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

[Lambach]

And that's where the fantasy lies tbqh.

Feel free to disagree with that, but one point you can't argue is that at least fewer people get fucked over in that case.

 

[cvv]

Someone ask Cain/Boyarski how they made this piece of shit yet?

Letting the new blood have too much freedumb on the project/not telling them their ideas were dumb.

Also this could have had a role to play (Outer World discussion starting 1:52):

 

[Hellraiser]

Someone ask Cain/Boyarski how they made this piece of shit yet?

Letting the new blood have too much freedumb on the project/not telling them their ideas were dumb.

Also this could have had a role to play (Outer World discussion starting 1:52):

So basically obsidian is filled with millenials from broken families who feel threatened when people get into a vigorous argument over game design, because they get parents' divorce flashbacks? Then again this explains a lot of other things...

Not dismissing Cain's point about risk-aversion and caution. It could explain why TOW felt so bland, for example why the perks feel so weak (and don't have attribute requirements? been a while since I, unfortunately, played it). There's definitely a "design by committee" play it safe feel to it which is why the game feels so meh.

 

[Roguey]

Not dismissing Cain's point about risk-aversion and caution. It could explain why TOW felt so bland, for example why the perks feel so weak (and don't have attribute requirements? been a while since I, unfortunately, played it). There's definitely a "design by committee" play it safe feel to it which is why the game feels so meh.

TOW is a game for the masses, requiring someone to plan their character before they've even started is considered bad game design.

If one is making a game for some degree of thousands then sure, make them use a spreadsheet before they start (e.g. Underrail).

 

[Grunker]

The game's solution is to put a competent capitalist in charge.

Based and Chad-pilled.

also, I have nary a fucking clue about the game, I just found this discussion interesting

it's the most boring version of a "capitalism bad m'kay" story you can imagine

 

[Grunker]

Not dismissing Cain's point about risk-aversion and caution. It could explain why TOW felt so bland, for example why the perks feel so weak (and don't have attribute requirements? been a while since I, unfortunately, played it). There's definitely a "design by committee" play it safe feel to it which is why the game feels so meh.

TOW is a game for the masses, requiring someone to plan their character before they've even started is considered bad game design.

If one is making a game for some degree of thousands then sure, make them use a spreadsheet before they start (e.g. Underrail).

 

[Roguey]

it's the most boring version of a "capitalism bad m'kay" story you can imagine

But it's not a "capitalism bad" story.

However, co-director Boyarsky said the studio has been “very careful” not to “lecture” players with the themes featured in the game, telling VGC it’s “the last thing we want to do.”

He said: “I like money: I’m not against capitalism and in a lot of ways I’m happy with our society. But of course there are a lot of ways in which it could be improved.

Boyarsky said The Outer Worlds’ story is less a critique of modern capitalism and more about “power and how power is used against people who don’t have it.”

He said: “It can be insidious; the way which people control the stories you tell about the world. If you let other people control that narrative, then they can control you to a certain degree. That can be any form of government: if it wasn’t capitalism it could be something else.”

TOW is a game for the masses, requiring someone to plan their character before they've even started is considered bad game design.

If one is making a game for some degree of thousands then sure, make them use a spreadsheet before they start (e.g. Underrail).

I have no interest in Elden Ring, but if it's like Dark Souls and Bloodborne, it's not a "plan your build in advance or you get brickwalled" it's "if you fuck up your build you'll just have to grind for a long while to fix it" which is more palatable.

 

[Yosharian]

The game's solution is to put a competent capitalist in charge.

Based and Chad-pilled.

also, I have nary a fucking clue about the game, I just found this discussion interesting

it's the most boring version of a "capitalism bad m'kay" story you can imagine

It's so badly told that it actually makes you root for capitalism instead

 

[Grunker]

it's the most boring version of a "capitalism bad m'kay" story you can imagine

But it's not a "capitalism bad" story.

However, co-director Boyarsky said the studio has been “very careful” not to “lecture” players with the themes featured in the game, telling VGC it’s “the last thing we want to do.”

He said: “I like money: I’m not against capitalism and in a lot of ways I’m happy with our society. But of course there are a lot of ways in which it could be improved.

Boyarsky said The Outer Worlds’ story is less a critique of modern capitalism and more about “power and how power is used against people who don’t have it.”

