The Outer Worlds - Obsidian RPG

Stone Deaf 4evr

played a few more hours over the weekend, hit level 20 and am fairly deep into the quests on Monarch.

one thing the game is crying out for, is the ability to track multiple quests at once. Its a chore to have to go into the menu, go across to journal, then scroll down through each one to see which waypoint pops up closest to your current position. I know the picture of the planet gives you a general idea, but it's a very clunky way of doing it.

Been using Sam as a companion a fair bit, some of his lines are great, plus his special attack is massively OP.

Finished it 100% yesterday, was getting to the point were it was about to outstay it's welcome. In the end on supernova I respeced for the very end

I just couldn't deal with the adds and talked my way out of it

Then a speed run on easy to get the final achievement from Sophia. Unreal how much you can cut out of the game with some ultra violence, just over an hour to get to pretty much the end of the game

Was toying with the idea of doubling down and playing it again on PC so installed it, sickened by the difference in load times, on PC entering and exiting the Unreliable is instant, on console theres a 45-50 second load screen in and out :mad:

Was only able to run it at 1440p with low to medium settings and a steady enough 40-45 fps , new card needed me thinks but just don't play that many games on PC to justify it, it's playable but the janky fps is a little annoying. What did people do with the ini file to improve it?

Glebee

FFS, getting close to the end I presume (im in The Pit) on PC
and theres a room that when I access it game crashes. No way around room, need to enter. Fcuk it anyway. This game has got more and more unstable for me over the last few days. Was there an update??

hitemfrank

If you've got it through the Xbox app, reinstalling might be the way that. It fixed it for me with the crash issues I was having.

I would have expected a patch by now tbh.

Evade

Approximately how much xp is there to be gained on Tartarus? I just hit level 28 and only have one or two other quest to wrap up before the point of no return and I'd like to get the level 30 trophy on this play through.

Homelander

Glebee wrote: »

FFS, getting close to the end I presume (im in The Pit) on PC
and theres a room that when I access it game crashes. No way around room, need to enter. Fcuk it anyway. This game has got more and more unstable for me over the last few days. Was there an update??

Same on every platform in that section, crashes when you walk in. The only ways around it are a) initate combat from outside the room and then walk in, but that obviously closes off all other non-violent options. Or b) go back to the central area, jump on the yellow railings and walk around the barricades to the other side. If you do that and enter via the back door of the same room, it doesn't crash. That's how I got past it.

Evade

Evade wrote: »

Approximately how much xp is there to be gained on Tartarus? I just hit level 28 and only have one or two other quest to wrap up before the point of no return and I'd like to get the level 30 trophy on this play through.

I hit 30 a fair bit before that, think I did almost every thing I could. I know some of the quests I turned in very late on gave a large amount of XP one was 149k.

There are few to be done around Byzantine, like from the hat shop, they guy at the sewer entrance, a few of the companion quests end there too.

I had revered status for every faction too I believe.

Evade

Deleted User wrote: »

There are few to be done around Byzantine, like from the hat shop, they guy at the sewer entrance, a few of the companion quests end there too.

I managed to make myself permanently vilified in Byzantine so I can't take any quests there.

Glebee

Homelander wrote: »

Same on every platform in that section, crashes when you walk in. The only ways around it are a) initate combat from outside the room and then walk in, but that obviously closes off all other non-violent options. Or b) go back to the central area, jump on the yellow railings and walk around the barricades to the other side. If you do that and enter via the back door of the same room, it doesn't crash. That's how I got past it.

Cheers, went in the back way and completed. 6/10 from me I think. Nice game but just missing something..
Finished just in time for Red dead 2.
*Scratch that, no way im paying nearly 50 euro for a PC game.

Calhoun

Just finished it tonight, amazing game that leaves me wanting more. The game bugged right at the end when you speak to

Rockwell

but i got passed it by dismissing one of my companions.

Hope they make either DLC or a new game.

Jordan 199

dreamers75 wrote: »

Didnt know that, I got I guess the good?

