Obsidian Strikes Back with The Outer Worlds

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Korin said:
It is a great game but liking the games isn't mutually exclusive unless you have a borderline personality :p
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Of course it's not. But it seems several people over at Bethesda forums and Fallout 76 reddit are actually commenting about how they will be playing Outer Worlds and not Fallout 76 anymore. And these two places were always places where criticism of Bethesda and/or Fallout 76 was quickly shut down and drowned in praise by the fans. This is not the case anymore.

For example, the Bethesda.net thread that Toront posted the other day about the Fallout 1st was (when I read it the other day) around 97% of people who always defended Bethesda and play Fallout 76, complaining and saying enough is enough, 2% of people that don't play Fallout 76 saying the same and 1% of people actually saying that Fallout 1st is nice.

And of course, there are the "inevitable" posts there of people saying they are playing The Outer Worlds instead and don't care about Fallout 76 anymore. Others saying that they will not buy any Bethesda game full priced anymore and a few saying that they will not buy Bethesda games in the future (debatable thought, since people say one thing and then when games are released, they can do the opposite).

But anyway, this is a huge discrepancy with the past, where if anyone complained about anything in those forums, they would be drowned by 99% of people defending Bethesda. Fallout 76 reddit is similar too (last I checked, I don't go to reddit much, maybe it changed by now?).
 
Look, it's a good game from a dialog perspective. But it's not the be-all and end-all. And, despite the rushed ending of KOTOR 2, it doesn't hold a candle to the quests/dialogs from a 15-year-old game.

It's a short (about 32 hours to finish), instanced game and more like a short BioWare game than a Bethesda game. The combat is simple and lacks quality AI though it's not the worst ever and I'd put it down as 'adequate' for a dialog-centric CRPG. There are a bunch of fetch quests and only one part of the main quest (Monarch) was 'memorable,' at least to me. It's really linear and you definitely can't go off and 'do your own thing' and let the galaxy burn. They lock areas like the old BioWare games. Heck, you can't even get into certain open-world quest areas until you have the quest - no pre-entry, no accidental pre-finishing quests (like fixing the power plant).

There's very little replay value even at higher difficulties as all that happens is they add more HP and damage to the enemies until you get to Supernova , at which point your companions are subject to perma-death.

The esthetic is okay. It obviously steals much from Bethesda's Fallout.

And, yes, it has bugs even if people want to pretend otherwise. For many, they couldn't get it to load and it was a huge crash fest. Even I've been bugged at times. Periodically the 'E' key (interact) borks out and you have to quit & restart. I've had a couple CTDs.

So, yes, I enjoyed the game. Finished it. It was nice. A solid "8" of a game. But let's not go crazy because there has been a drought of quality CRPGs in the science-fiction/apocalypse genres.
 
MosesZD, it's not over The Outer Worlds being the best, but that it fills a niche that's sadly lacking since NV: A solid ARPG. All we get these days are games with light RPG elements (Fallout 4) or very flawed ones (Greedfall). Bethesda is actively pushing their fans away with there poor quality and insane monetization. The fact that their die-hards have finally had enough should worry Zenimax. Whales will only fatten their coffers for so long. Konami was once a beloved game company, and now when it comes to games, they're little more than a pariah. If the money starts to dry-up, Zenimax will take it out on the dev teams, down-size, fire them and place pressure (That is if they haven't already) to make a product that sells. Blizzard got gutted, EA simply absorbed properties and destroyed beloved game companies. I see Zenimax doing much of the same down the road.

I agree with you about The Outer Worlds not being the greatest game ever, but you're off-base to say it steals from Bethesda's Fallout. It's nothing like their dumb-downed sandbox games. The writing and satire in the Outer Worlds is sharp. Gameplay-wise it's similar, but so what? It's a 3D RPG. Hardly anything new. Let's not be so quick to credit Bethesda with everything. Fallout 3/4 look drab as hell when compared to the vibrant colors and world boxes of The Outer Worlds. You cannot become a Master of All in The Outer Worlds. I ended up with a sniper thief who's got a silver tongue. Everything else I'm mediocre to ok. If this were designed like a Bethesda game, I'd have power armor at level 1 and given the difficult choice of "Shoot everything now" or "Later."

You talk as though the game's as buggy as a Bethesda one. It's not. I've had a single bug and zero crashes. If this were say Bethesda, I would be on crash number 25 by now and seen near a hundred bugs. The Outer Worlds just came out too, so one cannot expect it to run perfectly for all PC users. Every rig is a little different. Compare this early release of The Outer Worlds to an early release by Bethesda and one cannot make a comparison.

