How is there no Outer Wilds thread here yet?

[Dansen]

I still think people should play this game...

I just started playing it this weekend. The opening basically lets you go through a series of tutorials before you get in your spaceship for the first time(without any time pressure) which do a fairly good job of illustrating the basic concepts and tools of the game while getting a feel for the home planet you start out on. After that you can pretty much skip right to the space exploration stuff on every loop afterwards. The fact that every planet in the system is both easy to find and quick to get to allows you to pretty much decide where you want to go and just go there, but once you gain access to your ship, the sandbox is open.

As, I think, the only other person on the Escapist to have played the game, I'm curious if you've finished it and your thoughts.

I played a bit of it and its interesting but frustrating. Maneuvering in the game is pretty hard both on foot and in the ship. Several times I've been slingshot into space off low gravity planets/objects and its annoying every time. Its a very melancholy and somber feeling game, which I'm sure was the intention, so gj devs. I just sorta lost interest after a while though since there isn't much to do in the areas I explored without finding the right info to proceed. I should get back to it someday since I heard it gets pretty nuts.

 

[Drathnoxis]

I haven't yet, sadly. I started it and gotten distracted by others games(such as Stellaris, which has it's claws into me). I visited a bit of Timber Heath, the two sand planets and then the collapsing planet before I stopped. I'm curious to go to Dark Bramble but also kind of afraid to go there as well(I shot a probe into the bramble on Timber Heath and...that was weird).

I do like it, it's just I've been very easily distracted by different games as of late and real life keeps demanding me do stuff that's cut my gaming time down a bunch. It's just unfortunate I keep getting into games that are LONG(I was playing Octopath Traveler when I started Outer Wilds and I haven't finished that either) and the fucking autumn rush has already started as well. Kotaku keeps posting articles about it as well, which keeps reminding me I need to get back to it.

I promise I'll have things to say about it when I'm done.

Stellaris is pretty fun but has a way of kind of ticking me off. They keep on adding more content, but kind of ignore refining the content that's already there. Managing your planets is worse now than ever and you end up fighting the UI to try and get your mineral+ pops to actually do some mining and need to constantly go back to each planet every time you get another 5 pops to build another place for them to work. And there's a thousand little changes they could make to make the game less tedious like letting you cue up star bases properly by calculating influence cost at build time rather than cue time and making a button for your ships to build a starbase and and all the mining stations in a system.

I played a bit of it and its interesting but frustrating. Maneuvering in the game is pretty hard both on foot and in the ship. Several times I've been slingshot into space off low gravity planets/objects and its annoying every time. Its a very melancholy and somber feeling game, which I'm sure was the intention, so gj devs. I just sorta lost interest after a while though since there isn't much to do in the areas I explored without finding the right info to proceed. I should get back to it someday since I heard it gets pretty nuts.

The main thing to wrap your head around when moving is that you need to account for deceleration time. You can't just hold down the thruster button and expect to get where you want to go. On planets you need to accelerate to a reasonable speed and then maintain it with periodic thrusts. If you start to fly out of orbit use boosters to push yourself back down. In the spaceship you want to roughly match the hundreds of m/s to the kms. So to get to a planet you accelerate until the kms drop below your m/s and then start decelerating. Also pay attention to the arrows beside whatever you're locked on to, the longer they are the more you need to correct course or you will go sailing past.

 

[Dansen]

The main thing to wrap your head around when moving is that you need to account for deceleration time. You can't just hold down the thruster button and expect to get where you want to go. On planets you need to accelerate to a reasonable speed and then maintain it with periodic thrusts. If you start to fly out of orbit use boosters to push yourself back down. In the spaceship you want to roughly match the hundreds of m/s to the kms. So to get to a planet you accelerate until the kms drop below your m/s and then start decelerating. Also pay attention to the arrows beside whatever you're locked on to, the longer they are the more you need to correct course or you will go sailing past.

Thanks for the tips. Landing I can rap my head around eventually, the bigger issue I'm talking about walking on the surface of a comet or moon one second, then finding myself hurdling through space after jumping a crater rim.