I am the king, pavroti leaves to be with yer wan, Nyoko stays the same, the Scientist dies, all the clever people from earth save the colony.

Same for me

Calhoun

dreamers75 wrote: »

Didnt know that, I got I guess the good?

I am the king, pavroti leaves to be with yer wan, Nyoko stays the same, the Scientist dies, all the clever people from earth save the colony.

Jordan 199 wrote: »

Same for me

My

Pavroti stayed with the ship

, i thought i had completed her storyline.

Mickeroo

Calhoun wrote: »

My

Pavroti stayed with the ship

, i thought i had completed her storyline.

You might have just used different dialog options.

I got the "good" ending too I think. Enjoyed every minute of the game. If I was doing another play through I think I would give my character low intelligence so it opens up all the [Dumb] dialog options I hadn't even realised this was a thing until I was looking through how to get some of the secret achievements I missed.

quokula

Started this last night. A bit disappointed on first impressions. I never played Fallout New Vegas but have played and enjoyed Obsidian's other stuff, none of which is anything like Bethesda's Fallout, so it came as a shock to me just how heavily "Fallout" it was.

It feels way too much like a Bethesda game. I'm not talking about story or anything, just the way the game feels. The moment I took the controller and started walking it felt like I was back in Fallout 4, a game I didn't particularly enjoy. The janky animations, the endless junk loot everywhere, the completely walled off towns separated from the surrounding area by a load screen, the lifeless landscape with bandits waiting around at set points, the dead stare into the camera of everyone you speak to.

I think I was expecting something more Bioware like, with a bit more life everywhere and a lot more cohesiveness.

I'd read that you could approach tasks in multiple ways rather than always resorting to combat, and I promptly spent all my stats points on speech and engineering. Then the first sidequest I took on involved going to fetch a book from a building (which again felt identical to fallout in the way you load into it and in its layout) inhabited by marauders who attack on sight, just like every single quest in Fallout 4.

The time I spent wandering around the first town chatting to people was good, there seem to be plenty of choices and branching paths in conversation, though there were a relatively small number of "real" NPCs to interact with beyond the nameless residents. And the whole corporate theme is an interesting one, but it's approached in a somewhat overly cartoony way from what I've seen so far.

Don't get me wrong, I've played some incredible Obsidian games in the past and I'm sure this will keep me entertained. It's just not what I expected so far. I'll keep going and hope it gets better.

H3llR4iser

Installed when it came out via Xbox Game Pass for PC. Played a good 5-6 hours on Sunday, then I literally left it for the whole week until I came back to it last night...well I'm still a bit on the fence about it.

It surely has that decidedly "Falloutish" feel to it - the retro-futuristic technology and adverts, the shanty towns, the dregs populating them, the "wasteland" feel outside of the cities...but I find that to be the game's downfall as well: It doesn't fully try being its own thing. It distinctively feels like you're playing a Fallout knockoff. Like when I played "Rise of the Triads" after playing Doom, or "Fatal Fury" at the Arcade when "Street Fighter II" had too long a queue.

In general, I feel The Outer Worlds is missing on a lot of opportunities that would've been afforded by the setting: the locations, for example, manage to feel both completely disconnected and all the same. You're literally hopping between planets and space stations, it would've been a great opportunity to come up with wildly differing locations and encounters. Instead, marauders look all the same, space stations and buildings look all the same - and the difference between Monarch and Terra-2 are a bunch of Raptidons and Mantiqueens, plus the odd acid pool.

Nothing ever feels truly "alien" in the game world and the whole space setting serves little to no purpose at all - you get no feeling of distance between a place and the other, like you would in TES or Fallout when you are on one end of the map or the other. An adventure set across a whole solar system should easily have a "grandiose" scale, and it's missing completely in this. Probably, the fact the game doesn't seem to have a specific means of tracking time (if anybody figured out how the day/night cycle works even on Terra-2, let me know, am I missing something?) contributes in no small part to this issue - "oh this item is on a WHOLE DIFFERENT PLANET - sure let's fire up the ship and go fetch it, 5 minutes like!".

