I bet that's not the usual reaction people have with the outer worlds. I sure didn't hear anything of the sort being said by people before going into this game, what with it being praised as the bethesda killer and the game that made fallout obsolete and so on.
The Outer Worlds epitomizes the "less than the sum of its parts" concept. I wanna start this with all the good stuff so I won't be overly negative. The game takes its roleplaying very seriously. It gives you incredible freedom in how to tackle things and how your choices affect the way the world reacts. It works to take seriously the non-combat approaches and almost always gives you a way to avoid combat if you want to. Also the science guns were fun.
Sadly, for all of those good points, they never quite translate into fun in the way you'd expect. I think a big part of this is that the entire world the game builds is fundamentally...well...lame. Really really uncool. The character designs are either generic (in the case of the masked space soldiers) or terribly ugly in the case of the people. Not sure who picked those hair-styles but I wouldn't entrust them with my mane. Skyrim had ugly models here and there but you could at least see where the designs were trying to go with it and it was more an issue of rendering them badly and fallout had genuinely charming characters. Sadly, all this adds up to the point where I never really got to feel I was doing something cool. It feels like a very depressed game where you're engaged in a Sisyphean task throughout its entirety and your coolest moment is making a shitty situation slightly less shitty. You never truly feel heroic basically. I'm all for morally gray stories but just because the choices you make are gray it doesn't mean that the result should be bland as well.
Another negative stems from one of the positives mentioned above. Due to the game's support for non-combat playstyles, it gives you WAY WAY WAY too much experience for doing basic things, and very little experience for combat. This is compounded by the fact that the plot often discourages combat by having it come at a penalty with your standing towards one faction or another. This is one of those cases where "realistic" roleplaying just makes the game boring, because yeah if you shoot at the guards of this company it makes sense they'll all like you less but by making the most efficient way of resolving situations talking to people and convincing or tricking them you remove a lot of the gravitas out of these events. Playing it feels legitimately like the bureaucracy the game spends all its effort criticizing.
And on that mark, lets touch on the story a bit. The companions are interesting chars, liked all of them. Everyone else was practically worthless though. I never cared about the people I was harming or helping in this game. They all were unlikeable and impossible to relate with. The story was overly one-note, playing the same joke about the authoritarian capitalist dystopia over and over. By the time I was doing the early retirement mission I knew what was gonna happen. Hell I think I actually knew what was going on there before I even got the mission when I was walking past the area for the first time.
So yeah, adding all this stuff, somewhere around the part where I was wrapping up the last few sidequests which basically just entailed a lot of fast traveling and talking to npcs, I started feeling like playing Skyrim again. I had played fo4 somewhat recently but skyrim I've not touched in 5 years if not more and I dunno what it was about it but I kept thinking about all the cool things you could do in that game while I was here talking to this girl's life insurance provider and regretting my completionist personality.
I dunno what the point of this topic is outside of me ranting about how underwhelming this game ended up being. Maybe a warning to others who haven't played it and heard people praise it to high heaven? Yeah, lets go with that haha.
The Outer Worlds epitomizes the "less than the sum of its parts" concept. I wanna start this with all the good stuff so I won't be overly negative. The game takes its roleplaying very seriously. It gives you incredible freedom in how to tackle things and how your choices affect the way the world reacts. It works to take seriously the non-combat approaches and almost always gives you a way to avoid combat if you want to. Also the science guns were fun.
Sadly, for all of those good points, they never quite translate into fun in the way you'd expect. I think a big part of this is that the entire world the game builds is fundamentally...well...lame. Really really uncool. The character designs are either generic (in the case of the masked space soldiers) or terribly ugly in the case of the people. Not sure who picked those hair-styles but I wouldn't entrust them with my mane. Skyrim had ugly models here and there but you could at least see where the designs were trying to go with it and it was more an issue of rendering them badly and fallout had genuinely charming characters. Sadly, all this adds up to the point where I never really got to feel I was doing something cool. It feels like a very depressed game where you're engaged in a Sisyphean task throughout its entirety and your coolest moment is making a shitty situation slightly less shitty. You never truly feel heroic basically. I'm all for morally gray stories but just because the choices you make are gray it doesn't mean that the result should be bland as well.
Another negative stems from one of the positives mentioned above. Due to the game's support for non-combat playstyles, it gives you WAY WAY WAY too much experience for doing basic things, and very little experience for combat. This is compounded by the fact that the plot often discourages combat by having it come at a penalty with your standing towards one faction or another. This is one of those cases where "realistic" roleplaying just makes the game boring, because yeah if you shoot at the guards of this company it makes sense they'll all like you less but by making the most efficient way of resolving situations talking to people and convincing or tricking them you remove a lot of the gravitas out of these events. Playing it feels legitimately like the bureaucracy the game spends all its effort criticizing.
And on that mark, lets touch on the story a bit. The companions are interesting chars, liked all of them. Everyone else was practically worthless though. I never cared about the people I was harming or helping in this game. They all were unlikeable and impossible to relate with. The story was overly one-note, playing the same joke about the authoritarian capitalist dystopia over and over. By the time I was doing the early retirement mission I knew what was gonna happen. Hell I think I actually knew what was going on there before I even got the mission when I was walking past the area for the first time.
So yeah, adding all this stuff, somewhere around the part where I was wrapping up the last few sidequests which basically just entailed a lot of fast traveling and talking to npcs, I started feeling like playing Skyrim again. I had played fo4 somewhat recently but skyrim I've not touched in 5 years if not more and I dunno what it was about it but I kept thinking about all the cool things you could do in that game while I was here talking to this girl's life insurance provider and regretting my completionist personality.
I dunno what the point of this topic is outside of me ranting about how underwhelming this game ended up being. Maybe a warning to others who haven't played it and heard people praise it to high heaven? Yeah, lets go with that haha.
