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

[Konjad]

Wow, people actually discuss this turd on 'dex! For over 300 pages!

 

[MajorMace]

Wow people talk about this turd on the 'Dex for over 300 pages !

We're usually pretty resilient in the face of shit games, are we not ?

 

[Konjad]

Good job, shillfinitron.

Not so sure about that considering what is being said about it.

Thought so the same, so removed it, but you were too quick

 

[MajorMace]

No idea what you mean, pal.

 

[thesecret1]

Good job, shillfinitron.

Not so sure about that considering what is being said about it.

Thought so the same, so removed it, but you were too quick

It's because it's by Obsidian, else the thread would be much shorter

 

[ItsChon]

Mediocre means, something is of moderate quality. I would not seek out a mediocre restaurant, but if I had to eat at one, I would not be upset and would enjoy the food. Similarly, I wouldn't seek out a mediocre game, but if I was to be locked in a room an hour with nothing else to do, I would play it. If I was locked in a room with TOW, I would rather do anything else than play it. I would literally rather close my eyes and take a nap, or do some push ups. The game is not good!

You might want to recheck that math. 5 is not the middle between 1 and 10. 5.5 is.

Rating systems in general are skewed upwards from 50% for a variety of (good) reasons, an average performance being around 6 in most cases (On a scale of 10).

So, 3/10 sounds harsh to a lot of people. (Though honestly, depending on your viewpoint of Outer Worlds an argument can be made)

You do you of course and its your own personal rating system anyway so who gives a shit?

If you made the scale between zero and ten it would functionally be the same, but thank you for the correction. Personally I like having 0.5's in a scale, as it allows for further specificity and gives games a +/- wiggle room of one point which accounts for differing personal tastes in reviewers. I digress though.

As for rating systems being skewed upwards from 50%, I know this is common and I guess it was disingenuous of me to pretend like it doesn't exist when drafting my post, I just think it's retarded. Unless you're moving by 0.1 increments, you will never be able to consistently rate a games quality, and while you will be more accurate using this type of a rating system, your precision will be close to zero. I think it's a byproduct of reviewers being lazy, and people generally being stupid, and I refuse to participate in it.

Also, the sheer amount of decline in this thread. I will say this now.

FALLOUT: NEW VEGAS IS A 5/10 GAME AT BEST. IT IS NOT GOOD!

If you enjoyed that game, you have poor taste, and I'm not surprised you consider TOW to be "mediocre". KC:D is better than both FO:NV and TOW, and even then it is only a 6-6.5/10.

 

[Duraframe300]

As for rating systems being skewed upwards from 50%, I know this is common and I guess it was disingenuous of me to pretend like it doesn't exist when drafting my post, I just think it's retarded. Unless you're moving by 0.1 increments, you will never be able to consistently rate a games quality, and while you will be more accurate using this type of a rating system, your precision will be close to zero. I think it's a byproduct of reviewers being lazy, and people generally being stupid, and I refuse to participate in it.

What?

0.1 incremenets is implied here already. I don't know what that has to do with a rating system naturally being skewed up above 50%. I'm not saying to move in whole numbers.

If you reviewed a range of products *SUPER PROFESSIONALLY* with a list of fair and specific criteria when you average the whole thing out it probably will be at 60+ because at some point nearly every game will tick some random checkbox and get points for it. It's why an average/mediocre product for me isn't 50% (Which is a fail) because the product has to at least some additional positive value to it to be mediocre compared to the whole of the market or even just to be useful to me.

Reviews are shit because they're bloated and game reviewers are super unprofessionally (I doubt anyone of them actually keeps a consistent list of criteria) and corrupt, not because of specific interpretations of a rating system.

Anyway doesn't matter, again your rating system is perfectly fine. It does not apply to your scale (Your lowest is terrible, not non functioning so value is already implied) and you've stated how its to be interpreted. There's really nothing else necessary.

 

[Delterius]

I think TOW's mediocrity transcends scoring systems. The game fills the entire checklist for a 3/5, the problem is how it does so. As others have said there isn't anything that stands out in the game. So it goes from serviceable and entertaining enough - which is what mediocrity should be - to not worth thinking about. It's like if you made sauce with decent tomatoes and olive oil only to forget adding salt and seasoning. You're never doing that again.