After the first couple of hours, any sense of "danger" is basically gone, and you and your party can fry mantiqueens for breakfast. Increasing the difficulty simply makes combat longer and more tedious, as the only apparent difference is that enemies have more health.

Some of the characters are relatively interesting and even fun, yet most quests are "go there, fetch X, come back and I'll ask to go somewhere else and fetch Y". The most interesting / fun I've done, so far, was Parvanti's date thingie, to say...

Last, pet peeve: the disconnect between the environments in no more apparent anywhere else than when you step in or out of the ship. You're on a landing pad on Monarch, step in the ship...all of a sudden you see the planet from orbit in the ship's windows. This would've been so easy to "lampshade" with an in-story reason, like "the landing pad needs to be kept vacant": as soon as you're far enough so that you can't see it anymore, make the ship disappear, as in "went back to orbit". When you need it again, have a "call ADA" mechanic, where a cutscene of the ship landing is played. Easy peasy.

All in all, I've seen worse but I don't think the game deserves the enormous praise it's been getting, to be honest.

Suffered some burn out on this game. I think Monarch has too much in it. Thought I was nearly done and got back to the main quest only for it to open up a load of new side quests.

I shouldn't really be complaining I suppose, more game for your €1 :-)

Does anyone know is there an achievement for completing all quests? I've a botched quest because i sold some scientist dudes research instead of returning it to him. I thought it would just take me down a different path, not fail the quest for me. Would be a bummer to miss out on an achievement because of it.

Evade

Deleted User wrote: »

Does anyone know is there an achievement for completing all quests? I've a botched quest because i sold some scientist dudes research instead of returning it to him. I thought it would just take me down a different path, not fail the quest for me. Would be a bummer to miss out on an achievement because of it.

No, but there is one for for returning one of the pieces of research to him it's

the diet toothpaste.

Something that could have made the environments feel different from each other is different gravity on different planets. Bouncing around on Scylla in 0.2G or slogging through Monarch in 1.3G. It might have made inventory management a little more annoying though.

quokula

H3llR4iser wrote: »

feels like you're playing a Fallout knockoff

Agree with this so much. Like I said previously it is so much like it mechanically (in all the bad ways that came with Bethesda's janky engine), but on top of that, and on top of the retro-future styling being so similar, why is everything so much like a post apocalyptic wasteland too? I could easily forget I'm not back in Fallout 4 as I'm running around an abandoned building full of marauders and finding CRT computer terminals with hints of how it fell into disrepair.

The colonies aren't that old. The last thing I expected before starting the game would be running around abandoned hollowed out buildings exactly like the ones in Fallout. I expected a frontier being tamed, not a civilisation in decline.

H3llR4iser

quokula wrote: »

Agree with this so much. Like I said previously it is so much like it mechanically (in all the bad ways that came with Bethesda's janky engine), but on top of that, and on top of the retro-future styling being so similar, why is everything so much like a post apocalyptic wasteland too? I could easily forget I'm not back in Fallout 4 as I'm running around an abandoned building full of marauders and finding CRT computer terminals with hints of how it fell into disrepair.

The colonies aren't that old. The last thing I expected before starting the game would be running around abandoned hollowed out buildings exactly like the ones in Fallout. I expected a frontier being tamed, not a civilisation in decline.

I think the main idea was that the colonies are failing, mostly due to the super-original "corporate BAD!" approach of the storyline.

But all in all, I suspect the idea behind the game was pretty much "let's do Fallout right!" and what came out was basically a clone, which is however missing elements form the original. Primarily, the sense of unknown and danger, secondly the sheer scale - which is an amazing thing to pull, as I said, in a game set through an entire solar system.

I've noticed another thing - two evenings straight, I find myself literally struggling to keep my eyes open barely an hour into the game. I am chalking it down to sheer tiredness, but still - it's quite an odd thing to happen.

