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

[DalekFlay]

Finished the DLC. Overall... More Outer Worlds out of 10.

The Gorgon area is probably a bit smaller than Monarch and has less going on like the multiple towns and rebels and whatnot, but it's a lot bigger than the other areas of the main game. The quest chain does take you to other places though, including new buildings in existing places and a space station. Epic client says it took me 11 hours to finish. I don't think the writing is any better or worse than the main game, it's pretty similar. There's some good corporate satire emails, like one that tells an employee his lunch could not have been stolen because he, the "thief" and the lunch are all Spacer's Choice property and thus cannot steal each other. If you liked that kinda jokey tone of the main game, there's plenty more here, but don't expect anything different. There's a few Obsidian style choices to make as well of course. I was pretty annoyed at the need for 150 point skills to do certain things, since a max level character starting the DLC can't get there, but they did say it was meant for mid-level characters I guess.

All in all... More Outer Worlds out of 10. Oh shit I already said that.

 

[fantadomat]

Buahahaha even the mellow king CohhCarnage find it mediocre and bland "underwhelming" lol.



If it doesn't work right,his opinion is at 31 min.

 

[Thac0]

Honestly this should have been part of the base game.
I don't hate TOW, I regard it about the same as Pillars of Eternity. Bland and inferior to what it copies, but good enough to play when nothing else to do. 5.5/10 territory.
Nothing about the marketing of Gorgon was appealing on any level. They promised nothing new, and apparently delivered absolutely nothing new apart from a slew of new content.
Since the base game was super short that isn't the worst addition, but why would you want to pay for it, let alone replay the game for it? Sounds like something that is nice to have in a decade when you can get TOW gold for 5 bucks with all DLC.

 

[DalekFlay]

Sounds like something that is nice to have in a decade when you can get TOW gold for 5 bucks with all DLC.

Having just played it, balance wise it feels very much like something meant to follow Monarch on the path through the game. Playing at the very end was downright broken in several ways, like my mentioned stat point issue. If you're like me and only had endgame saves, I'd wait until you replay the game to fuck with the DLC.

 

[Infinitron]

Spoilery impressions: https://www.pcgamesn.com/the-outer-worlds/peril-on-gorgon-endings

I don’t want to choose between Peril on Gorgon’s bad endings
The Outer Worlds' new DLC adventure is too grim for its own good

Spoiler

Thinking back, it was the human meat cube that pushed us over the limit, the priest and I. For Vicar Max, I suspect the sight of a corpse mashed into a box shape – work clothes and boots included – was too much to bear, and he said as much on our way out of the clandestine testing facility on The Outer Worlds‘ new location, the asteroid Gorgon. For me, the grisly moment was simply a bridge too far, finally straining The Outer Worlds’ odd tonal dissonance to the breaking point.

Peril on Gorgon is The Outer Worlds’ first big expansion, and it’s a capsule adventure that introduces an all-new location full of twisting underground research facilities, ravenous robots, and glittering gilded age reception areas. After wrapping things up on Monarch, you’ll receive an unusual package on the Unreliable – it’s a severed arm holding an audio log, which directs you to a lonely mansion built way out in the asteroid belt.

There, you’ll meet Wilhelmina Ambrose, a suspiciously wealthy heiress who wants you to travel to Gorgon, the asteroid where her estranged mother once headed up a science venture gone horribly wrong. Being that this is The Outer Worlds, you can probably guess where this is going: yes, it’s another story about corporate greed and inhumanity, and Peril on Gorgon cranks the dial on company brutality and monstrosity up several notches.

It’s not spoiling too much of Peril on Gorgon’s story to reveal that the research going on at the Gorgon facility was meant to produce a new line of stimulants for Spacer’s Choice, the Outer Worlds’ stand-in for modern megacorporations. True to the company slogan (“You’ve tried the best, now try the rest!”), Spacer’s Choice placed barely competent managers in charge of ethically compromised scientists, and the results were gruesome – as the vicar and I discovered to our dismay in the meat cube stamping room.

There’s a lot of genuinely lovely stuff in Peril on Gorgon, and you swing rapidly between The Outer Worlds’ glitzy upper crust and its Dickensian working class squalor at a dizzying pace. One quest has you tracking down a former Project Gorgon researcher at a fancy dog show on Byzantium (a typically on-the-nose reference to the ‘byzantine’ nature of the bureaucracy that keeps it afloat) before descending into a hellish human subjects testing lab back on Gorgon.



Look, violating the Geneva Conventions is not really a big deal in videogames – there’s a whole Twitter account devoted to it, in fact – but Peril on Gorgon deals in some particularly heinous stuff. Company emails you unearth at employee terminals detail experiments reminiscent of Stanley Milgram’s ethically deranged studies at Yale and worse, but The Outer World’s limited tonal range doesn’t allow you to react with anything like the appropriate level of disgust and horror.

Mechanically speaking, Peril on Gorgon slots neatly into the rest of The Outer Worlds, adding a smattering of new enemies to fight and gear to collect. Playing as a long guns specialist, I didn’t find any of the fights much different from the shootouts you find through the base game’s campaign, but I enjoyed exploring the Bioshock-influenced interiors of Gorgon’s dungeons all the same. The guns are fine. They’re fine.



