The Outer Worlds - Early Impressions

Got a chance to really sink my teeth into it over the weekend. I'd say this game feels about 60% Mass Effect 2, 30% Borderlands, 10% Bioshock. There are actually some mechanics and even sound effects in the game that sound like they're the same as Mass Effect (not that that is a complaint) and the combat and companion system gameplay feels very reminiscent.

Overall really enjoying the game, enjoy having a lot of skill checks and dialogue options. I spent a lot of time making my Edgewater/Botanical gardens decision and I'm looking forward to seeing how it affects the story. I find the conversations humorous and/or interesting a lot of the time. A couple zones have felt "fetchy" in that it feels like you spend a fair amount of time just running back and forth between an NPC and a quest location that's buried somewhere in a labyrinth (Groundbreaker) but it hasn't been too bad. I have very few complaints so far and the ones I have are minor:

- It is annoying that you can't keep your weapon holstered because the same button used to activate items also unholsters the weapon, so your gun is pretty much always out
- The 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th slot inhaler items don't seem very intuitive or useful to me. There doesn't appear to be a way to have them "auto-equip" or be able to distinguish between when you do and don't want to use them (since it uses them all when you use the inhaler).
- There are too many button interactions that require you to "hold" the button, in particular the weapon selection wheel. If I'm switching weapons more often than not I'm in combat and I don't like having the added delay
- You can't fast travel from inside a building so sometimes you spend a fair amount of time trying to find your way out of a large area so you can fast travel
- The modify system for weapons/armour is a little unintuitive and I find it difficult to understand what you have equipped/are replacing along with what the stat changes actually are (this might be just me)

 

The character system seems to have a lot of impact at least as far as conversation choices go. Seems like almost every conversation has an option to use various skills and you encounter interactable situations in the game world your skills factor into. You won't see these options (in dialogue) unless your skill levels are high enough for that situation though. The only thing meaningless in character creation was designing how your character looks. After you choose how they'll look you never see them again.

If people are comparing it to Fallout maybe. The freedom and exploration of the game seems to be more cerebral with the choices you make than the places you go. I'm actually not sure how open the world is but there are some points to explore. There just doesn't exist quest or other prompts nudging you to do so.

I like the dialogue personally but I'd say I'm not taking it too seriously. The game universe seems to be ironic and whimsical so I expect the characters to be a bit ridiculous.

Like you get too much? It's not a randomized item system like Borderlands, it seems like there are generic item types/tiers that give different bonuses. I'm not a fan of the modding system because it's unintuitive. There's a lot of clutter items in the form of "aid" that don't get used and don't seem practical.

High expectations often leave people disappointed. If you expect a game release to re-create all the same feelings of excitement and pleasure you remember mostly through nostalgia you can really ruin a game for yourself. It's better to just play Outer Worlds with no expectations and let yourself find the enjoyment naturally in the way the game offers it.

 

You pick up dozens of unique types of consumables, a lot of which have the exact same (and often mediocre) affects like "200% health regeneration out of combat for 30 seconds" so right now I probably have 20-30 different stacks of aid items and most of them are nearly useless. You can bind them to be auto-used with the inhaler but their benefits aren't useful enough to justify constantly juggling them in the inventory screen. Health regen items in particular don't serve a purpose in combat and you don't want to waste adrena charges just to use consumables. Also the interface doesn't let you easily select or hot key these items and in the inventory screen you can only consume them by holding the "A" button (on xbox) which is really annoying. That's just my take.

 

The UI for aid items was better in Skyrim :p you could very quickly and easily see what each item did and consume it with a quick button press. It's not game breaking by any stretch, I don't find a frequent need to heal and largely just ignore everything in the aid category.

 

No probably not, a lot of them aren't combat oriented. They're minor regeneration/stat boosts that last a few seconds and you already regenerate health out of combat (unless you have your temperament set to the lowest value) which might disable health regen all together. Maybe someone would find them useful but it's more bothersome than anything and the game's difficulty doesn't seem that high. The only time I've used items is for skill checks where I was a couple points short but I'd have to spend a couple minutes trying to find if there was an item that would actually give me a boost.

It is... I dealt with that by not using any of the aid items. Healing is auto-bound to the left bumper so that's all you need. Healing with "other stuff" requires you to fill those limited inhaler quick slots or make them part of the inhale (medicine skill) but they don't auto-assign so the slots are empty unless you keep refilling them. The items aren't necessary, I'd be surprised to find anyone truly needing them based on the game so far. I could be proved wrong. I'm playing a mostly science/engineering build with only 50 points in long gun. I'm not really min/maxed for combat or anything.