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

[Cohesion]

Here's the question: How many times has increased budget made for a better sequel?

Worked for The Witcher series, Divinity Original Sin 2, and Wasteland 3.

Wtf? Witcher 1 is the best Witcher. 2 and 3 are shit and decline.

Agreed. But Witcher 1 was kinda shit as well

Holy cow. I've never actually played W2 or 3 (well, I played a tiny bit of each), but they're actually worse? How?

Combat.
W2 - QTEs.
W3 - dodge roll spam (we have dark souls at home!).

 

[mediocrepoet]

Combat.
W2 - QTEs.
W3 - dodge roll spam (we have dark souls at home!).

DDR -> QTE -> Jank Souls?

... I'll take W3.

 

[Hellraiser]

Twitcher 1 was good for what it is despite the combat. The witcher preparation gimmick (potions, oils etc.) was great, the branching/C&C was decent, I liked the writing but I had the advantage of playing it in the original Polish and some things would just not translate well. It had the advantage of being better than expected and expectations from me were low.

Twitcher 2 somehow failed to capture what made the first great, added pure akshun combat which in the end I didn't really enjoy for some reason despiting thinking it should be a clear improvement, felt a bit short on content compared to the first game, but had the act2 branching gimmick and I guess Leto as upsides.

Twitcher 3 felt like Twitcher 2, but way longer (too long for it's own good, the mechanical side is too shallow to carry it that long, the game gets stale by the time you reach Skellige), without the act 2 branching gimmick and with a ton of garbage open world content that's pointless to engage with. Overrated thoroughly, couldn't even be bothered to finish it, dropped it somewhere in the endgame.

 

[Krivol]

Still, W3 sold better than W1 and 2.

I don't believe TOW2 will be good, but I believe Fergus believes it may sell well.

 

[Hellraiser]

Still, W3 sold better than W1 and 2.

Normie storyfaggots, graphic whores and I guess people who find the shit open world good caused it.

 

[Krivol]

Still, W3 sold better than W1 and 2.

Normie storyfaggots, graphic whores and I guess people who find the shit open world good caused it.

That's a fact. But we are talking if TOW2 would be a selling bust, not a quality, hardcore RPG for codexers

Probably TOW was not the worst game ever created, but they were trying to sell it to me as a new FNV (which I liked, probably my fav' "modern (?) open world RPG") with Tim Cain on board, and I was really, really, REALLY disappointed.

 

[mediocrepoet]

Still, W3 sold better than W1 and 2.

Normie storyfaggots, graphic whores and I guess people who find the shit open world good caused it.

That's a fact. But we are talking if TOW2 would be a selling bust, not a quality, hardcore RPG for codexers

Probably TOW was not the worst game ever created, but they were trying to sell it to me as a new FNV (which I liked, probably my fav' "modern (?) open world RPG") with Tim Cain on board, and I was really, really, REALLY disappointed.

I just don't recall anyone being overly in love with TOW. It's not so much that anyone really hated it so much as even the ones who enjoyed it seemed fairly muted and like it passed quickly Obsidian actually does have fans so it seemed to me like it flopped due to being mediocre even in the eyes of the wider gaming audience.

 

[Bulo]

I don't know whether I've detailed this before but there's some impressive reactivity on the first planet. You're presented with the choice of siding with the mayor and starving out the hippy colony outside the walls, or siding with the hippies and depriving the company town of electricity. But I wasn't happy with either choice, so instead I redirected the power to the city and killed the mayor. If you go back to the hippy woman she is dismayed by your decision but can be convinced to go back to the company town and lead in the mayor's stead. Wasn't enough to keep me interested in the game long term but it made me wonder how many other modern RPGs would have gone to such a length to satisfy a player's agency

 

[Bulo]

Cons: There's no reason to play it. You can extrapolate everything you need to know about the game by Googling "The Outer Worlds" and flicking through the image results

 

[Wesp5]

If you go back to the hippy woman she is dismayed by your decision but can be convinced to go back to the company town and lead in the mayor's stead.

The problem is that this was obviously intended to be the ideal solution and after you do it, the whole colony is basically run by women, check out the police station! Very in the face message here like in several other places all over the game...

 

[Bulo]

If you go back to the hippy woman she is dismayed by your decision but can be convinced to go back to the company town and lead in the mayor's stead.

