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Jul 15, 2020 18:55
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 16:29 |
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pedrovay2003 posted:Oh my God, if I had a nickel for every time I do that when I'm talking about this game... Okay. 
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Jul 15, 2020 21:38
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I think my favourite thing about this game is that more than literally any other game I can name off the top of my head, even The Witness, there's not really a single thing I can say even after a 40 minute first episode that wouldn't still be a spoiler. poo poo, was even saying that a spoiler?! Oh god- Also I'm a big fan of misreading the word "intentionally" and thus completely missing one of the better jokes in the game.
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Jul 17, 2020 15:44
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Yeah, I've never seen the translator break like that before. There's no special kinds of text or anything, all script is translatable, always. Congrats on finding a new bug? Also for managing to stumble onto the way off of White Hole Station without the text that explains how to do it. I love Brittle Hollow. I've seen some great inhospitable settings in videos game, arguably some less hospitable than Brittle Hollow, but none of them really manage to perfectly nail the almost comical spite of the cruel god that brought this place into being. It's a nice fragile crust, whose surface exists under a endless blanket of natural artillery fire from orbital volcanoes, wrapped around a loving black hole, with the underground consisting of makeshift bridges between hanging platforms. It's completely absurd. Pro Tips: The signalscope has different frequency profiles you can flip between. The reason you kept losing that unidentified signal is because it's in a profile you haven't found anything in yet, so you can only scan for it when you're close to a source, so when you jumped back into the geyser the signalscope switched back to the Outer Wilds frequency.
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Jul 21, 2020 06:08
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So... what do you think happened to your ship?
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Jul 23, 2020 04:37
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pedrovay2003 posted:I just watched the video again, and I'm still trying to figure that out. I thought at first that a meteor had hit it and just kind of flung it into space, but it also looks like it landed on another planet (unless that's just where it was headed). Well, I'm sure you can crack this case! (I mean, I can be sure, because I know) One of my favourite things about this game is how viscerally apparent the spherical...ness... of the planets you walk on becomes when you're navigating. They really do let you orbit these things, and while your suit thrusters are pretty small, with the right jump and enough height you can do some really fun things with momentum... like slam into walls at maximum speed and die. Or do sick speedrun tricks on Brittle Hollow by slingshotting around the black hole.
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Jul 25, 2020 03:17
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Aw yiss slingshots. Finally delivering on the promise of Super Mario Galaxy. Don't get me wrong I loved that game but lord if I wasn't a little disappointed to find out that doing sick orbit jumps wasn't really on the priority list for them. Anyway, it's surprisingly how easily this comes once you discard your fear of death and just start jetting. I have this sense that y'all're getting tripped up by the distance readouts? The scale of this game is super weird; to hear the numbers tell it, these planets are all maybe 500 entire meters in diameter, and the entire solar system is 40km or so across. It's a solar system for ants.
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Jul 29, 2020 03:46
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Star System Summary: Timber Hearth: Breathable atmosphere, abundant trees and water, comfortable gravity Brittle Hollow: Unstable shell of a planet around a black hole under natural volcanic artillery fire Giant's Deep: Endless hell tornados that regularly lift islands briefly into orbit Hourglass Twins: Baking hot surface or cave system regularly filling with crushing sand Dark Bramble: Unnavigable non-Euclidean plant maze staffed by hatefish
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Jul 30, 2020 05:01
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Any landing you can walk away from right?
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Jul 30, 2020 21:13
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You didn't, strictly speaking, miss talking to Gabbro about meditation; that conversation becomes available when you talk to him about the time loop in two different loops. It's a strange choice by the game to give you a permanent upgrade in this way, though I suppose it tracks in-universe. The thing is, it's really not obvious that it's there, and it's quite useful - although it's not usually very difficult to die in this game if you decide you need to. I do think that as well as this there should have been a fast forward button you could use at will. That said, of course, the way they got the campfire fast forward to work is by disabling all rendering and allowing the game to literally run at 5x speed or so, so if that's what that took, I guess it's possible that having a visible fast forward might not have been feasible just on a technical perspective.
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Aug 4, 2020 04:30
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That sure is one way to get through the cactus room. By the way... you can totally land on the Sun Station manually. Trophy for it and everything. I'll post a little about it in spoilers. Alternatively don't read this and try and do it for real yourselves! So we saw in this video one attempt that went awry in a pretty typical way, with the ship getting flung off into space at a speed the thrusters couldn't compete with. This isn't due to any control issue or any particular anomaly, it's just a consequence of how orbital mechanics works, and the reason this thing is so difficult in the first place. As observed, you can't lock on to the Sun Station (not until you're very close, anyway), so you can't just hammer the match velocity button and keep on playing like it's a floaty atmosphere-flight sim, you have to actually do a whole orbital approach on your own, approaching the Sun at a velocity comparable to the Sun Station's orbit and correcting until you align with it. You then have to - still manually - maintain that orbit while closing on the station, with the Sun's not inconsiderable gravity now in the mix. The game's also cheating a little at some of its stuff so the forces acting on you and on the Sun Station aren't quite behaving the same, with the result that you can't just cut all acceleration and maintain your orbit like the station can, you gotta be constantly maintaining the orbit. Too slow and you get melted, too fast and you get yeeted. Once you get close enough - you actually can kind of land the ship on the outside of the station - you unbuckle and drop out the hatch in the five or so seconds before those inconsistent forces pull the ship into the sun, situate yourself in the gap between the two modules without the helpful context of having jumped off of one of them to have a matching starting velocity and alignment, and manoeuvre into the hatch. This will of course lose the ship and you can't open the other hatch from the outside and since you didn't warp here the teleporter wouldn't be charged anyway, so this is pretty much a one way trip (I don't think it's actually possible to do all this and then leave, basically).. This game!
