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

[Grunker]

Finally fixed the foliage. GOTY 2023

 

[Roguey]

"As someone who used to play games mostly on a PC and now plays mostly on a console hooked to a big TV," says Cain, "I am looking forward to the 4K resolution and increased texture sizes."

Yeah, that sounds about right.

 

[ferratilis]

Do you think his husband has ever played Fallout 1/2? Or if they at least talked about it during dinner, while eating chicken karaage?

 

[Silverfish]

I'd actually respect Obsidian more if, in keeping with the setting, the Spacer's Choice Edition is a buggy piece of shit that crashes constantly.

 

[lycanwarrior]

This happens after the poor year Xbox had last year along with the MSFT layoffs last month.

This is what an economic crisis smells like in the morning!



EDIT: Published by Take 2. The above still applies anyway lol.

 

[agris]

Is this the best Alpha Protocol spiritual successor, or just the one that hews the closest to the original vision?

 

[cigaretteEnjoyer_despirit]

Is this the best Alpha Protocol spiritual successor, or just the one that hews the closest to the original vision?

Don't be so harsh on AP. It's an all right game.

 

[Roguey]

Largely empty interview with Boyarsky and Cain with some clickbait at the end https://www.thegamer.com/the-outer-worlds-hopeful-dystopia-interview/

Something that sticks out upon revisiting The Outer Worlds is that it is a much more hopeful world than Fallout. In those games, while the story plays out things rarely get better, they simply change, and the world is still burned to a crisp. As cynical and satirical as The Outer Worlds is, it focuses on humans managing to survive in the face of overwhelming odds and unending corporate greed.

Both Boyarsky and Cain bring up how many of the characters you meet are just “people trapped in the system,” as Boyarsky puts it. He goes on to explain that maybe the darkness of the Fallout games is down to “the naivete of us in our early 30s,” in his words this was a time when “everything seemed to be going good on the surface”. At that time the games industry was growing, and there was a tech bubble that seems like it will never burst, “It just seemed like a hopeful time”. As a result, the team leaned into making the Fallout universe grim because, according to Cain, “it’s funny to go dark when everything’s great.”


But when it came time for a spiritual successor to these games, Cain mentions that The Outer World started development in April of 2016, and that “reality intruded a little bit… the world changed greatly,” and it seems like Obsidian needed to focus on the possibility of better futures in the face of a grim reality. Boyaskary explains that he thinks their games will always be dark and cynical to a point, “but when the world gets really dark,” he says “I think you take on trying to find that hope.”

ORANGE MAN BAD

 

[Lemming42]

I think that's interesting, the idea that Fallout was a response to "end of history" optimism and TOW was a response to mid-late-2010s cultural despair - though in the latter's case, it didn't feel particularly hopeful or inspiring to me, it just felt fairly dull.

Seeing Fallout described as hopeless feels very jarring to me, though; even in Fo1, the bleakest game of the series, there's still a strong sense that the world has the potential to recover (or even reinvent itself entirely) and the Vault Dweller's ability to affect positive change. Maybe it's just the way I tend to approach fiction, but I've always considered Fallout to actually embody 1990s optimism, rather than be a reaction to it - even in the horrors of the post-apocalypse, there's a lot of decent people, things to make you laugh out loud, and so on, and every settlement you discover offers you the opportunity to leave it better than you found it.

Then Fallout 2 is essentially a comedy, and New Vegas is undeniably forward-looking and infused with a certain degree of optimism - there's a reason people use the term "post-post-apocalyptic" for it.

Meanwhile TOW didn't feel like it demonstrated any kind of deliberate optimism or sense of hope to me, despite the fact that I got the best ending where you talk Debra Wilson down without violence and become widely considered the best person in the universe or whatever for your work on saving the colony. Definitely didn't pick up on anything that seemed like a specific reaction to 2016-era culture war malaise.

 

[Ash]

Twice I almost cashed in and bought this game, and twice I came here to remind myself that it's a bad idea. Thank you Codex.

It would help if the powers that be did not keep posting/bumping threads with new marketing material dedicated to these garbage games. Codex is like 60% threads dedicated to garbage, 40% to acceptable or greater. It's very unfortunate. But that's fine, because most (but not all) threads are of the garbage games getting mocked and the good games getting praised, I just wish the codex had a little more emphasis on the incline as opposed to the decline, even if the incline is very hard to find these days.

 

[Kev Inkline]

TOW is like the tranny audience it's catered to, doesn't quite know what it's trying to be.

In the process what's meant to be quirky and funny turns into banal and boring.

 

[gurugeorge]

I will say the one positive thing I found about the game was the attempt - not all that well done, because the writers are retarded, but at least an attempt - to make interlocutors' dialogue with you a bit more context-aware, more directly responsive to you and the path you'd taken up to the point of dialogue. It was occasionally surprising and had an interesting effect, and it's a trick that should be explored more in RPGs (probably more possible with AI actually).

