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

[Prime Junta]

Wasn't he a SJW or some sort of suburban socialist or some such? Or maybe I'm wrong, I haven't been very active on our /pol lately.

Objection. I am not suburban.

Spoiler

As to my character arc? In the early days of the SJW movement I was sympathetic because I felt I shared some of their aims: popular culture (and games specifically) really was rather uniform, with the white male space marine protagonist and everybody else either absent or represented as yuk-yuk clichés. Later I thought the Gamergate fiasco was a fucking insane, not to mention retarded, overreaction, and I did not want to be associated with those neckbeards in any shape or form.

At this point however the SJWs won and just replaced the previously shitty state of affairs with a new, differently shitty state of affairs. So I feel a lot more comfortable speaking my mind about it.

 

[TalesfromtheCrypt]

After Deadfire came out I said this will be the last Obsidian game with halfway acceptable world and writing. This was mainly because despite all his faults, Sawyer is a trained historian who was keeping that Californian middle class wokeness in check.
With TOW, the transition from classic Obsidian to nu-Obsidian is complete. Half the company are white middle class female college students who have been living in their absurd little bubble and never experienced anything of the real world.

It's hard to think of any game in recent years that looked as bland and completely unappealing as TOW.

 

[the mole]

Parvati reminds me of my grandmother in a lot of ways, she's dark skinned Italian raised in a small town, they aren't that different based on their reactions to things

Black people or dark skinned people don't throw up gang signs based on genetics, I'd say culture plays a bigger part, and Parvati grew up in a sheltered culture, she even tells you this when you first meet her in the game

 

[Jasede]

When the Codex leftists like a game you always know it's garbage. Better than any review.

 

[AwesomeButton]

It's the worst possible game to play after Disco Elysium.

*after having played -- autism mode.

 

[Jarpie]

I like the new Prime Junta

Wasn't he a SJW or a suburban socialist or some shit like that? Or maybe I'm wrong, I haven't been very active on our /pol lately.

He is epitome of champagne socialist, like most of the commies.

 

[Prime Junta]

You can say that's Obsidian staying in their safe space ("hey, we intentionally designed a setting that just happens to let us write people who behave exactly like Californians!") but they aren't as oblivious as you're saying.

So somebody there has retained a modicum of self-awareness. Good for them, have this award:

LOL we meant it that way is still an excuse tho.

 

[the mole]

Everything must be connected to politics even video games

 

[cvv]

This itself is a woke critique, disguised as an anti-woke critique

It's called "using their arguments against them" you know.

Her last name is "Holcomb" and she was raised in a society that the developers explicitly say has left all the old world distinctions of race and nationality behind.

Agreed with that. What Junta and Felipe said would be legit in a real Earth environment. In this tho it makes sense. People cut off from their cultural ties and stuck in a small, closed society end up thinking and talking the same.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

It's fascinating to read all this comprehensive critique of TOW political themes...coming from the same people who were praising Disco Elysium's sophisticated political commentary "fascism is that thing in your butt" "lols, because it's shit, get it? lol lmao hehehehe".

 

[Prime Junta]

Agreed with that. What Junta and Felipe said would be legit in a real Earth environment. In this tho it makes sense. People cut off from their cultural ties and stuck in a small, closed society end up thinking and talking the same.

Like woke white middle-class Californian liberals, you mean?

Seriously: if they had taken a serious stab at this, the game could've been mega cool, with the different micro-communities developing their own argots and weird sociopathologies and what have you. Think Pitcairn Island but way more so.

 

[Drakortha]

 

[thesheeep]

Steam forums. Steam forums never change.

 

[Prime Junta]

Jesus Christ men. It is a mediocre game that does nothing new. Why so much trouble over nothing.

Maybe arguing about it is more interesting than playing it?

 

[Daedalos]

Made it unto the Groundbreaker colony ship:

Here are some first ramblings of impressions early on:

Writing so far has been decent, but obviously far worse when you just come off the Disco Elysium high. It's serviceable to good, and honestly I like that it isn't too high strung, as it fits the game and the theme itself nicely.
I don't think alot of the NPCs feel alike, but actually varied so far. I like the C&C i've experienced already, and though the worlds feel smaller, but also more coherent and tight and alot less open worldy, which is great imo.

