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

[Darkzone]

I'm like 10 pages behind but I find it hilarious that 'Gogol' which is an actual name can't be used because it means... uhh... something in some language?

Obsidian writers are a bunch of cultureless hacks. Someone should send them the Overcoat, so that they could at least learn to write.

 

[Prime Junta]

idealist

Them's fighting words, comrade.

 

[Nano]

BTW, since they're not up on Mobygames yet, here's the crucial snippet from the credits:

My sense is that the developers who perform tasks associated with "area design" in the past would have also done the writing for those areas. Professional game development have evolved towards separating and specializing those roles.

Wtf, Sydney Wolfram is back at Obsidian? Maybe she hasn't updated her LinkedIn for a while, but it says she moved to Romania to work for an Ubisoft division in early 2018. She had to have quit that job fast.

 

[Lacrymas]

idealist

Them's fighting words, comrade.

The greatest triumph of capitalism over the human spirit is that it has convinced you (general you) that idealism is worthless and unrealistic.

 

[Deleted Member 22431]

How many characters in FO are deep? I don't mean long-winded, but deep. Very few, if any.

I'm not really sure I understand what you mean by "deep." I do think most characters in FO are fully realised and well grounded in the setting.

They are unidimensional characters that don't have the depth of a measly comic book character. Yet they work and people didn't discuss the literary merits of the characters because this was irrelevant. Now, this is supposed to be something cRPG developers should strive for because reasons.

 

[Deleted Member 22431]

I'm like 10 pages behind but I find it hilarious that 'Gogol' which is an actual name can't be used because it means... uhh... something in some language?

Obsidian writers are a bunch of cultureless hacks. Someone should send them the Overcoat, so that they could at least learn to write.

Better yet, how about firing all the narrative "designers" and let the actual designers do their own stories?

 

[you know what time it is]

I'm all ears.

Well, to be even more fair, there's still no industry-wide consensus on what your average game designer is even supposed to do, as in job description, so yeah.

Anyway, I feel like narrative design should be about storytelling as a whole, not just verbal, not just any particular plot. Scars being the oldest form of storytelling and all that. And akin to scars it should be mostly passive, to provoke interest and not just outright tell you whatever you are supposed to know. Take Sigil, take wasteland for example - they don't just have character, they are characters on their own. Sadly I can't say the same about TOW, the world has no feel to it, there's an art direction, sure... but it's not supported by level design, by character design, by writing - it's all very strained and uncomfortable, like a person that has no real identity until they get drunk. I think a good deal of those issues stem from the lack of proper management (not just with Obsidian, but gamedev in general). With ever-increasing manpower it makes sense to delegate certain tasks and spread the workload, but it gets progressively harder to make sure that everyone stays one the same page.

 

[Infinitron]

BTW, since they're not up on Mobygames yet, here's the crucial snippet from the credits:

My sense is that the developers who perform tasks associated with "area design" in the past would have also done the writing for those areas. Professional game development have evolved towards separating and specializing those roles.

Wtf, Sydney Wolfram is back at Obsidian? Maybe she hasn't updated her LinkedIn for a while, but it says she moved to Romania to work for an Ubisoft division in early 2018. She had to have quit that job fast.

I think it's more likely she did some sort of contract work on the game between 2016 and 2018, no?

 

[Prime Junta]

The greatest triumph of capitalism over the human spirit is that it has convinced you (general you) that idealism is worthless and unrealistic.

That was a Marxist in-joke.

It's very popular for Marxists to accuse each other of being idealists rather than coolly rational and ruthlessly determined masters of scientific socialism, aka dialectical materialism. The Marxist definition of idealism differs markedly from regular usage.

[citation needed] https://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/i/d.htm

For an example of idealism, what follows are the beliefs of three prominent idealist philosophers in regards to what is truth. While truth is an abstract, or ideal from reality; idealists understand such abstractions through equating them to other abstractions:

Descartes: "true are those things that are certain."
Husserl: "truth is doubt"
Hegel: "the element in which truth is found is the notion"

The materialist, on the other hand, understands abstractions by equating them to reality.

Marx: truth is known through practice

 

[Heroic Liberator]

idealist

Them's fighting words, comrade.

The greatest triumph of capitalism over the human spirit is that it has convinced you (general you) that idealism is worthless and unrealistic.

It is not worthless, yet it has to be tempered by pragmatism. Thus what comrade Junta probably perceives as a degenerated workers' state, I perceive as the best of what could've been and embrace a heroic realist perspective.

 

[Deleted Member 22431]

idealist

Them's fighting words, comrade.

The greatest triumph of capitalism over the human spirit is that it has convinced you (general you) that idealism is worthless and unrealistic.

Let me ask you something: in your own head this pretentious gibberish sounds profound? Did you stop and think about this stuff or do you have a little notebook filled with this nonsense? My god, we should have a vote to decide who is the most pretentious poster in the Codex. My vote was for Prima Junta until I read this brilliant sentence. You have my vote, Lacrymas. You are awesome. A once in a generation armchair developer. There are no words to describe the clarity of your reasoning and the subtlety of your way of looking at things.

 

[Prime Junta]

My god, we should have a vote to decide who is the most pretentious poster in the Codex.

 

[Heroic Liberator]

idealist

Them's fighting words, comrade.

The greatest triumph of capitalism over the human spirit is that it has convinced you (general you) that idealism is worthless and unrealistic.