 

[SpaceWizardz]

In the defense for Tim Cian, he does pointed out in The House of Dev interview the lack of trust from Obsidian leadership:

Cain is the problem, the insipid skinnerbox Fallout 3 derived design was his input.
No more cope posts ITT like "We could've had Space Arcanum if it weren't for those dastardly dangerhairs!!". I WILL post the triangles again if I keep seeing nonsense.

 

[ItsChon]

What?

0.1 incremenets is implied here already. I don't know what that has to do with a rating system naturally being skewed up above 50%. I'm not saying to move in whole numbers.

It is very common for people to review games and just give whole numbers, from my experience at least. Even then, it is common for people to not properly use the 0.1 increments. I avoid 0.1 increments for this very reason, as you go from having twenty to twenty-two possible ratings in my system, to having over a hundred when going by 0.1. You might as well just rate the game out of a hundred then, and that is avoided for the same reason 0.1 increments are either avoided or done poorly.

If you reviewed a range of products *SUPER PROFESSIONALLY* with a list of fair and specific criteria when you average the whole thing out it probably will be at 60+ because at some point nearly every game will tick some random checkbox and get points for it.

You are misconstruing fair, objective, and specific, with professional. Games, much like any other subjective thing, cannot be quantified/boiled down to checklists. A level of subjectivity is required, and good reviewers will not shy away form this but instead, embrace it. The rating system is merely there to easily communicate a reviewers oppinion without having to watch/read a lengthier explanation. Thus, I reject the assertion that TOW would end up 60+, and I'm not sure what point you're trying to make.

Reviews are shit because they're bloated and game reviewers are super unprofessionally (I doubt anyone of them actually keeps a consistent list of criteria) and corrupt, not because of specific interpretations of a rating system.

Reviews being shit and reviewers being lazy are two different things. In terms of reviews being shit, I disagree with your first reason. Serious reviews often require a good bit of time to properly detail what went right and wrong with a game. The average Darth Roxor review for example takes longer to read through than if you were to read the transcript of the average IGN review. If you meant bloated with shit that doesn't matter, while skimping out on the important shit, I might agree depending on the reviewer, but bloat is hardly what comes to mind when I try to think of reasons why most reviewers are shit.

I think TOW's mediocrity transcends scoring systems. The game fills the entire checklist for a 3/5, the problem is how it does so.

Name something that TOW does which is a 6/10 (3/5).

 

[Delterius]

Name something that TOW does which is a 6/10 (3/5).

Sorry, I meant to say 2.5/5 or 5/10. On that account I'd say everything. It's a mediocre 'shooter with stats'. It's a mediocre take on a corporate dystopia. It's graphics are mediocre. It's humor is too ambient. It's satire has no bite. It's art direction has highs and downs. And I'm not super stoked by the music either but I guess it's a 6+. There are only very specific moments in TOW I can glimpse a better game but they are few and far in between.

 

[thesecret1]

You people are thinking too hard about this shit.
1/5 - utter shite
2/5 - shite, but not completely
3/5 - meh
4/5 - pretty good
5/5 - excellent! I love it!

 

[Delterius]

1/5 released 10 years after i joined the codex
2/5 released 5 years after i joined the codex
3/5 released when i joined the codex
4/5 released 5 years before i joined the codex
5/5 vampire the masquerade bloodlines

 

[ItsChon]

Sorry, I meant to say 2.5/5 or 5/10. On that account I'd say everything.

You actually consider the games combat to be a 5/10?

Spoiler

This shit is mind numbingly terrible. Shooting or hitting things has zero weight or feel to it, enemies have no lateral movement making everything painfully easy to hit, movement in general is incredibily slow, no skill or tactics are required to get past encounters, and there are plenty of other things wrong with it. How does this qualify as a 5/10?

I'm not going to bother going into every aspect of the game and why many of them are below a 5/10, but let's ignore that for a moment. Games, just like art or movies or literature, are not something that can be summed up by just going through a checklist. Many great games are greater than the sum of their parts, and many terrible games are worse than the sum of their parts. Even if you were to get a 2.5/5 for example if you averaged out the ratings you gave the various elements of the game, that doesn't mean you can give the game itself a 5/10. Why is that a hard concept to understand?

You people are thinking too hard about this shit.