On Hard diff, Combat still feels too easy, and item management and the loot pinata is also annoying.

Combat itself though feels surprisingly fun, which I thought was the worse part of the game, but actually is quite enjoyable, even if too easy.

I thought about going supernova difficulty, but I hate shit like no save, no fast travel, and annoyances like food and drink, simply because they are time sinks, and shit you have to manage, and not really important overall to the rest of the game, just "hindrances". But if those things don't bother you, I would recommend supernova.

Graphics are not bad, either. Better than Fallout 4 and New Vegas for me, like a touched up HD version of those games, but still, dated of course. Graphics isn't the reason I'm playing this.

I'm still very early on, so I can't comment all that much on story, other than I like the big corporation arch and how indoctrinated everybody is. I hope it goes abit deeper than that, otherwise it will probably feel fairly bland in the end.
I hope for some cool twists and turns, we'll see.

All in all, the game is a guilty pleasure, a comfy RPG to play around with, and good enough to keep me engaged.

Hope you all are enjoying the game, despite all the butthurt, trolling and everything else.

 

[felipepepe]

Agreed with that. What Junta and Felipe said would be legit in a real Earth environment. In this tho it makes sense. People cut off from their cultural ties and stuck in a small, closed society end up thinking and talking the same.

But they don't even do this, that's the biggest issue here. These people have been indoctrinated their entire lives to obey corporations, they should think of Spacer's Choice like a North Korean thinks of their Supreme Leader™.

Instead, they moan and complain sarcastically like an American teenager having to wear the McDonald's uniform at his part-time job. FFS, you could get an Amazon warehouse worker from right next to Obsidian's HQ and they would tell a story about corporate abuse much better than these hipsters.

 

[cvv]

So this explains 80% of what we've been banging on about here.

Where The Outer Worlds gets its sense of humour:

As one in-game ad says: "You haven't tried the worst until you've tried boarst wurst."
Megan Starks was part of the team that authored this sick scenario. A senior narrative designer who holds an MFA in creative writing, she pens plot-lines, dialogue, characters and even item descriptions at Obsidian Entertainment.
...
What Starks brings to the writing team skews towards the darker, violent side of the comic spectrum. Starks also wrote Clive, the creepy owner of the mutated pig slaughterhouse, who calls himself "the boarst king." Starks said she thought it'd be "funny" to make him a serial killer who's probably also a cannibal.
...
When you eventually find the boss in his office, he's spattered with blood and preparing his meal. "I was just killing... some time," he says.

darker, violent side of the comic spectrum

darker, violent side of the comic spectrum

darker, violent side of the comic spectrum

Can you also see Boyarsky being all "oh wow, that's so funny Megan, great job!", all grimacing and pretending to wipe his tears, desperately trying to steer clear from the meetoo waters, quietly thinking "I'm too old for this shit, just trying to survive till my first social security check"?

It's a fun image if nothing else.

 

[Jenkem]

Oh she didn't abandon the alphabet guild at all, nobody in TOW did. The alphabet guild is integral to white middle-class Californian wokeness after all. My problem is precisely that everybody stays in their box -- the liberal Californian middle-class alphabet-soup woke box, with skin tone and name and what have you applied as cosmetics only. Put another way, Parvati is, effectively, blackface. Her writers are just too oblivious to realise that's what they ended up with.

Again: it's early days and maybe this will change -- I'm on the Groundbreaker, just got clearance to leave -- but so far everybody I've talked to has given me this exact same vibe. Even the psychos are a middle-class liberal Californian's idea of a psycho. It's like a larp in Pismo Beach.

The premise of the game is basically neoliberalism and corporate bootlicking amped up to absurdity and you are confused why the game is populated by multicultural corporate sycophants? In the case of Parvati particularly, there are plenty of people in the USA or UK of Indian descent that would fit her description tbqh... what the fuck do you want her to do? Talk like Apu and shit in the streets?

 

[Shadenuat]

Parvati is just poor Veronica clone. although Veronica was also one of the weakest FNV companions. If not for the Brotherhood lore and story, she would be same giggly calarts gal.

