LogFAQs > #941932186

Lokarin posted...

I haven't seen much of it, but there are people saying it's as good if not better than New Vegas

Those people are blatantly lying to you.



ChaosAzeroth posted...

I enjoyed it. I think part of the issue comes down to overhype. I didn't have over the moon expectations, I just expected it to be fun and not a dumpster fire. It delivered higher than expected by some for me.

I think my main problem stems from what I expect out of RPGs (including past Obsidian RPGs), especially ones that are blatantly advertising themselves as basically being "NEW VEGAS IN SPACE" (and it very much was - they absolutely hyped the New Vegas ties in most of the ads).

The game starts out giving you almost zero reason to give a single shit about Welles or what he wants you to do. Character creation gives you backstory options (for minor stat boosts), but in the vein of the game trying to be LOLOMGCOMEDY most of them are incredibly lame (and calls into question how you're even capable of being the hero Halcyon needs to save it when you're clearly just as much of a loser as everyone else seems to be). You're dropped into a world and left to your own devices, which would almost make sense if the map was an open-world sandbox (the way New Vegas was), but Outer Worlds is very linear and mostly on-rails (so there's no point to that type of opening).

Your first quest is to find a ship to get off the starting planet... in spite of the fact that you're given almost no motivation to WANT to find a ship and get off the planet at all, other than the game telling you you have to. This sets the stage for nearly every quest that follows, where you're basically just doing what someone tells you to do, with almost no initiative or personality of your own. The only choices you ever really have are whether you want to be "nice" or "asshole" (but with no effect on anything either way).

If anything, it almost feels like the only real way to play through the game is to just play as much of a clueless idiot as the game seems to want you to be, and play a low INT character and turn the whole game into comedic farce (and then just crash the Hope into the sun in the end to turn the whole story into a futilely nihilistic tale of how nothing will ever change for the better and you should never hope for the future because human stupidity will always ruin everything).

Most of the characters you meet are one-dimensional jokes. Your first companion (unless you completely avoid Parvati) is likeable but dull (and she seems to exist solely to annoy the sort of players who want romanceable PCs, and to silently judge murderhobos). Most of the other potential companions are people you would NEVER, EVER invite on to your ship in a million years (the drunk, the homeless jerk kid, the asshole priest), because in addition to their negative personality traits, they give you almost no reason to WANT to have them along. Nyoka might be the exception - you know she's a badass hunter. But Felix is a shit, Max doesn't scream useful or trustworthy, and both SAM and Ellie are easily missable if you aren't in a "COMPLETE EVERY SIDEQUEST" mindset. Literally the only reason you recruit them at all is "because the game says they're potential companions and I need to collect them". Again, it's hard to believe that the people who wrote characters like the companions in New Vegas also created these lackluster one-note jokes.

Most of the companions improve somewhat if you do their sidequests, but that's complicated by the fact that have of them are terminally buggy and you can be permanently locked out of them if you're not careful (which mostly involves you having to pre-plan hours ahead using wikis that will spoil story elements for you). And even then, half of them aren't necessarily ALL that improved. And Parvati's feels incredibly forced and kind of lame in concept (even if it's sweet in execution, and the character as a whole is absolutely saved by the fact that Ashly Burch is a great voice actor).

The ending choice mostly just feels like "the correct ending" and "being transgressive for the fuck of it ending". You're given almost no reason to ever side with the corporations other than for the lulz (and probably after saving your game and then reverting back to play through "the real ending" after you've had your fun). Because they were so interested in trying to make their ideological point, they forgot to actually write a worthwhile story.

The worst part is, ALL of this feels like things that could easily be fixed if you just had someone who gave a shit to read the plot over and do a few more revisions before rushing off to finish the game. Give more of an intro scene to establish motivation (or have NO intro scene at all and slowly establish motivation through gameplay). Develop better companion introductions, and give the player reasons to WANT to recruit them beyond "because video game". If you've given Welles more personality and the player more opportunities to interact with him narratively, you can then more effectively emphasize the idea that maybe you shouldn't trust him, and if you make the corporate side anything other than a completely lost cause, you could potentially establish reasons why a player might WANT to side with them. Allowing for more player choice and flexibility overall is the only hard part (because that requires time, manpower, and money that Obsidian clearly didn't have), but that would have gone a LOOONG way towards making the narrative actually worth something.

Outer Worlds felt like sitting down and expecting to read a novel, and then discovering that you accidentally picked up a comic book from the 1950s. It can be silly fun, but it's shallow as fuck, silly rather than clever, and ultimately somewhat unsatisfying and unmemorable.

Even outside of the narrative, gameplay is overly simplistic and occasionally awkward, and the VATS-replacement time-dilation feels forced at best and kind of crappy at worst. The music is generic as hell. The scenery looks pretty and has a fair amount of variety, but doesn't really mean much.

For all the New Vegas comparisons, Outer Worlds feels more like it's trying to be Borderlands 2, but is falling short of the mark in pretty much every way.
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family