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I think I'm gonna go through the game again and immediately turn in Phineas to see what The Boards side of things look like. I'm assuming it's gonna basically be mustache twirling evil and all my companions will hate me, but gently caress it. Probably won't take more than a few hours to plow through. Maybe I'll make every single faction hate me except the Board too.
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Nov 6, 2019 05:43
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Phineas is so Wanted that when you go to the board with information, they give you a fetch quest before listening to you. gently caress off.
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Nov 6, 2019 07:41
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Wonderful, 100% crash bug during loading screen when I try to return to the Scylla base to finish Felix's quest. At least it started for me and didn't bomb outright like it seems to do for many others, so I got to see half of it 
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Nov 6, 2019 07:53
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What I think is funny is how the Byzantium retirement quest is just a worse rehash of that one vault in New Vegas, where they do the same for elected Overseers.
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Nov 6, 2019 08:35
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Deified Data posted:On reflection, the only force working against the board and corporatism that isn't seen as equally flawed or secretly evil is Zorah, right? And even then they're on the same planet as Compassionate Capitalist Sanjar Nandi, so not even siding with them without reservations is seen as a truly positive outcome when you can always find compromise between the two. So I ended up listening to the interview someone posted earlier, and it has the answer for this question, and it's hilarious: It turns out that they did a "nuance" pass after writing characters that involved making people who work for bad groups good and people who work for good groups bad. The example they gave during the podcast was that Tobson is a company loyalist and the company is evil, so they went back and tweaked the character to make him noble and self-sacrificing.
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Nov 6, 2019 09:43
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Are people just looking to this game to affirm their own politics and give them a pat on the head or something? They present a world where corporations won and everyone else is just living (miserably) in it. And at the end of the day everyone's still a human. Yeah everyone is presented as flawed, with different motivations and competing interests, and... that's a bad thing? People just want this to be a Sith vs. Jedi, capitalists vs. anti-capitalists thing, so they can feel better about themselves? I'm not sure how you get a centrist reading out of the theme, especially after getting bashed over the head with the opposite within the 10 minutes of getting to Edgewater. If you don't want centrist compromise outcomes then don't pick the centrist options. If there's an actual message, it's certainly not debating whether corporations are good or not; it's that effecting societal change requires loving people over, a lot of whom don't deserve it. Saying "burn it all down" is easiest for those who are secure in the knowledge it's not their house that will be burned down.
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Nov 6, 2019 10:08
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Scorchy posted:Are people just looking to this game to affirm their own politics and give them a pat on the head or something? They present a world where corporations won and everyone else is just living (miserably) in it. And at the end of the day everyone's still a human. Yeah everyone is presented as flawed, with different motivations and competing interests, and... that's a bad thing? People just want this to be a Sith vs. Jedi, capitalists vs. anti-capitalists thing, so they can feel better about themselves? I'm not sure how you get a centrist reading out of the theme, especially after getting bashed over the head with the opposite within the 10 minutes of getting to Edgewater. If you don't want centrist compromise outcomes then don't pick the centrist options. The game definitely does not jump at the thought of leftism being inherently good and that's OK food for thought, but at the same time paints a failed capitalist state with people cartoonishly brainwashed into abjectly accepting failure, misery, and finally death over the course of generations as a worthy second choice. Part of the reason the game so clearly meshes with the Fallout experience is that no habitation I've visited so far is any more advanced than your average Fallout shantytown or burnt-out city. Continuing to pursue the current course will cause the colonies to fail and everyone to die straight-up, but if I take away Edgewater's power I have to listen to sick people asking in horror about who turned the power off and "live with the consequences of my choice" as if they would have lived had I sided with the very corporatists who are killing them, often directly (the generator plant's state is the result of a crime against humanity) to make number go up. That's a false dilemma. The actual dilemmas in the game are "sane and rational behavior" vs. "end stage capitalism ghoul" vs. "gently caress all this, I'm a sociopath who likes to watch the light go out of peoples' eyes when I run them through." So, generally, nothing terribly deep even for a Fallout game. The writers don't get this though; if you do the first thing, the game criticizes you and acts like the story's far more nuanced than it is. That's where the accusations of the game being written by centrist "both sides have good points" scum is coming from.
