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

[SomeGuyWithAnOpinion]

https://support.privatedivision.com...rlds-Spacer-s-Choice-Edition-Patch-Notes-v1-2

The Outer Worlds: Spacer's Choice Edition Patch Notes - v1.2​

The Outer Worlds: Spacer’s Choice Edition Patch v1.2 is available now for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S. Thank you for your patience while our team worked diligently to get this out, and continue reading below to see what resolutions this update brings you.

Performance:
• Replaced dynamic resolution with FSR and added option selector on PC
• Framerate improvements on all platforms
• Various improvements to reduce hitching issues across all platforms
• Specific DirectX 12 allocation improvements to fix hitches on PC
• Fixed settings auto-detection on PC
• Fixed multiple flickering issues
• Optimized graphics settings on PlayStation®5 and Xbox Series X|S
• Optimized VFX during combat to address frame rate dips

Stability:
• Fixed occasional crash when detecting graphics settings on PC

General:
• Various bug fixes
• Fixed bug where EULA needs to be accepted after every launch
• Material and texture updates to remove visible seams and improve overall visuals
• Lighting improvements
• Fixed excessive shadow popping bug in Roseway
• Fixed disappearing reticle when changing settings during gameplay
• Fixed floating grass in Monarch
• Improved LODs to reduce popping

Though this patch introduces many fixes, our team is still hard at work gathering feedback and implementing further improvements. If you encounter a bug not listed above, please contact our support team directly to report issues.

Lots of fixes, but nothing addressing the atrocious gameplay. Pass.

 

[Yosharian]

Imagine thinking that anything could 'fix' this game lmao

 

[Fedora Master]

Imagine thinking that anything could 'fix' this game lmao

Codex still thinks mods can fix Skyrim or Cyberpunk. Hope springs eternal.

 

[Latelistener]

LoversLab did fix Skyrim though.

 

[v1c70r14]

I bit the bullet and tried this game out, with the inventory dupe glitch of course. It looks visually repulsive, like a colorblind person puked up the palette after mistakenly eating rancid food, so I knew it wasn't going to be fun to play it. Why did I download this piece of crap preachy Ameri-leftist Rick and Morty ripoff brought to you by Microsoft®? I don't know, maybe some people involved had enough goodwill fumes left from the Troika days, maybe it's because I'm a sucker for science fiction, a very guilty pleasure.

Took me one hour or so to eject myself out of it, deleting any trace of it I could find from my hard drive. There wouldn't be much to say about it, it sucked just as much as I thought it would, if not for the fact that I had come from playing the Marathon trilogy. Before I start tearing it apart I'll mention that it was decently optimized and the PC port didn't suffer from any technical problems. It looks just as bad as intended and there were no glitches or bugs. I played the original version and not the worse "remaster", who knows how many bugs they introduced with the visual downgrade.

A game running smoothly on even aged PC hardware won't save it from being bad though. Marathon came out way back in 1994 and coming from that game I think you start asking questions beyond the usual objections people might have to this game. Yeah, you might ask why they chose to set the reddit critique of capitalism in the future as well as in space and then not do anything with these other parts. It's not like you need to go to another planet to say something about capitalism if that's your intention, but then if you are a part of what's bad about it then I suppose it's a bit awkward to point a finger to anything but yourself if you place the game in a contemporary setting. The Marathon games told stories that couldn't possibly take place anywhere else than the high tech far-future setting they picked. I'm not just talking about plot points, but themes and what the game deals with.

Being the response to Doom for the Mac I suppose they expected other Mac users were as heady as they were, while Doom had generic demons to shoot Marathon was all about context.

In the first Marathon game you are immediately invested, even before you start the game the manual alludes to this larger universe and contains mystery hooks. Before you know it you're liberating aliens from slavery, one of the ship's three AIs starts worrying about the death of the universe and delivers meta-commentary on your relationship to the game as a player as well as that you play as an undead cyborg from a half-forgotten Sol conflict. This is all delivered in the form of unvoiced text in terminals spread out in Doom-style levels and it does not just a better job of making AIs interesting characters than any characterization in Outer Worlds was, but I'd go further and say it's better than System Shock.