He said: “It can be insidious; the way which people control the stories you tell about the world. If you let other people control that narrative, then they can control you to a certain degree. That can be any form of government: if it wasn’t capitalism it could be something else.”

TOW is a game for the masses, requiring someone to plan their character before they've even started is considered bad game design.

If one is making a game for some degree of thousands then sure, make them use a spreadsheet before they start (e.g. Underrail).

I have no interest in Elden Ring, but if it's like Dark Souls and Bloodborne, it's not a "plan your build in advance or you get brickwalled" it's "if you fuck up your build you'll just have to grind for a long while to fix it" which is more palatable.

Classic Roguey. You were responding to someone talking about attribute requirements. Elden Ring has a gazillion of those. Even if that was a concern, allowing free respec is still a better solution than designing a shit character system.

Sometimes your philosophy of lowest-common-denominator-design just isn't true. The path of least resistance is what brought you to it - not its truth-value

 

[cvv]

I played TOW only for a few hours but I absolutely walked away from the game with the impression it was a rather dimwitted and very inept anti-corporatist tale, despite Boyarsky claiming it wasn't supposed to be.

 

[Delterius]

anti-corporatist tale

It's not even anti-corporate, because the sympathetic characters are all corporate managers who played by the rules and were competent but were mismanaged into hell. But even you have to agree that being anti-corporate isn't the same thing as being anti-capitalist. 'This Oligopoly is literally the government for the entire star system and it happens to have evolved into a dystopia when it didn't have to' is nowhere close to a criticism of capitalism.

Again, this is a world where the government was abolished in the 1900s and humanity magically developed from there on. The fact that the developers seem to think factory farming is satanic isn't the same as them being anti-capitalism. Unless of course you really want to eat the gene-modded pigs and the bug burgers.

 

[Roguey]

Classic Roguey. You were responding to someone talking about attribute requirements. Elden Ring has a gazillion of those. Even if that was a concern, allowing free respec is still a better solution than designing a shit character system.

Sometimes your philosophy of lowest-common-denominator-design just isn't true. The path of least resistance is what brought you to it - not its truth-value

For equipment and not perks, right? DIfferent thing.

Elden Ring is a highly demanding game that happens to have massive appeal thanks to over a decade of From building up its brand. Outer Worlds demands little. "Having to plan/build a character before you can even start playing is bad game design" isn't a statement that originated from me, I've read it from multiple professional game designers. Outer Worlds rebels just a bit by making you choose your attributes and tag your skills before playing through a tutorial level, though it does so in a very streamlined fashion.

 

[Yosharian]

Outer Worlds demands little

It doesn't deliver much either

 

[Grunker]

Classic Roguey. You were responding to someone talking about attribute requirements. Elden Ring has a gazillion of those. Even if that was a concern, allowing free respec is still a better solution than designing a shit character system.

Sometimes your philosophy of lowest-common-denominator-design just isn't true. The path of least resistance is what brought you to it - not its truth-value

For equipment and not perks, right? DIfferent thing.

Elden Ring is a highly demanding game that happens to have massive appeal thanks to over a decade of From building up its brand. Outer Worlds demands little. "Having to plan/build a character before you can even start playing is bad game design" isn't a statement that originated from me, I've read it from multiple professional game designers. Outer Worlds rebels just a bit by making you choose your attributes and tag your skills before playing through a tutorial level, though it does so in a very streamlined fashion.

You only say this because you grew up in the dark days of this being the accepted paradigm. From wasn't a fluke, it was just a new paradigm.

The ironic thing is that it makes Outer Worlds feel outdated. It's from an era where blandness and shallow system design was praised. Outer Worlds isn't "for the masses", it's for the Fallout 3 crowd. The kids who themselves are today what we were back when Fallout 3 was released.

 

[Hellraiser]

TOW is a game for the masses, requiring someone to plan their character before they've even started is considered bad game design.

If one is making a game for some degree of thousands then sure, make them use a spreadsheet before they start (e.g. Underrail).

Designers claiming planning in advance is bad are behind the times if anything. Respeccing and various types of systems allowing builds/specializations (usually some derivative of skill trees) are pretty much a design standard and it's hard to find a game, especially "live service" or open world one, without this type of mechanics. WOW, lootathons (Diablo, Borderlands etc.), even fucking mobas to some degree, spread the concept far and wide to the point you need to be a FIFA-only casual not to be aware of it. Even fucking COD multiplayer allows you to specialize IIRC for over 10 years now, since cod4: modern warfare (although granted this was less permanent than the other examples, but still shows how common the basic concepts are)?