The problem is that this was obviously intended to be the ideal solution and after you do it, the whole colony is basically run by women, check out the police station! Very in the face message here like in several other places all over the game...

I think you're overestimating the average consumer. Modern games train the player not to leave the rails

 

[Roguey]

The problem is that this was obviously intended to be the ideal solution and after you do it, the whole colony is basically run by women, check out the police station! Very in the face message here like in several other places all over the game...

Not true, she's actually the evil option.

Adelaide McDevitt replaced Reed Tobson as the leader of Edgewater. She and her followers transformed Edgewater in their image. Anyone loyal to Reed was pressured into leaving town, and those who stayed behind adapted to her way of life. Adelaide transformed the old cannery into a new garden. The nearby Edgewater Cemetery provided a convenient source of fertilizer.

Contrast with

After returning to Edgewater, the Deserters negotiated workplace reforms with Reed Tobson, including a single day of rest, which came to be known as a “weekend.”

As the world around them changed, Tobson soon found himself pining for the old days. He was known to spend his weekends in the cantina, nursing one of the few remaining bottles of Zero Gee, and repeating to himself, “it’s not the best choice – It’s Spacer’s Choice.”

or if you side with the board

Edgewater’s Cannery met its production quota for the first time in three years. As a result, the Adjutant rewarded every worker in Edgewater with a place in the Lifetime Employment Program.


Reed Tobson was granted twenty-five years in suspended animation; however, a computing error adjusted his duration to two-hundred and fifty years. A trouble ticket to resolve this error remains open.

If you side with the board, you have to destroy Edgewater if you put Adelaide in charge.

 

[Wesp5]

Not true, she's actually the evil option.

Adelaide McDevitt replaced Reed Tobson as the leader of Edgewater. She and her followers transformed Edgewater in their image. Anyone loyal to Reed was pressured into leaving town, and those who stayed behind adapted to her way of life. Adelaide transformed the old cannery into a new garden. The nearby Edgewater Cemetery provided a convenient source of fertilizer.

How is that the evil option? "Adelaide transformed the old cannery into a new garden." Also nobody would die because they solved the scurvy problem, which isn't mentioned in the other solutions. Only because she pressures some people away?

 

[Roguey]

How is that the evil option? "Adelaide transformed the old cannery into a new garden." Also nobody would die because they solved the scurvy problem, which isn't mentioned in the other solutions. Only because she pressures some people away?

Sending people out to die because they disagree with her is bad, yes.

 

[Silverfish]

Considering the state of Edgewater, it's probably best to send people who want to maintain that status quo on their way.

 

[ColonelMace]

Picked this up on sale at the beginning of this year.

The first chapter on Edgewater was good and promised enough to keep me playing, but it just didn't deliver in the later parts of the game.
Everything that happens on Monarch feels inconsequential due to the shameless segmentation of the game, which has the sole merit of scrupulously following the narrative on which lies its setting (being that the colony is under firm HHC control and moving around freely simply isn't on the menu for pretty much anyone but corporate white collars).
Meaning that the whole colony is broken down in planets/spaceships/stations/asteroids/dlcs which are almost utterly disjointed from one another.
Shit feels inanimate, like a game from Bethesda, and immersion takes a blow from it.

Doesn't help that it's signed by Cain and Boyarsky, who delivered some of the most interesting crpgs systems of the 90s. The Outer Worlds offers little in that department, despite its skill points group-based distribution mechanic (which, tbh, is quite good on paper, and I kinda wish to see this iterated upon), because the game design barely ever tries to give any illusion of openness.
Everything past Edgewater quickly starts to feel narrow.
Quest structure, level design, hubs layouts, dungeons (or rather, the single dungeon that gets repeated times and times again : a more or less remote lab/factory that got abandoned and overrun by beasts/robots/marauders, which -unfortunate aggravating circumstance- constitute the backbone of all bland copy pasted encounters, from beginning to end.
Even character progression just narrows as you gain levels. By the midterm of your journey, you'll just pick random perks for the sake of confirming the level up process.