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Nov 6, 2019 10:33
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So I was pretty disappointed by the game. Got over that, gave it another shot. It's not as good as we hoped but it really isn't bad either. This is a game where they didn't do anything WRONG, but they didn't do it right either. The guns are fun to shoot and they're pretty cool and the mod system is fun. However, early on the modding is too restrictive, there isn't enough variety of guns, and there isn't enough variety of things to shoot. The RPG system makes sense and you do kinda feel like you're building a character. However, it needs a big balancing overall in order to feel like your character choices actually matter. All of your companions have an individual personality and they're fine. Are you gonna walk away from the game going: "HO HO HO THAT PARVATI IS A CARD" or screaming: "GO FOR THE EYES BOOO" or anything? Not really... The plot overall...yeah okay this is pissweak. But it's not full of holes at least. The setting is fun and unique. However since you've been in hibernation for 70 odd years, I feel like your character is never drawn into the world, which means you, the player never are either. Overall I had a lot more fun when I stopped comparing it to New Vegas and took it on it's own merits. It's not brilliant, but it was fun. There's potentially a really great game in here that I hope they get to develop for a kickass sequel or something similar.
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Nov 6, 2019 10:34
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Scorchy posted:Are people just looking to this game to affirm their own politics and give them a pat on the head or something? They present a world where corporations won and everyone else is just living (miserably) in it. And at the end of the day everyone's still a human. Yeah everyone is presented as flawed, with different motivations and competing interests, and... that's a bad thing? People just want this to be a Sith vs. Jedi, capitalists vs. anti-capitalists thing, so they can feel better about themselves? I'm not sure how you get a centrist reading out of the theme, especially after getting bashed over the head with the opposite within the 10 minutes of getting to Edgewater. If you don't want centrist compromise outcomes then don't pick the centrist options. New Vegas could support a lot of debate about the pros and cons of NCR vs. House vs. Independence (the only people irl arguing for Caesar were fascists and contrarians) but in TOW there's only good vs. evil, and the good conspicuously avoids contradicting the underlying philosophy of the evil. There's not a lot there to chew on and it reads as kind of shallow. There's also, conspicuously, no concept of organized labor (the main organized anti-capitalist faction is religious in nature), despite collective action having come about as a direct response to similarly draconian and abusive corporate behavior in real history. Almost like they're afraid to show someone clearly economically lefty as sympathetic, while having no compunctions about doing so for people working for actual, unequivocal evil as presented by the game's text itself. (And there's something of a weak lore justification for this narrative decision but lore is cheap and malleable, much like how until recently, WoW conspicuously lacked non-white humans for "lore" reasons and just as easily reversed that decision.) Runa fucked around with this message at 10:40 on Nov 6, 2019 |
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Nov 6, 2019 10:37
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Also I guess I don't know how many years into the future this is, but it did feel strange that in a colony with nominally regular connections to Earth that historical organized religion appears to be completely supplanted by this dianetics-style thing and is played straight with no real element of satire attached to it because it's only covered by 1.5 characters
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Nov 6, 2019 10:49
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In complaints now that I finished the game, the unique weapons and armors are all ultimately pointless, because they're too expensive to keep leveling. On top of that, they all end up with less abilities than a modded generic weapon, barring the tiny handful of science weapons with actual special effects. The leveling system in general, and how on top of that there are two or three tiers of most weapon types, feels like it all only exists to pad out the limited supply of weapon types with busywork so you don't think about how much off the stuff you get is exactly the same plus or minus some levels. Section Z posted:Figures the most New Vegas thing about the combat is "Hold on, I need to stop and repair my gun at no real expense beyond wasting my time." The whole durability system also feels like it only exists as an extension of the busywork to keep you from noticing the limited number of unique variations. Fallout 4 does a lot of dumb stuff, but its weapon/armor customization system is a million times better than the entire durability/leveling/mod system in OW. Volte posted:I finished it with an empty pending quest log, glad to be done with it. Won't play it again unless they do some major overhauls of the progression sytem. Total playtime was 28 hours.  Malcolm Turnbeug posted:The mind control Ray is objectively good at killing stuff but it makes an annoying as hell sound I got immediately sick of and respecced my character out of science immediately bc the other weapons were just bad. If you give the Mind Control Ray to Max, it scales OK because of his Science and it doesn't make that sound.