You think FO:NV is a great game. You should try thinking harder for a change.

 

[Delterius]

This shit is mind numbingly terrible. Shooting or hitting things has zero weight or feel to it, enemies have no lateral movement making everything painfully easy to hit, movement in general is incredibily slow, no skill or tactics are required to get past encounters, and there are plenty of other things wrong with it. How does this qualify as a 5/10?

Those are the things I expect from all mediocre shooters yes, which includes every 'shooter with stats' made by Obsidian and Bethesda so far.

Even if you were to get a 2.5/5 for example if you averaged out the ratings you gave the various elements of the game, that doesn't mean you can give the game itself a 5/10.

Wow amazing it's almost like that's what my initial post was about.

 

[ItsChon]

Those are the things I expect from all mediocre shooters yes, which includes every 'shooter with stats' made by Obsidian and Bethesda so far.

A shooter so bad that doing nothing for an hour would be more enjoyable than actually playing the game is a good enough product to qualify as mediocre. Does someone need to come into the room and kick you in the nuts every fifteen minutes while you're playing a shooter for you to consider it shit?

Wow amazing it's almost like that's what my initial post was about.

I still disagree with the assertion that the game is filled with 2.5/5s but whatever. The important point is that the game is shit.

 

[Delterius]

A shooter so bad

Yeah I find all these rpg shooters mediocre and boring. This one doesn't stand out from a pack that is below my notice. I don't really care if you think that's not a damning assertion. Skill issue.

 

[thesecret1]

You think FO:NV is a great game.

I think it's pretty good. Not all it could be, but pretty good nonetheless. I had fun playing it, thus 4/5. Any rating system with more granularity is doomed to be useless to a large degree due to the subjectivity of such ratings.

If I see someone rate a game 3/5, I know "Oh, so he thought it's pretty average." If he rates it at 2/5, I know he though it was pretty weak. There is a strong difference in meaning between each point. What difference in meaning is there between 7/10 and 8/10 however? I guess the dude had fun in both cases, and more fun with the 8, but am I getting any tangible information about the amount of fun present? Do I really get more information than a simple 4/5 "I had a pretty good time playing this"? No, I don't, because, that's literally all the information these two ratings contain. I don't know your precise standards for what makes a game an 8/10 compared to a 7/10, since everyone's opinion on this differs. Two people can have the exact same amount of fun, yet one may rate the game a 6/10 while the other rates it 8/10, because their standards differ. The resulting information is worthless. In comparison, however, there is no such ambiguity on a scale from 1 to 5. Did you have fun? Yes? Then it is either a 4 or a 5. Were you absolutely blown away? No? 4 it is. There is no room for fudging numbers over one person being more snobbish with his ratings than the other, and to a reader, the conveyed information is clear at a glance. "Oh he rated it 4/5, so he thinks it's a fairly fun game."

 

[Roguey]

Must have been an unpleasant shock to go from an atmosphere of such passion and creativity to what sounds like a very corporate, boring, soulless environment at Obsidian.

This transition happened with Fallout 2, which is why he quit. Went back to Feargus thinking he had changed (he had not).

 

[ItsChon]

You think FO:NV is a great game.

-snip-

My statement was an ad hominem attack. The implication was that FO:NV is a bad game, and if you like it you than you are not very intelligent/have decline taste, and thus, your opinion is not worth considering. That being said, let's look at your post and give you the benefit of the doubt.

If I see someone rate a game 3/5, I know "Oh, so he thought it's pretty average." If he rates it at 2/5, I know he though it was pretty weak. There is a strong difference in meaning between each point. What difference in meaning is there between 7/10 and 8/10 however? I guess the dude had fun in both cases, and more fun with the 8, but am I getting any tangible information about the amount of fun present?

It is as I suspected, you are retarded.

It doesn't matter if you can't differentiate between a 7/10 and an 8/10 because as you said, you use ratings as a simple fun meter to get a rough idea whether or not something is worth playing. If someone rates a game a 4/10, you know it's not worth playing, just like if they rate a game a 2/5. If someone rates a game a 7/10 or an 8/10, you know the game is "worth playing" just like they were to rate a game a 4/5. If someone rates a game 5/10 or 6/10, you know the game is pretty average, just like if they were to rate a game 3/5. So there really is no functional difference in using a 1-5 system and a 1-10 system when you rate games. I haven't even gotten into why rating scales which are curved towards the latter half of 0-10 scale are stupid.