I’ve made it through the bulk of one playthrough in just shy of ten hours, and that’s focusing almost exclusively on the new content. Peril on Gorgon is padded out by lots of reading at terminals and plot discussions with key NPCs, but it’s a healthy size DLC all the same.

I just don’t know whether I want to bother finishing it. I’ve enjoyed The Outer Worlds’ critique of corporate exploitation of labour, but Peril on Gorgon’s clumsy use of human experimentation as a backdrop suggests it doesn’t fully appreciate the severity of the issues it’s signposting. A (fairly predictable) third act heel turn has left me with nobody to root for. While the shooting and RPG elements are fine enough I suppose, they’re certainly not outstanding. What’s left to consider is its narrative voice, and in Peril on Gorgon, The Outer Worlds feels like it’s being used to tell the wrong story.

 

[fantadomat]

Bland and inferior to what it copies,

Ahhhh,so you think that Fallout 3 is better game than Outer Worlds......it makes sense.

 

[Naraya]

Looking at this tweet I start to wonder if the whole team behind TOW is so easily excited...

 

[jackofshadows]

Buahahaha even the mellow king CohhCarnage find it mediocre and bland "underwhelming" lol.



If it doesn't work right,his opinion is at 31 min.

Wait, what?! Listen to this:

What a fucking hypocrite It's like he has no obligations now and just expressing his real thoughts.

 

[Thac0]

Bland and inferior to what it copies,

Ahhhh,so you think that Fallout 3 is better game than Outer Worlds......it makes sense.

I give TOW the benefit of the doubt and say it copies FN:NV, not Fallout 3. Fallout 3 is like 2/10. Can't stand that game, bores me to tears on a level that only GTA and Dragon Age Inquisition ever managed to do so.

 

[Naraya]

/snip
What a fucking hypocrite It's like he has no obligations now and just expressing his real thoughts.

Nothing to see here - 99.99% of streamers are exactly like this*.

*) please don't forget to like, subscribe and DONATE <333

 

[fantadomat]

/snip
What a fucking hypocrite It's like he has no obligations now and just expressing his real thoughts.

Nothing to see here - 99.99% of streamers are exactly like this*.

*) please don't forget to like, subscribe and DONATE <333

Oh yeah,the guy is doing the business thing. Nearly all of his "review" videos are positive and shilly . So having that in mind,imagine how boring and shit this DLC is lol.

Still i do enjoy watching him from time to time,the dude plays rpgs and it is good at them. Also very chill.

 

[normie]

Bland and inferior to what it copies,

...Fallout 3 is better game than Outer Worlds

yes

 

[Flying Dutchman]

Guess CohhCarnage's paycheck didn't come through in time for the DLC, now THERE'S a compelling story.

In all seriousness, that's a pretty surprising turn of evaluation.

 

[DalekFlay]

Spoilery impressions: https://www.pcgamesn.com/the-outer-worlds/peril-on-gorgon-endings

It's insane to me to complain about over-the-top corporate evil in a game that is all about over-the-top corporate evil.

 

[Flying Dutchman]

It's insane to me to complain about over-the-top corporate evil in a game that is all about over-the-top corporate evil.

BTW, minor spoiler, but I can't access a spoiler tag so be warned:

I think that's unfair to the reviewer, who seems to indicate:

1. They are tired about the corporate greed theme - there are ways to avoid this with good quest design, writing, and pacing, but apparently, it felt one-note (arguably like the base game) but even more shallow than the core game. Which leads me to...
2. The reviewer "complains" about being complicit in the Evil Scheme(tm) without being given a choice and murdering the test subjects, which genuinely sucks because it's the gameplay loop you're supposed to enjoy and engage in? That's more than fair.
3. And also, along with other story weakness, I don't see what the issue is about claiming the story is predictable in Act 3. Overall, it just seems like the writing and the premise is "meh" and so is the presentation. I feel like that's a fair critique to make if that's how they feel.
4. I am not a shill for PCGamerN, I normally hate all review sites and all journalists because they are idiots anyway. I did find Cohh's reaction super funny and honest, though. He could have given a review just with his expression after the final dialogue.

Guess we'll see about quality for DLC2, maybe they'll "experiment" with better writing approaches. On NeoGAF, the posters were mentioning that the team and production was pretty much a clusterfuck, so this might have been the result.

 

[Roguey]

Citation: https://www.neogaf.com/threads/the-outer-worlds-peril-on-gorgon-announce-trailer.1557488/

Apparently, the development for this DLC was a big mess, probably accounts for the delay.
...
I really hope so. Apparently, the 1st DLC team (led by one of the writers Kate?) took the DLC off the rails for months, and they had to restructure it and clean up the mess once they realized the problem.