 

[Dalisclock]

Stellaris is pretty fun but has a way of kind of ticking me off. They keep on adding more content, but kind of ignore refining the content that's already there. Managing your planets is worse now than ever and you end up fighting the UI to try and get your mineral+ pops to actually do some mining and need to constantly go back to each planet every time you get another 5 pops to build another place for them to work. And there's a thousand little changes they could make to make the game less tedious like letting you cue up star bases properly by calculating influence cost at build time rather than cue time and making a button for your ships to build a starbase and and all the mining stations in a system.

Yeah, it's got the paradox problem of adding more content which might break the systemsthat's already there without necessarily fixing them, not to mention the the farther I get into the endgame, the more I notice just how pants-on-head idiotic the AI is. The fact I've got the damn scourge chewing up a big chunk of the galaxy but only one empire of any consequence(An awakened empire at that) is doing anything about it while the other keeps ineffectively throwing ships onsie-twosie at chokepoints I have locked down with powerful fleets and battle stations(afer a couple attempts at doomstack breakthroughs prior to this) feels bizarre. I guess the problem is that a War in Heaven broke out before the Crisis hit and rather then anybody call a damn truce to deal with the horde of Space Locusts from another galaxy, everyone just carrying on like business as usual. And it's difficult to get ships up to fight the scourge myself because they're hitting the far side of the galaxy and until fairly recently I had exposed flanks from the aforementioned AE who for some reason can't actually focus on the actual problem(And they're Militant Xenophobes/Jingoistic Expansionists to boot, so I would think an actual invading horde would really get their dander up).

I want to believe this is commentary on real life people fighting each other rather then attacking the problem, but it's easier to believe it's an issue of the AI being really dumb.

So yeah, I've got 10 games years left before I hit 2500 and it already feels like I'm done because I don't have much time to do anything at this point. I guess I'll go ahead and finish the Worm-in-Waiting storyline if I have time since I'm almost to the end.

The main thing to wrap your head around when moving is that you need to account for deceleration time. You can't just hold down the thruster button and expect to get where you want to go. On planets you need to accelerate to a reasonable speed and then maintain it with periodic thrusts. If you start to fly out of orbit use boosters to push yourself back down. In the spaceship you want to roughly match the hundreds of m/s to the kms. So to get to a planet you accelerate until the kms drop below your m/s and then start decelerating. Also pay attention to the arrows beside whatever you're locked on to, the longer they are the more you need to correct course or you will go sailing past.

I found the "Match Velocity" button helps a lot in the approach, which is appreciated in a game like this. I already recently read an article talking about how they apparently put a lot of time and effort into making the solar system act in a certain way without being too scripted(and I wish I could find the article again) which does make me want to get back into it.

 

[Drathnoxis]

Yeah, it's got the paradox problem of adding more content which might break the systemsthat's already there without necessarily fixing them, not to mention the the farther I get into the endgame, the more I notice just how pants-on-head idiotic the AI is. The fact I've got the damn scourge chewing up a big chunk of the galaxy but only one empire of any consequence(An awakened empire at that) is doing anything about it while the other keeps ineffectively throwing ships onsie-twosie at chokepoints I have locked down with powerful fleets and battle stations(afer a couple attempts at doomstack breakthroughs prior to this) feels bizarre. I guess the problem is that a War in Heaven broke out before the Crisis hit and rather then anybody call a damn truce to deal with the horde of Space Locusts from another galaxy, everyone just carrying on like business as usual. And it's difficult to get ships up to fight the scourge myself because they're hitting the far side of the galaxy and until fairly recently I had exposed flanks from the aforementioned AE who for some reason can't actually focus on the actual problem(And they're Militant Xenophobes/Jingoistic Expansionists to boot, so I would think an actual invading horde would really get their dander up).

I want to believe this is commentary on real life people fighting each other rather then attacking the problem, but it's easier to believe it's an issue of the AI being really dumb.

So yeah, I've got 10 games years left before I hit 2500 and it already feels like I'm done because I don't have much time to do anything at this point. I guess I'll go ahead and finish the Worm-in-Waiting storyline if I have time since I'm almost to the end.

