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

[Silverfish]

You're missing certain self-insert asexual meme lesbo character to hang around with.

I just started playing this a while back and deleted my saves and started over just to avoid recruiting Parvati.

 

[Nano]

There's a much more efficient way to avoid the characters in this game, ya know.

 

[Silverfish]

No, I hated her that much.

 

[Zombra]

More efficient than that.

 

[Zeriel]

Still playing TOW, and I'm puzzling over trying to further pin down what's unsatisfactory about it, despite it being fun in parts. I think it's 2 things:-

1) The "Pavlovian" nature of the design, as I said in my earlier post. It's like it's been designed to push one's buttons, and one feels like a lab rat. Now of course all games have some element of that, but I feel it's all been done in a rather soulless way with this, as a mechanical exercise. One might almost say it's too competent in this regard. Virtually everything that's player-facing in the game is designed to elicit a player reaction. Even the humour is designed in a particular way, for a particular kind of audience (social-status aware SJWs).

This is in contradistinction to a game where there's some intent to design a virtual world that has things just because that's how the world is. The game lacks a sense that these places have a life of their own, they're just so blatantly designed to invite the player to certain thoughts and actions, to present POIs in a logical flow, etc. It also makes exploration oddly unsatisfying, because you don't get the illusion that you're actually discovering something - you're always aware that you've been led by the nose to the discovered thing (e.g. like noticing a path up the side of a hill - you just know there's going to be something there, as opposed to it being a mystery whether there will be something there or not, it might just be a part of the landscape that doesn't reward you for exploration).

It's almost like the devs are deathly afraid to disappoint the player in any way. But the problem is, where there's no risk of disappointment, there's no excitement of discovery.

2) The dialogue. This is tricky because I actually like some of what they've done with the dialogue - there's an attempt in the dialogue to make the player's responses more logical (as in, what someone might be inclined to say in that given situation), as opposed to being options that just move the player along the plot in certain ways. It's almost the opposite problem of 1), where there's a lot of flavour in the dialogue that actually disguises what the optimal choices might be. But the problem here is that the chat is too Fourth Wall-ish, too self-aware, too winking, and not just that, but (again) its sense of humour is that of SJW-infected college graduates, a very narrow band of humour that walks on eggshells and can't really afford any visceral humour (because that relies on truth).

I found the C&C not really mattering at all more of a deathknell. If you're gonna do the C&C thing and make it your selling point and then it actually doesn't matter and just feels hollow... well, why else am I playing your game? There are plenty of better shooters with environments that are more fun to explore and have more stuff to find, better shooting mechanics, etc.

On the one hand I could say it was a huge disappointment in that it was supposed to be Cain & Boyarsky's return to grace... but that would imply I actually thought it was going to be. It was more that I was hoping against hope they would prove themselves, and instead they met my cynical expectations that their best days are behind them and they're just riding out their days until retirement. I guess with all that went down at Blizzard we now know why Boyarsky wanted to "downgrade" to Obsidian.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

everyone is fuckin offensively ugly, all the jokes overstay their welcome and then are beaten to death especially anything involving terminals, the writers don't know how to write so they substitute personality with gender race and sexuality, nothing matters because it's a "lol so zany" comedy game except it tries to be serious at times but the writers aren't capable of doing it so it's even worse than if it was just a comedy, the stealth is fuckin atrocious and some of the worst I've ever seen, perks or w/e they're called are worthless therefore the phobia system is worthless, nearly all the doors are just painted on and is especially painful in the last area where it's just a bunch of hallways with painted on doors, I remember disliking the companion AI or someshit idk I barely remember the game's RPG mechanics at all so they must have been dogshit in general
on the upside, you can kill nearly anyone and you're going to do it because nearly everyone you encounter is a fuckin ugly retard

nobody would have given two shits about the game if it wasn't released shortly after the Fallout First blunder
the next time you see anything advertising "from the creators of [thing you like] comes [shitty product]", run away. Good products don't need to namedrop.

I liked Vicar Max though.

 

[Zeriel]

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.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

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.

Corporations are bad, all they gave us was interstellar travel and colonization of alien planets.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

You know you're really rebelling against the man when you play a game about corporations being bad made by a subsidiary of one of the largest, most predatory corporations in the world.

 

[jackofshadows]

I just started playing this a while back and deleted my saves and started over just to avoid recruiting Parvati.

You could've just shot her in the face, you know. Or yeah, play something else. It's not like Parvati is the only game's problem.

 

[Silverfish]

You could've just shot her in the face, you know.

That's still more interaction than I wanted with her.

 

[Roguey]

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]

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]

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]

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.

 

[Sannom]

Corporations are bad, all they gave us was interstellar travel and colonization of alien planets.

Nah, the government invented interstellar travel after the corporations nearly killed each other and allowed it to rise up.

 

[Roguey]

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. 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]

There's one person like that

 

[Roguey]

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

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

I'll say this again, this game badly needs a jsawyer mod to fix out the difficulty.

 

[Nano]

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.

 

[Monolith]

I never tried it - thanks to you guys. It does read like a mightily shitty game in here.

 

[Delterius]

I never tried it - thanks to you guys. It does read like a mightily shitty game in here.

i think it's worse than shitty. it's really... median. it's the pilot of something worth talking about.

 

[vortex]

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?

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

It's just dead inside.