Grunker already mentioned it as I was writing my post, and as much as I am not a fan of resetting/respecing characters mid-game, allowing it is a design choice that's present in "mass market" titles for a long time now, specifically to address the problem of players fucking up their builds in various ways. TOW also has it, but IIRC you can't reset attributes.

Furthermore as far as the "required to" thing and brickwalling goes, I can't comment on Underrail as I never played that, but even with the "read the fucking manual" perk approach of Fallout none of them were really needed for anything, as the PC's power anyway came mostly from gear and skills facilitating it's effective use in the case of weapons. Yes a hypothetical "can't finish the game after playing for a few hours, your build has no good perks available with these attributes and the mandatory boss kills you, restart" game could be made, maybe Underrail is one, but this is a balance (and linear design) issue as shown by Fallout, and I personally can't think of a RPG that gated perks/feats/skills behind attributes that resulted in a chance of getting brickwalled. Now fucking up a build due to bad choice of attributes and starting skills and getting brickwalled AoD style, that's something different and a matter of preference, but usually results in a quick reroll after 20 minute at most.

 

[Grunker]

Delterius my poor boy, don't tell me you defend this trash

 

[Delterius]

Delterius my poor boy, don't tell me you defend this trash

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.

i'm not defending anything, i'm just describing the actual existing plot and world that is in the game.

 

[Grunker]

Delterius my poor boy, don't tell me you defend this trash

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.

i'm not defending anything, i'm just describing the actual existing plot and world that is in the game.

Phew. At least you're just wrong and not retarded then. I knew I must have been mistaken

 

[jackofshadows]

It was truly interesting to read arguments against subj being blatant anti-capitalism tale with an odd "it's not absurd, just a parody m'kay" (but actually a kafka level absurdiness) angle. But yeah despite what supposedly Boyarsky had in mind, the result shows through writers agenda and inablity into depth.

 

[Roguey]

You only say this because you grew up in the dark days of this being the accepted paradigm. From wasn't a fluke, it was just a new paradigm.

The ironic thing is that it makes Outer Worlds feel outdated. It's from an era where blandness and shallow system design was praised. Outer Worlds isn't "for the masses", it's for the Fallout 3 crowd. The kids who themselves are today what we were back when Fallout 3 was released.

Is it? The biggest western RPGs from the last five years (i.e. sold at least a few million): Kingdom Come Deliverance (no planning period), Greedfall (basic character building no planning), Disco Elysium (basic building, no planning obviously), Outer Worlds, Wasteland 3 (accessible party-building), Cyberpunk 2077 (attribute requirements on perks but you gain attributes throughout the game, also significantly overhauled in 2.0 so not exactly an example of stellar design), Hogwarts Legacy (no planning), Baldur's Gate 3 (from what I read, it ignores the very few attribute prerequisites 5e has), Starfield (come on).

Tim boasted in a video that The Outer Worlds is his best-selling game by far. Perhaps if Arcanum had tried to be a polished, casual, and accessible game Troika would have lasted a lot longer to make more reactive RPGs with 00s-quality writing. They were never good at being "hardcore."

Designers claiming planning in advance is bad are behind the times if anything. Respeccing and various types of systems allowing builds/specializations (usually some derivative of skill trees) are pretty much a design standard and it's hard to find a game, especially "live service" or open world one, without this type of mechanics. WOW, lootathons (Diablo, Borderlands etc.), even fucking mobas to some degree, spread the concept far and wide to the point you need to be a FIFA-only casual not to be aware of it. Even fucking COD multiplayer allows you to specialize IIRC for over 10 years now, since cod4: modern warfare (although granted this was less permanent than the other examples, but still shows how common the basic concepts are)?

See above. Don't care what multiplayer games are doing, they're a different thing from single player RPGs.

Furthermore as far as the "required to" thing and brickwalling goes, I can't comment on Underrail as I never played that, but even with the "read the fucking manual" perk approach of Fallout none of them were really needed for anything, as the PC's power anyway came mostly from gear and skills facilitating it's effective use in the case of weapons. Yes a hypothetical "can't finish the game after playing for a few hours, your build has no good perks available with these attributes and the mandatory boss kills you, restart" game could be made, maybe Underrail is one, but this is a balance (and linear design) issue as shown by Fallout, and I personally can't think of a RPG that gated perks/feats/skills behind attributes that resulted in a chance of getting brickwalled. Now fucking up a build due to bad choice of attributes and starting skills and getting brickwalled AoD style, that's something different and a matter of preference, but usually results in a quick reroll after 20 minute at most.

