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

[Silverfish]

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,

Having met the characters that populate Edgewater, I'd say the biggest problem with The Board is that they don't go far enough.

 

[jackofshadows]

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

I remember Leonard wasn't happy with the game actually, especially if to read between the lines. They had to cut a lot, also as I understand to streamline a lot (the whole flaw system which on paper was pretty cool in practice turned out to be very meh) etc etc. Tim on the other hand, seemed genuinely happy with it. There was also a major management issue, I imagine Patel saw things differently, the other dangerhair writer tried to insert as many lesbo girlbosses as possible etc. Be the project leaders for this kind of team isn't the same as they did things at Troika. Either way, the game turned out so awful it's just a disgrace.

 

[luj1]

Ya they cucked out

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

Why am I investing in groups of skills rather than individual skills. Like what's the point of even having Persuade and Intimidate as different skills if I invest in them simultaneously.

This is one of his ideas for how he believes he should have done Fallout. You generalize and then you specialize at higher levels. It's fine.

Yeah, I can see the thinking behind this. Persuasion has some of the same aspects as Intimidation. For example, reading the person's face and mannerisms that you're using that ability on to figure out what is and isn't working, right? Something like using a mace has similarities with using an axe in terms of getting the most out of a swing. Knife combat and melee have similarities. This question has come up since Fallout when players and developers were discussing skill overlap, like First Aid and Doctor. Maybe when you put 9 points in one, the other should go up by 3 to a certain point. If you do that, it eventually becomes a balancing issue on how many skill points you hand out per level and so on.

 

[Roguey]

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.

You put the granarchist in charge of the town and you thought The Board would be okay with that?

 

[Lemming42]

I'm glad there are consequences for it but at the same time, a quest that asks you to just outright wipe out a town is something most players aren't gonna do and which will immediately undermine any interest they might have had in taking the Board seriously. The way the game's set up is that you hear people talking about the Board for the whole first couple acts and you're waiting to meet them yourself to finally get their side of the story and see what they're really about, and they turn out to be cartoon villains in a way that just annihilates any interest the game's setting might have held. It doesn't help that this is also the very first quest they give you, about 30 seconds after you meet them.

If the antagonists are this dumb and thinly-written, what's the hook keeping the player attached to the story, or to the final act where the future of the colony has to be decided?

 

[Roguey]

I'm glad there are consequences for it but at the same time, a quest that asks you to just outright wipe out a town is something most players aren't gonna do and which will immediately undermine any interest they might have had in taking the Board seriously.

How many people are going to instill granarchist as the town leader? You have to go out of your way to do it.

For some reason TOW didn't bother to do any faction specific achievements so there's no way of telling what the ratio is.

 

[Lemming42]

How many people are going to instill granarchist as the town leader? You have to go out of your way to do it.

Probably quite a few; the game herds you into the granarchist-vs-bowlerhat conflict, encourages you to investigate both sides, and frames it as the game's first major choice. Edgewater's written to ensure that literally every player will detest the place - and by extension, the Board - within two minutes of setting foot inside it, and granachist, for all her problems, is broadly positioned as the candidate for change. Plus, don't you get an equivalent genocide quest if you just send Edgewater's power to the commune? Correct me if I'm wrong, I don't know this game too well.

I'm really giving the game the most charitable run possible because I want to find the good in it but the Board have just killed it for me, it's like doing a Legion playthrough of New Vegas. Which is to say, they're so patently and retardedly evil that I have no idea why I'm working for them other than that I'm forcing myself to see all the game's content. Except unlike in NV, there's only two factions here, and when one of them's this dumb it puts a damper on the whole story.

I committed genocide to keep doing the Board quests and the next thing I was asked to do was assassinate someone (which I assume is the intro quest for anyone who doesn't get the genocide quest). I literally just walked in, I'm new here! Couldn't they at least build you up to this kind of stuff, have a few intro quests to get you actually interested in the Board and loyal to their aims, and then escalate you to this kind of thing when you already have a feel for who these people are and why they go to such extremes? Akande has really scant dialogue too, there seems to be so little to actually learn about her or her motivations, and yet she's my main point of contact for this silly faction. I think the only humanising touch she even gets is in the damn epilogue when the game's already over.

