The Outer Worlds - new RPG from Obsidian

[H-O-W-L]

Poking Moon Hat Boy until he basically cried is one of my 2019 gaming highlights.

[Timothy]

Weird decision to have the holster weapon button be the same button as the talk button. Everytime I talk I unholster the gun. Bit immersion breaking imo.
Small issue but hope they patch it.

[Famous Mortimer]

I've been enjoying it so far. Good story, although (for me) the difficulty goes off the charts at a few moments when you're trying to sneak into an area to talk to one person but you aggro everyone within ten miles.

[Alberon]

Weird decision to have the holster weapon button be the same button as the talk button. Everytime I talk I unholster the gun. Bit immersion breaking imo.
Small issue but hope they patch it.

It isn't on the PC. Short tap on R to reload, long press to holster. E to talk.

I've just gone round the Groundbreaker and off on a mission and I'm already considering a rerun at a higher difficulty level playing a complete bastard.

[Mobius]

Weird decision to have the holster weapon button be the same button as the talk button. Everytime I talk I unholster the gun. Bit immersion breaking imo.
Small issue but hope they patch it.

Yeah this is really annoying to be honest. Such a weird decision. The other annoying thing is the massive tooltip thing when you hover over any item in your inventory.

[brat-sampson]

It kinds falls into the trap that if you just level 'speech' everything becomes *way* easier. I feel like it was maybe a mistake to combine the three talents like this, as just being able to lie to this guy, intimidate that one and persuade the other means you've got all your bases covered, unless later on the checks get a *lot* higher. Also it's happy to let you do everything at once, to the extent that my initial low intelligence gave me access to [DUMB] responses, but I'm still able to explain to this lass I've just met why her machines aren't working and persuade this smooth-talking smuggler that I'm legit on his side.

It's all very well-polished, especially for an Obsidian game, and yeah, it's fun, no denying it, and some of the writing and quests and companions make for some interesting choices, but coming off of Disco Elysium, there's no real surprise, or punishment for wrong options, or basically no consequences for the *player* as a result of their actions. I lifted some items in direct view of a guard, he came over and asked what I was up to, but I just lied and said 'nothing, officer' and he left me alone. You can choose which settlement lives or dies and that'll maybe change which shopkeepers you can visit or which followup quests you can receive, and I know this is just how these things usually are, but DE opened up so much more...

Basically, play this *before* Disco Elysium, not after.

[Blue Jam]

Fallout 4 bored the arse off me but I'm currently enjoying Borderlands 2 because it's like Fallout 4 except good.

How much like a Fallout game is TOW then? Does it lack that shonky animation which makes the ground wobble as you move forward and gives you motion sickness? Does it not look like a PS3/Xbox 360 game? Does it have no bloody crafting in it?

;) I've got Game Pass, I'll give it a go, though having this, Borderlands 2 and Gears 5 on the go at the same time might be too much of a good thing.

[The Boston Crab]

BJ, I reckon you'll like this. It's not too far from your Prey/Dishonored kind of thing. Kind of simmy FPS with loads of choice and combat options. I think it's really well made but not really to my taste so I'm guessing you'll dig it.

[wooders1978]

This is shit, fucking boring, crap weapons, stupid "humour" - shite shite snoriofest - fallout 4 pisses all over it, sorry it just does

Will probably revisit in 6 months and it will be my fave game but for now, can't be arsed

[Al Tha Funkee Homosapien]

It kinds falls into the trap that if you just level 'speech' everything becomes *way* easier. I feel like it was maybe a mistake to combine the three talents like this, as just being able to lie to this guy, intimidate that one and persuade the other means you've got all your bases covered, unless later on the checks get a *lot* higher. Also it's happy to let you do everything at once, to the extent that my initial low intelligence gave me access to [DUMB] responses, but I'm still able to explain to this lass I've just met why her machines aren't working and persuade this smooth-talking smuggler that I'm legit on his side.

It's all very well-polished, especially for an Obsidian game, and yeah, it's fun, no denying it, and some of the writing and quests and companions make for some interesting choices, but coming off of Disco Elysium, there's no real surprise, or punishment for wrong options, or basically no consequences for the *player* as a result of their actions. I lifted some items in direct view of a guard, he came over and asked what I was up to, but I just lied and said 'nothing, officer' and he left me alone. You can choose which settlement lives or dies and that'll maybe change which shopkeepers you can visit or which followup quests you can receive, and I know this is just how these things usually are, but DE opened up so much more...

These are basically all my thoughts, but betterly more worded. Nothing you do seems to really matter, but then again that may just be a big meta-comment on the futility of IRL pursuits.

Still, I am enjoying it for what it is. The side characters are not super annoying, I kind of fancy Parvati (because I am a stupid MAN with stupid, easily-manipulated MANBRAIN) and the shortish run time is appealing to me (doing a part-time MSc does not work well with 80-90 hour games apparently).