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Aug 6, 2020 06:32
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God that cave is a motherfucker and a half right? The path through that first bit is so difficult to find because it's positioned in a way that you basically won't see unless you're looking carefully and moving slowly and isn't even I think visible unless you're facing directly away from the destination, and all those rocks basically look the same anyway. It probably actually does get a bit easier when the floor is covered in sand, since the contrast will show the paths a little clearer. I think the developers intended the area design to try and bring about a lot of just-in-time solutions. I think they did this a little too well.
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Aug 11, 2020 04:54
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Well, I mean, you could quantum teleport into the quantum cave, but that would require you to already know or luck into the thing that you learn in the quantum cave, so...
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Aug 14, 2020 20:12
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Man, what an episode to lose the blind reactions to. I love the whole chat with Solanum, not even specifically because of any of the things you learn from her but just because what else could possibly be in any way a fitting reward for a game-spanning optional quest in a puzzle game than a whole bunch of exposition (see also: the secret videos in The Witness)? I also love the retrospective character arc she has going on. The game's telling of the Nomai's story needed a character like her. The Nomai's quest to find the Eye of the Universe inspired an almost spiritual following among her ancestors, but as must be somewhat inevitable for children of a species who placed such a great value on curiosity and scientific explanation, she began to question what must have seemed to her like a dogmatic prevailing belief in the significance of it all. Her serene stoicism regarding the possible futility of this quest is a valuable thematic counterbalance to the audacity and fervour of Poke, Pye, Idaea, Ramie, Mallow, Cassava and the rest who dreamed up and built the Sun Station and the Ash Twin Project in their pursuit. At the risk of invoking something from The Witness a second time in this one post, it's all very Richard Feynman, appropriately enough a physicist himself neck deep in quantum bullshit; "If it turns out there is a simple ultimate law that explains everything, so be it, that would be very nice to discover. If it turns out it's like an onion with millions of layers, and we're just sick and tired of looking at the layers, then that's the way it is, but whatever way it comes out, it's nature, it's there, and she's gonna come out the way she is, and therefore when we go to investigate we shouldn't pre-decide what we're going to do except to find out more about it. If you said your problem is, why do you find out more about it, if you thought you were trying to find out more about it because you're going to get an answer to some deep philosophical question, you may be wrong... My interest in science is simply to find out more about the world, and the more I find out the better it is." (this is from a BBC Horizon episode called The Pleasure Of Finding Things Out after a book of the same name published by Feynman. Here's a mirror of it on DailyMotion, that bit is in the clip starting 44:50) Solanum's not of course here to either unmask the whole Eye quest as a sham or to herself be shown up for having doubted it, she's just here to show us what all this might have meant to entire future generations who weren't around for the beginning of it, how the culture that grew around it was so compelling that even in their embrace of curiosity and doubt their children were still drawn to it, still found meaning in it, enough to turn the Quantum Moon into a rite of passage. For all she knows, the quest still is futile... after all, hundreds of thousands of years later it still hasn't been found, and she can't have guessed that after all this time the Ash Twin Project has finally come to life. But she's okay with that. She knows why they tried anyway. I severely dislike Dark Bramble because of the specific constraints around anglerfish evasion; there is an element to the difficulty of it which is largely artificial and completely needless and screams for a somewhat more discrete in-game solution. I'm not wholly sure how it could be optimally done but it's one of the very few cases in this game where a problem is born of interactions between game systems which are themselves fine but turn out to jar when taken together.
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Aug 15, 2020 06:19
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The Lone Badger posted:Some answers if you want: This is more or less correct, except: They're not searching the whole universe, only the local star system, which they know the Eye is in but at an extremely distant orbit beyond their ability to detect conventionally. The cannon is wired to select a random probe trajectory every time it fires. The decision to not blow up the sun isn't automated, instead the whole loop is continued manually each time, where one Nomai presses one button which causes one probe to fire, its data to be stored, and the Sun Station to fire, and the data sent back in time, and when they found the Eye they would just not press the button. The Ash Twin Project isn't really deteriorated in the game timeline, in fact it's almost perfectly preserved (possibly the Orbital Probe Cannon might have decayed a little over hundreds of thousands of years; maybe it really would have held up back in the day). The reason it's going haywire is because unlike the original plan the Sun going nova isn't happening by design, it just always happens, and the loop repeats indefinitely (or until you turn off the Project). The only other alteration is the Hearthians excavating some statues and bringing them back to Timber Hearth, but given that the statues were meant to be all over anyway (you see them at various locations connected to the Project, in varying states of repair), this isn't really a very big change. I forget exactly where the statue in the museum actually came from. It's basically a giant coincidence that you happened to be the person standing nearest to the statue 22 minutes before the supernova. The game asks that you not question why future loops always begin from the campsite and not the museum. It's also possible that the Nomai originally intended to properly decommission the Project but the Interloper took them all completely by surprise.
