#i guess the devs really want disabled players to fuck right off

[snorfbin]

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[derkastellan]

Review: The Outer Worlds

Seems like I can’t review this Epic Games Store exclusive on Steam yet, nor on gog.com, nor even on Epic itself (though I might have missed something). So let’s do it here.

I played in “Story Mode” (combat easier) and it took me 41 hours to finish the game, including solving all the side quests (”tasks”) I could find to do.

Let me emphasize this is the most bug-free title on release I’ve played in a long, long time. Not a single CTD, no quests I couldn’t complete. Runs smooth on my mid-range gaming rag, no fancy uber-graphics card required. Looking your way, RDR2...

It ain’t as great as “Fallout: New Vegas” (FO:NV from now on) but it is a funny, quirky title and I enjoyed my time in Halcyon.

There will be spoilers.

The game’s loading times are exemplary, fast, and most building interiors have been integrated into the larger game world. Both starting up the game in the first place and

The graphics are nice, colorful, and given that some see these to be the kickoff to something to replace the Fallout series and lure its fans, something new. While a lot of what we see has the mark of decay and failure on it, it is not an almost entirely dystopian wasteland.

Because in “The Outer Worlds” (TOW) there is Hope. Both literally (the name of the missing colony ship you derive from) and implicitly. The vibe of “the world died” is - for good and bad. It is good to not have this hang above your head all the time! I mean, there’s villains, corruption, evil, but the big bad hasn’t already happened. But I noticed one thing... When I play FO:NV or “Fallout 4″ (FO4) little touches can evoke a lot. You find these carefully arranged little scenes that level designers made - two skeletons on a dirty mattress in a bunker, some booze bottles, and maybe one gun, and you get this hunch that somebody didn’t want to face this grim reality of a world that died anymore. And to me, this is missing from TOW. Somehow it’s less emotionally impactful.

What isn’t missing is superb, witty, funny dialogue. In fact, the satirical elements of the game world are top notch, and frankly, the red tape and greed corporate world it depicts is not as far from where we are now than you might wish. Obsidian simply envisioned a world where companies do not have to abide with elections at all or do lobby work, just crank out the propaganda and brainwash them from cradle to grave - chilling, for sure.

You can follow dialogue trees and obtain a lot of information, open up new options through skills. Optimizing for certain builds - like stealth/hacker and personable smooth-talker - will change how the game plays, bypass combat, and give you new options of how to finish missions.

You are usually given choices that range from “I’m the do-gooder”, ”Come the revolution”, “Leave everything as it is”, “What’s in it for me”, to “Fuck you all, I love to mess with you”. Similarly I can easily imagine that the game might tolerate killing pretty much everyone. I didn’t try but I see many quests do not so much depend on people but getting key items and info, I think you could get by by looting the items, using consoles, and solely trading with vending machines. Not my thing but seems at least largely possible.

Choice

Choice is a tricky thing with TOW. You see, this being an Obsidian game, they couldn’t leave choice out. It’s just... clumsy at times, forced.

In FO:NV you start the game in Good Springs (IIRC) and get to side with the villagers or with the Powder Gangers. You get to do various things to beef yourself and your allies up and end up with the showdown with your choices impacting how it goes. You can even walk away and ignore it, shoot everyone, whatever.

This video sums the game design choices regarding, well, choice up very well in the first round about seven minutes when it comes to FO:NV and FO4. It’s the difference between “hey, you chose your path” and “you shoot dese guys, dey be bad” pretty much.

TOW falls clumsily in between. In the end, the game is propelled by its missions. It’s not per se a “wander around” game. There are few optional locations that only feature in side quests. I think Fallbrook on Monarch you don’t have to visit, for example. Well, that’s a bit unfair, I guess. If you wanted to skip through the game you probably can ignore almost everything on the Monarch moon colony. And I think you could solve your “I have no energy coupling” problem in the Emerald Vale probably by going in, taking it, and shooting the opposition? Not entirely sure. At the least you go straight to the Geothermal plant and back and you’re done.