Also I will have a PC game code to give away (once I've fitted my new CPU etc, sometime this week). So if you'd like it then send me a PM and I'll pick a winner this time next week.

[H-O-W-L]

fallout 4 pisses all over it, sorry it just does

You can dislike TOW if you want but lying like this just makes you a tit.

[The Boston Crab]

Whether or not it's deliberate, and it probably is, it feels very stagey and theatrical, the scale implied rather than exhibited. The dialogue is arch, which some people obviously really enjoy but it's a tone I find wearing, personally. I quite like the combat which I didn't expect. I don't play this kind of game for the story or role playing, though, I play for the exploration and atmosphere, somewhere to lose myself. It has atmosphere but because it seems like a set, I'm always aware of the limitations. It's the difference between wild hiking and following a footpath.

[Timothy]

Almost near the end now. Loved every single second of it. The dialogue is great, the game is at points absolutely hilarious. Really enjoyed the combat.

Bit spoilery:

The further you get into the game the harder it gets to talk yourself out of situations. It also feels that every single decision I made now counts.

Definitely top 3 2019 for me.

[Blue Jam]

BJ, I reckon you'll like this. It's not too far from your Prey/Dishonored kind of thing. Kind of simmy FPS with loads of choice and combat options. I think it's really well made but not really to my taste so I'm guessing you'll dig it.

Hehehehe, cheers Bosto. Started it today and so far I'm wondering how anyone could have got away with making something this like Fallout 4 without Bethesda suing their asses- who knows, maybe they will...

Whether or not it's deliberate, and it probably is, it feels very stagey and theatrical, the scale implied rather than exhibited. The dialogue is arch, which some people obviously really enjoy but it's a tone I find wearing, personally.

With you on this- it's a bit unsubtle and far too pleased with itself, though I just had the gravedigger quote Mr. Show at me (he asked me to collect a debt for him, "quarters mostly"). That aside I suspect this just isn't for me and it'll be back to Borderlands 2 as my favoured comedy FPS.

Oh yes, and cosmetic options for a player character whose face you can't even see? Aaaaarrrgghh.

[Harpo Speaks]

Started it today and so far I'm wondering how anyone could have got away with making something this like Fallout 4 without Bethesda suing their asses- who knows, maybe they will...

It feels much closer to New Vegas to me which make sense, but without the same sense of exploration. Guess Cain/Boyarsky get some leeway given they were responsible for creating Fallout in the first place. Plus Bethesda have got other fires to fight at the moment in any case.

Oh yes, and cosmetic options for a player character whose face you can't even see? Aaaaarrrgghh.

Do you mean on the character creation screen, or the cosmetic items such as hats and so on?

I'm really enjoying it personally, but then NV is an all-timer for me so that probably helps.

[Mobius]

I've not played this game as much in the last few days.

It has all of the aspects I like about Fallout New Vegas but .. it feels more like an homage to that type of game, and doesn't do anything new. There's nothing particularly wrong with it, but nothing massively exciting about it too. It's all a bit too familiar.

Perhaps I need to give it more time but none of the characters particularly standout. The dialogue is 'videogame funny' and the world, missions etc are all fairly generic.

[Famous Mortimer]

I've not played this game as much in the last few days.

It has all of the aspects I like about Fallout New Vegas but .. it feels more like an homage to that type of game, and doesn't do anything new. There's nothing particularly wrong with it, but nothing massively exciting about it too. It's all a bit too familiar.

Perhaps I need to give it more time but none of the characters particularly standout. The dialogue is 'videogame funny' and the world, missions etc are all fairly generic.

I didn't think it did anything new either, but I liked what it did do. Good controls, fun environment, interesting NPCs, it's about as much as you can hope for from a game like this.

[Al Tha Funkee Homosapien]

SO DOES ANYONE WANT A FREE COPY OF THIS ON PC?
PM ME, FIRST COME, FIRST SERVED (LIKE YOUR MUM).

[Moribunderast]

Finished this tonight. Really enjoyed it. Not perfect and very much indebted to the Fallout games but has some nice writing at times, fun missions, good combat gameplay and constant encouragement to explore. It tickled my OCD itch of clearing up every possible mission I came across. Some of the companion characters were very good - Parvati, in particular, is a delight and her sub-plot is entertaining and well done. The game's not overly long (especially, I'm guessing, if you don't do every side mission you find like I did) but the gameplay does sorta plateau after a while. You're not going to be surprised by anything after a certain point.

For fans of Fallout-style games it's close to a must play. Solid 8/10. Not GOTY tier but a very enjoyable time if you're into the genre.