 

[Silverfish]

granachist, for all her problems, is broadly positioned as the candidate for change

Not only that, but Adelaide's more objectionable elements can be entirely missed and surprisingly easily.

 

[Wesp5]

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

As I wrote before, from their perspective it probably came close. Tim is a programmer and this game is the least buggy he ever made! Leonard is an artist and the artistic direction of TOW is great! Shame though that none of them is a writer...

 

[Daedalos]

Can we just fucking get more TOW 2 news.

I want TOW 2 to be the REAL New Vegas 2 in space that we deserved, not some half-assed cut down mainstreamed version of whatever fallout in space was supposed to be. TOW wasn't it.

The game defiinitely felt more akin to what Tim Cain would have wanted, wacky story, anti corpo, alot of "humour" and other takes of black comedy I guess.. whereas Leonard comes across as somebody that really really got the fallout 1 vibe, grim fucking dark violent shit, with no tippytoing around it
I wanted a dark nihilistic TOW with a more serious tone, and I felt Tim went againt that, but Leonard really wanted it..

So if Leonard is calling the shots more in TOW2, i hope they do a 180, and work on the games, tone, humour and just overall grit and make it more like fallout 1. Probably not gonna happen.

The world just felt "too" cartooney and goofy, that was my major problem. I mean fallout 50s theme was ALWAYS in the background never in the foreground, only after bethesda acquired it, did it become 50s THEME EVERYWHERE cranked to 11 (new vegas being the exception), and they never got what fallout 1+2 was truly about or the setting.

TOW feels alot like what Bethesda is doing with fallout, trying to force the overarching wacky fun goofy theme everwhere, SPACERS CHOICE; HAHA, YEA ; ANTI CorpOS, when in truth, it should perhaps been more in the background all along, and more focused on stronger narratives and coherence, choices.

I'm still hopeful TOW2 will turn out way better than TOW 1, but it probably wont.

 

[BlackAdderBG]

artistic direction of TOW is great

This is irony, right? Muted colours all over the place right next to bright red and yellow makes this game ugly, fake and hard to look at. Look at this shit:

 

[Daedalos]

artistic direction of TOW is great

This is irony, right? Muted colours all over the place right next to bright red and yellow makes this game ugly, fake and hard to look at. Look at this shit:

View attachment 48869

Yeah I definitely wouldn't highlight TOWs art direction/tone as something great, it was oversaturated, messy and overall, just looked too much of everything. Like No Man's Sky on speed, which was offputting for a supposedly "deep" RPG.
It wasn't all bad everywhere, but man did it stick out like a sore thumb in most places.

Especially with the Spacers Choice DIRECTORS cut version, that they really botched and fucked up, and oversaturated the colours and shit even more, highlighting to just twisted the art direction was/is.

playing it, I instantly found mods/reshade, that toned all that shit down, and went with more muted colours and more darker tone.

I remember the game had INSANE chromattic abberation too, when it launched.. like... wtf? How do you launch with that... the joke is, that Tim Cain is colourblind so... but damn, u couldnt even fucking turn off the Chromatic Abberation at first... it was headache inducingly bad.
Players can't even look at your environment and world for more than 30 seconds without looking away lol. GG

In the end, the game still plays the same for me, even replaying it many years later.

Aggressively mediocre.

 

[Lyric Suite]

artistic direction of TOW is great

This is irony, right? Muted colours all over the place right next to bright red and yellow makes this game ugly, fake and hard to look at. Look at this shit:

View attachment 48869

That is indeed utter, irredimable shit.

 

[Kev Inkline]

I also replayed both Starfield and New Vegas not long ago and TOW is interesting to revisit next as a game that acts as a successor to the latter and a prelude to the former. It's interesting to see Obsidian try and fail to replicate their lightning-in-a-bottle success, and then see how Bethesda fucked the same idea up in their own unique way.

You have replayed Starfield? Already? :chapeau: A true latrine connoisseur.