 

[MajorMace]

The use of AI in dialog dynamics has a lot of potential. But for it to work properly, wouldn't it impact the game design negatively ? Like, purposefully restraining your creativity for the sake of safeguarding the AI specific framework ?

Feels like handmade reactivity will remain preferable for a long time to me.

 

[gurugeorge]

The use of AI in dialog dynamics has a lot of potential. But for it to work properly, wouldn't it impact the game design negatively ? Like, purposefully restraining your creativity for the sake of safeguarding the AI specific framework ?

Feels like handmade reactivity will remain preferable for a long time to me.

I'm thinking along the lines of that the "handmade" aspect would be the computer being aware of the choices you'd made up to that point (so far as they would be known about by relevant people or characters in the virtual world of course), and there being a set of handmade potential response types in the abstract (that would move the quests/plot along), with the particular manner of response and the concrete details of it - turn of phrase, words used - given the character and flavour of the person you're talking to by the AI. Is that possible?

I think the virtue of being able to talk to anybody like that, and not just specific "named" characters, would be very interesting - it would mean you could have a lot more interesting conversations with random NPCs, for one thing, and could be led further along quest paths by them. It would be a lot more like having a real DM responding to you through characters in the game world (or taking control of the NPC you're talking to in a NWN/NWN2 persistent world).

 

[MajorMace]

I think the most obvious and pragmatic use AI would help with is, just as for semantic web, the ability to let the player literally type stuff in.
We would have gone from keyword to dialog options (which really are decorated keywords as long as systems are concerned) to actual free input.
But I don't see how it could amount to anything, ultimately, but finding your own way to ask what the designer would have let you ask in the first place.
For AI use to make sense, you'd have to review your designs principles. It wouldn't be mere feature to toy with, but an actual paradigm shift to marry, I assume.

Because, yeah, you could have a discussion with an NPC about the state of the town and how the local dwarf bank is full of niggards, and it can even feel eerily authentic to some extent... but to what end after all ?

It's already difficult to fully grasp the potential of our current design architectures, so to imagine what could be done with AI-processed NPC behaviour is nigh impossible.
An angle of work I feel would be interesting is to look into how such a way to handle dialogs can help craft investigation in such games.
The way investigation works today is, by necessity, scripted and therefore deterministic. You'll eventually find the solution in the finite given amount of options. But with AI, said options are potentially infinite, meaning that with proper beacons (not to turn it into an impossible task ofc), you could deliver new ways to let the player unravel mysteries and shit.
One thing's for sure, and that's the potential of tomorrow's AI-powered systems.

On the long run though, the designer's job will evolve into an architect role. You'll essentially work on beacons and boundaries, and most of the fluff will be AI-generated.
Genuine creation will be the exclusive lot of geniuses, whose genius will warrant discovering the fruit of their writing, and I can't really say that's such a bad thing.

 

[gurugeorge]

I think the most obvious and pragmatic use AI would help with is, just as for semantic web, the ability to let the player literally type stuff in.
We would have gone from keyword to dialog options (which really are decorated keywords as long as systems are concerned) to actual free input.
But I don't see how it could amount to anything, ultimately, but finding your own way to ask what the designer would have let you ask in the first place.
For AI use to make sense, you'd have to review your designs principles. It wouldn't be mere feature to toy with, but an actual paradigm shift to marry, I assume.

Because, yeah, you could have a discussion with an NPC about the state of the town and how the local dwarf bank is full of niggards, and it can even feel eerily authentic to some extent... but to what end after all ?

It's already difficult to fully grasp the potential of our current design architectures, so to imagine what could be done with AI-processed NPC behaviour is nigh impossible.
An angle of work I feel would be interesting is to look into how such a way to handle dialogs can help craft investigation in such games.
The way investigation works today is, by necessity, scripted and therefore deterministic. You'll eventually find the solution in the finite given amount of options. But with AI, said options are potentially infinite, meaning that with proper beacons (not to turn it into an impossible task ofc), you could deliver new ways to let the player unravel mysteries and shit.
One thing's for sure, and that's the potential of tomorrow's AI-powered systems.

On the long run though, the designer's job will evolve into an architect role. You'll essentially work on beacons and boundaries, and most of the fluff will be AI-generated.
Genuine creation will be the exclusive lot of geniuses, whose genius will warrant discovering the fruit of their writing, and I can't really say that's such a bad thing.

Interesting, that's pretty much as I suspected is possible (especially the third paragraph).

