It's widely stated that the best Fallout game in recent memory was not made by Bethesda and some people might even say that Besthesda has NEVER made a good Fallout game. Yet of the FPS versions of Fallout, there is only one that is universally stated as the best, a game made by Obsidian using Bethesda's engine and assets, Fallout: New Vegas.
Personally I never got it. I played Fallout 3, 4, and New Vegas, and I never really thought they were very good. Yet i looked back over my Steam Library and looked at my play time on all the Fallout games. Turns out only one Fallout game had the achievement for beating the main story on it. New Vegas. Yet for the life of me I couldn't remember playing New Vegas, I couldn't remember liking it and I think if the playtime was any indication I only beat it because it was fairly short to main story your way through it.
Yet with every new Fallout game to come out, people would keep bringing up New Vegas and I just didn't get it. I remember the Bethesda engine bugs, and the typical problems you expect from Bethesda now. The main thing about New Vegas was the story, the writing, the characters, the stuff that Obsidian had full control over. I ignored it all for a long time.
With The Outer Worlds i finally get what everyone meant. The game is in an entirely different league compared to anything Bethesda has put out with any IP. It's colorful, funny, well animated, and fucking bugless. The first thing that strikes you in the game is how funny and fun the tone of it is, and it's not in the Boardlands pop culture in your face every dialog line has to be a joke way, the humor here is subtle but remarkably well done.
Your character is part of some colony ship of people in hibernation that got lost along the way to a new system. A scientist(?) finds you an unthaws you and set you on a quest to gather the things you need to save everyone else in hibernation. You quickly find yourself in a world that has become so hyper-capitalized that health care is only provide to people that this omni-powerful company deems worth helping. Wounded field workers state company slogans as they bleed out in front of you. Everyone comments about all the paperwork they need to fill for every little thing. And the way it's all done is obviously satire but kinda scary in a "feels too real" fashion, and that's what makes it all so great.
The writing is amazing. Every character I've encountered so far has been fun to interact with, and the enhanced dialog options thanks to my speech skills I picked when I created my character make interactions all the more fun. For example the officer who was going to write me a ticket for an illegally parked spaceship, in which I used my charm to convince her I was just there to clean it and that in order to do so I needed to fix it so that it could be flown back to headquarters and reported on properly, you know...for the company or whatever.
And every NPC has had wild options like that. I told a mortician who couldn't afford his own gravesite fees to simply yank the gold teeth from a recently dead worker to pay his bills because obviously the guy was dead and who would know.
Exploring, questing, chatting with NPC's has all been great and the freedom you have to twist the quest objective to complete the quest in either easier or harder ways is just wonderful. Every quest seems to have options to help and do the quest completely or maybe skip a few steps and do it half-assed.
The only thing that feels weak in the game is that first person combat and gunplay is just weak. Your guns don't have the impact on the enemies that they should, melee combat is as goofy as it always is in first person, and it just doesn't seem to matter if you put points into your combat stats at all. It's still early for me and there are a lot of abilities I still don't have yet, so maybe that will change later. If not, then combat will definitely be the weakest part of the game. It's functional, and it works, it's just not exciting and doesn't have any punch to it. Nothing about it makes you eager to go out and fight things. But it works and that's more than any Bethesda experience can say.
Which brings me to another point. The game is clean. Like bug-free clean. I've yet to see a ugly texture pop, bad animation, a broken interaction point, broken dialog, jerky NPC movement, nothing. This game is polished in a way that makes you wonder why we accept bugs in all our other open world games. I think the gaming community has basically accepted that open world games tend to have a few bugs even in the best possible games. But TOW seems to prove that there doesn't have to be any of that, at least nothing that would be noticed by the average player.
Overall Obsidian proved to me that they knew all along how to do the Fallout formula right. I now see what people saw in New Vegas, even though I couldn't overlook the Bethesda engine and it's problems.
The Outer Worlds is almost perfect.
Personally I never got it. I played Fallout 3, 4, and New Vegas, and I never really thought they were very good. Yet i looked back over my Steam Library and looked at my play time on all the Fallout games. Turns out only one Fallout game had the achievement for beating the main story on it. New Vegas. Yet for the life of me I couldn't remember playing New Vegas, I couldn't remember liking it and I think if the playtime was any indication I only beat it because it was fairly short to main story your way through it.
Yet with every new Fallout game to come out, people would keep bringing up New Vegas and I just didn't get it. I remember the Bethesda engine bugs, and the typical problems you expect from Bethesda now. The main thing about New Vegas was the story, the writing, the characters, the stuff that Obsidian had full control over. I ignored it all for a long time.
With The Outer Worlds i finally get what everyone meant. The game is in an entirely different league compared to anything Bethesda has put out with any IP. It's colorful, funny, well animated, and fucking bugless. The first thing that strikes you in the game is how funny and fun the tone of it is, and it's not in the Boardlands pop culture in your face every dialog line has to be a joke way, the humor here is subtle but remarkably well done.
Your character is part of some colony ship of people in hibernation that got lost along the way to a new system. A scientist(?) finds you an unthaws you and set you on a quest to gather the things you need to save everyone else in hibernation. You quickly find yourself in a world that has become so hyper-capitalized that health care is only provide to people that this omni-powerful company deems worth helping. Wounded field workers state company slogans as they bleed out in front of you. Everyone comments about all the paperwork they need to fill for every little thing. And the way it's all done is obviously satire but kinda scary in a "feels too real" fashion, and that's what makes it all so great.
The writing is amazing. Every character I've encountered so far has been fun to interact with, and the enhanced dialog options thanks to my speech skills I picked when I created my character make interactions all the more fun. For example the officer who was going to write me a ticket for an illegally parked spaceship, in which I used my charm to convince her I was just there to clean it and that in order to do so I needed to fix it so that it could be flown back to headquarters and reported on properly, you know...for the company or whatever.
And every NPC has had wild options like that. I told a mortician who couldn't afford his own gravesite fees to simply yank the gold teeth from a recently dead worker to pay his bills because obviously the guy was dead and who would know.
Exploring, questing, chatting with NPC's has all been great and the freedom you have to twist the quest objective to complete the quest in either easier or harder ways is just wonderful. Every quest seems to have options to help and do the quest completely or maybe skip a few steps and do it half-assed.
The only thing that feels weak in the game is that first person combat and gunplay is just weak. Your guns don't have the impact on the enemies that they should, melee combat is as goofy as it always is in first person, and it just doesn't seem to matter if you put points into your combat stats at all. It's still early for me and there are a lot of abilities I still don't have yet, so maybe that will change later. If not, then combat will definitely be the weakest part of the game. It's functional, and it works, it's just not exciting and doesn't have any punch to it. Nothing about it makes you eager to go out and fight things. But it works and that's more than any Bethesda experience can say.
Which brings me to another point. The game is clean. Like bug-free clean. I've yet to see a ugly texture pop, bad animation, a broken interaction point, broken dialog, jerky NPC movement, nothing. This game is polished in a way that makes you wonder why we accept bugs in all our other open world games. I think the gaming community has basically accepted that open world games tend to have a few bugs even in the best possible games. But TOW seems to prove that there doesn't have to be any of that, at least nothing that would be noticed by the average player.
Overall Obsidian proved to me that they knew all along how to do the Fallout formula right. I now see what people saw in New Vegas, even though I couldn't overlook the Bethesda engine and it's problems.
The Outer Worlds is almost perfect.
