LogFAQs > #941933097

ChaosAzeroth posted...

I adore Felix. He's hecking adorable. SAM just cracks me tf up. Yes yell about entering stealth mode. Real stealthy there pal.

Yeah, but Felix's introduction is basically as a random character just hanging around near your ship, and you can easily walk right past him and never speak to him at all. When you DO speak to him, he offers no real motivation or reason to take him along, other than out of pity. You can like his personality or find it funny, but from a narrative perspective, it doesn't really make much sense to bring him along. It's basically just "Here are some more jokes" rather than really telling a story, comedic or otherwise.

In SAMs case, he's just in the closet on your ship, and you may not even realize he's there or that you can fix/recruit him if you don't investigate. And Ellie starts out as an NPC that is just asking you to do a sidequest to sneak into a dangerous area to talk to someone who might be biologically contagious in some way, and only after you're done does she reveal that she's recruitable. But even then, all she really says is "Let me come along, I hate being in people's debt", but she doesn't really offer any overwhelming reason to accept her offer.

In some ways that kind of parallels companions in New Vegas (you can potentially miss Boone completely, Veronica kind of hides her skills and just asks to travel with you without really giving you a reason to want her, and the various personalities conflict enough that you'd almost never recruit all of them in one group unless you're literally just trying to "collect them all"). But there are much better ways to introduce characters (for all of Bioware's faults, they're very good at this). Don't just plop a character down and go "Well, I guess you can recruit this guy if you want, up to you." Make the player WANT to recruit that character via story and scene. Show me why I would WANT to have Felix in my party. Have a scene where Felix shows up and does something cool, or saves me from getting jumped by some guys, or helps me break in somewhere, etc. Give companions a chance to shine BEFORE I recruit them, then give me the choice to recruit them or not.

I recruited them all (because it feels like the game wants you to), but if I played Outer Worlds the same way I play New Vegas (and RPGs in general), I'd have recruited Parvati and maybe reactivated SAM (but would never really take him along into combat), but my ship would be really empty otherwise.
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