 

[Wesp5]

artistic direction of TOW is great

This is irony, right? Muted colours all over the place right next to bright red and yellow makes this game ugly, fake and hard to look at.

I didn't mean the colors, but the retro asthetic look of the technology. The colors are probably so weird, because Tim Cain is colorblind !

 

[Roguey]

Probably quite a few; the game herds you into the granarchist-vs-bowlerhat conflict, encourages you to investigate both sides, and frames it as the game's first major choice. Edgewater's written to ensure that literally every player will detest the place - and by extension, the Board - within two minutes of setting foot inside it, and granachist, for all her problems, is broadly positioned as the candidate for change. Plus, don't you get an equivalent genocide quest if you just send Edgewater's power to the commune? Correct me if I'm wrong, I don't know this game too well.

Ah right. But it's the same thing, it's quite schizophrenic for you to side against the obvious wishes of The Board and think they'll be fine with your decision.

My impression of the town is that it was run by a guy who had to make hard choices just to survive. And Parvati, the pet character, tells you to direct the power to the town. Granarchist is incredibly vindictive and using human corpses as fertilizer, she's not a good person. Her trying to build you up as a great savior is her trying to manipulate you (and the mask drops when you send the power to the town).

 

[SpaceWizardz]

My impression of the town is that it was run by a guy who had to make hard choices just to survive.

He's a nakedly incompetent middle manager, your first meeting with him is overhearing Parvati trying to explain why shoving random crap into the saltuna machine doesn't produce saltuna and he gets agitated because he's a moron who thinks the machine is magic.

Granarchist is incredibly vindictive and using human corpses as fertilizer, she's not a good person.

Causing mass malnutrition due to negligence and driving people to suicide because they're spooked into believing the plague is a consequence of not exhausting themselves with work is "making hard choices just to survive", while recycling dead bodies so people can have an actual diet is some unmistakable evil?
"But she's rude!!"
Stellar ethical dilemma, Obsidian.

 

[Roguey]

He's a nakedly incompetent middle manager, your first meeting with him is overhearing Parvati trying to explain why shoving random crap into the saltuna machine doesn't produce saltuna and he gets agitated because he's a moron who thinks the machine is magic.

Yeah, that's middle managers for you.

Causing mass malnutrition due to negligence and driving people to suicide because they're spooked into believing the plague is a consequence of not exhausting themselves with work is "making hard choices just to survive", while recycling dead bodies so people can have an actual diet is some unmistakable evil?
"But she's rude!!"
Stellar ethical dilemma, Obsidian.

It's not negligence, it's a problem that can only be solved by the best and brightest minds who all happen to be frozen. And she's more than rude, if you send the power to the lab she only takes on a handful of the people from the town and sends the rest to starve to death. If you put her in charge of Edgewater, she kicks out everyone who disagrees with her. Siding with Reed lets everyone live except the bitter old granny who dies alone.

Sounds like you're a lib, so of course The Board path isn't for you. It's primarily for those who put self-interest above all. Ruling in Hell instead of serving in Heaven.

 

[Lemming42]

Ah right. But it's the same thing, it's quite schizophrenic for you to side against the obvious wishes of The Board and think they'll be fine with your decision.

I don't want them to be okay with my decision - I'd be fine with being locked out of their entire questline. I'm objecting to the way they're written overall, comically evil with no real motivations, plus the way that their content is introduced to the player. I wouldn't mind as much if the genocide quest came toward the end of their questline and came after you had a chance to really get to know Akande and Rockwell and learn why they'd be so prepared to take unthinkable measures, what the alleged crises are that are forcing their hand*, but the inverse happens. And then when you finally do get to learn their motivations, it's just sort of... nothing, and you already have enough information to know that their actions aren't remotely necessary.

*think killing Mr House or wiping out the BoS in NV - stuff that players might find objectionable, but which they'll be deep enough into their chosen faction's questline by that point to be prepared to do it for a cause/group they already believe in

Remember the the entire rest of the game primes you to hate these people before you even meet them, so a good writer would pull the rug out from under you when you finally get face to face with Akande - maybe she has a critical piece of information that'll cast everything you know so far in a new light. Maybe you've been misled by previous NPCs and the Board has been misrepresented to you. But no, they prove within thirteen seconds of meeting them to be worse than you already thought they were, leaving me wondering what the point of the whole story is.

