Sulphur on 26/10/2019 at 06:42
Yup, 'cause even a game where you play a 4-eyed alien traversing space in a rickety ship is closer to Fallout than FO76.
Sulphur on 26/10/2019 at 06:44
:o
(Also, happy birthday, redface!)
Phatose on 30/10/2019 at 22:56
So, this game keeps getting mentioned compared to Fallout, but in terms of game structure, it's far more Mass Effect. A number of individual worlds, nothing huge, with some well done side quests. This is not a Fallout style free roam game. It's far tighter, more focused - not a thousand miles wide but 3 feet deep the way modern Fallouts have been. Doing a much better job of world building then even New Vegas - starts out on selling a typical noble rebellion against incompetent, amoral corporations, but manages to take it from black and white territory quite well, quite quickly.
Sulphur on 31/10/2019 at 12:20
Yeah, it's really a melange of influences, but it hearkens back to the KoTOR and ME formula with some of that good old Alpha Protocol reactivity. Kill everyone, and the game'll apparently have alternative ways to keep quests going.
Apparently one of the influences is William Hope Hodgson's 'The Night Lands', which I read back in my college days, and... I think it's safe to say the atmosphere of that book wasn't a primary influence. But you can get dehydrated water tablets (!), which is a firm nod to The Night Lands' ideas.
People playing on PC might want to hit up (
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_Outer_Worlds) PCGW and apply a few improvements: removing mouse acceleration, improving the TAA settings, and skippable startup videos being the most immediate ones to use. The combination of TAA with no sharpen filter makes stuff blurry by default, so fixing that was essential.
Malf on 31/10/2019 at 12:49
It also flickers the occasional, irritating black frame in fullscreen mode on my machine, so I've reverted to running it in windowed fullscreen instead, which gets rid of that black frame. Of course, that means it's probably not using GSync, but I've not noticed any tearing yet.
It's definitely weird playing this back-to-back with Destiny 2 from a technical standpoint.
The Unreal engine texture pop-in is noticeable, and there's something off with character facial animations (which is more an artistic problem than a technical one, granted, but still jarring). It's possibly down to their odd choice to go with Oblivion-style close-ups in conversations. It feels very old fashioned having since played lots of games with more dynamic conversation cameras.
As for the game itself, I'm enjoying it enough, and there's lots of fun to be had. It hasn't hooked me as hard as Deadfire did, and the setting grates after a while (THE CONSTANT FUCKING JINGLES), but it's fun being a space asshole.
I'm not a fan of the gear system, with even unique gear being outclassed fairly quickly by a seemingly random drop that might be 6-10 levels higher, and the Tinkering system being far too expensive to keep favourite weapons up to date, even with maxed-out engineering / science. It's left me in a state of loot paralysis. It probably doesn't help that I've put all of my points into Stealth, Dialogue and Tech skills. But then combat on Normal doesn't seem to absolutely require investing in combat skills.
And any points I put in to them means points taken away from the fun stuff.
And the other problem with such a huge amount of loot is that most of my perks so far have gone in to allowing me to carry more / get better prices at vendors. I don't know when I'll next need to reconfigure my gear to make sure I pass a conversation check, so I'm constantly lugging everything everywhere.
Best part so far: I had woolly cows in my cargo bay!
Worst part so far: The woolly cows disappeared with no fanfare or explanation of where they went. There's no longer a soothing mooing when I come back to the ship :(
Thirith on 31/10/2019 at 12:55
Do I understand correctly that, compared to a game like Fallout New Vegas, The Outer Worlds presents you with distinct, self-contained locations and missions, and once you're done with a mission you're also done with that location? While I too suffer from open-world fatigue, right now I think I'd miss the interconnectedness, however slight, of New Vegas' world. In RPGs I always think it's a shame if the world feels like a sequence of levels, though I also think it's hellishly difficult to create a cohesive RPG world that still feels interesting when you go from A to B to C for the twentieth time.
Sulphur on 31/10/2019 at 13:07
Depends on your definition of levels. The average location isn't as small and modular as something from ME: if you're on a planet-side location, they're generally medium-sized, open, and threaded with areas and quests (some interlocking), similar to how the locations in Dragon Age: Inquisition were constructed (though there's nothing as big as the Hinterlands). Depending on what you do, there's consequences to be had, and revisiting an area after some time does reflect the scope of your actions in at least one instance.
It's not open-world, simply because it isn't set on a single world; and the politics of the game have you explore different facets of its nasty, wide-ranging corpocracy in different places, which helps propel the main quest line. Think KoTOR, and you'll have a sense of it.
Thirith on 31/10/2019 at 13:35
Okay, that does sound much better. A few things I've heard and read made it sound more like Mass Effect, and the footage I've seen has focused mostly on the combat, which a) seems to be set largely in barely disguised corridor-style environments and b) doesn't look particularly good to begin with.
Sulphur on 31/10/2019 at 14:29
The graphics are definitely not the game's strong point, but there's some strong art direction throughout, and it's fairly colourful. There are lots of corridors once you enter buildings, of course, but the first area's a decently sized map in a garden-y world with a central settlement. Here's a (
https://techraptor.net/sites/default/files/images/The%20Outer%20Worlds%20Edgewater.jpg) screenshot I am randomly misappropriating from a review if you want to see it.
Keep in mind this game's not exactly an instant recommendation. It's a very entertaining and thoughtfully constructed RPG (especially in terms of quest options/player choice), but in the sense that it's a good ol' comfort gaming romp rather than sharp social commentary like Fallout 1/NV or studded with character like VtM:B. It's always smart (or not, if you're playing a stupid character - that Interplay/Troika heritage shows), but many of its trolleys have problems we've already pondered over in the past.
henke on 4/3/2020 at 14:53
Oh yeah I'm playing this now. I've reached Monarch, haven't found the woolly mooing cows Malf mentioned, but I'll be on the look out!
My fave thing is the combat actually, which is surprisingly meaty for this kinda game. Slo-mo makes everything better. I hang back and snipe dudes in slo-mo while my companions rush in and fuck shit up.
Playing this right after my return to the Bioshocks however... kinda makes me wish it was a simpler, more streamlined Bioshock kinda thing. Some of this complexity I could do without, like my inventory overflowing with different health and consumable items just a short while into the game. Does anyone actually use all this crap? I've only ever used the regular health-inhaler thingy. Then again I'm also just playing on Medium so it's a bit on the easy side and I don't really need it. Perhaps on the harder difficulties you need to pick your poison more carefully, but is that fun tho?