[Famous Mortimer]

I feel largely the same way as Moribunderast. Parvati is a great character, and although the ending sort of wrapped up the storylines of everyone involved, it'd be fun to revisit the characters. Well, not all of them, a few of them are a bit underwritten.

I think there's a few tweaks I'd make. Like, not having you unholster your weapon every time you so much as look at your controller. It makes the RPG aspect of it a little odd at times - just wandering through this heavily guarded building, and then! Huge rifle appears in my hands. And, perhaps make it clearer that to get a 100 skill in anything is to sacrifice enter swathes of your character. I felt like there was so much ammo around, you never really needed to worry about going hand-to-hand, so the melee weapon side of things just fell by the wayside for me. I didn't feel the melee option was that useful, but I didn't play it that way for a long time.

I wonder how many different "endings" there are? There seemed to be lots of player-based options that became part of the voiceover that wrapped the game up.

[Harpo Speaks]

Enjoyed this so much I ended up doing another full run on the hardest difficulty to get the platinum. I'd also done a bit of fucking around by using earlier saves etc just to see what the consequences would be of certain actions.

The game feels impressively reactive to you as a player, they've obviously put some thought in to what happens if the player kills a certain NPC character or finds a quest object before they are tasked with finding it etc. Hard to go into detail without spoiling things, but the second run was interesting.

Dialogue trees are really well done, and there were some genuinely funny moments in the game. Great voice work. Loads of other little details that I really enjoyed.

Parvati, in particular, is a delight and her sub-plot is entertaining and well done.

I thought it was a neat touch that there was an in-game explanation as to why you were going from location to location and spending a substantial amount of time in getting everything in place.

Seems like the game has done quite well which hopefully bodes well for what Obsidian can do in the future.

[Inspector Norse]

I'm about halfway (or possibly less, not sure really. I've just finished all the stuff on Monarch) through and enjoying it. Echoing what others have said, it's nothing new, but very enjoyably familiar with fun and clever dialogue, interesting plotting and some tasks and quests that avoid being too predictable.
I love the design of the Groundbreaker, I really enjoyed the part of the story there after leaving the first planet, although I'm hoping for a bit more variety in the locations later on.

[H-O-W-L]

Fuck, I dropped this like, a week after release. It's the only pissing reason I upgraded to Windows 10, too. Really need to get back on that horse as I was quite enjoying the dialogue and stuff, I was just miserably fucking bored by the gunplay and combat. It was pretty good and satisfying just far too shallow and uninvolving for me to be enthralled by.

Strange, too, since I'm probably one of the only weirdoes on the planet to fucking love Fallout: New Vegas's gunplay, for entirely cyclepassic reasons (I love the fact you mostly end up killing named or otherwise 'unique' seeming characters -- it adds a lot more purchase and intrigue to the world and setting, plus the fact every body is a named, relatively-persistent container you can drag around makes it feel so much more visceral and real than say, yer Mass Effect.).

[Jim Bob]

upgraded to Windows 10

Desolation.

[H-O-W-L]

It was only from 8.1, and the only reason I didn't upgrade sooner was laziness.

[Al Tha Funkee Homosapien]

Fuck, I dropped this like, a week after release. It's the only pissing reason I upgraded to Windows 10, too. Really need to get back on that horse as I was quite enjoying the dialogue and stuff, I was just miserably fucking bored by the gunplay and combat. It was pretty good and satisfying just far too shallow and uninvolving for me to be enthralled by.

The most efficient way to deal with the combat is to just run past enemies. Works every time and great if you find it boring.

[Mister Six]

Got this for Christmas and have found myself mildly disappointed while simultaneously really enjoying it. The latter because it's basically more of the kind of thing I really like, the former, well...

I understand there were probably budget limitations that necessitated several smaller maps rather than one big one, and jumping from world to world is a good way to justify that. But I was really fucked off to discover that there are great big invisible walls everywhere, to discourage exploration beyond the handful of roads, gulleys and gentle hills you'll come across. Don't fill your terrain with Giant's Causeway-stile rock pillars and then stop me from jumping up them, you bastards! And don't make me bounce off an invisible wall when wading into the ocean - at least slow my character down to a stop gradually, so I get the message that area's off-bounds without having my illusions shattered.

The combat is great (it certainly has the most satisfying sniping I've enjoyed in an FPS since Skyrim), but the guns so far are so fucking blandly designed. Just anonymous glomps of grey-brown metal with a bit of yellow paint on them. Might be tonally correct for the dull corporate universe, but not much fun to play. It's also just been boring handguns, boring shotgun and a couple of boring machine-guns so far. Oh, and a plasma rifle. Nothing as satisfying as Fallout 4's silenced pistol, or as hefty-seeming as the Bioshock shotgun. The melee weapons are more interesting to look at, but I'm not going to respec just for that!