The only voice lines in Marathon are from the hapless Bobs, the workers in the hollowed out moon that is the colony ship Marathon, and despite either being these very annoying guys you are to rescue or later on cybernetically enhanced soldiers forced to fight for a rogue AI they still have more personality to them (and are much more memorable) than anything in OW. This is despite all their lines being short barks recorded by one guy in an afternoon.

So how do you mess it up that badly? One reason is that when you're stuck with the pomo comedy you can't make the game too sincere or ask the player to take it seriously or get invested. Doubly so with the corporate critique the game tries and fails to do. Why would you get invested in anything when everyone is written like an asshole and if you start shooting everyone you see you get some reddit quip back. There are no unknowns, it doesn't go anywhere and everything in the game is necessarily shallow.

Maybe it's too much to expect something so self-conscious that the devs do the Morrowind thing before Kirkbride popped his first pill, as Bungie did in Infinity when they had the player undergo AI rampancy (becoming independent) themselves, and this leading to true freedom in the end, since the game was the first in the series bundled with a map editor. But with games such as Fallout and Arcanum and such it was easy to get invested, the worlds themselves and characters offered all sorts of questions, themes, mysteries, explorations and more. Space is supposed to be the final frontier but it was less imaginative than games set on Earth in OW. There aren't even any competing ideologies as Alpha Centauri offered, the game comes in exactly one flavor and once you've seen the first five minutes you've seen it all.

Playing OW is like being stuck in an LA nightmare and you're free do whatever you want, even to shoot anyone but not even that offers satisfaction. There's nothing endearing about the wacky writing which exists because of a lack of confidence in actually making something worthwhile. Maybe it's a very 90's thing to look up at the stars and ask what's out there, and maybe we aren't allowed to talk about what corporations do that is actually harmful to us, but they could have not made everyone talk as if they were written by Joss Whedon. It's like the writers sat down before making the game and binged Marvel flicks along with all the seasons of Justin "Jewish Pedophile" Roiland's Rick and Morty and thought they'd like to make that but even worse.

If I cared more I would have thought this post through more and structured it to hammer in how a half-forgotten Doom clone for Apple hardware in 1994 did everything better than an AA Obsidian game, headed by Troika has-beens, and published by Microsoft. Text terminals in labyrinthine FPS levels aren't inherently more engaging than fully voice acted, cinematic, pseudo-RPGs.

Rounding things off the character creation gets compliments since you can make a character that looks like yourself and you're not forced to pick from the ugliest looking raisins that Larry Fink wants to force you to play as, but it's baffling that they even have this component in the game at all since there is no conversation camera, no third-person mode and you practically never see this character you created. Why put in all this effort on the player customization when your character isn't in the game at all? Cyberpunk 2077 did this too and I can't warp my head around the game designer's process here.

Character creation

Other screenshots

At least it isn't empty like Starfield will be.

Combat isn't very fun, it's just as bad as it is in most FPS RPG-lites.

Everyone in the game is tremendously ugly for some reason.

 

[thesecret1]

There's nothing endearing about the wacky writing which exists because of a lack of confidence in actually making something worthwhile.

That's the impression I got from it as well. That they weren't actually trying to be funny, but rather used it as a shield to deflect criticism with.

 

[Fedora Master]

You knowingly ate shit only to regale us with an Impression of how said shit tasted. You'll fit right in with the rest of the Codex.

 

[v1c70r14]

There's nothing endearing about the wacky writing which exists because of a lack of confidence in actually making something worthwhile.

That's the impression I got from it as well. That they weren't actually trying to be funny, but rather used it as a shield to deflect criticism with.

It's often the case with games "trying to be funny", I can't think of many examples of games where the developers had a track record of making humorous content and doing it as a natural part of the game and something that fits with their talents. Most of those cases it's people coming in from other mediums and getting game developers to make a game for them. Obsidian did this for South Park, regardless of if you find it funny or not it was a game built to deliver that type of content and the comedy was the point of it. Using jokes to cover up a lack of talent, pointing out how dumb and bad your game is, that never works out. Most people can see right through it.

You knowingly ate shit only to regale us with an Impression of how said shit tasted. You'll fit right in with the rest of the Codex.

After Marathon I ran out of quality science fiction games to play, what else is there to do at that point than analyzing shit? I thought I might be able to stomach it for longer since people keep saying it's mediocre, or inoffensive but bland. Turns out it's not, it's actively foul and unlike a mid game you can enjoy if you have nothing else to play this is a game I wouldn't play if it was the single form of entertainment I had available on a deserted island.