I will reiterate - I wouldn't call TOWs "bad", but it's certainly not great at all. What I don't get are the glowing reviews - it's a 6, maximum 7/10 game, not 8 or 9 as most claim.

Homelander

Judging it solely against more recent Fallout titles isn't really a fair comparison, it's more of an homage, and Obsidian is the original home of Fallout to begin with as well as the developer of the excellent Fallout New Vegas. The Outer Worlds accomplishes perfectly what it sets out to achieve, it was never meant to be a game remotely as vast or in-depth as a Fallout title and certainly didn't have remotely the same financial backing behind it either in any case. Obsidian already delivered Fallout for Bethesda in the excellent New Vegas, this is something different, closer really to RPG-lite games like Rage or Far Cry, maybe Bioshock Infinite to a degree, but done infinitely better. It's just a tight knit RPG lite shooter with amazing scripting and personally I had far more appetite for that than a lumbering, buggy, 200 hour time sink. It's Game of the Year for me.

Calhoun

The big thing with outer worlds is that Obsidian essentially created the fallout series and they did one of the better Fallouts of recent times (NV). Getting some distance was always going to be a big issue as the themes are very similar (corporate greed screwing the world).

The thing that was missing from this game compared to fallout was the open worlds with many settlements. You definitely get the impression that they were trying to stick to a tight narrative and probably had a small budget. Some of the fetch quests became annoying because of this as it was loading screen after loading screen.

I look at it as a first outing into a series of games, right now i don't see much in the way of replayability. I felt i did it all in the first go and will just leave it at that. This is something that could bite them as if you look at fallout or skyrim they last so long as communities play them for years.

Good game, i wouldnt say it was a great game but i am wanting more and that is not a bad position for them to be in.

H3llR4iser

The problem is - you do a game that's just like Fallout, it's gonna be compared to Fallout, especially when it's sold as a full price AAA title (even if it was specified it wasn't going to be "AAA" in terms of size).

The fetch quests are infuriating at times when it looks you're done - only to be told there is something else to go fetch. It's a classic issue with this types of quests, I know, but in this game it's made a bit worse possibly due to the extreme disconnect of environments - "oh right, now I need the McGuffin number 3" - which sits on a different planet. All great in potential - wow, it involves a space trip, landing on a new planet, who knows what dangers lurk...nope, it's four loading loading screens and going through an unnecessarily deep dialog menu.

Homelander

How can you infer it's not an AAA game simply based on the size of the game world? The average playtime for The Outer Worlds is 30-40 hours, there are any amount of single player games with far less gameplay time, many as little as <8-10.

The Outer Worlds has been compared to Fallout, and it's really not a 'problem' because it has been very favorably so, because it incorporates the best things about that game in typical Obsidian fashion while delivering a far tighter experience.

Calhoun

H3llR4iser wrote: »

The problem is - you do a game that's just like Fallout, it's gonna be compared to Fallout, especially when it's sold as a full price AAA title (even if it was specified it wasn't going to be "AAA" in terms of size).

The fetch quests are infuriating at times when it looks you're done - only to be told there is something else to go fetch. It's a classic issue with this types of quests, I know, but in this game it's made a bit worse possibly due to the extreme disconnect of environments - "oh right, now I need the McGuffin number 3" - which sits on a different planet. All great in potential - wow, it involves a space trip, landing on a new planet, who knows what dangers lurk...nope, it's four loading loading screens and going through an unnecessarily deep dialog menu.

I think to be fair because of favorable deals with microsoft i got the game for free on two platforms and i am feel like it makes my subscription to the service worth it.

Would i have bought it myself? i bought a mate a subscription to gamepass primarily for outerworlds.

Thats exactly why the fetch quests annoyed me allot of moving around, it was better at times to wait until you had a few in another place to go.

Homelander wrote: »

How can you infer it's not an AAA game simply based on the size of the game world? The average playtime for The Outer Worlds is 30-40 hours, there are any amount of single player games with far less gameplay time, many as little as <8-10.

