Starker on 6/1/2020 at 03:27
And lots and lots of railroading otherwise. And it's not like nuking Megaton really has any far-reaching consequences. You still get an apartment to put your stuff in. The only thing that comes from that is that your dad furrows his brow and says he's disappointed in you.
icemann on 6/1/2020 at 05:12
Of course. But you still had choice in how to deal with people. Could roleplay etc. Not to the same level as New Vegas sure, but it's there.
Compare that with 4 where every conversation choice leads to the same outcome.
Sulphur on 6/1/2020 at 05:41
FO3 had a fairly binary set of decision trees, and very few of those had any actual impact on anything. In terms of narrative design, it's legitimately as shallow as a puddle of radioactive piss. Let's also not forget that FO3's main quest was basically a bunch of what the fuckery with some Michael Bay tacked on in the end. Even Mass Effect did choice and consequence better.
I want to say it's a terrible all-around game, but that's not true: there's some fun to be had in its wasteland, and Beth's environmental design team came through as always; plus, it paved the way for FO:NV. In the end, it's a very middling game that managed to be a lot of people's introduction to the franchise - which is simultaneously an achievement and a travesty, but whatever.
Starker on 6/1/2020 at 06:16
Or compare with the previous game where you could play into people's prejudices and pretend to be an ignorant tribal, up to having a guy cut off their pinky to make a deal with you.
henke on 7/1/2020 at 13:09
I keep track of my gaming in a Google Sheet. I know what you're thinking, "wow what a cool guy". Without further ado...
FINAL GAMING STATS 2019
Played games: 75 (PC: 45, PS4: 16, Switch: 9)
These were mostly 2019 releases, with the rest being from 2012-2018. I only included games I'd played any serious amount of time of, not stuff I just peeked at and then uninstalled.
Finished games: 39
Alrighty, that's more than half! What can we learn from this?
Conclusion: I have too much free time on my hands.
icemann on 8/1/2020 at 02:45
Lol
scumble on 8/1/2020 at 17:38
I suspect I'd have said DMC5 and The Outer Worlds if I'd managed to finish them. I'm having trouble remembering what I played in general during the year...
Malf on 8/1/2020 at 17:51
While I enjoyed The Outer Worlds, I don't think it was a stand-out game for me, and in fact found it rather... average. Certainly not Obsidian's best. I'm glad I essentially got to play it for free through Xbox Game Pass for Windows or whatever it's called.
My game of the year is probably Streets of Rogue, closely followed by Control. I would have said Deadfire for sure, as I bought it in 2019, but it came out in 2018.
Disco Elysium is fantastically good, but I have to be in the right mood to play it, and I've recently been distracted by shinier, flashier things (namely: Control, Prey & Death of the Outsider).
DE is very thinky, and recently I've just wanted to blow shit up / hack stuff / sleeper-hold goons.
I can't think of much else I've played that was actually released in 2019, but I'm at work at the mo with no access to my libraries, so this may get updated when I get home.
Edit: Nope, turns out that not many of the games I played last year were actually from last year.
icemann on 9/1/2020 at 07:30
Links Awakening on the Switch I only started playing this month, and that is excellent.
Sulphur on 9/1/2020 at 20:00
I'm in the final stretch of The Outer Worlds and while I don't completely agree with the assessment that it's an average game, I do agree it's not Obsidian's best.
The reason why I don't think it's average is because the average game is shallow in a very different way compared to what you see here. While the game seems about as deep as a puddle, it's constructed with a lot of care and attention towards how you roleplay it, from weapon choices to quest solutions via skill checks to just going flat out Dark Side and having the game story fork appropriately if you're being a megadouche instead of someone with a moral centre. It's also got the best skill checks (I used my engineering skill to tell someone how to use a door handle), and in classic Interplay style, there's dedicated Dumb dialogue if you min-maxed your character and went low intelligence. It's just comprehensively built to ensure you consistently have options to be entertained - and that's nothing to sneeze at.
But it's also not Obsidian's best because it definitely is more of a comedy pastiche of different influences (a good deal of that being Obsidian's own games from the past in amongst the more recognisable homages to things like Firefly) without a really compelling main story. The quests are entertaining in the moment, but there's no deeper subtext than 'capitalism bad, but you're a free agent so you might as well have fun anyway'. Everything's still written with the polish Obsidian's known for - nothing's outright bad. It's just shallower than you'd expect after, say, FO: NV. Even Alpha Protocol wasn't particularly deep, but it had the most interesting choice and consequence system in any RPG to date - TOW doesn't really do anything special like that, if we're using Obsidian's own games as a benchmark. It's just a solid RPG that's fun, silly, and completely inessential.