Actually, the general look of the game is disappointing. It emulates the neon glows of Borderlands, the art deco corporate vibes of Bioshock and the dilapidated retro-futurism of Fallout, but so far hasn't presented a unique vision of its own. Building interiors feel less lived-in and plausible than New Vegas, too. It's amazing what a few bedrolls and filing cabinets did for that game. And the hyper-colourful environments mean that the hyper-colourful enemies get lost in the vegetation, especially once they're dead. And if they're just an ash pile? Fuggeddaboudit.

But that stuff is surface detail, I suppose, and the underlying gameplay is strong enough to carry me through all of this, as is the writing. The conversations are entertaining (the devs are proud of those translucent ears, aren't they?) and I like how the corporate head bloke actually comes across as a reasonable chap who's been brainwashed by the corporation rather than a cackling villain.

I'll probably use this thread as a little journal, at least until i get bored of writing it. Lucky you!

[The Culture Bunker]

I also got it for Christmas, and I can understand your point of how it somehow manages to discourage exploration by spreading it all over different planets.

However - the strength of the characters you take on has really worked a number on me. Helping Parvati, for instance, get ready for her big date was a lovely little side quest.

I was a bit "meh" about the combat until I picked up a rifle with scope along the trail, since when I've enjoyed blasting the head off many a marauder gobshite from distance.

[Mister Six]

Right, so I was all set to shift the leccy over to the gardens on the basis that Spacer's Choice are a bunch of cunts and using corpses for fertiliser honestly doesn't seem like that bad a deal when you're on a planet with an endless supply of psychopaths waiting to be riddled with bullets and dumped in a ditch. But then Pavarti kept bleating about not hurting the people in Edgewater, and I wasn't allowed to check whether they would be allowed to join the deserters or whether they'd all just starve to death, so I ended up shifting the power to them, then convincing the bloke in charge to step down so that corpse granny can take over with her secret fertilising ways. I'm assuming that's what the game wanted me to do.

Happy ending I guess? Kinda? Although the game was at pains to point out she's wracked with hate, and I can't help but feel the Fallout equivalent would have let me just tell the Edgewater guys to plant some crops on their graveyards, or even let me fix the power station so it could supply both places (although that would have been a cop-out).

I dunno, it's not a big thing but it's one of those things where I can feel myself being pushed into making decisions I can't totally get behind because my options and available information are limited.

Anyway, fuck it, my spaceship is in the air and I have the hacking vicar on my team, so that's fun. Next stop: space station!

[Mister Six]

Still plugging along with this and enjoying it, I suppose, but it really is pants compared with New Vegas, isn't it?

Things are coming together better now I'm on Monarch, the biggest map yet, with loads of valleys and mountains and three substantially dissimilar cities - boring corporate Stellar Bay; Old West-looking, semi-underground merc hub Fallbrook and anarchist shanty-town Amber Heights. The weapons are solid (except for the shotguns, which remain pissy and weak), the script is mostly amusing and the baddies are fun to mow down.

But. BUT. The systems are shit, aren't they? New Vegas was obviously designed by some bunker-dwelling gun nut who obsessively included every possible type of ammunition (two varieties of shotgun shell? Fuck off!), but at least that meant the ammo was limited and there was a reason to cart around a few varieties of weapon, so you could fall back on a pistol when you were out of 5mm and .223 ammo, say. But in TOW you only have three types of ammunition, so once you've got a decent sniper rifle, shotgun and heavy-duty weapon lined up, pretty much anything else you might find is pointless. Just grab whatever has the highest DPS, maybe have an electricity weapon to take on robots and you're sorted.

And because there are so few types of ammo, you'll never, ever run out for even the biggest weapon. Especially as people are apparently prone to leaving boxed of bullets lying around in containers in busy streets where any idiot (me) can pick it up.

They've also fucked the skills. The leadership skills don't seem to do much once you've unlocked the companions' special attacks, the ranged weapons don't change dramatically with increased points, the melee stuff is pointless unless you're deliberately going for that build, and the dialogue checks rarely amount to much more than a bit of bonus XP while you trundle down a linear conversational path. Stealth, lockpicking - maybe hacking and engineering for a couple of side quests. That's about all you need to focus on. No way to make an explosives-obsessed psychopath or a deadly sniper or a smooth-talkin' ladies' man (or woman) as there was in NV. Very limited play styles as far as I can see, and despite claims made in the trailer.

And what's with the companions' specials? In NV they were passive, unique and generally helpful. Here they amount to an attack that gives some kind of minor boost (a status ailment, or temporarily stunning the enemy). Which is great, but since most enemies aren't that tough, it doesn't amount to much.

I guess a lot of that stuff comes alive on the nightmare difficulty level, when everything counts. But the standard game shouldn't feel so bland and fuzzy.

I mean, I'm still enjoying it. It's still good fun. But such a disappointment.