You're assuming a player who's good at playing games. A great deal aren't (see Sawyer's QA horror stories).

 

[Hellraiser]

Is it? The biggest western RPGs from the last five years (i.e. sold at least a few million): Kingdom Come Deliverance (no planning period), Greedfall (basic character building no planning), Disco Elysium (basic building, no planning obviously), Outer Worlds, Wasteland 3 (accessible party-building), Cyberpunk 2077 (attribute requirements on perks but you gain attributes throughout the game, also significantly overhauled in 2.0 so not exactly an example of stellar design), Hogwarts Legacy (no planning), Baldur's Gate 3 (from what I read, it ignores the very few attribute prerequisites 5e has), Starfield (come on).

Tim boasted in a video that The Outer Worlds is his best-selling game by far. Perhaps if Arcanum had tried to be a polished, casual, and accessible game Troika would have lasted a lot longer to make more reactive RPGs with 00s-quality writing. They were never good at being "hardcore."

Only thing that proves is that those designers still follow the old paradigm as Grunker called it, and his point that this already changed. My argument was that that old paradigm is no longer applicable because the average gamer is more exposed to RPG concepts like character builds including planning, and it's barely any kind of leap for them to to go from "I specialize during the game as I gain talent points" to "I also have to pick some stats in advance that limit my future specialization". The only reason we don't see more of this devs are stuck in the past and risk-averse. The MMO/online gaming example anyway also shows that if players can't grasp the system they just google some cookie-cutter builds and maybe build guides on youtube.

See above. Don't care what multiplayer games are doing, they're a different thing from single player RPGs.

See above. Also you claim TOW was made for the "masses", the "masses" also play multiplayer games, it doesn't matter you don't care about what those games are doing, it's relevant to what the "masses" are familiar with and capable of.

You're assuming a player who's good at playing games. A great deal aren't (see Sawyer's QA horror stories).

I told you outright that this is purely a balance issue, what you are writing here doesn't address my argumentation. Again, players won't complain about having to plan in advance if they are not specifically brickwalled by bad mandatory encounters, ruining their experience.

And what you posted not only isn't in any way related to character building/planning, even worse it's mostly (except for the post-release FNV case) filtered through the lens of QA over a decade or two ago, and the main example in the quotes you put there are related to the same encounter in IWD.

If you had post-release stories from around the time TOW was released there might have been some backing to your claims. But what you presented here proves hardly anything more than some players and QA testers were shit or extremely stubborn 10 or 20 years ago, not how many of them are relative to the vague "masses" at the (near) present for which TOW was supposedly made (if anything the target was New Vegas/Fallout 3 fans, like Grunker mentioned). Should we assume the average player will walk around in circles like that one infamous Half-life 2: Episode 2 QA tester also based on one developer commentary?

 

[Roguey]

My argument was that that old paradigm is no longer applicable because the average gamer is more exposed to RPG concepts like character builds including planning, and it's barely any kind of leap for them to to go from "I specialize during the game as I gain talent points" to "I also have to pick some stats in advance that limit my future specialization".

I'll put a pin in this and perhaps return to it in 10 years.

See above. Also you claim TOW was made for the "masses", the "masses" also play multiplayer games, it doesn't matter you don't care about what those games are doing, it's relevant to what the "masses" are familiar with and capable of.

Single player and multiplayer games cater to different people even when targeting the broadest possible audience.

Should we assume the average player will walk around in circles like that one infamous Half-life 2: Episode 2 QA tester also based on one developer commentary?

Yes. People don't change.

 

[Cpt. Dallas]

Can you trust sales numbers for any game available on Gamepass or the like for free/$1 ?

 

[Sannom]

A particularly bad outbreak of sawyeritis at Obsidian's offices (explains both the bland perks and why Roguey enjoys the game).

In my view, the bland perks are collateral damage from the decision of gaining some automatically when you reach skill thresholds. With 18 skills and 5 thresholds (6 if you got Perils of Gorgon installed), that's 90 perks (108 if you have Perils of Gorgon installed) that are removed from the perk selection. That's not insignificant.

its a world where anarcho-capitalism enabled technological development to the point where earth colonized the galaxy.