The Outer Worlds has been compared to Fallout, and it's really not a 'problem' because it has been very favorably so, because it incorporates the best things about that game in typical Obsidian fashion while delivering a far tighter experience.

I would say its just about a triple A game but you would be forgiven for thinking its not. It used the same old engine and system as fallout 4, they even advised they couldn't do a 3rd person view due to time and money constraints.

I played most my game as melee and would have loved and over the shoulder view with decent animations.

Game size is only an issue for certain communities but just because its not an issue for you doesn't mean it is for them and vice versa.

quokula

My problem isn't that it compares badly with Fallout. My problem is that it's like a complete clone of Bethesda's Fallout games and devoid of anything different.

Which is a pity as Obsidian have in the past shown themselves to be capable of far, far better than Bethesda.

H3llR4iser

Homelander wrote: »

How can you infer it's not an AAA game simply based on the size of the game world? The average playtime for The Outer Worlds is 30-40 hours, there are any amount of single player games with far less gameplay time, many as little as <8-10.

The Outer Worlds has been compared to Fallout, and it's really not a 'problem' because it has been very favorably so, because it incorporates the best things about that game in typical Obsidian fashion while delivering a far tighter experience.

Not me - by their own definition, the company making it call themselves an "AA" games maker:

https://kotaku.com/dont-expect-the-outer-worlds-to-be-as-gigantic-as-fallo-1831074160

Now, it IS indeed ridiculous that many companies get away by making games with stupidly short single player modes, usually with the excuse that "players want MP anyway", but the "size" of a game can't be measured on length in terms of hours. You can have an abysmally small game last hundreds of hours by filling it with repetitive and "samey" missions.

Most of the length in TOWS comes from "but wait, we need something else still!" moments and the moving around necessary for a lot of missions.

Calhoun wrote: »

I would say its just about a triple A game but you would be forgiven for thinking its not. It used the same old engine and system as fallout 4, they even advised they couldn't do a 3rd person view due to time and money constraints.

I played most my game as melee and would have loved and over the shoulder view with decent animations.

Game size is only an issue for certain communities but just because its not an issue for you doesn't mean it is for them and vice versa.

TOWS is not an AAA game in terms of assets and world development; A lot of buildings are just cosmetic husks, the game world is not fleshed out at all, there are only a handful types of "enemies", the gameplay is not balanced at all ("Supernova" mode would be interesting if your companions didn't actively try to get killed constantly). Again, going by the developers' profile, it wasn't meant to be.

But "size", I wouldn't care about if the game world wasn't...well, boring for lack of a better definition. There are no "what the fcuk happened here?" moments, no "what the hell is that?" situations. Which brings my main gripe about the setting: why the heck set it in space if you're not going to make use of the "sh1t, we're in a different solar system!" element AT ALL? Space Opera missing, well, space, mystery...nor any concepts that are "alien". Yeah, Terra-2 has rings, wow, so edgy...

As an easy, casual pseudo-RPG (most of the stats make little to no difference at all after level 7-8) where the most fun mission is helping your Chief Engineer get in the knickers of a space station's Captain, well it's A-OK. But it's not the "superb" game reviewers claim it to be.

Stone Deaf 4evr

On the Fallout comparison - its definitley deep rooted in the game, I found it initially quite jarring for about the first hour.

however - if I was to compare it to any game, Id actually say its more akin to the original Deus Ex, the levels are more crafted than your typical fallout fare (imo).

Temptamperu

Finished her this afternoon. Absolutely cracking little game. The locations and characters where a complete joy to behold and the story wasn't too bad either.
I was a charismatic lady with a nice sniper rifle took on some flaws for perks but I didnt really like the perks. There was never a "oh my god I need that" perk at all other than the carry weight and the slow time perks.

Might try a dumbass with a stick playthrough next.

Evade

I've hit a wall on Tartarus, my solo sniping play isn't working.

dreamers75

Evade wrote: »

I've hit a wall on Tartarus, my solo sniping play isn't working.

if your speech is above 70 you can get the shroud when talking to the landing dude.