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We're proud of you. Impressive (accidental) timing on that Stranger bonk. Now I kinda want to see it happen to someone on their first approach, get a Truman Show moment. Edit: since top of new page, update was last post.
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Feb 20, 2023 21:56
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| # ? May 3, 2024 21:23 |
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So now that it has definitively not happened in this LP, let me tell you about how Echoes of the Eye can backfire spectacularly. Unlike the base game which has an extremely wide spider of webs to follow all around the solar system and a ton of dots to connect, at least some of which any given player will statistically just stumble upon accidentally, Echoes has a fairly rigid if not entirely linear order to it. The Stranger is freely explorable but almost all of its secrets are quite well hidden. You explore and take in the basic lore until you find the hull breach, the lab teaches you about the artifacts, you maybe explore the dream world, and eventually make the connection with the submerged vault. You go down there, peek into the vault, and are met with a vision that lays out, fairly explicitly (albeit with one detail missing) that you should go to the one room in that tower, in which you can find the passcode that leads you to the room with the three pictures that show you the reel-burning places. In there, you find the reels that walk you through fairly explicit procedures about... doing something in the dream world. This is where we are in the LP. Two things stand out about this synopsis so far. Firstly, unlike the base game, there is quite a lot of explicitly following breadcrumb trails rather than making inferences and casting about like we were doing before. But second, and far more importantly, the entire line of logic, everything on which rests your ability to reason through the critical path, passes through a single, fragile, point of failure; your trip to the submerged vault. In that room, you have to interact with the open button for the locked vault while the locks are still on it, wait a little while, and then look directly into the light coming out of the vault. Consider what happens when, through any possible combination of various factors, you leave that room without looking in. Maybe you didn't think to try opening the locked vault. Maybe you did but looked away before the light appeared. Maybe you looked toward the light but didn't hit it dead on. Or maybe something else. You leave the room. What will follow is misery. There is no other indication that the locked room in that tower even exists, let alone how to open it. You can explore the dream worlds, which... well, without getting ahead of the LP I can't really expand on this point, but they'll suggest to you something which is not possible and one solution in particular which is extremely ill-advised to attempt. You will, almost to a certainty, not be able to progress, without the extremely specific guidance you can only get from the burned reels, of which you are exceptionally unlikely to stumble upon all of them and will only find if you access the tower, which you will only be able to do if you look inside the vault. Without this one single action, the entire critical path critically fails. Your last fallback for guidance, the rumour map, will blink at you; there's more to explore in the submerged vault! No poo poo, you'll say, we haven't opened the vault yet! Your misery will continue, indefinitely, until you look up a guide, or ask a friend. This happened to me and it very nearly caused me to give up on the whole game. It's only because a friend realised (based on my venting about what the game seemed to be asking me to do) what had happened and decided to drop a laser-guided spoiler that my experience was salvaged. In retrospect, I love Echoes of the Eye dearly. But oh my god, it is subject to an extremely insidious failure that can turn all its strengths against themselves
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Feb 24, 2023 02:47
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Fedule posted:Your last fallback for guidance, the rumour map, will blink at you; there's more to explore in the submerged vault! No poo poo, you'll say, we haven't opened the vault yet! I understand the thought process here, but I don't think it's how the "more to explore" indictator works anywhere in the base game or DLC. "More to explore" means that there's something to find that doesn't require any special knowledge or actions beyond just looking everywhere. Something that requires specialized knowledge to access is indicated by a separate entry, for example the Statue Workshop portion of Statue Island.
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Feb 24, 2023 03:29
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Fedule posted:So now that it has definitively not happened in this LP, let me tell you about how Echoes of the Eye can backfire spectacularly. I had a similar experience. I tried to open the locked vault but never stepped into the light to see the visions. Still managed to solve the first two dream locations without the hints after lots of trial and error. It's been patched now so you get the vision as soon as you try to open the vault.
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Feb 24, 2023 04:25
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Fedule posted:Two things stand out about this synopsis so far. Firstly, unlike the base game, there is quite a lot of explicitly following breadcrumb trails rather than making inferences and casting about like we were doing before. Yeah, making the clues visual instead of textual like in the base game is an interesting way to engage with the puzzles a little differently, but what it loses is the ability to allude to things without being explicit. You can't have idle worldbuilding chatter, because accessing the stuff is just enough of a chore it would be frustrating. You can't give half a clue in someone's idle remarks (for example: "I've noticed something that could explain the Giant's Deep stuff, we've replicated it here at the observatory" you can either trek there to find info, or you can use the viewer and notice that they have replica tornadoes and that might be enough to pick up on what's going on). And, like you said, you can't have multiple ways of stating the same information from different directions.
