Current Events > I'm an hour into Outer Wilds and this is fucking crazy.

(+) Yeah! (+)

I finally got the other warp tower to work. I figured it might have something to do with that since they're sort of drawn attention to in the writings, but your logs don't specifically track that info. Also I'd tried waiting there before but the sand tunnel likes to throw you out of the room since the ceiling is shattered.

Every time I read about someone playing this game it feels like the final act of Ender's Game with the weird -ass gigantic simulation.

So there was no third mask user, it's the probe. rip

So if I'm understanding this correctly, once the sun reached its natural life cycle, the Orbital Probe launch loop finally started for real, and I'm guessing each time it receives data from the future it adjusts the trajectory of the launch, so the loop may have happened millions of times before some slight deviation causes the player to look at the statue. Who knows how long Gabbro has actually been in the loop...? Or maybe the masks only activate when the coordinates to the Eye are found, but obviously the problem with that setup would be what if it never finds it. Maybe there was a theoretical maximum unique coordinate launches allowing for a fail safe. My guess is for the Namoi (and now for us), that was the true intent of the project, not to simply save probe resources but to "instantly" do a comprehensive search?

I can answer some of those questions if you like, but they are answered in the game.

There is more to explore here, I guess is what's I'm saying.

Never in my life have I treated a controller joystick like a precision instrument the way I did tonight. I did multiple rehearsal runs where I pretended to grab the warp core and still my hands were shaking.

I was really happy Solanum was part of the campfire ring.

Hey congrats!

It's always a hoot watching people come to the realization of the combination of the ticking clock and the danger of going through Dark Bramble.

Now I'm going to start Echoes of the Eye. This DLC seems to have a reputation, especially about being scary. I think there was actually some kind of imagery warning when you first boot up the game? I like scary games a lot, though I'm not scared by deep space or deep sea like many Outer Worlds players are, so we will see.

apparently part of the DLC idea came from seeing how many people found the base game scary (when they didn't intend it to be scary) and then wanting to intentionally make something scary instead

The first impression I have is that it's a lot more esoteric than the main game. Like I've walked around a lot but I don't feel like I've made any progress. Obviously the language can't be translated but I'm also not getting any of the film reels to work. I'm thinking maybe there's a way to turn off all the lights on the station and you need to do that.

A member of my chat when I streamed it said simply: "It's Outer Wilds. There's always a trick."

I loved the main game, but I think my problem with the DLC is that it felt too tedious. I got tired of it just as I was starting to figure things out because it was just requiring too many repeated sessions of going into the Stranger and doing certain things in a certain order all within the confines of the time limit.

It isn't quite like the base game, where once you have the knowledge, you can work toward it straight away after resetting.

I think I should have probably taken a break before starting Echoes of the Eye. I went into it not too long after beating the base game. It's unfortunate that I couldn't bring myself to finish it though, because it looks like there was a lot of good stuff in there too.

GeneralKenobi85 posted...

it was just requiring too many repeated sessions of going into the Stranger

it's kind of a shame that you have to constantly do the flight back there every time but I don't know how else they could have slotted the DLC into the game

I'd just put it on autopilot and take the time to sit back and think about what I learned from previous loop

It's actually pretty clever how they put a projector style thing in one of these rooms to teach you to use the flashlight for them if you haven't figured it out (as I hadn't)

I think the next step for me is to get into the third building which I'm guessing you need to ride a wave when the dam bursts ...hmm scratch that I think

For some reason I spent a loop trying to go as far out into space as possible. I was hoping for a distance or velocity achievement I guess, those don't exist but I did get "tried to escape the solar system" and it trivialized "harmonic convergence" to hear all the musicians at once. Also impressed that you do hear each musician disappear one by one as the nova engulfs them...

I recorded 33,000 Km distance from the sun and -55,000 m/s relative velocity before it blew up

There's a glitch the all-achievements speedrun uses that launches you out of the solar system at insane speeds, the game actually starts giving your distance stat in scientific notation once it gets past I think 8 digits?

Doe posted...

Also impressed that you do hear each musician disappear one by one as the nova engulfs them...

There's no real trickery, the game does actually just simulate the entire solar system in real time. If it runs much longer than the time limit, it starts to break down.

One fun bit of trivia is that the game works like the Planet Express ship. You never move, your coordinates are always 0/0/0. The universe moves around you.

That some of the simulation chambers flood when the dam breaks is extra punishing

Cannot believe I cleared the mine area my first run through just going off the reel and after fucking up twice by falling in the water and warping at the wrong time. Before the tower collapsed from the dam pressure. as I was descending to the reel area, the whole time I was waiting to get pulled out by the tower collapsing. Then I saw there were three reels instead of two. each time I put one in I was thinking "fuck I'm gonna get kicked out before I finish these" and have to do the segment a second time. But then I got out with time to spare. As I'm typing this it literally just fell as I started this sentence. I guess I thought the tower collapsing was several minutes before the loop instead of 1.

Its not clear to me still what the mental state of these people are. As I was typing this I just realized why I cleared Shrouded Woods. I had opened a path and gone to Hidden Gorge to have max time to work with what with the flood. But I just realized the flood emptied out the church(?) and that's why that area was empty. Anyway yeah I'm not sure what they think I am. If they were in their right mind they might be concerned that I could turn off their simulation. When they catch you doing the lantern glitch they crush your spine which seems deranged. And there's the guy endlessly flipping through a reel of life on the old planet even as he's in the simulation. Maybe they're just too old for their mind to take this.

This is a sad thought but mustn't it be impossible to give the Prisoner closure and reach the Eye in the same loop since you need to die in the Stranger?

Doe posted...

When they catch you doing the lantern glitch they crush your spine which seems deranged

They know you don't actually die, so them "killing" you is no different from kicking you off the server.


