). Fallout 76 still has players. Fallout New Vegas is widely beloved. People are looking forward to Elder Scrolls 6 (for some crazy reason) and Starfield (for some even crazier reason). Nobody talks about The Outer Worlds.
 

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