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.