I think it was a mistake to make the way hubs open so linear, yet I've got an itch already to play the game again. It is limited in this sense compared to Fallout 3/4, yet whenever I tried replaying those two games it felt like a damn chore. Big open worlds of nothing. Just power level and collect weapons. They're fun to explore once, and then it's "Been there seen that." The Outer Worlds might be linear but plenty of bigger quests allowed me to pickpocket access cards, lock pick, hack, stealth, talk or shot my way out of a situation. It's not as robust as NV, but then it is a smaller budgeted game built on purpose to be a smaller romp than a grand adventure through the Mohave. Let's reserve bigger criticism for the sequel.
 
I want to know as well because this game looks nothing like the Bethesda's Fallouts.
 
Risewild said:
the Bethesda.net thread that Toront posted the other day about the Fallout 1st... But anyway, this is a huge discrepancy with the past, where if anyone complained about anything in those forums, they would be drowned by 99% of people defending Bethesda. Fallout 76 reddit is similar too (last I checked, I don't go to reddit much, maybe it changed by now?).
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I just had to post this quote from the latest post in that Beth forum thread. It's this guys first post there and it sums up the sentiments nicely.

"[censored] you todd. This game is in no magnitude that justifies monthly subscription. Put the crack pipe down you [censored]."
 
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More Outer Worlds talk.




Some of this just sounds bad. When I hear words like lifeless I think of standard Bethesda RPG's.
 
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In 2019 people are simply happy to have a Bethesda game not made by Bethesda. I can understand the feeling since I am happy to get a MGS game that is not a MGS game.
 
Jabberwok said:
I think it's more that even a half-decent RPG is very difficult to come by in the AAA space nowadays. That makes Outer Worlds look better by comparison.
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Yeah I mean, outer worlds is just a 100% totally fine RPG. It's not gigantic, it's not old school. It does IMO make fallout 76 look very bad and fallout4 look somewhat mediocre. I still wish they'd used their pillars of eternity engine to make a true fo1/2/t style game... but I doubt microsoft actively WANTS them to lose money.

Outer worlds also makes things like mass effect andromeda look very bad. It's a 60$ game with baseline competence and no needs to promise to fix anything. That was the standard back in the day 10-20 years ago, but now it's pretty rare. It's a fun game, it's got mild replayability, it's an interesting new world. It's not as good as fallout, but bethseda is probably never going to make another good fallout game ever at this rate, so people are willing to settle.

edit:Also I want obsidian to do well because I don't want obsidian to die. Pillars2 was imo way worse than pillars1 and tyranny didn't sell well and was imo somewhat mediocre, but tyranny pushed boundaries in some interesting ways. I'm hopeful that now that obsidian isn't desperate they can go back and make their next game a classic rpg. I am worried though microsoft will demand 87 outer world sequels instead though.

Something like pathfinder kingmaker with obsidian writing and microsoft paying for obsidian to make a non-buggy tripleA game would be kind of amazing but probably won't happen.
 
namad said:
Something like pathfinder kingmaker with obsidian writing and microsoft paying for obsidian to make a non-buggy tripleA game would be kind of amazing but probably won't happen.
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We aren't going to get any AAA isometric games. Don't worry about it. Just go play Disco Elysium. :D
 
MosesZD said:
The esthetic is okay. It obviously steals much from Bethesda's Fallout.
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I don't think Outer Worlds and Fallout are anything alike... I don't know why people consider them direct comparisons, the only thing they have in common is being an FPS RPG. Outer Worlds is closer to Mass Effect than Fallout. It feels about 60% Mass Effect 2, 30% Borderlands... 10% Bioshock? They were also released about a year apart from each other I guess, that makes them comparable timewise.
 
Korin said:
I don't think Outer Worlds and Fallout are anything alike... I don't know why people consider them direct comparisons, the only thing they have in common is being an FPS RPG. Outer Worlds is closer to Mass Effect than Fallout. It feels about 60% Mass Effect 2, 30% Borderlands... 10% Bioshock? They were also released about a year apart from each other I guess, that makes them comparable timewise.
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I am guessing that the comparison is mostly floating around for two reasons:
1. A lot of players are only familiar with Obsidian because of New Vegas, so Obsidian game = Fallout.
2. A lot of players have never played an RPG that wasn't from Bethesda, so any 1st person RPG looks like a clone of those games to them.

And then add in a healthy dose of confirmation bias...
 
After finishing Outer Worlds, I tried to form an opinion other than "It's made by Obsidian so it'll be just like New Vegas."

But nope. It's uh.. It's just a Borderlands TC for New Vegas lmao. It's fun, but even Fallout 4 kept me engaged for longer
 
Mr Fish said:
So people are celebrating mediocracy?
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With me, it's the solid writing, low cost of entry and that the game actually fucking works. Video games now are in a state of "release it now and fix it later" mentality and that's not just directed at Triple A games either. Last RPG I went through prior to this was Stygian and those pricks had the nerve to release a third of the game as a finished product that's riddled with bugs. A game that actually works as intended and feels complete goes a long way. It's fucking sad that's where we are, but that's how it is.
 
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