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Nov 6, 2019 11:06
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H13 posted:The setting is fun and unique. However since you've been in hibernation for 70 odd years, I feel like your character is never drawn into the world, which means you, the player never are either. I was watching an interview with John Gonzalez, who was the lead writer on New Vegas and Horizon Zero Dawn, where he talked about the challenge of writing pre-defined vs. blank-slate protagonists. In both cases he said how it's important that whatever character you're inhabiting is exactly the person you need to play -- that they have some kind of innate connection to the main story that moves the plot forward. I thought about that a lot with The Outer Worlds because your character is entrusted to make all these important decisions without really having anything to prove or a mission that's personally relevant to your goal. You're just kinda running errands for this Doc Brown-looking dude because..? I'm not saying every video game has to follow a Chosen One narrative, but as in the case of the Courier from New Vegas, you have a personal stake in achieving your goals that helps to guide your decisionmaking.
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Nov 6, 2019 11:12
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i frequently forgot my character was even a person, or that i was from a secret lost colony ship, or why I was doing anything.Mormon Star Wars posted:So I ended up listening to the interview someone posted earlier, and it has the answer for this question, and it's hilarious: can you link this..I'm having trouble finding it in the thread
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Nov 6, 2019 11:15
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exquisite tea posted:I was watching an interview with John Gonzalez, who was the lead writer on New Vegas and Horizon Zero Dawn, where he talked about the challenge of writing pre-defined vs. blank-slate protagonists. In both cases he said how it's important that whatever character you're inhabiting is exactly the person you need to play -- that they have some kind of innate connection to the main story that moves the plot forward. I thought about that a lot with The Outer Worlds because your character is entrusted to make all these important decisions without really having anything to prove or a mission that's personally relevant to your goal. You're just kinda running errands for this Doc Brown-looking dude because..? I'm not saying every video game has to follow a Chosen One narrative, but as in the case of the Courier from New Vegas, you have a personal stake in achieving your goals that helps to guide your decisionmaking. It's even worse because they had an obvious motivation available right from the get go that they didn't use and that would have only taken minor rewrites: they could have had space professorman's revival process not be perfect, so you need to get the space chemicals (that are also needed to revive the other colonists) so he can fix you before you explode into goo or something. Toss in increasingly worrying space mails about cell samples liquefying blah blah blah after you finish each major quest line to give a background sense of urgency. Roadie fucked around with this message at 11:22 on Nov 6, 2019 |
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Nov 6, 2019 11:20
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in TOW nuance is generated by writing contradictions: an "evil" person is given "good" attributes to make them more sympathetic, and vice versa. that's how high school essays work, not the real world in New Vegas nuance is generated by writing more detail. characters have motivations for doing things and those motivations are explained or demonstrated to the player. sometimes those motivations are kinda selfish or short-sighted, but they are authentic - true to the character and the world. e.g. nuance for the Legion is that Edward Sallow genuinely believes Hegelian dialectics will lead to the merger of the NCR and Legion and the creation of a stronger, more effective state; Dale Barton likes that the Legion protects his property rights and he doesn't have to pay much in taxes. there's no real effort to balance these feelings against, say, the feelings of people enslaved or crucified by the Legion, because that would be silly. more importantly, there is little concept of a "balance" between different characters/factions that must be written towards - the designers were quite happy to have the Legion be a lovely rear end in a top hat faction because that's what a bunch of violent fascists ultimately are, no if or buts
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Nov 6, 2019 12:31
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Lt. Danger posted:in TOW nuance is generated by writing contradictions: an "evil" person is given "good" attributes to make them more sympathetic, and vice versa. that's how high school essays work, not the real world
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Nov 6, 2019 12:37
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PipBoy but it's capitalism instead and you're the dead horse.
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Nov 6, 2019 13:14
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Perhaps a hamster posted:Yeah, this. How about not starting from an "evil/good" axis to begin with, and just writing everyone as people instead? yeah, this is one of the amazing contrasts compared to haha u looked where in that game, everyone is written as a whole person first who then selects some cause rather than just being Generic Causeman
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Nov 6, 2019 15:15
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I really hope we get a TOW2 that is less like Fallout and more like Mass Effect 2 or 3 in combat (but, like, better, yanno), with the Science Weapons being powers, and set far far in the future from this one when much more interesting poo poo is happening and it isn't about capitalism in particular. I think that was a misfire here and worked against the potential of the game and the strengths of their writers.