So, how much you meander and what tasks you take on and how you chose to solve them is mostly on you. You get to chose which factions you side with and which ones you chose to piss off.

And yet...

Switch off one colony, you must

The first mission or first part of your main mission forces “choice” down your throat. You have to shit on one faction. Period. And it seemed forced. To repair one space ship you have to disable one of two colonies? Really? It is both a weak choice and weak writing. I mean ships are seen in the sky over Edgewater. Why can’t I loot their power MacGuffin?

And it is largely a no-choice as well. Spacer’s Choice is running the colony into the ground, why leave them in charge? They realized this - and let Parvati offset this with a purely emotional plea. So they add this additional hurdle you have to pass over to essentially do the right thing. In a way. Because you cannot do anything about the hard-headed heartlessness of the woman leading the Deserters. So you have the choice between two assholes, essentially. The endgame titles for this choice are especially galling. People will die because of your choice - or else your mission never starts. It has a bit of a negadungeon feel about it...

Of course this makes for some “edgy” choice, right? No easy rights and wrongs? Fair enough. Except the choice is forced by nothing else but your own need to get out of there. The stakes of the two parties in the end do not matter. I find it fair that no ideal choice exists - this is what makes it one of the true dilemma choices of the game - but maybe it should not have been under such a weak, flimsy pretense to begin with.

Phineas

Another choice you can make several times during the game and eventually have to make is whether to turn Phineas in. I cannot imagine why you would do it, but it is a choice, right? Even if you try not to turn it in, he gets captured in the end. It becomes a choice of no consequence because the plot is on rails. It might change how Phineas feels about you and some epilogue, I guess, but it is largely without impact.

They also paint Phineas increasingly grey to justify this. He let people die - horribly - to save you. Ironically you are offered the same choice - you can let the suspended colonists in the Board labs die to get as much MacGuffin gas as you can to save the others, making you equivalent to Phineas and his “the end justifies the means” choice. But again, an empty choice. I doubt you would end up reviving all the colonists if you took that option, so besides making you feel bad: no consequence.

Since Phineas is so central to the plot he is the only character, I think, with true and literal plot armor. He only talks to you from behind bulletproof glass. I guess they wanted to avoid that trigger-happy psycho players can’t finish the game.

One world at a time

The game never truly turns into open world (but also was never advertised as such by the devs, to be fair). You unlock one location after another. I only missed out on one of them - the landing pad of the Board stooge I ended up shooting later.

You go from Emerald Value to the Groundbraker to Rosewater to Monarch to Byzantium to the Hope to Tartarus. (Schedule some visits in Phineas’ lab on the way.) You unlock optionally Scylla and two space stations. You might bypass Amber Heights and Fallbrook in terms of major settlements. And that is the game. (I think people put the main quest at 20 hours and given I did all I could conceive of in 41 that seems reasonable.)

The unfolding of the world is on rails. (Again, it was not advertised as open world.) FO:NV also had a “recommended” order. But you could rush past most of it. It was just gated behind danger, not impossible. Here you get no choice. You will see roughly 50% of the game by default - which is fair, but not terribly big. TOW, the planets themselves, seem small. You can deviate from the main path, but not much.

Again, nothing else was promised, but we all know this game is here to capture the Fallout fans - made by the FO:NV studio and with Fallout creators as leads... you can’t ignore that when evaluating the game. It was in the ads. And I never triggered the endgame in FO:NV because I was busy exploring its world (though it seemed good) and I never triggered the endgame in FO4 because frankly it seemed stupid to begin with and I was busy exploring its world.

Not so in TOW. I ran out of stuff to do. This is where choice is in chosing to explore. Exploration involves being lured off the beaten path or chosing to do out of curiosity. The game encourages small exploration by hiding stuff in every nook and cranny possible. Also, since monsters don’t wander, you have all the time in the world to explore those nooks and crannies once you’ve killed the area monsters...