Although it might seem like I spent way too many words talking about OW and my mostly unfiltered stream of consciousness don't make for good reading what OW did for me was to make me think about other games. How much Homeworld could accomplish with some voice acting, music and gameplay that looked like this most of the time:

Spoiler

Or how great Arcanum's introduction was. Immediately starting the game it drives story hooks into you, who shot up the zeppelin, who was that dying gnome, what's with this ring, who does this religious guy think I am? Or how static computer terminals in Marathon are more engaging in terms of character and lore than whatever Obsidian can deliver with fully voice acting expressive 3D models. Every second spent playing OW you become intimately acquainted with how genius just about any other game truly is. If you don't play shit games like OW you'll never realize just how much of a slammer it is to open your game with the player getting shot in the head.

 

[v1c70r14]

TL;DR: if you want to rekindle your love for even mediocre video games then force yourself to play Outer Worlds.

 

[cvv]

I don't need Umberto Eco either

Inb4 Sawyer releases Disco Elysium iike game inspired by The name of the rose and its actually good

A Name of the Rose game would be extremely cool. All 53 people who'd buy and play it would enjoy it tremendously.

Just reading through the thread and came across these old posts.

As it turns out, Sawyer DID release a historical game, it IS based on Name of the Rose, kindda, it IS Overwhelmingly Good and about 53 people actually bought it.

RPG Codex, home of the hottest of hot news. Learn about upcoming games waay before even the developers.

 

[Sarathiour]

it IS Overwhelmingly Good

about that

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

You knowingly ate shit only to regale us with an Impression of how said shit tasted. You'll fit right in with the rest of the Codex.

he still has to finish it 7 times.

 

[AwesomeButton]

I was recently afflicted with the morbidest of morbid curiosities, and decided to give ToW a try.

Impressions after ~5-6 hours, reaching lvl 7 and just wrapped up the Edgewater hub:

This would have been a fun RPG, if it was not FPP. I will elaborate.

ToW's weaknesses are:
1. its graphics style, which looks as if someone vomited all over your screen. I'm playing it on a 48" LG OLED which is an HDR TV and in HDR this shit looks even worse, because of the deeper colors. I've used an ini-editing mod to reduce the post-processing, but it's still looking pretty bad.
2. The uncanny valley of the writing's overall tone. I'm not even commenting on the clumsy and inept social commentary. The odd hybrid of dark humor which at specific times intentionally bleeds into something like nu-Fallout's horror is inappropriate for the choice of FPP. The first person perspective tugs towards simulationism and realism, and the writing is somewhat in conflict with that. There is also the separate problem with the tone being that of a parody when presenting the corporations, but dead serious and dramatic when presenting the point of view of the "SJW" faction.
3. The game has been produced on a shoestring budget, and this shows much more in an FPP game. NPC variance, the size of areas, the lack of small character animations that add believability to an FPP game's world further impair the "suppression of disbelief".

ToW's strengths:
1. The C&C giving potential for replayability.
2. The humor, which often shines through the unfortunately chosen first person perspective, and is a fairly unique feature of the game.
3. The art and architectural style of the society where the story takes place

Basically all three of those strengths were made much of in pre-release materials, and it's no surprise that they so were.

If you imagine the same RPG content - characters, voiced conversations, quests, areas and all - but set in an isometric game, the three big weaknesses immediately disappear, while the strengths are underscored. By not distracting the player with requiring him to trample pointlessly from place to place, you direct his attention to the things that are your game's strenghts.

Why I say "trample pointlessly". The Behesda RPG's core strength is in the game loop of "explore - gather loot - progress skills and gear".

When Obsidian tries to superficially emulate the Bethesda gameplay, it does so without offering the exploration part. Emerald Vale exists for the sole purpose of making the player trudge through it in order to fetch an item or talk to an NPC rooted in some corner of a one square mile area. You can barely try to explore without hitting a quest-related spot. There isn't enough space on the map for exploration to actually occur. And when there is no exploration in this otherwise Bethesda-reminiscent game, the player ends up asking himself, does this designer hate me or is he trying to waste my time by making me walk from here to there.