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Feb 24, 2023 04:31
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Feb 24, 2023 23:13
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Mar 3, 2023 21:55
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"Dear owlbears, I would like to file a bug report..." That was a fun eureka moment. You'd found all the pieces and gotten distracted in the middle of putting them together, I was worried you'd need a nudge.
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Mar 4, 2023 01:12
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I loved my realization moment. I was trying to get past all those elks when one of them picked me up to blow out my flame, then put me down and disappeared in a puff of green smoke. Then I woke up drowning. That was enough to clue me in. I hadn't seen the slide about walking through the fire yet, but it was obvious enough to try when I got back to that location and found nothing else of note.
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Mar 4, 2023 08:19
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Do you want to know why you don't get ship log updates while in there? Same reason as to why you don't see your HUD elements. You ain't got your suit.
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Mar 7, 2023 19:59
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Mar 9, 2023 21:36
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If it helps (it doesn't) you're not missing something, it's really this annoying.
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Mar 10, 2023 00:09
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I love hearing the energy of the video change as things go from frustration to discovery. It can be a bit disheartening sometimes but the highs make it. This is a game which has a lot of spinning your wheels until something clicks.
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Mar 10, 2023 00:28
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Bruceski posted:I love hearing the energy of the video change as things go from frustration to discovery. It can be a bit disheartening sometimes but the highs make it. This is a game which has a lot of spinning your wheels until something clicks. It's basically a puzzle box. I've come to accept that. There's also this video that came out recently from Daryl Talks Games, that I thought was particularly interesting and resonated a lot with my feelings on the game. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRm4pjbMfYY
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Mar 10, 2023 01:05
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Does it make sense that Our Guy can remember what happens in the virtual world after he's dead? Do we care?
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Mar 10, 2023 11:33
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Brutal Garcon posted:Does it make sense that Our Guy can remember what happens in the virtual world after he's dead? Do we care? Maybe if the user is alive, it functions like VR (hence they can recall events that happened inside once they wake up/get looped in the supernova), but it generates an AI construct for continuity's sake if the user dies while inside. That doesn't quite seem to be what it looks like, but could be an explanation. e: That also makes me wonder, though. Can the owlk be kicked out of the virtual world by each other? If the AI construct of the admin boots you and you're dead in the Stranger, you're just gone I guess. Kangra fucked around with this message at 21:07 on Mar 10, 2023 |
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Mar 10, 2023 20:20
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Kangra posted:Maybe if the user is alive, it functions like VR (hence they can recall events that happened inside once they wake up/get looped in the supernova), but it generates an AI construct for continuity's sake if the user dies while inside. That doesn't quite seem to be what it looks like, but could be an explanation. The impression I have is that the artifacts combined with the special fires do some kind of fuckery to your brain that is able to stabilise and preserve whatever the fundamental consciousness is, even through brain death. How? Magical alien sci-fi tech, shush. We can be sure that whatever happens in the dream world when we're dead is actually happening in our brain, because otherwise the Ash Twin Project wouldn't back it up. I have to think the owlks are, like us, anchored to the dream world by the artifact's flame, and so yeah they would be kicked out if theirs ever went out. I further suppose that the owlk all being dead IRL - and therefore preserved only in the dream world - is why they are so antagonistic; they are defending their last chance at life.
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Mar 12, 2023 04:08
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 Finale will be posted Friday or Saturday. After that, Michael and I are gonna try to get together for another round of achievement stuff and talking about the game.