Doe posted...

This is a sad thought but mustn't it be impossible to give the Prisoner closure and reach the Eye in the same loop since you need to die in the Stranger?

Teeeeeeechnically, you can datamine or brute force the code to the third lock. There's even an "all friends" speedrun category where you meet every NPC and finish the game on the first loop.

Speaking of, you might want to finish the game one more time.

So, my thoughts on Echoes of the Eye. A couple posts alluded to this from others in the thread, but I do think the DLC has trouble with the fact it's DLC of Outer Wilds. It is annoying to deal with the loop mechanic, but more than that, I think the DLC struggles to really take advantage of what makes Outer Wilds so magical. There's two pieces of that, the freedom and the archaeology.

The Stranger is probably the most constraining setting in the game, with ~1.3x gravity and no access to your ship, the way you navigate the ring planet is more akin to a traditional exploration game. The ring nature of the planet is beautiful and very striking when you first arrive, but unfortunately there's not too much you get to do with the concept in practice. You can circumnavigate through the water, but obviously you can also do that on a normal planet. The main thing it does in practice is justify a looping hallway structure for the planet, but again, this is a constraint on the player unfortunately. I would have liked to see something like being called to find a way to boost past the center of gravity and land at a spot on the other side that would be otherwise inaccessible, that's an example of how it could've better fit Outer Wilds in my opinion.

Second is the archaeology. When you first see "Unknown Language" it's simultaneously exciting and creepy, and the reels are an effective way to show the Elks with more personal distance and uncertainty and foreboding than the Nomai. But it's also a much more rigid and inflexible mechanic. Nomai conversation can be placed anywhere and read & understood quickly, which lets the base game add meaning to what might be otherwise miscellaneous rooms by placing slice of life -leaning dialogue or hints for bigger mysteries. In EotE though, reels are the only communication method besides visions (functionally the same) and they're only used to paint big picture ideas of the chronology of what happened and hint how to mechanically proceed. Reels don't feel meaningfully tied to their location in most cases which breaks the base game's formula of finding an interesting location and then learning specifically what was happening in that spot, since that spot is where the Nomai wrote.

When you get to the simulation, at that point you're kinda just not playing Outer Wilds anymore. I think the content itself is fine, although it struck me at one point that it could feel like I was basically watching a walkthrough in order to play.

I was definitely jumpy at certain points like in the Endless Canyon segment, but... I think most games can accomplish that if they lower your view distance to five feet beyond which is pitch darkness. It's basically revving you up to be permanently anticipating a jump scare or loud noise. I don't think the setting itself or the elks are very scary.

My favorite part of that was probably the three error report reels, the visual and audio cues in those are effective at being unnerving.

All that said, it's not that I didn't like it, but I don't think it's an essential part of the game and it may have fared better if some of the ideas were put into its own thing rather than be packaged with Outer Wilds.

I did of course really love the final visions you share with the Prisoner. Though you can think of that in a funny way as the player Hearthian telling him "dude there's this really cool game called Outer Wilds outside this ship"

Yeah I have similar thoughts in terms of the freedom section. I think the way information is conveyed in the DLC though is extremely cool, they managed to tell a coherent story and lore and build a world/people that it feels like you understand, all without a single piece of actual text. It's different but it's kinda cool in a way. I think the equivalent of the slice-of-life dialogue is more of an environmental storytelling thing now - things like:

the failed artifact that blew a hole in the ship (this artifact is still lying in the testing room, you can bring it to a campfire yourself for predictable results)
the rocket fuel stored at the burned eye church
the RGB pixels if you get too close to the window (it's actually a display screen, not a window)
the burnt controls for the eye-sealing device so that it can never be reopened
there's tons of portraits all over the buildings. some of the portraits are intentionally destroyed (you can probably guess whos those are)

That's fair, I think part of my issue was that the reels are so relatively information dense that I ended up basically scanning around for them without trying to soak the smaller details in. For some of it, I felt less like I was learning the story through the environment so much as something would be ambiguously in a state of disrepair or destruction and I'd learn why it was in that state from the reel.

The Nomai writings gave you the opportunity to slow down and take in the scene by matching it to whatever that person was expressing. I think the Stranger exploration is still a valid way to paint a story. I think for me it was just missing some of the pathos of the Nomai. I was able to really build an emotional connection to the Nomai. They have no unique faces attached to their names and they share a scientifically-minded culture, but I still recognized the individualities in them.

In contrast you mostly only ever see the Elk people as the collective of the Elk people. That's not inherently a bad thing but I do think that meant some of the magic of Outer Wilds for me wasn't present.

I will say again I really really love the final two visions. The one that adds the fifth circle, while only briefly showing EotE stuff, fits the game really well. I like how if you've played everything then there is really no new information being conveyed, and yet it's really impressive how you can recognize all these events and the order they happened in by visiting some crash sites and reading conversations.

I feel the Stranger itself was more simple and confining in design to accentuate what a new environment the simulations were, requiring you to think in ways you've never even considered up to this point, which is very Outer Wilds.

Doe posted...

I will say again I really really love the final two visions. The one that adds the fifth circle, while only briefly showing EotE stuff, fits the game really well. I like how if you've played everything then there is really no new information being conveyed, and yet it's really impressive how you can recognize all these events and the order they happened in by visiting some crash sites and reading conversations.

I think you may have misinterpreted the fifth reel vision a bitsince it is you passing information on to The Prisoner, it actually only contains story beats youve figured out in the game itself. So there is never any new information in it, because the information is coming from you and you cant share what you havent learned yet. If you go to The Stranger straight away in a new game without finding out anything else, the vision you share is largely empty because your character has no idea what happened.