I just beat the game and appear to have gotten mostly good, optimistic endings. It took me 21 hours and I also played through the DLC Peril on Gorgon.
I have a system save all set for when DLC #2 is released, which is apparently this week.
Great game. I liked it as much as some of the Fallout games and wow, it is nice to see a great Fallout game that is true to the series best aspects. The only thing missing is a big open world. Maybe Outer Worlds 2 will have this?
I’ve been playing the game for a couple months.
Honestly, I find the game just okay. I think the overall universe they’ve constructed pales in quality to Fallout: New Vegas and Pillars of Eternity, and even Fallout 2 which was made by Interplay/Black Isle Studios by the people that would leave to form Obsidian. It certainly feels like an Obsidian Game, but it’s not even close to Pillars of Eternity in quality, IMO. The combat starts out fairly challenging on the first planet when playing on hard mode. (I’d play on the hardest difficulty level, but I don’t want NPC permadeath. Especially since your companions are idiots in combat. I suppose you could micromanage them maybe to keep them alive longer, but this really isn’t the type of game that lends itself to particularly tactical combat.) But as you level yourself and boost your equipment via workbenches you quickly find yourself well outpacing the power level of your enemies. And there’s a lot of combat and regularly respawning areas making combat a chore.
The Board and its corporate lackeys also make for a ridiculously 2-dimensional faction. I wouldn’t be surprised if the members are all twirling their mustaches and laughing like Snidely Whiplash or Dick Dastardly. Yeah, we get it. Corporations are dicks. But not all corporate lackeys are either mindless drones, evil people, misunderstood individuals who are trying to change the world through the corporation, or former corporate managers who saw the light. People are complicated; it might be nice to see it in this game rather than cookie cutter stereotypes.
Also, aside from the Alien invasion craziness of their leader, which would actually make for a more interesting subject to explore, Sublight is no better fleshed out. They are just as 2-dimensional, but in this case the faction is an anti-corporation smuggler operation.
And most of the companion NPCs have fairly boring backstories and their side-quests are largely easy and uninteresting. (Then again, most side-quests are largely easy and uninteresting.)
It just seems like fleshing out the world and the characters in it was an afterthought. Like they had a great setup, and then got rushed into writing the characters.
That being said, the game is not un-fun. It’s not a bad game. And it’s beautiful. It’s a nice change to see a dystopian futuristic setting not look washed out and filled with sepia. It’s just the whole thing makes me think of a newly constructed home right after the drywall is put in. There’s no trim; no appliances; there’s nothing that makes it feel like a fully fleshed out world and game.
It also has some funny lines. There are some truly amusing moments in conversation. But I feel no connection to the world. I feel no connection to my character. And combat even on hard mode is ridiculously easy.
I got it on sale. It’s probably worth what I paid for it. I know I’m making it sound like a bad game. It isn’t. It’s just not all that good. And I wouldn’t be attacking it as much if it hadn’t been hailed as this great RPG that was one of the best games of the year.
In defense of this, I got a huge future-retro vibe from the game which made me think of robber barons (railroad tycoons) in space. The whole twirly mustache thing fits really well. I think adding more nuance would go against the aesthetic. I personally don’t mind that aspect of the game.
Second and final DLC is a murder mystery story releasing Wednesday. I may even pause my new game(Cyberpunk 2077) to go back and do it.
Outer Worlds 2 was just announced and has one of the best reveal trailers for a game I’ve ever seen.
I finished playing the game twice, back-to-back: first time as a “good guy” on normal difficulty and the second time as a “bad guy” on the hardest difficulty. I quite enjoyed it and there were enough differences in the plot to make it worth playing twice (compared to Fallout: New Vegas, where my first run-through was as an independent leader of NV and then subsequently playing on the NCR’s side or Caesar’s side was basically the same quests with very minor variations).
I thought the variety of weapons was about right, although I didn’t bother ever using melee. Is the melee system interesting? Also, I wish it was cheaper to upgrade the “legendary” and “science” weapons rather than having to chuck them aside once a new tier of weapons becomes available.