Again, isometric, with world map travel, would have been a bit better. Even better would have been sparing the budget for some random encounters on the way from place to place. Whoever made the decision to go with FPP for ToW turned from potential cult title into the forgettable mediocrity that it is.

In conclusion, Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarski seem to be suffering from an oldtimer syndrome where they are not bothered by multiple RPG cliches and shortcomings exhibited by ToW, as if they haven't been playing RPGs since Fallout 3. Dude, your game's opening 10 hours are boring and predicatable, wake up. It was Tim Cain's video on how he QA'd ToW and his enumeration of different characters he played the game with, that sparked my interest, and that lead me to this observation about him. He seems to have had great fun, whereas for me, these initial hours felt like going through the motions.

 

[ItsChon]

No mention of the dogshit combat? Even if they had done the sensible thing and made TOW isometric, I somehow doubt they would have managed to introduce a good combat system.

 

[AwesomeButton]

No mention of the dogshit combat? Even if they had done the sensible thing and made TOW isometric, I somehow doubt they would have managed to introduce a good combat system.

The quality of combat is destroyed utterly in multiple ways - first of all, the laughable FoV, then the input lag, then the AI that's somewhere at the Duke 3D level. I started with the intent to play a one-shot-kill pistol-wielding sneak, but around lvl 6 I just waved my hands and started pumping marauders full of bullets, with the help of Parvati who was diverting enemy fire from me.

True though, you can't pass in an isometric game with combat this bad, unless your name is Swen Vincke. It would have been so fun to read the mainstream reviews if Obsidian had copied his magic/physical shield "system" 1:1 and called it "bullet armor"/"energy shield" or whatever, and then all the scolding reviews would pop up about how simplistic and number-spongy it is.

I didn't put much effort into analysing combat because, what does it matter in the final tally? Does Fallout have good and balanced combat, and enemy AI, and how much does it suffer from not having those?

 

[Butter]

Isometric Outer Worlds with Fallout-tier combat probably would've received a pass from most people.

 

[AwesomeButton]

Isometric Outer Worlds with Fallout-tier combat probably would've received a pass from most people.

I'm glad you're hinting at ToW's apparent commercial success, because my money is firmly on the expectation that ToW fooled consumers that "it's gonna be like Fallout New Vegas" the same way that PoE fooled around a million consumers overall that "it's gonna be like Baldur's Gate". I fully expect that Deadfire's fate will be mirrored by ToW 2 and it will be a better game which will suffer a far weaker reception due to people feeling burned by the first game. Time will tell.

I can imagine Outer Worlds being carried by its (isometric) graphics style, C&C and humor and reaching the one million mark through good reputation and word of mouth.

Sure, no one can argue that it makes more financial sense to sell your game to (say) 5 million people who will play it for 5-20 hours and put it on the shelf, or in the best case, do one playthrough sticking to the main quest.

 

[thesecret1]

Dude, your game's opening 10 hours are boring and predicatable, wake up.

No kidding, I uninstalled after about 6 when I found myself literally falling asleep at the keyboard.

I think the main issue was that in games like these, most people want to get immersed. They want to feel like they are inside the setting. It's why Bethesda games always get so many mods emphasising essentially slice of life things – hunting and skinning deer in Skyrim, being able to chop firewood to sell or burn, bathing... Loads of stuff that is absolutely ridiculous from game design perspective, save for the immersion it can provide. And then you get TOW that absolutely murders that entire aspect right out the gate by making everything a retarded parody. The fact it's hideous didn't help it either.

It's like they completely forgot what New Vegas is.

 

[SpaceWizardz]

garbage assessment

I guess we are now in the revisionist period of TOW's life.
We all played this trash, you can't peddle cringe about TOW's mediocre combat being what drove people away from a masterclass in RPG storytelling because we already know that's blatantly untrue.
By all the worldbuilding, writing, and design standards set by Fallout/Arcanum/New Vegas, TOW is unambiguous decline in every aspect.

But the humor though!!!

Deeply unserious opinion, maybe you meant to post in this thread instead?

 

[AwesomeButton]

garbage assessment

I guess we are now in the revisionist period of TOW's life.
We all played this trash, you can't peddle cringe about TOW's mediocre combat being what drove people away from a masterclass in RPG storytelling because we already know that's blatantly untrue.
By all the worldbuilding, writing, and design standards set by Fallout/Arcanum/New Vegas, TOW is unambiguous decline in every aspect.