It also makes them look wildly incompetent in the same way NV factions often do - oh look, this person we've been watching has foiled all our plans so far and expressed nothing but disdain for us; let's entrust them with our most secret evil plans the instant they walk in the door and then stand there looking shocked if they betray us.

 

[Roguey]

I don't want them to be okay with my decision - I'd be fine with being locked out of their entire questline.

You're locked out if you don't correct your mistake and slaughter them.

I wouldn't mind as much if the genocide quest came toward the end of their questline and came after you had a chance to really get to know Akande and Rockwell and learn why they'd be so prepared to take unthinkable measures, what the alleged crises are that are forcing their hand, but the inverse happens.

A ruthless manager isn't going to allow you to fuck up and leave your fuck up to maybe get fixed later. You fix it now or you're gone.

But no, they prove within thirteen seconds of meeting them to be worse than you already thought they were, leaving me wondering what the point of the whole story is.

"These people are so stupid that I the Player Character can easily be in charge and run this place instead."

Four flavors of endings:

Spoiler

You brought an end to the chaos on Tartarus, and proved yourself the most capable leader left in the colony. With Sophia Akande as your Adjutant, you returned in triumph to Byzantium. All of Halcyon was yours.


In time, you demonstrated a talent for leadership that far surpassed your predecessor, Chairman Rockwell. With your steady hand, you guided Halcyon through the turbulent years to follow, and helped ensure the colony's survival.

After fighting in Tartarus came to an end, you returned to Byzantium in triumph. As a reward for you service in saving the colony, you lived until the end of your days in luxury the likes of which Byzantium had never seen. Your estate was the envy of the city, and your revelries were things of legend.


With all the wealth of the colony concentrated in Byzantium, you wanted for nothing until the end of your days.

After the riots on Tartarus came to an end, you threw in your support with Sophia Akande. While Akande administered the board herself, you oversaw the Lifetime Employment Program, stamping out corruption and negligent. Under your leadership, the Program ran smoothly. Halcyon’s workers were treated with a modicum of dignity.


Your involvement kept the Board honest, and allowed the Board's scientist to work without the meddling of bureaucracy.

Akande offered you any reward you could imagine. Power. Wealth. Influence. However, you were more interested in the simple pleasures in life - like the smooth, artificially enhanced flavor of a Rizzo's Purpleberry Munch. Rizzo's Purpleberry Munch - the only snack in Halcyon officially endorsed by the Captain of the Unreliable.

 

[Silverfish]

I didn't mean the colors, but the retro asthetic look of the technology.

Yeah, that's the frustrating thing about TOW (well, visually anyway). The final game looks terrible, but the actual design work is pretty strong. Granted, we're talking about a developer whose best looking game is based on paper cutouts.

 

[Lemming42]

Finished the game, having more or less rushed to the ending and skipped the DLCs. The whole thing is just massively disappointing overall. Expanding on my earlier whine, the Board do really suck. It's doubly frustrating because, having explored the dialogue options as much as I could and played both endings (talking Akande down and talking Welles into suicide), you can actually see that there was a more interesting plot hidden away in there and both Welles and Akande had the potential to be far more exciting and dynamic characters than either of them actually are for 99% of the game.

The idea of the colony being essentially doomed, contact with Earth being lost, and the player having to choose between Welles' ultra high-risk idealistic plan and Akande's safer* but more morally questionable plan is a good hook for a plot, and there's some decent characterisation: Welles being driven by the guilt of his failed previous attempts to revive the Hope colonists, and Akande being driven by an entirely genuine (and not entirely incorrect) belief that hard measures have to be taken to save the colony. There's definitely the outline of a good story there; two people who are truly trying to do the right thing but both of them are fucking it up and neither of them has a solution that's morally palatable nor entirely logically sound.