Writing-wise, it ranges from uninspired to good, but there again does it take a dive after the first chapter.
I also wonder, and maybe someone here knows about this : doesn't the whole tone and quality of writing sensibly drop after Edgewater ? Or is this just an impression ?
It feels like a completely different direction was taken for the Groundbreaker, Monarch and on. In the case of the latter, you even have to suffer the slightly forced wackiness while talking to the leader of MSI, a major faction on the planet.
To mostly meet goofy folks is harming immersion enough, but at the very least, for the love of God, keep it serious when talking major plotlines with important npcs...
In the end, the narrative falls apart, lacking strong characters to rest upon, and you're left with picking sides and conflicts that simply do not matter in the greater picture, because they're disjointed from the main plot, as mentioned above.

Anyway, to utter a conclusive word : it's way too narrow. There's barely any room to fuck around.
It gets narrower and narrower in all compartments as your playthrough progresses, until you're suffocating, gasping for air, desperate to get some reinvigorating air out of a newly met NPC, before the cunt greets you with either some obnoxious meta-comments on corporatism or full on wacky and zany nonsense (sometimes, both).
Said obnoxious meta-comments on corporatism which, ironically, felt like more or less historically accurate depictions of the daily life in the late Soviet Union.

On the bright side : I dig the art direction (besides the writing that is). It legitimately doesn't suffer from any lack of personnality. I'd even say the game can be charming.
It truly is a shame that whoever was tasked with writing npcs and quests seemingly didn't have anything to offer. They were either shy or unconcerned. Let's hope for the sequel that it was the former, if any hope remains at this point.
Because there isn't a single noteworthy idea in sight there. Nothing. It's a well-presented, rather bug-free husk of a game. Which starts moderately sized, and then narrows, and narrows, and narrows on and on, like some crpg dying star...

 

[Krivol]

Let's hope for the sequel that it was the former, if any hope remains at this point.

Oh, you sweet summer child!

 

[Wesp5]

How is that the evil option? "Adelaide transformed the old cannery into a new garden." Also nobody would die because they solved the scurvy problem, which isn't mentioned in the other solutions. Only because she pressures some people away?

Sending people out to die because they disagree with her is bad, yes.

You mean compared to have the whole city die because of scurvy?

 

[Roguey]

You mean compared to have the whole city die because of scurvy?

But they don't die, they thrive. The only person who dies is her the other way around.

 

[Wesp5]

You mean compared to have the whole city die because of scurvy?

But they don't die, they thrive. The only person who dies is her the other way around.

How would they thrive by getting a weekend off? The original boss never even understood the problem of the colony!

 

[Roguey]

You mean compared to have the whole city die because of scurvy?

But they don't die, they thrive. The only person who dies is her the other way around.

How would they thrive by getting a weekend off? The original boss never even understood the problem of the colony!

Everyone's suffering from malnutrition. The unfrozen scientists fix the problem.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

I kinda liked TOW dungeons. But ppen areas are like a 2005 game and not in a good way. It would have been 5x better if they went leaned more into Deus-Exy direction, obviously the budget was nowhere near enough to make decent-open world maps.

 

[Lemming42]

Still on a replay of this and the way the Board are written is so crippling to the game. The whole time you're waiting to hear the other side of the story - not that there's much they could say to justify the over-the-top horrors you've seen - but as soon as you meet Akande, unless you resolved the first town in a specific way, she orders you to commit a massacre. There's no reason at all to side with the Board at that point unless you're LARPing as a lunatic, which most players won't be on a first run, and so virtually nobody is going to get to actually experience the Board questline.

It totally undercuts the setting to have the antagonists be so transparently evil (and dumb to boot). I was really hoping to side with Akande and Rockwelll this time to get the alternate perspective but it seems like it's just mustache-twirling shit with absolutely no logic or nuance backing it up, other than the thinnest veneer of pragmatism. It would actually have been interesting to have the colony in such dire straits that you're forced to consider whether or not the Board are right to make tough compromises, but the writers' brains seemed to short-circuit when they wrote this bit, and they couldn't think of anything more interesting than genocide.

 

[Baron Tahn]

Damn I played through this entire game and the way you guys are talking makes me feel like it was a different thing. I barely remember any of it! Dungeons!? I don't remember any dungeons...I do remember shit writing though, a terrible cast of NPC party members, too many loyalty quest lines and the story being basically left just as it seemed to get to something interesting after trudging through trite nonsense for the whole game.

 

[luj1]

This was Tim and Leo's dream game. Let that sink in.