Are there major things to be gained by chosing to explore? I would say no, unless you define “exploring” as “doing all the sidequests” - which it is not. Did I find interesting story details by walking around beyond quests? Not really. I found a dead miner and an excavation robot on Scylla. But no real info. No story. I have found a remote location beyond Cascadia on Monarch, but my reward for slaughtering myself past the biggest beasties? A meaningless location marker that I cannot fast-travel to, no explanation, and some free ammo. Basically enough to replace the one I spent.

All the hidden science weapons are quests. I did not find them valuable in spite of putting science in them, but you can “easily” seek them out should you chose to. The one on the Groundbreaker was the hardest to get to and I fell to death twice in getting another one - the only in-game deaths I ever had.

TOW does not expand on story through exploration, simply not. You can miss out on story by not reading all datapads that are in your way, though.

Killer lottery

Now there is another mission that lacks any real choice and has a weak design, wasting its impact needlessly. There is an “Early Retirement” lottery where it is almost instantly clear that this is some dystopian BS. My only question was if they would be turned to Soylent Green or not.

You end up entering a room where people who are “winners” end up being shot by killer drones. Given my own body count at this time in the story hardly shocking, more like lazy and shoddy. No impact.

And then you get to do nothing about it! You can tell a person about it or you can fool somebody out of spite to also get killed, but not a single line of dialogue appears anywhere to apply a consequence to having done the quest. You cannot shut it down - unless shooting the drones count - and you cannot hunt down the people responsible. You do not learn whodunnit and you do not get the satisfaction to avenge these people. It is just a mood piece, and a badly made one.

You could reason you ultimately get the responsibles in the end, but the game does not facilitate you here.

Oh, and if you leave Dr Chartrand alive, you are supposed to talk to Phineas, but no impact on the epilogue, no dialogue line with Phineas. Somebody got to code that?

No (real) consequences

If you opt to thaw up the Hope’s crew you solve all of the colony’s problems. So simply going through with everything Phineas suggested yields a happy end. You can walk the straight path with the default choice and end up none the worse.

What good points are there then to joining with the Board, giving in to your doubts, etc? The colony will slowly prosper and no price is being paid for chosing the most common part. Can I improve on this by playing differently? I don’t feel so.

Let’s see how FO:NV compares - you can hand the Mojave to different factions and the endgame outcomes are really different. There is no by-default good choice. Even if you paint Phineas as grey he is the good guy. A flawed good guy but the person that keeps events in motion.

Do I really care enough about the other options to see them played out? Probably not. Definitely not. I can watch that on YouTube eventually.

There were some consequences to my actions, though. The factions I helped that were not in bed with the Board ended up helping me in the endgame confrontation. Due to the poor handling of friendly fire when it comes to NPC allies I had to reload because I accidentally shot an ally and now had double as many enemies against me. Thanks for helping. Really.

But I liked the touch - Groundbreaker Mardets, Iconoclasts, and MSI troopers all joined me at some point. I felt the faction reputation made at least some sense. I was worried it was only good for discounts at this point...

So, the choices you make will influence the epilogue somewhat, rebates you get, close off some quests, and generate some help in endgame. I guess this is fair but not excellent.

Fridge logic and verisimilitude

In order to justify the whole second half of the plot the colony will starve if things are left as they are. There is a major plot hole here, several actually.

First of all - the colony did not starve in 70 years. How can you not starve in 70 years if there is a problem with the nutrients? Are we to assume that for 70 years actual starvation was held off by supplementing with foods from Earth and other colonies? If this were true, people would need to be near-death and starving already, emaciated. Or is it a matter of a certain stockpile running out?

The whole thing seems weak. It justifies why nobody thawed up the additional mouths but creates more problems than it solves.