But the humor though!!!

Deeply unserious opinion, maybe you meant to post in this thread instead?

I have better low-effort posts than this.

I made the disclaimer that I started the game to check what Tim Cain liked about it, not going to try to convince anyone it's a gripping RPG experience.

 

[Fedora Master]

Just proof that you shouldn't listen to has-been boomer devs.

 

[KVVRR]

snip

Nah, the game's meandering and making you go from place to place isn't that big of a deal, at least not nowadays. It is a problem but it's one that stems from this genre in specific, this mania open world games have with all this space in between interesting locations and nothing to really do within them. It's very hard to pull it off right and Outer Worlds certainly didn't have the time nor budget to actually pull it off. Funnily enough when the game first released I remember either obsidian, Tim or whoever else talking about how they didn't want to make TOW an open world game but one that had hub-areas, which would be the planets. It goes to show just how little content there really is when they themselves consider these maps small yet there just isn't that much in them, to the point the same complaints about open world games might apply.

But shitty gameplay in RPGs is nothing new. People can get by with terribly mediocre gameplay if there's something else to hook them. Like SpaceWizardz said, it's the tone and writing which utterly fail the game. You mention that you found the humor funny, but you're still on Edgewater. Go back a few hundred pages and you'll see how people talk about how they've becomed bored of it by the time they leave that planet, and how the game still has 3 or 4 more with the exact same jokes played over and over again in them.

Then about the C&C... there's some interesting options but again, if you keep playing, you'll quickly realize that most of the effort was put on that first planet. Try and see what a corpo playthrough looks like. To this day I still can't find a reason why you'd side with them even if you're going with a fully evil or greedy character. And they're the only other faction around.

 

[AwesomeButton]

You mention that you found the humor funny, but you're still on Edgewater.

I even specified - impressions after the first 5-6 hours.

Then about the C&C... there's some interesting options but again, if you keep playing, you'll quickly realize that most of the effort was put on that first planet. Try and see what a corpo playthrough looks like. To this day I still can't find a reason why you'd side with them even if you're going with a fully evil or greedy character. And they're the only other faction around.

My intention was to test Tim Cain's suggestion that the game can cover so many playstyles, so I thought I'd try to go against what I assume were the designers' intentions and roleplay the ultimate obnoxious libertarian Ayn Rand-in-stockings-pinup-on-my-school-locker autist.

In Edgewater, I found that I am implictly shown that I'm a bad person for helping Spacer's Choice, but these decisions were supported by the game, if begrudgingly. The libertarian mentality soon finds itself at odds with the corporations' policy of suppressing personal freedom however. They are more authoritarian/totalitarian which companies tend to become if they can get away with it, and on a remote colony in space, they indeed can. So I came to the conclusion that if you want to play a pro-corporations character, you have to roleplay something of a vatnik instead of a libertarian.

But why would you roleplay something that goes against your interests, and is it that bad in terms of how much the game supports it? The former - because why roleplay anything other than a calculating Anton Chigur murderhobo (aka "metagaming") except for fun. The latter - I don't know, haven't progressed that far yet, to see if it's really so bad and repetitive.

 

[cvv]

snip

People can get by with terribly mediocre gameplay if there's something else to hook them.

This. Proof - Torment, TW3, ME1, some of the best games ever with mediocre gameplay at best.

Obviously for decades we had games with great gameplay and shitty writing (98% of RPGs from 1980s on) but at least the inept writing in all the grorious RPGs of yore, hacked together by autistic neckbeard engineers with zero artistic talent, didn't stand in the way of your enjoyment of combat, itemization, exploration, systems etc.

But TOW made me so sick with the subliminal estrogen, vegan, Bay Area bluehair vibes the world and characters gave out I couldn't be able to enjoy it even if the combat or itemization was good. Which is wasn't.

 

[gurugeorge]

The only glimmer of interest this game had is its way of dealing with conversational responsiveness to the player - it seemed like an effort had been made to make the NPCs more "aware" of the player's choices, and comment on them in amusing ways, which I think is something that could be done much more in RPGs.

(While of course avoiding the ridiculous telepathy games sometimes have - you know, you dungeon delve in some obscure place and next time you go to town all the NPCs somehow know exactly what you did.)