To make matters worse, word from the studio was that Obsidian lied to Private Division about Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky being involved in the DLC (they weren't), and it took their actual involvement to fix it - but "fixing" means the DLCs more like the core game, and that means your mileage may vary since I know some really loved it, and some thought it was "meh". Obsidian apparently has a bad rep of assigning devs to projects without really putting those devs on it, then charging the publisher for the "devs" involvement - they did this with Paradox, Bethesda, and Private Division, it's probably one of the reasons they don't tend to work with publishers more than once, but there might be other reasons for that and with MS, they certainly don't need that anymore.

Peter Principle Patel really feeds into my preconceived notions of her abilities.

 

[DalekFlay]

I think that's unfair to the reviewer, who seems to indicate:

This is the line I was mostly responding to:

Peril on Gorgon’s clumsy use of human experimentation as a backdrop suggests it doesn’t fully appreciate the severity of the issues it’s signposting

The whole game is a whimsical take on super evil corporate actions. The main game is filled with that stuff, as is the DLC. If you're going to complain about treating those subjects in such a silly manner, then it's far from an issue with the DLC itself.

 

[Flying Dutchman]

This is the line I was mostly responding to:

The whole game is a whimsical take on super evil corporate actions. The main game is filled with that stuff, as is the DLC. If you're going to complain about treating those subjects in such a silly manner, then it's far from an issue with the DLC itself.

I think it's fair to complain about a poorly-implemented theme, thus the word "clumsy." The rest of the review seemed to have valid critiques, including punishing the player with a "gotcha!" for fighting test subjects and then feeling shitty about it (or hopefully you should). Give me a break, that's worse than clumsy, it's like anti-design.

But thanks for calling out the specific citation, I wasn't sure what you were talking about.

 

[Flying Dutchman]

Also, have to say, I always think you're Alex/Alec Frey based on your handle's similarity.

 

[DalekFlay]

I think it's fair to complain about a poorly-implemented theme, thus the word "clumsy." The rest of the review seemed to have valid critiques, including punishing the player with a "gotcha!" for fighting test subjects and then feeling shitty about it (or hopefully you should). Give me a break, that's worse than clumsy, it's like anti-design.

But thanks for calling out the specific citation, I wasn't sure what you were talking about.

Well, I finished the DLC and don't ever remember that happening. You can react appalled at what they did, but no one ever chides you for defending yourself that I recall.

 

[Flying Dutchman]

Well, I finished the DLC and don't ever remember that happening. You can react appalled at what they did, but no one ever chides you for defending yourself that I recall.

If you actually give a shit about your character and understand the context of what's going on, who the hell cares what NPCs think?

If an NPC tried to explain why you shouldn't feel guilty with a well-structured argument as to why it's okay to engage with the gameplay loop that was almost the entirety of combat in the core game and would naturally extend to the DLC, that's different.

Look, if you liked it, great. If you are attacking the reviewer for bringing up some points that make a lot of sense, more power to you, but I can see where they're coming from, and it sounds like it could have been fixable pretty easily if some idiot dev even thought outside their own narrative blinders to even consider how a variety of players might react.

 

[DalekFlay]

Look, if you liked it, great. If you are attacking the reviewer for bringing up some points that make a lot of sense, more power to you, but I can see where they're coming from, and it sounds like it could have been fixable pretty easily if some idiot dev even thought outside their own narrative blinders to even consider how a variety of players might react.

Is there more to the review than Infinitron posted? Because you're extrapolating a lot from what he quoted. Have you played the DLC all the way through like I have? Honest questions.

Spacer's Choice was up to some nasty stuff on Gorgon, yes. The game has no pacifist options once combat begins, even when the enemies are maybe not purely evil or under some kind of drug effect, yes. Your two end choices are both morally grey, yes. The writing and tone are silly and whimsical despite depicting heinous actions, yes. My point is that NONE of this is different from the main game, at all, whatsoever. The reviewer seems to be calling out the DLC for this in particular, which is what I don't understand. If you disliked that stuff in the main game, you wouldn't even be playing this.

 

[Flying Dutchman]

I don't know if it's "seems" because that's an interpretation - again, the reviewer actually uses the word "clumsy." If you think it was well-executed, great. And I don't care about pacifist options, I do care that they present you with an option where you'd consider a pacifist option if that makes sense.

I've only seen the Let's Plays (I'm not going to spend $15 for a DLC until it's reviewed) although I did think Cohh's facial expression review does seem to support the "clumsy" aspect of the narrative.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Spoilery impressions: https://www.pcgamesn.com/the-outer-worlds/peril-on-gorgon-endings

It's insane to me to complain about over-the-top corporate evil in a game that is all about over-the-top corporate evil.

Poor, repetitive writing. Same reason the terminals went from "heh" to "stop it" in the base game.
Compare it to e.g., Futurama which had how many episodes, yet still remained funny and fresh to the finale. I can't remember ever thinking Futurama was overdoing a specific theme or joke, yet much of its premise is very similar to Outer Worlds.

 

[Flying Dutchman]

Poor, repetitive writing. Same reason the terminals went from "heh" to "stop it" in the base game.
Compare it to e.g., Futurama which had how many episodes, yet still remained funny and fresh to the finale. I can't remember ever thinking Futurama was overdoing a specific theme or joke, yet much of its premise is very similar to Outer Worlds.

<==== This. The Futurama point is perfect.