*of course, the game ends up explicitly telling you that the Board plan is unviable, just to really ensure that you can't get any enjoyment at all out of this plot

But that potential is buried under twenty tonnes of utterly inane shit and cringeworthy unfunny comedy and Obsidian's "satirical take" on capitalism (ie gibberish), plus these two central characters are introduced to you in the worst way possible. Welles is a vehicle for unfunny Rick and Morty tier jokes and Akande - if you even meet her - is immediately painted as a psychopath in a way that ensures most players will neither learn nor care to learn about the deeper motivations of either character. Both of them literally only start to become remotely three dimensional or interesting in the final twenty minutes of the fucking game, and only if you're playing a very specific type of character who'll be able to do the high speech checks with them.

The resource shortage plot should also be front and centre at all times, you should be getting a real grasp during the very first act of the game as to why Welles would be willing to risk everything on a moonshot plan and why Akande would be prepared to do the unthinkable to keep what's left of the colony safe. Yes, we do see clear signs of it in Edgewater, but you never really get the full force of it in the way you should, because the game's more concerned with Parvati's new girlfriend and the funny moon-face man and all kinds of other mind-numbing dogshit.

tl;dr: not a fan of the game. I think Welles and Akande could both have been great characters with challenging views but the writing did a huge disservice to them both. The food crisis plot could also have been interesting but was similarly scuppered. I neither liked nor remembered any other NPCs, except Nyoka, who was funny while drunk and then permanently boring after sobering up. All other companions were utterly hateful. I maintain that the genocide quest is one of the most baffling mis-steps I've ever seen in a videogame.

 

[KVVRR]

The Board path isn't for you. It's primarily for those who put self-interest above all. Ruling in Hell instead of serving in Heaven.

I've said this before but this doesn't work for The Board. The appeal of an evil or selfish playthrough like that is to rule either by yourself or amongst the best; to cast the plebians down to the pits where they belong and pound them with an iron fist as you see fit. You don't get this with the Board. Any material wealth you could amass with them is rendered useless both gameplay and in universe by halfway through the game when the starvation issue becomes clear, and the board itself is just way too incompetent for anyone to realistically want to side with them. This isn't New Vegas where you can be seduced by the appeal of power Mr House has in his own little town, with him showering you with caps and promises of a great future together as his second hand; this is a place where you're unironically going to be a wagie no matter how high you rank up, and your best hopes are to be frozen while somebody else fixes the problem, maybe. And as Lemming said, their quest is locked behind so many roadblocks -- not JUST the genocide or how it's set up, you can't even walk up to them in the first place and rat Welles out, you have to go through another incompetent manager first who also hates your guts -- that even I had to force myself to go through a board playthrough instead of just shooting everyone and getting it over with.

 

[Cael]

The Board path isn't for you. It's primarily for those who put self-interest above all. Ruling in Hell instead of serving in Heaven.

I've said this before but this doesn't work for The Board. The appeal of an evil or selfish playthrough like that is to rule either by yourself or amongst the best; to cast the plebians down to the pits where they belong and pound them with an iron fist as you see fit. You don't get this with the Board. Any material wealth you could amass with them is rendered useless both gameplay and in universe by halfway through the game when the starvation issue becomes clear, and the board itself is just way too incompetent for anyone to realistically want to side with them. This isn't New Vegas where you can be seduced by the appeal to power Mr House has in his own little town, with him showering you with caps and promises of a great future together as his second hand; this is a place where you're unironically going to be a wagie no matter how high you rank up, and your best hopes are to be frozen while somebody else fixes the problem, maybe. And as Lemming's said, their quest is locked behind so many roadblocks -- not JUST the genocide or how it's set up, you can't even walk up to them in the first place and rat Welles out, you have to go through another incompetent manager first who also hates your guts -- that even I had to force myself to go through a board playthrough instead of just shooting everyone and getting it over with.

This is what happens when there is an agenda. Instead of something that is logical or even remotely believable, those with an agenda makes it so distasteful to work with a certain group that players have to force themselves to do it, and most won't. And that is the point. It is the writer being preachy.