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Nov 6, 2019 15:29
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I finished the game and read the last few pages in here. I generally agree with the statement that the game is good but not great. It's close, it just need that x factor to pull me into the world a little more and I would probably love it and want to explore every corner of it. I think it was weakest in it's quests. The game started really strong. I loved the opening, and thought it was really funny. I just never found a quest which I was excited to do and found hilarious or interesting. I remember feeling the same way about FNV but then I did "Come Fly With Me" https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Come_Fly_With_Me and found it so ridiculous that I was 100% on board with whatever the game wanted me to do from then on. Most of the quest lines seemed to be 2 faction story chains in which I became generally uninterested in either of the factions. Vicar max was pretty funny during his quest chain with I can't loving read french! and then beating a man to death , which was about the point that I stopped caring about the games plot too. I was disappointed that I couldn't make him a philosophist and with some reading it doesn't seem possible either. After about that point I just started murdering everyone who wouldn't give me what I wanted. The shooting is OK for this type of game. What is strong about the quests is the way the game is crafted to allow you to solve them in different ways. If you want to stealth your way to the objective like a catburgler it works! If you want to bribe or intimidate your way to success it seems to work too. If you just start shooting and "accidentally" hit the quest givers the game has been designed to give you more hints and objectives to keep the story going. I never really felt stuck because of bugs (I actually experienced 0 bugs!) or because I didn't want to blindly obey someone and that was pretty nice to see. The main story chain has lots of different endings to accommodate your choices. In my story I played as a dumb character. I also put points into perception to help my gun accuracy, it was pretty weird that I was able to use a perception check to say something clever just after saying something really dumb. The highlights of the playthrough were when I told ADA "I'll skip the ship myself. I'm really good at maths, I know all the best numbers" and then skipped it into the sun. Game over LOL and then if you avoid that choice and do what the game intends and jump to phinneas's lab. later on phinneas asks why you did it you can say "I did it for some ice cream" and the end credits roll and then the narrator tells you that "you got a big bowl of ice cream and were happy" Overall, I'd say it needed more comedy. I might replay it as if I was an accountant or middle manager and completely avoid combat. I wonder what that would be like.
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Nov 6, 2019 15:37
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Agreed posted:I really hope we get a TOW2 that is less like Fallout and more like Mass Effect 2 or 3 in combat (but, like, better, yanno), with the Science Weapons being powers, and set far far in the future from this one when much more interesting poo poo is happening and it isn't about capitalism in particular. I think that was a misfire here and worked against the potential of the game and the strengths of their writers. I don't think this world is interesting enough to revisit and I'm gonna look at any Outer Worlds 2 askance
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Nov 6, 2019 16:06
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Philman posted:I finished the game and read the last few pages in here. I generally agree with the statement that the game is good but not great. It's close, it just need that x factor to pull me into the world a little more and I would probably love it and want to explore every corner of it. I think it was weakest in it's quests. Actually, you can make him philophist. I did it. You locked yourself out by killing the man instead of hearing him out. He tells you to go to Scylla to meet a hermit. Max and you go on a vision quest. If you get Max to kill his ideal self, he becomes a philosphist and achieves inner peace. All of his ambient dialouge changes as well. And if you ask him abouy Philopshism noe he admits he is one.
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Nov 6, 2019 16:08
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Wolfsheim posted:I know everyone's dunking on the confusing meme and this isnt the right thread for it but I really wanna emphasize how terrible Bioshock Infinite is Infinite seemed to have a very troubled development that explains some of it's issues. People who worked on it said there was enough cut content for 5 or 6 different games, including two completely different multiplayer modes that were scrapped a year before release. Early press previews seemed to indicate that the game was originally supposed to be much more open and less linear than what we ended up getting. It sounds like they came up with a ton of ideas, before realizing it wasn't coming together and they were running out of time. They took all the best pieces and tried to cobble them together into a fairly standard shooter at the last minute.
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Nov 6, 2019 16:14
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Philman posted:Overall, I'd say it needed more comedy. I might replay it as if I was an accountant or middle manager and completely avoid combat. I wonder what that would be like.
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Nov 6, 2019 16:35
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Covok posted:Actually, you can make him philophist. I did it. You locked yourself out by killing the man instead of hearing him out. He tells you to go to Scylla to meet a hermit. Max and you go on a vision quest. If you get Max to kill his ideal self, he becomes a philosphist and achieves inner peace. All of his ambient dialouge changes as well. And if you ask him abouy Philopshism noe he admits he is one. hah, cool. I actually went to visit the hermit but she didn't want to help us translate the book.