I know that was the lore given in the pre-release promotion cycle, but doesn't the game say that the galactic colonization was only enabled because a government wrestled power away from the corporations after they exhausted themselves in a war ? It's part of the reason why Halcyon is promoted as a colony by and for corporations, because a state otherwise reined them in.

[...] the average gamer is more exposed to RPG concepts like character builds including planning, and it's barely any kind of leap for them to to go from "I specialize during the game as I gain talent points" to "I also have to pick some stats in advance that limit my future specialization".

I disagree. There is a big difference between seeing, in the same screen, that a particular ability down the progression tree needs to have taken another one previously and that some abilities are exclusive to one another (see the Barbarian in Deadfire, king of this system) and being informed that one ability needs not only other abilities but also specific scores in other systems (and let me change screens to see what my current score is and check the rules to remember how they progress).

 

[Hellraiser]

Single player and multiplayer games cater to different people even when targeting the broadest possible audience.

Overlaps between those groups exist, there's even a MMO subforum here on the codex after all. Potential new players (customers) who have not yet "discovered" a particular genre also exist. There is more to catering to potential customers than catering with just gameplay. Art style, graphics, tits, storytelling and settings or music all can be used as selling points to draw in new potential players from outside of a genre. Marketing strategies have utilized various aspects of games to sell more copies, as can be witnesses by checking the buzzwords on the back of game boxes or on steam pages.

Yes. People don't change.

The question/quote you replied to was whether one memorable example of Valve's QA tester failing in navigating a level is representative of players as a whole, but I'll bite anyway.

This is simply not true in general terms. While individuals might not change much past a certain point in life*, the general population shifts as part of natural generational replacement since people die off and new ones are born. This is inevetible and affects other markets as well as each generation is slightly different spending habbits due to the particular socio-economic-technological circumstances that shaped them.

Every newer generation grows-up with different mechanics as obvious "always been there in games" things, be it WSAD controls, graphical UI in operating systems, analogue stick controllers, online multiplayer, quicksaving on consoles, regenerating health in action games or the already mentioned variation on skill/talent trees and classes. And while there are areas of stagnancy in games design (big budget in particular, due to risk-aversion due to high investment), game design slowly does change (not just for the worst, just mostly) and new trends emerge as witnessed every time a new flavor of the month breakaway hit game starts getting its copycat competition.

*although teaching old dogs new tricks is not something that uncommon in for example employer-organized training sessions, and things such as Kolb's 4-step cycle of learning in adults exist specifically to help with that, and yes, before anyone asks, some people will never learn no matter how much effort is spent. Still one of the things I learned over the years about people, including after witnessing how training them new tricks is working, is that on average people are neither as dumb as I think they are nor they are as smart as I think they are. You constantly get surprised both ways regardless of the assumptions made.

I disagree. There is a big difference between seeing, in the same screen, that a particular ability down the progression tree needs to have taken another one previously and that some abilities are exclusive to one another (see the Barbarian in Deadfire, king of this system) and being informed that one ability needs not only other abilities but also specific scores in other systems (and let me change screens to see what my current score is and check the rules to remember how they progress).

The way you phrase it this seems like a UX/presentation issue (the character creation needs to make it clear what you can and can't get) rather than a difficulty/inability of the player to cope with a more restrictive system resulting in a worse experience for them. Similar to how I claim that brickwalling due to crappy builds is a balance (and critical path/game progression design) issue, here I have to claim that if information is presented conveniently and clearly to the player at character creation, and the game doesn't penalize the player for the developer's deficiencies in how information is conveyed to the player, then it should be no problem. Of course an important issue to be addressed is going the other way and not overloading the screen with information, as that would chase most fresh meat away, and the whole argument was the masses could cope with this type of extra complexity. But once again that is a presentation issue that's probably solvable without resorting to multi-screen setups, although it's also possible such a solution would be an interface design compromise that hides some crucial details and you have to click in deeper or hover over for tooltips to get to them anyway.

As a sidenote I wanted to add that I mentioned Fallout's "read the fucking manual" approach to perk requirements as an example of how not to do this, most of the information about requirements should be in the game easily accessible and definitely visible at least when you get to pick perks. This is actually one of the things Bethesda improved in Fallout 3 IIRC.