The Outer Worlds · 1:32pm Dec 7th, 2019
I got the game because it looked like the Fallout fix I needed. Obsidian, who made New Vegas, made it. It looked like Space Fallout and had a lot of similarities. Waited for the Black Friday sale, then grabbed it for $48. Thanks for the holiday, you turkey-eating Americans.
Positives
It looks good and plays well. I’ve beaten the game without running into a single glitch or crash so that puts it miles ahead of Bethesda. It’s 48 bucks well spent. I’d say that even if I had to shell out the full $59.99. If you played Fallout 76, which I didn’t, I’d recommend it to wash the taste out of your mouth. As a Fallout fix, it works well enough. Character creation will feel quite familiar as will the gameplay.
I like the companion system with each companion having a special attack you can activate, sort of like Mass Effect 2 and 3. It allows for more strategy. Being able to fiddle with their AI is good too.
I like the Tactical Time Dilation which they replaced VATS with. It’s basically Max Payne’s slow time effect. Making it a resource you have to manage requires better strategy as well and improves challenge. It’s less jarring than the VATS effect too.
I like some parts of the story. Even though it’s not a post apocalyptic world, it still has some of that survivalist feel to it. The idea of being ruled entirely by mega corporations is also quite interesting, if nothing else.
I like the flaw system in which the game offers you some stat penalties after specific events like being exposed to a lot of plasma damage. You get an extra perk in exchange. I think it’s a nice addition and gives some depth to the character advancement.
Negatives
Overall, not enough content. This game reeks of “we’ll put the rest of the game in DLCs”.
Not enough story content. The main story is quite short. It didn’t take me that long to beat it even though I did every side quest I could get my hands on.
The companion system is interesting IN COMBAT, but your actual companions are too few and uninteresting. When I first saw that there was an option to fire a companion and get them out of my ship, I was excited. It suggested to me that there are more recruitable companions than there are available slots in your crew. Disappointingly, that’s not the case. You have six slots in your crew and there are exactly six characters to recruit. None of them particularly grabbed my attention and their personal quests were not only short but kind of lame. There’s no approval system. They’re always loyal and they will immediately tell you their life story and personally quest as soon as you reach the required areas. There’s no romance option either.
Not enough weapons. The weapons that are present are pretty good if not a little generic, but it is obviously lacking. You got your pistols, automatic and semi automatic rifles, machine guns, grenade launchers, pellet shotguns and flamethrowers. And a shock cannon, which is just a flamethrower that throws electricity. There’s a variety of melee weapons too like hammers, swords, and pole arms. The game tries to cover for it by having mods that alter your damage type. See, if you apply the corrosive magazine to your flamethrower, then it’s an acid thrower! Totally different weapon! Not good enough, game. They also scale weapons up by adding MK II versions of them in the late game. It’s the same generic pistol you started out with, but it’s MKII so it has more DPS. Again, not good enough. Some weapons I expected and didn’t get include: grenades, mines, automatic pistols, slug shotguns, any sort of weapon that’s fired from the shoulder, fist weapons even just the ability to punch people unarmed. And this is just the typical Fallout stuff. The game is set in the far future and could have gone wilder with the weapons, but didn’t. There are a few “science weapons” like the shrink ray and the mind control ray, but they are primarily used to cause status effects. Their damage is too low to be reliable as main weapons. And there’s too few of them as well.
Not enough gore. There’s no blood in the game. I can hose down an enemy with a heavy machine gun until their limbs fly off, but there’s not a drop of blood to be found. Enemies don’t melt into puddles of goo when you kill them with corrosive damage. Plasma and N-Ray kills just create very generic ash piles. Shock kills just make them convulse a bit then drop dead as if killed by generic bullets. I want horribly burned bodies. I want N-Ray kills to cause bodies to explode as if you microwaved them.
The story lays it on thick, as in anvil to the head, ham to the face, levels of thick. Corporations are evil. I get it. Soon as you start, the game hammers it into you. “The Board” is so cartoonishly evil and shortsighted that they make Caesar’s Legion look benign. There’s no nuance to it. The game offers no defense for the Board. In New Vegas, Raul will talk about how the Legion maintains order in Arizona and all along the east. Cass will begrudgingly admit that the Legion protects its caravans better than the NCR. Hell, in Fallout 4 you get the synth companion who is pro-Institute, and Danse who is pro-brotherhood, even as they are instructed to shoot him on sight. Here, all of your companions think the Board sucks, even the priest, who should be the token corporate dude in your party but will magically transform into a hippy who doesn’t give a fuck once you give him his first high and convince him his religion is a sham. Clever writing, I’m sure. The only companion who doesn’t think the Board sucks is the fucking robot who doesn’t voice any opinion beyond playing ads.
Not enough perks, and the perks available are generic as fuck. As far as perks are involved, you won’t have much of a build going on because, by the endgame, you’ll have most of them. They’re pretty generic stuff like more health, more carrying capacity, and better time dilation. If you take the flaws, then you’ll be close to getting all the perks.
Enjoy
Not finished it yet, but this sounds accurate to me overall. Though, I will say, I do appreciate how active the companions are in dialogue. For all that I may agree with your other criticisms of them, I really like how any companion or combination of companions you bring along when you leave the ship will have something to say or contribute to whatever quest you're doing. Fallout 4 kind of had that, where companions might comment on goings on, but I've never seen companions in the Fallout games interrupt NPC conversations and steer them in a whole new direction without the player's prompting. Not to mention how companion pairs will have their own party banter with each other. It just adds a better sense of character to them all, I think.
5165761
I do appreciate the double partner thing and the party banter. In Vegas, you could also do the double companion thing, but the other companion had to be either the dog or the eyebot.
The thing is, I’ve seen this sort of thing done better with Dragon Age. It needs an approval system so you would put more weight on the character’s point of view. Then, you might have a situation where you have your two companions advising different courses of action like Alistair and Morrigan would in Origins. As it is, the companions in Outer Worlds just don’t have that much weight to them.
5165930
Yeah, that's fair.
Oh hey, my friend works at obsidian! (He didn’t work on this game though.)