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Nov 6, 2019 16:43
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You could also interpret the game as utterly nihilistic. "Everything sucks and everybody is doomed no matter what choices you make so neither you nor your choices actually matter"
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Nov 6, 2019 16:48
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GreenBuckanneer posted:So finally after 45 hours beat the game, those last two levels being super crashy put a damper on my enjoyment but otherwise I had fun with it. Pro-Phinias. Forty five hours? What the hell were you doing for all that time? I did everything except getting one science weapon and it was still only 18.
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Nov 6, 2019 16:58
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Son of a Vondruke! posted:Infinite seemed to have a very troubled development that explains some of it's issues. People who worked on it said there was enough cut content for 5 or 6 different games, including two completely different multiplayer modes that were scrapped a year before release. Early press previews seemed to indicate that the game was originally supposed to be much more open and less linear than what we ended up getting. It sounds like they came up with a ton of ideas, before realizing it wasn't coming together and they were running out of time. They took all the best pieces and tried to cobble them together into a fairly standard shooter at the last minute. Better that than give birth to another Mass Effect Andromeda.
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Nov 6, 2019 17:01
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Philman posted:hah, cool. She never does but you can convince her to do a vision quest. I may be wrong about being locked out. I am assuming you can't if you kill him but it sounds like you still get her location. If you can convince her, you can do it.
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Nov 6, 2019 17:06
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So I met this guy Felix Millstone, and all signs, especially his name point to him being a liability. Pavarotti seems to like him though, but I mean I don't want to replay the entire game again just on this guy's account if he turns out to badly gently caress something up. Without spoilers, am I missing out on a lot of content if I don't take him? Is it a significant disadvantage if I do?
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Nov 6, 2019 17:15
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Taear posted:Forty five hours? What the hell were you doing for all that time?
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Nov 6, 2019 17:17
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You’ll miss out on his companion quest but they are all mostly minor and self contained. There’s no reason not to recruit him tho.
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Nov 6, 2019 17:19
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I think I was locked out. I tried to convince her.
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Nov 6, 2019 17:21
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Immortal Wombat posted:So I met this guy Felix Millstone, and all signs, especially his name point to him being a liability. He's one of the 6 companions, there's absolutely no reason to leave him behind.
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Nov 6, 2019 17:24
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I'm coming into this thread blind so I don't know what the current politics are but I just drank with Parvati and talked about Jun on Groundbreaker and SAM is my newest addition to the team so his responses are brand new and my gooood the whiplash in tone was so amazing I was losing my mind. I think I helped her too, which is nice.
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Nov 6, 2019 17:46
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Is there another way to get the Roseway distress signal that isn't through Gladys?
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Nov 6, 2019 17:57
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GulagDolls posted:i frequently forgot my character was even a person, or that i was from a secret lost colony ship, or why I was doing anything. http://interactive.libsyn.com/the-outer-worlds-co-game-director-leonard-boyarsky
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Nov 6, 2019 18:03
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This inspired me to start a new New Vegas game, at which point I immediately discovered that a) you can mod a bunch of its problems away, but also b) you are also one bad mod choice or ini typo from making it hard lock/infinite load time/poo poo its pants with no way to fix it but uninstall/delete all/start over lmao. Eat poo poo forever Gambryo engine. Think I got it right the second time around by being very minimal with anything that isn't just a texture mod or a bugfix of some kind that's been updated recently. Movement/shooting is rear end even with mouse accel turned off in the ini but it also just feels like there's more ways to goof around in fun ways, if that makes sense. The skill/trait/perk system is way more interesting, but in fairness to TOW is also full of ways to gently caress yourself stupidly that TOW doesn't have, and having skill/stat requirements to take perks that are also gated by level anyway means you have to really plan out your build to an irritating degree. Overall I'm digging it, and I seem to have forgotten just enough details that I'm not autopiloting through it. 
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Nov 6, 2019 18:07
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sean10mm posted:but also b) you are also one bad mod choice or ini typo from making it hard lock/infinite load time/poo poo its pants with no way to fix it but uninstall/delete all/start over lmao. Eat poo poo forever Gambryo engine. You really don't need to delete everything if you gently caress up installing a mod. also I don't think you can blame gamebryo for the game hardlocking if you mess with the game inis/gently caress up modding
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Nov 6, 2019 18:26
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SAM is the best follower. It's also hilarious to be sneaking around just to have him rocket up a ladder and slam down behind you.
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Nov 6, 2019 18:37
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