Yeah, the AI is pretty braindead. They just can't handle strategy at all. It's kind of frustrating because I was never sure where to set the difficulty and I'd pick a level and play for like 10 hours before I realize I'm steamrolling everyone and they don't have a chance. Doesn't help either that the player can get some ridiculous over powered events that further tip the balance in their favor. On my last playthrough, one of the first archeological digs I finished around 70 years in gave me the Grand Herald, a Titan class ship that single-handedly annihilated 3 of my opponents before I even thought about building additional ships. Winning the game was pretty much a very tedious formality from that point on, since no one else could catch up to my lead.

I've never actually seen one of the endgame scourges. My computer chugs so much as the years get up there, I've either won or just get sick of everything taking FOREVER and give up.

 

[meiam]

Yeah, it's got the paradox problem of adding more content which might break the systemsthat's already there without necessarily fixing them, not to mention the the farther I get into the endgame, the more I notice just how pants-on-head idiotic the AI is. The fact I've got the damn scourge chewing up a big chunk of the galaxy but only one empire of any consequence(An awakened empire at that) is doing anything about it while the other keeps ineffectively throwing ships onsie-twosie at chokepoints I have locked down with powerful fleets and battle stations(afer a couple attempts at doomstack breakthroughs prior to this) feels bizarre. I guess the problem is that a War in Heaven broke out before the Crisis hit and rather then anybody call a damn truce to deal with the horde of Space Locusts from another galaxy, everyone just carrying on like business as usual. And it's difficult to get ships up to fight the scourge myself because they're hitting the far side of the galaxy and until fairly recently I had exposed flanks from the aforementioned AE who for some reason can't actually focus on the actual problem(And they're Militant Xenophobes/Jingoistic Expansionists to boot, so I would think an actual invading horde would really get their dander up).

I want to believe this is commentary on real life people fighting each other rather then attacking the problem, but it's easier to believe it's an issue of the AI being really dumb.

So yeah, I've got 10 games years left before I hit 2500 and it already feels like I'm done because I don't have much time to do anything at this point. I guess I'll go ahead and finish the Worm-in-Waiting storyline if I have time since I'm almost to the end.

Yeah, the AI is pretty braindead. They just can't handle strategy at all. It's kind of frustrating because I was never sure where to set the difficulty and I'd pick a level and play for like 10 hours before I realize I'm steamrolling everyone and they don't have a chance. Doesn't help either that the player can get some ridiculous over powered events that further tip the balance in their favor. On my last playthrough, one of the first archeological digs I finished around 70 years in gave me the Grand Herald, a Titan class ship that single-handedly annihilated 3 of my opponents before I even thought about building additional ships. Winning the game was pretty much a very tedious formality from that point on, since no one else could catch up to my lead.

I've never actually seen one of the endgame scourges. My computer chugs so much as the years get up there, I've either won or just get sick of everything taking FOREVER and give up.

The AI can actually get the grand herald too, pretty much over if an aggressive AI gets it, from what I understand they're going (or already have) nerf the event so it's more reasonable.

But yeah the AI is brain dead and it's kinda sad, there are some mod to help with that, but I never actually tried them (people swear they make things better but I wouldn't be surprised if it was placebo effect).

 

[Dalisclock]

They just can't handle strategy at all. It's kind of frustrating because I was never sure where to set the difficulty and I'd pick a level and play for like 10 hours before I realize I'm steamrolling everyone and they don't have a chance.

From What I've seen, the only thing the difficulty level changes is the amount of resources the AI gets to compensate for it's inability to think. So playing on any of the higher difficulty levels just ends up with the AI getting flooded with resources in the early game before you have a chance to build up your own economy(if you can survive to that one it probably doesn't matter much because now you can outproduce and outthink them).

AKA the computer basically cheats and difficulty just controls the cheating level.

 

[Dreiko_v1legacy]

for the Xbox One and the Epic Games Store.

This is kinda the answer to why there's no thread about it lmao.