I think immersion counts for a lot in RPGs, they aren't "merely" tactical combat games, there's a story element, and an immersion element, and both redound on the decisions you make if you're roleplaying a character. So I think being able to type in natural responses would definitely be an advancement. Of course people will fuck about with it - hell, everybody will fuck about with it for a bit, for fun - but if it can be used "seriously" that would be very cool.

Agree re. investigation. I mean basically, what you want AI to do is be like a semi-intelligent DM, much as the original developer's dream for Daggerfall was. You want the game world to interact intelligently with you. So if the game can observe what you're doing (e.g. inspecting footprints in an area) it ought to be able to intelligently guess that you're investigating something and nudge you along appropriately (in any number of ways - a passing NPC making a comment, the sudden existence of a relevant item nearby (that would have been culled to your vision previously, so you don't know it's suddenly appeared in the game, i.e. for all you the player know it was always there).

Such a game is always going to be like a stage set that's furiously being unrolled, rerolled, changed around, in various ways "behind the scenes" according to the decisions you make - various possibilities are lined up and pre-prepared (much like possible textures you might soon be looking at), and the game agilely switches between them and creates alternative virtual paths. Essentially a Potemkin virtual world that's constantly adapting to your decisions - but you don't know it, your feeling, your immersion, is that it's all stolidly there, has always been there the way it is, that these NPCs have always been around living their lives, etc.

 

[laclongquan]

What's especially striking about it though is that it is Fallout: New Vegas. It's the same game, and yet it doesn't work, whereas New Vegas does in spite of itself. Probably a lot to analyse there.

It's missing all the interesting parts of F:NV: the factions and their rock-paper-scissors idealogical conflict, interesting writing, and believable characters.

Outer Worlds is "capitalism bad, m'kay?" with shitty guns and forgettable characters.

"capitalism bad, m'kay?" is not the problem. Bad writing is the problem. Get it straight, storyfags!

In FNV, football gear barbarians and US troopers are not a problem (or even a joke) because the writings are good and cover all that jazz.

Truth be told, Outer World is missing a great deal with their terrible writing department. The idea of 50s-style Science Fictiony direction is a comparable idea to retrofuturism. But the main issue is the excution.

Outer World 2 could be on to a good thing if their writing department improve to the level of FNV, Bloodlines, or Fallout 2.

 

[gurugeorge]

What's especially striking about it though is that it is Fallout: New Vegas. It's the same game, and yet it doesn't work, whereas New Vegas does in spite of itself. Probably a lot to analyse there.

It's missing all the interesting parts of F:NV: the factions and their rock-paper-scissors idealogical conflict, interesting writing, and believable characters.

Outer Worlds is "capitalism bad, m'kay?" with shitty guns and forgettable characters.

"capitalism bad, m'kay?" is not the problem. Bad writing is the problem. Get it straight, storyfags!

In FNV, football gear barbarians and US troopers are not a problem (or even a joke) because the writings are good and cover all that jazz.

Truth be told, Outer World is missing a great deal with their terrible writing department. The idea of 50s-style Science Fictiony direction is a comparable idea to retrofuturism. But the main issue is the excution.

Outer World 2 could be on to a good thing if their writing department improve to the level of FNV, Bloodlines, or Fallout 2.

Yeah it's mainly the writing - vacuous zoomer retard female writers who one pictures being on their smartphones 24/7 - but the gameplay is also a bit tired and formulaic. You'd think such old hands would have had the balls to advance the genre at least a little bit, but it's the same tired old gameplay we've seen a thousand times by now, with nothing really to make you as interested in again it as you were the first few times you played that sort of game.

The setting, the concept, are all fine, and did promise something special.

And capitalism is bad, but the reasonings for why it's bad in the game aren't just sophomoric, but like "20 years out of date and I haven't even tried to update my priors in all that time" sophomoric.

 

[WhiskeyWolf]

So they are charging you for a slight graphical update... wow.

 

[laclongquan]

Gameplay is not the problem. FNV gameplay is more than a decade right now and do we get tired of that? No.

It's the writings, i tell you. Mods can change gameplay but nothing can fix writings~

On that note, dont ever expect AI will help you with writings. It could even worsen the level~

 

[luj1]

Is this the best Alpha Protocol spiritual successor

No this is the best Fallout 4 reskin

 

[Alienman]

So they are charging you for a slight graphical update... wow.

Leaves don't move by themselves you know.

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

FNV gameplay is more than a decade right now and do we get tired of that? No.

Uh... get?

 

[Nano]

Is this the best Alpha Protocol spiritual successor, or just the one that hews the closest to the original vision?

What the fuck are you talking about?

 

[jackofshadows]

The fact they're trying to charge people for this upgrade is far funnier than anything I saw in the game itself, and boy it tried.

Exactly, the irony levels are off the charts, good fucking job for once.