Did you play the DLC’s of this game? They are actually really excellent.
No, I just bought the base game. If the DLCs were five (Canadian) dollars, I might think about it. But usually the Canadian prices for Xbox DLCs are surprisingly expensive (in my limited experience) unless there’s a “Game of the Year” edition or something.
Ooh, shame. One thing I like about the DLC’s is that they were actually kind of different from the main game. Well, especially the second one, where you are essentially a detective solving a murder.
Anyway, I would strongly recommend them.
I started this game a long time ago and didn’t click with it. I’ve heard good things though so maybe I’ll give it another shot.
I really enjoyed it and have fond memories of it. It isn’t Fallout 5, but I have fonder memories of this game than I did Fallout 4, which wasn’t bad…but didn’t quite impact me the same.
I’m buying Outer Worlds 2 right away, though. For sure.
I bought it a year or two ago during a Steam sale and didn’t touch it. I was a huge Fallout fan beginning with #1. I even loved 4. (I don’t care for MMOs so I only tried the free trial of 76.) I think I was just scared that OW wouldn’t live up to expectations.
I’m finally started it yesterday and… it’s alright. (So far I have five everything in the first hub and I’ve completed all the quests that can be done in the second without traveling). The landscape doesn’t feel very interactive and movement feels artificially constrained - there’s no way to jump onto the roofs of buildings even when there are objects that should allow it. Also, the combat feels a bit too FPS-y. And the factions seen almost ridiculously one sided - “hey, let’s fuck all our workers just to see if we can raise our share price by a tiny fraction, despite the possible bad publicity.”
In Fallout, Vault-tec’s evil was easily explained in-world because it was just contract plans in case the world ended.
It’s a game made with plenty of intelligence but little inspiration.
The more I think back on it, the more I hope they expand Outer Worlds 2 to be larger and more like a fully fleshed out world.
Having said that, I had great fun with this game and can recommend both DLC’s, which might be better(equal?) to the main game.
I think my review remains the same as the earlier one, and talking to @Really_Not_All_That_Bright’s and @Mahaloth’s points, I’ll just quote myself from upthread.
But still recommend it as a good game, just not the great game it had the potential to be if it hadn’t streamlined itself so much.
As for the DLC, I played both, and Peril on Gorgon worked pretty well, although it was story-wise just more of the same style of Evil Corporate Actions and everyone else suffering the consequences. That being said, it was a well-done more of the same, so enjoyable other than the DLC gear > anything else in base game.
As for Murder on Eridanos, they added actual new elements to the mix along with the default storyline above. It was . . . mmmm, 80% successful? I personally didn’t care for the detective options, and it was super predictable, but I appreciate when they try new things rather than play super safe like Gorgon did.
So I’ll repeat my earlier evaluation for anyone who didn’t read the rest of the thread: B+ overall, but lots of glimpses where they could have gone for the A+.
This was the one I found to be more fun. I liked how different it was to solve a murder mystery in a game I was not expecting one to be in.
This is the first game I bought after recently buying a new PC that could play it. It is the type of game I always loved and would dig into for days. I played a session and can appreciate the quality of the game on play and writing but I think my brain has been rewired to play quicker shorter games because I haven’t gone back to continue even though I liked it.
This is a perfect succinct summary of the game.
You said in one sentence what my review up above took a few paragraphs to say.
There really is the makings of one of the best games by one of the best studios, but somehow it just falls flat. The whole is considerably weaker than the sum of the parts.
I think that if they had set all (or most) of the story on one planet, then it could have felt like a large, open world instead of a bunch of small, closed-ish worlds.
I still liked it, though. Like a version of Fallout 3 with more colorful graphics.
I really enjoyed the humor. “Spacer’s Choice!” The writing was good, the graphics being colorful and the cartoonish ultra-violence and alien settings made it seem like a Fallout/Borderlands mashup. Which are both awesome franchises.
I also liked the gun customization. That sold the system to me.
Hopefully a sequel can give us a bigger game.