But again, I was just roasting you and had no desire to actually address your shitty, low effort, smooth brained, half baked post regarding video game ratings. Much like the video game genre as a whole, forum discourse is also being dumbed down to complete shit.

 

[Ryzer]

The game is shit and deserves a full-blown 0/5, enuff said.
\backtomainpage

 

[thesecret1]

If someone rates a game a 7/10 or an 8/10, you know the game is "worth playing" just like they were to rate a game a 4/5. If someone rates a game 5/10 or 6/10, you know the game is pretty average, just like if they were to rate a game 3/5. So there really is no functional difference in using a 1-5 system and a 1-10 system with you rate games. I haven't even gotten into why rating scales which are curved towards the latter half of 0-10 scale are stupid.

A simple "I agree" would suffice, my dude.

My statement was an ad hominem attack.

I am aware, but I ignore such things in favour of actually discussing the matter at hand.

 

[ItsChon]

A simple "I agree" would suffice, my dude.

Except I don't agree with making a rating system from 1-5, because, as I said above, it is too simplistic.

 

[thesecret1]

A simple "I agree" would suffice, my dude.

Except I don't agree with making a rating system from 1-5, because, as I said above, it is too simplistic.

Any more complicated model would require the reader to actually be familiar with your rating standards to be of any informational value. But you are just some guy on the internet, why on Earth would anyone wanna familiarize himself with your personal standards? Then you get a thread full of people saying shit like "Oh I think this game is 6.5" and "No way, it is an 8 for sure!" where they may agree on virtually every aspect of the game, but use different kind of scales (even if they all go from 1 to 10).

 

[Gargaune]

Step 1 - State that there is no difference between the 5-star rating system and the 1-10 scale:

So there really is no functional difference in using a 1-5 system and a 1-10 system with you rate games.

Step 2 - Immediately point out a difference between the 5-star rating system and the 1-10 scale:

I haven't even gotten into why rating scales which are curved towards the latter half of 0-10 scale are stupid.

Step 3 - Call the other person stupid and act like you don't wanna engage despite having engaged and struggled to come up with four epithets of which three are effectively synonyms:

But again, I was just roasting you and had no desire to actually address your shitty, low effort, smooth brained, half baked post regarding video game ratings.

Your Resident Zoomer tag isn't encouraging, but come, let us be friends, kumbaya and all that crap, and I shall help you overcome your condition.

The distinction lies precisely in how the two systems are customarily used by the public, with the 1-10 scale being - as you say - "curved" towards the latter half in practice. This might be down to the scale being familiar across various school systems and the pass/fail threshold embedded in the public psyche, or maybe something else, but you are correct that 1-10 basically translates to 5-10 with the lower grades reserved for "this pisses me off on a personal level." You'd be tempted to think it's just the 5-star scale multiplied by 2, but you'll find that many people actually reserve 10/10 for milestone titles, 8/10 and 9/10 match 4 stars sometimes, others even 7/10 gets thrown in there, and things become even more haphazard below that, i.e. too many choices and standards leads to pointless ambiguity. Things get even worse once users remember the existence of decimals. The 1-10 scale does the job, but far from ideally.

The 5-star system doesn't seem to carry the same baggage, and it's 3 stars midpoint is generally accepted as a mark of safe mediocrity, the bread and butter of our existence. Three stars means a hotel is decently comfortable, a videogame is okay to kill some time with absent a better alternative, or that your Codex posts have significantly improved from their current state. Also, since we're dealing with personal opinion and provided you don't give in to the temptation of "half stars", the limited granularity is useful in reflexively forcing the rater to be more decisive and abstract with their assessment. If a simple Like/Meh/Dislike is too reductive and a (genuine) 1-10 scale is wasted on an audience unfamiliar with your likes and dislikes, a 5-step scale strikes a bit of a balance.

More importantly, however, you're getting upset over a misunderstanding. Same as you wouldn't use metres to measure temperature, games like Fallout: New Vegas can be rated on either the 5-star scale or (suboptimally) on the 1-10 scale, but The Otter Worlds can only be measured on South Park's Couric scale.