But most of the game time what irked me more was nonsensical asset reuse. Why are there weak-ass marauders on Monarch? They should be eaten in no time. Same for canids. The planet is supposedly a hellhole and admittedly full of Mantiqueens and Raptisaurs. So who are these people camping out somewhere in the hellscape without resorting at least to the safety of some buildings? Buildings in comparison where almost always safe spots with no enemies in them. You won’t surprise marauders having lunch - they’re too busy hanging out at intersections!

I also don’t get how Primals came to Scylla. They give the planetoid a distinct feel but what do they eat? Where did they come from? Maybe I missed that...

Short on Western

And finally almost all of the settlements and outposts I came across failed. No sturdy settlers sticking it out, no siree! (Except for the cannibal family.) They all huddle together in the few main places. No distant shack with a crazy coot. No (alive) hunters camping out on Monarch. No small places where we stick it out even if it’s bad idea because we do have gumption.

Also, you don’t get to roam. A western would be about roaming - like in RDR2. (Haven’t played it yet but this quality of just going out and riding around is attracting me to it. That was the damn best thing in “GTA: San Andreas”: Getting on a harley and riding the land once you unlock it.)  Here you turn a corner and find a collection of enemies. There is no freedom. The world looks and sounds like steampunk scifi western but the underlying archetypes of westerns are missing, except for some hick accents.

Things look like in a western but the world itself... is basically a series of failed and near-failed settlements. Even if you can improve on all that ultimately and there is hope you encounter a dystopia while you try to do so. Westerns aren’t usually dystopian. Scifi sure often is! But even a Scifi western like the original Star Wars was full of people, outposts, and what not. People in TOW are not eking out an existence on the frontier. They all clearly have already failed so:

Edgewater: All outposts failed, even the hunting camp needed to feed the “Saltuna” factory has been abandoned. The only other settled location is the - “abandoned” - Botany Station.

The Groundbreaker: You can prevent it from collapsing altogether.

Rosewater: Well, the labs went all to shit and the place is overrun by raptisaurs. They just fought off an attack that might have killed them all.

Scylla: Major settlement eradicated.

Monarch: People in Stellar Bay are scared. Amber Heights is failing. Only Fallbrook thrives. Cascadia ended up completely eradicated.

Byzantium: Rich town, facade breaking down, though. Can’t even keep their maintenance up.

So, where do people actually live? You never get to know. But you sure do your part in breaking down one of the last settlements to survive...

The charm, the wit, the warmth

Now, I ranted a lot about what threw me off. But the game is full of characters you end up liking, dialogue that makes you laugh, things you end up caring about. I mean, you even start to collect little stuff that begins to decorate your ship, gradually changing it as you progress. The experience is not sterile and your ship becomes a home where your small family hangs out.

I even did a hard pass on one of the six available companions because I did not want him around. I didn’t know I could have them all but frankly I did like him. It’s hard to gauge how big the game will be when you play it, and I would have wanted more of it to be sure.

But you cannot stuff just more in. More would inevitably at some point lessen it. At some point quantity inevitably replaces quality. And the companions I had I cared about. I wanted to help Parvati even though I question somebody needing several thousand bits and a visit to three different difficult-to-reach locations to just have a date in a world gone mad, but in the end I was glad to have done it. Her bubbling, quirky personality was believable and charming.

Similarly, I never did a mission without Ellie as soon as I got her. No matter who you talk to, no matter who else is there, Ellie brings out quality quips and wit all the time, even to whoever else is in the party. She’s too cool to be true and that’s fine with me. Shame she didn’t get more of a second mission to herself. She remains closed off as her character seems to be. 

Nyoka is also memorable though her companion quest suffers from cheap emotional impact. Why two expert hunters who can survive on Monarch would die near Edgewater is a mystery, but hey, but five graves and Nyoka surviving them all is what the simple heartstrings narrative wanted. We never get to really challenge her on her alcoholism, which is lame, and she never limits her intake, but maybe that’s actually realistic. And I can abide with that.