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Mar 15, 2023 19:52
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Mar 18, 2023 20:51
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Playing hide and seek with the owlks may be the worst part of Outer Wilds, but meeting The Prisoner might be my favorite part. It should probably let you trigger the ending scenario for the main game from there, though
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Mar 18, 2023 21:57
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Now that we're here, I can finally mention: I came across that final "error" purely by accident. After finding out that "dying" in the dreamworld did nothing, I started messing around and seeing how much it would take to snap out from it. I happened to be doing the initial testing at the hidden gorge, and first time I plunged into the water and woke up, so next test involved leaving the lamp behind to see if I drown... and promptly fell out of the radius. It was certainly a different experience, not having to do one of the stealth sections basically at all, and being able to scout into the darkened areas very easily. (I didn't much care for the stealth sections either) As for the three locks, they all have a valid combination for them, and they function as you might expect, middle one calling the raft and the right one turning off the light. Dataminers found the codes pretty quickly, and in one of the patches the developers also included an open version of the diving bell casket in the event you input the correct codes. It wasn't included initially, as using the intended methods, it's not really possible to see what happened given the whole... being dead thing. Another neat thing: That vision you beam to the prisoner, it actually changes depending on how much you have learned about the Nomai's fate on that current run. At the very least not knowing about ghost matter makes the Nomai just fall over without the interloper blowing up.
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Mar 18, 2023 22:34
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StarFyter posted:As for the three locks, they all have a valid combination for them, and they function as you might expect, middle one calling the raft and the right one turning off the light. Dataminers found the codes pretty quickly, and in one of the patches the developers also included an open version of the diving bell casket in the event you input the correct codes. It wasn't included initially, as using the intended methods, it's not really possible to see what happened given the whole... being dead thing. If I remember right doesn't the "correct" code for the left path not make the bridge line up properly?
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Mar 18, 2023 23:03
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Let me tell you about how Echoes of the Eye hosed me, again, one last time. Going through the 'cheevos for the main game, I was left with two in particular for last. The first was the one for filling out every single entry in the Ship's Log, which is surprisingly dickish, since there's no way to track exactly what you don't have and anything that's not critical path related doesn't raise a "more to explore here" flag. It's a pretty bad choice for a 'cheevo all told. The second was, of course, the one for finishing the game in a single loop. This is also a bad choice for a 'cheevo, mostly because just the concept of it is very stupid (you always finish Outer Wilds in a single loop! That's the whole point!) but also because all it really does is make the run more time consuming, stressful and frustrating, because you have to basically freehand the path to the Vessel and if you mess up you have to do the whole start of the game again, and there's just generally no reason anyone would ever want to do this. But wait, because there's a sting in the tail. Recall that the console ports of Outer Wilds don't have save profiles. This means I had to delete my only profile to even attempt that last trophy, and it is a classic Last Trophy, most people are going to get everything else and fully complete that file before deleting it to do the one thing, the only thing, that requires a new file. And that meant, when I came back to play Echoes, I was doing it off a fresh file. As has been observed, that last cutscene with the Prisoner is somewhat dynamic, with most parts of it being contingent on how much of the game you've played. With a completely empty log, that cutscene is pretty barren! It's pretty much, just, hello, I am a guy, I went to space, now here we are. It, like, completely erases the thing that makes the scene moving, the fact that we are telling this guy that his act of faith worked, that it was worth it, that at the moment of his forthcoming death he is fulfilled. I was pretty underwhelmed. It wasn't until I started discussing the ending that it became apparent that most people got far more detailed cutscenes than I did, and eventually I just looked up the full version. Just a really, really stupid unforced error from the developers. If you know me at all you will probably know my deep disdain for 'cheevos, but this really is another level. ...so anyway, that horseshit aside, Outer Wilds is pretty loving great! There's this classic Tarkovskyism I keep coming back to, that the purpose of art is to harrow a man's soul and prepare him for death. Outer Wilds definitely has that vibe down. You feel like you can die a little happier after completing it. Incredibly, Echoes of the Eye manages to deepen this sensation, extending the impossible quest for one weird spaceman to reach the Eye back yet another generation of civilisations, a grand culmination of accidental gambits by multiple species who never even co-existed, let alone communicated, and yet their collective existences led to something, at the end of time. loving transcendental cosmic poo poo. By the way I think it's now safe to point out that it's really funny that you went to pains to write down the Eye coordinates, twice, and then didn't notice that the game pops them up on a little display when you need to input them.
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Mar 19, 2023 02:02
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Apr 4, 2023 20:35
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| # ? May 3, 2024 21:23 |
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 That does it for Outer Wilds, everyone. I know things started out rough, but I don't think I would've had it any other way, knowing everything I do now. It was an incredible ride, and I hope the day comes when "Outer Wilds-like" become the new Souls-like. I'm not sure what my next project will be, or when it will happen, but please subscribe to my YouTube and follow me on Twitch if you haven't already. I always appreciate the company on my journey to be the #1 Video Game Boy.
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Apr 6, 2023 22:35
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