OUh yeah,the quality of the quests and the writing is sooo fucking amazing. Not the generic fedex garbage that is normally in such games,not at all

Wait until old lady asks you to save her son from reptiloids and 5 meters away girl would ask you to set up a date for her with guy selling dead reptiloids 15 meters away from her.

also trashmobs.

 

[CyberWhale]

Jesus Christ men. It is a mediocre game that does nothing new. Why so much trouble over nothing.

Maybe arguing about it is more interesting than playing it?

Literally saw this "joke" coming from a mile away. Or maybe Codex isn't any different than some other communities it likes to make fun of after all.

 

[Kyl Von Kull]

I’ll give you one. Parvati. She’s a brown queer working-class young woman with an Indian name. Yet she talks and acts just like a ditzy white middle-class liberal Californian teenager

Er... she talks like she’s from the 1890s (more specifically, she’s practically a carbon copy of the engineer girl from Firefly, just with a bit more melanin). There’s plenty to criticize about TOW, but middle class California girls haven’t talked like Parvati in over a century. As for her ethnicity, why would half-Indian ancestry mean anything when she’s never even met her Indian mother? That goes double in TOW’s dystopian setting where no one has an ethnic identity anymore because they’ve all been superseded by new corporate identities. Sort of like how early nationalism subsumed tons of smaller regional identities into state sponsored national identities.

Back to the whole “dieselpunk deadwood” dialect used by nearly every NPC I’ve seen so far. During the tutorial zone I didn’t have strong feelings about it either way, but sometimes it really works and I’m connecting with it more on Groundbreaker. For example, right after you land, the dock official wants you to pass along a message for him, something like, “tell her the shipment’s not coming in any time soon, and if she’d be so obliged, to get off my ass about it.” Small line, but it could’ve come right from an episode of Deadwood—something Charlie Utter would say.

Also, Adelaide’s angry lines are pitch perfect if you cut off her electricity and even better if you oust Tobson to install her as the new factory leader. Incidentally,

Spoiler

it’s more nuanced than “hippy deserters good/corporations bad so let’s all love each other as people.” Adelaide’s feeding her people by using human corpses as fertilizer, and she doesn’t sound too picky about where the bodies come from. Soylent Green is people y’all. When you tell her she’s in charge, her top priority is digging up the whole Edgewater graveyard so she can put those corpses (Spacer’s Choice property) to work in a new garden. She’s not wrong, but her enthusiasm is ghoulish.

I think I’d be enjoying this more if I hadn’t just replayed Disco, but at worst the game is fine.

 

[Shadenuat]

obsdian trying to be bethesda

suffice to say it doesn't work.

 

[the mole]

Are you implying Obsidian didn't use dumb humor like a talking mole rat before fallout 3 was made

 

[Haplo]

People seem to be asking where I am. Well, unlike folks who "don't care about this game" but are furiously playing since 2AM on a Thursday, me the fanboy was only able to get 2 hours in so far.

First impressions:

- The game looks okay-ish, one thing that bothers me is the static sky
- I like the how colorful it is, but then I'm very masculine and straight. People who get triggered by colors are usually closet homosexuals trying to resist their desire to suck dick and balls.
- Overall, the presentation and art has that distinct Firefly vibe, which is great
- Music and VO are instantly forgettable
- Systems don't seem very deep, but they're about what you can hope for in a mainstream game :/
- I like how brainwashed by corporations NPCs are, it's a nice touch
- skill checks, skill checks everywhere
- combat is FNV untouched by Captain Balance, too early to tell if it's good or bad thing. Hopefully there are some builds that just break shit.

I also haven't been able to play much yet. Just arrived at Edgewater.

I do love the graphics, they are better then I expected from Obsidian after FNV.

But so far what is the biggest fail from me is that Fallout 4 seems deeper/richer combat mechanics wise, with more powerful/interesting perks and ways to game the Vats system and exploit the guaranteed critical hits system.

This appears to be closer to a simple shooter.

 

[Prime Junta]

Er... she talks like she’s from the 1890s (more specifically, she’s practically a carbon copy of the engineer girl from Firefly, just with a bit more melanin). There’s plenty to criticize about TOW, but middle class California girls haven’t talked like Parvati in over a century.

I wasn't referring to her diction. I was referring to the substance, what she's actually saying. A hayseed accent is just more (mixed-up) blackface.