Now Felix and SAM obviously can’t keep up with that but they round out the choices. I was very surprised to end up with a crew of three interesting females, Felix was almost an afterthought. They all end up distinct with lots dialogues. You may guess whom the devs liked best by seeing how Felix essentially got only one spaceship mood scene to himself where there’s plenty of interaction with the girls and among each other.

Conclusion

TOW asks valid questions. It has a good story, it has great NPCs, and I love the party. It falls short on other counts, mostly to do with choice, verisimilitude, and exploration. It is a solid game, it is bug free, it was fun to play. I doubt it offers much replay value.

Thing is... these qualities. Good dialogue, good voice-acting, being essentially bug-free... these go down the drain the more content you produce. I never finished “Torment: Tides of Numenera” because I got bored with it. It was big and seemingly dragging on. And in places it simply showed that some of the level designers did not get the memo. (The memo being: “There are no combat XP in Numenera.”)

Not so in TOW. It seems to be made out of one piece, solid, consistent in what it does. A few quests seem kinda unfinished or loose in Byzantium, ending rather abruptly, but you never stand somewhere and say “This doesn’t fit with the rest.” It does reveal a lot of stuff on terminals and datapads, but I guess this way they could get quality voice acting where it mattered and fill out the background blanks elsewhere. The balance works. It sometimes does a tiny bit of “Fallout 76″ in that you often end up chasing datapads and consoles to piece together stories about all the dead people. But since you enact with plenty of varied NPCs it doesn’t matter so much. It not only has some, it has plenty!

It’s also a decent RPG shooter. Choices of weapon matter. You can sneak, in fact it gets so easy with a modest skill in the end that I accidentally walked into enemies without engaging sneak mode because they did not notice me or stay asleep. It will probably not register as a great stealth game even by far, but it does some of it. I somehow finished the game without triggering a companion ability, I have to say. Wish you could set them to do it on their own, actually.

Will this be remembered as a classic? Probably not. Maybe it will. But it puts forward enough stuff to maybe establish a new series. If so, the next installment will have to be more substantial.

Liked it, sometimes loved it.

PS - In watching some reviews now that I finished it I must say I seem overly critical of the game. I enjoyed it but at the latest on Monarch the game kind of wore on me. Long stretches of wilderness that vary the same enemies. There’s often no empty places, no interesting interactions with alien flora and fauna. Just stuff to kill, destroyed sites to explore. 

There’s some variation, there’s some cool moments when you look up and see spaceships passing before the gas giant in the sky. But since most of the time you have your nose to the ground it doesn’t seem all the spacey to me. Might go for a real space game next.

All in all I have waited for a long time for this one to get out. I feel like I finished it too soon and yet it was also good to be done because it had played out what it would like to play out. There were no big mid-game surprises, really. From Byzantium onward the story was clear and also quality slowly went down. It seems like from there on there were less ideas and the rails became narrower. At least Byzantium required some non-violent challenges to reach your goals, so did the Hope. They ended up being repetitive as well.

All in all, my interest in TOW started to fade after the first week, and I noticed that and was annoyed by it. It is a quality game, I won’t fault it for going a long way towards providing a good experience. But mid- and endgame the pace suffers and the game goes on about how difficult and impossible things are that really aren’t. I cake-walked over Monarch most of the time but was thrown off by the game’s attempts to insist stuff is hard. (Yes, I was in story mode but the game’s insistence on talking up stuff that actually is a regular challenge in midgame is annyoing.)

Tons of cool stuff in this one, but also missed chances. I want me some exploration and some deeper choices. That was so cool about FO:NV. You don’t need to save everybody from a catastrophy. You fix the winner of a major world-changing battle, and it can even be you! That was a game about choice. TOW is a game that emulates choice at times. All rails lead to the endgame, everywhere. But TOW’s are too visible for my taste.

Yes, I am spoiled. I complain about good games like “Disco Elysium” or TOW that I actually enjoyed. But come on, industry! Impress me, hook me! I’m waiting...