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Aug 20, 2020 13:03
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With Chert, you can also tell him about the Nomai transmissions coming in to the Vessel, talking about how the universe is dying, and Chert will basically have a breakdown there and then and be unresponsive for the rest of the loop. It's a laugh.
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Aug 26, 2020 21:28
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 16:29 |
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Outer Wilds is very much like Riven: The Sequel To Myst, in that it only really has a very small number of puzzles, but those puzzles happen to span the length and breadth of the game world, and bring together elements from every corner of it that you need to understand and combine in order to solve. Outer Wilds only really has three puzzles, and they're handily marked up as huge, central nodes in your giant conspiracy board on your ship: the Ash Twin Project, the Probe Tracking Module, and the Vessel*. What sets these puzzles apart from Riven is the capacity for solving some of them them accidentally. Riven's two puzzles both boil down to combination locks with, uh [opens calculator app] well one has about 6 million possibilities and the other has [opens scientific calculator app] 60,000,000,000,000,000 give or take, so those kind of put a hard stop on any idea of stumbling past them. (*and of course the Quantum Moon, which is optional, but has the same kind of deal, while also (ironically?) being much more game-like in its conceit). The Ash Twin Project puzzle is all about figuring out, basically, that you need to step on a plate during a window. It's fairly out in the open, figuratively and literally, in that the only real gate on it is the rising sand pillar, which will pull you away from the panel if you wait on it; you need to run onto it while the sand is rising, and that's really the only thing that could possibly keep you from stumbling in there by accident. To figure it out "properly" you combine the knowledge of the towers existence in the first place, the knowledge of how warp towers work, and the egregious technicality that the Hourglass Twins constitute a single astral body that can somehow accommodate two teleporters without cross-wiring them, which requires you to properly explore Ash Twin, the White Hole Station, and Brittle Hollow. Then, the Vessel requires you to basically "solve" Dark Bramble which requires you to find one of the other two escape pods first and also learn about anglerfish on Ember Twin (which, you might observe, very blatantly nudges you into firing your little scout at something from one position and using it as a navigational aid from another position). Finally, the Probe Tracking Module requires you to enter the observatory on Brittle Hollow and get a hint from Feldspar, who in turn sort of requires you to poke around Timber Hearth a bit, which is only hinted at from Attlerock. I suppose you can consider figuring out that the Nomai were on a quest to locate the Eye of the Universe, which is somewhere in the solar system but they needed its exact location, to be a fourth puzzle. You combine all of these things, and together they make the solution to the game. The thing is that the Ash Twin Project is kind of the biggest deal of all of these, in that it underlies the biggest and most direct mystery of the setting, and produces the most impactful consequence, but also is the easiest to stumble upon. I don't know exactly what chain of development, uh, developments led to this outcome, but for whatever reason, they decided that the inside of Ash Twin Project should contain more or less the entire itemised history of that endeavour; the discovery of time travel, the plan with the probe cannon, the construction of the warp towers, the failure of the Sun Station, and the arrival of the Interloper. Arriving there early fills out a huge chunk of the ship log by itself. I think, personally, this was a mistake; yes, it's kind of skipping ahead a bit in the plot once you're in there, but there's still two (or three) more keys you need to figure out before you can really do anything with the warp core that's in there other than get a bad ending, and the writings you do get don't really hint at that, so, yeah, that's just kind of a weird thing. I guess the idea is that seeing the story laid out start to finish like that is part of the reward for piecing together the puzzle to get in there in the first place, and a final assurance that everyone who reaches that point is on the same page. By the way, you can reach the core of Giant's Deep without using the cyclone if you fly into the water at like 6000m/s. Trophy for it too, natch. Other "fun" trophies include manually landing on the Sun Station (as discussed earlier), landing the model rocket on the Attlerock, flying the model rocket into either the Sun or Hollow's Lantern, colliding with the Timber Hearth satellite, and completing the game on the first loop. (I have a theory that Annapurna Interactive have a house policy about trophies that they impose on developers, because I've played a couple of their games now and they all seem to have this approach to trophies; there's never one for just beating the game, but instead they're all weird, optional, often humourous but also very much not enjoyable to pursue things that there's basically no reason to want to do. This will probably be a chapter in the book that I keep joking that I'm writing about Trophies.)
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Aug 27, 2020 15:36
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