Let me ask you something: in your own head this pretentious gibberish sound profound? Did you stop and think about this stuff or do you have a little notebook filled with this nonsense? My god, we should have a vote to decide who is the most pretentious poster in the Codex. My vote was for Prima Junta until I read this brilliant sentence. You have my vote, Lacrymas. You are awesome. A once in a generation armchair developer. There are no words to describe the clarity of your reasoning and the subtlety of your way of looking at things.

Well, at least in the case of Marxism, it's a technical vocabulary akin to those of certain philosophers. It's not a matter of pretentiousness inasmuch as it is of clarity.

 

[Junmarko]

My god, we should have a vote to decide who is the most pretentious poster in the Codex.

Or DarkUnderlord could just put the Peter Molyneux button in already.

"Layers of an onion..."

 

[GentlemanCthulhu]

The greatest triumph of capitalism over the human spirit is that it has convinced you (general you) that idealism is worthless and unrealistic.

I think the greatest misconception would be to believe in "cogito ergo sum", I think therefore I am. Couldn't be further from the truth.

 

[Lacrymas]

The greatest triumph of capitalism over the human spirit is that it has convinced you (general you) that idealism is worthless and unrealistic.
Let me ask you something: in your own head this pretentious gibberish sound profound? Did you stop and think about this stuff or do you have a little notebook filled with this nonsense? My god, we should have a vote to decide who is the most pretentious poster in the Codex. My vote was for Prima Junta until I read this brilliant sentence. You have my vote, Lacrymas. You are awesome. A once in a generation armchair developer. There are no words to describe the clarity of your reasoning and the subtlety of your way of looking at things.

One finds out how pretentious he is by the quality of his allies. And I do find my allies to be of high quality, at least on this forum.

Anyway, I meant idealism in the sense of believing that there can be a better way/society, not the philosophical term/category "idealism".

 

[Junmarko]

One finds out how pretentious he is by the quality of his allies.

 

[tripedal]

https://www.pcgamer.com/disco-elysium-has-ruined-the-outer-worlds-for-me/

It's hard to go back from that to "[Persuade] Please let me have more money for the quest I did" straight away. OK, so The Outer Worlds is better written than that, but the function of skill checks in dialogue is largely to get out of fights or get extra cash, and often your choices will have no bearing on conversations at all. Any insight you get will probably be freely offered moments later. Conversations, then, feel like they're on rails, and while you can pretend that your character has a personality and certain traits, it's rare that the game will acknowledge that beyond some throwaway dialogue options. It's like nobody is listening to me—my worst fear, aside from spiders.

 

[Darkzone]

1) Since I loathe everything with vampires, werewolves or zombies in it I've never played Bloodlines and probably won't play B2 either.
2) Why, is this shaping up as woke garbage too?

1) Monsters are a expression of their times. Vampires have become teen romantic gay shit, because of Anne Rice and this Twilight thing. Werewolfs have still a sence of manace and terror besides the shit that is Twilight and Werewolf: The Apocalypse. Zombies are an expression of mindless nihilism and of an danger by the amorphous group. And Monsters are to be challenged and fought by the Hero, which is to be the protagonist of the story, and not being the protagonist or being played by the player.
2) Because they are seated in California and the sun has cooked there their brain?

 

[Shadenuat]

asexual crash.

how does this even work

should't she be more like data from startrek then? https://youtu.be/sO_9ay6rJCo

 

[Prime Junta]

The greatest triumph of capitalism over the human spirit is that it has convinced you (general you) that idealism is worthless and unrealistic.

I think the greatest misconception would be to believe in "cogito ergo sum", I think therefore I am. Couldn't be further from the truth.

Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum.

 

[Shadenuat]

https://www.pcgamer.com/disco-elysium-has-ruined-the-outer-worlds-for-me/

It's hard to go back from that to "[Persuade] Please let me have more money for the quest I did" straight away. OK, so The Outer Worlds is better written than that, but the function of skill checks in dialogue is largely to get out of fights or get extra cash, and often your choices will have no bearing on conversations at all. Any insight you get will probably be freely offered moments later. Conversations, then, feel like they're on rails, and while you can pretend that your character has a personality and certain traits, it's rare that the game will acknowledge that beyond some throwaway dialogue options. It's like nobody is listening to me—my worst fear, aside from spiders.

and yet Dialog is still the only skill that actually provides some reactivity and changes events.
sometimes
it changes slides for sure. some of them

 

[GentlemanCthulhu]

Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum.

Well, whether its capitalism, Marxism or straight up communism, these are all still materialist schools of thought. In my experience strict materialism is not an accurate representation of reality. The failure of all these doctrines is largely due to that. You can't build a house on shaky ground.

 

[Heroic Liberator]

The greatest triumph of capitalism over the human spirit is that it has convinced you (general you) that idealism is worthless and unrealistic.

I think the greatest misconception would be to believe in "cogito ergo sum", I think therefore I am. Couldn't be further from the truth.

Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum.

I'd rather say that I will therefore I am, friend.

 

[Zerginfestor]

Shrink Ray seems absolutely useless. Finally decided I should fuck around with it, and it can't even keep the effect going after swapping to another weapon for a 'Shrink and Squash' caveman combo. Will probably emit superior DPS once the science perks are nabbed as well as Science being at 100.