@Agayek

My nigga.

But the real question is - can I role play as a courier that follows Robert House and this new game is his newly colonized solar system??

Many reviews call it the spiritual successor of New Vegas, but without the crippling bugs. Does it hold up to the lofty standard that is the followup of my favorite game of all time?

Has Obsidian released mod tools for this/will they? Because if so, I'd give it roughly 2 weeks until we have an Outer Worlds version of SkyUI or VUI+

I mean I'm gonna get it soon anyway. But Jesus. Is this finally the example of a AAA Obsidian RPG that is given the proper time to be created? KOTOR 2 is the finest Star Wars installation of all time despite the limitations. New Vegas is the closest I've ever come to playing Fallout 2 for the first time again. The Stick of Truth was a fully immersive South Park experience that played beautifully. Pillars of Eternity held my attention for nearly a hundred hours. But POE was self-funded and made, KOTOR 2 and New Vegas subject to rushes. The Stick of Truth was glorious, an Ubisoft title that got out of its own way... Have we reached Peak Obsidian Nirvana?

 

You probably could, yes. Headcannon the Board as something House set up after Earth started recovering from the nukes, and you could totally play as his enforcer/troubleshooter.

Spoiler

Like, no lie, in the very first town you enter, you could walk into the police station and tell them "Hey, so this crazy scientist guy you guys have a bounty on just thawed me out of cryo and sent me down here to stop the Board. How about you pay me the bounty and I bring you his head?"

As for your second question, jury's still out on that. I'll have to put a good few more hours into it too say either way with confidence. Early signs are very promising though. If it keeps up this same level of quality the whole way through, I think I may like this a fair bit better than New Vegas, which is impressive.

Though with that said, I do feel the need to point out that this isn't exactly "Fallout: Space Edition". You don't get plopped into an open map that's miles upon miles across and left to wander. It's instead a series of smaller, more directed maps. There's still an element of exploration and everything, but by and large, you're not gonna have those moments like in Fallout where you go "I'm gonna go that way", and then stumble upon four hours of content hidden away in some cave.

Think of the Outer Worlds as less of an open world game and more like the more classical RPGs, like Dragon Age: Origins, Baldur's Gate, etc, rather than Bethesda style. You get a series of environments, each with quests that guide you through portions of that environment, and then a few secrets scattered around it for flavor.

 

Jesus Christ. Slower you slut, I'm almost there

 

Also, re: mod tools, there's no official mod support/tools at launch, but Obsidian has said they want to add it. No details or timeline, but my expectation is that it would likely end up being a thing that comes with the Steam launch, just because Steamworks makes that so much easier.

 

My friends are loving it, and someone pointed out you can test the game for £1 - it's included in Microsoft Game Pass, which currently has a £1 first month, £4 onwards.

I doubt you can port characters to Epic/Steam (in 12 months), but you can give it a spin for pocket change.

 

It's the best Fallout game ever made, and it's not even Fallout. Well, by name at least. I've actually been calling it Firefly: New Vegas - the first companion you have a chance to pick up is straight out of the Serenity, and it feels a ton like the show at times, while still maintaining the feel of the best parts of F:NV. None more than the dialog, which I've laughed genuinely out-loud at constantly.

I'm about 15h in now, and it's going to take some monumental fucking up on their part at this point for me not to call this one of the best RPGs ever made. I've really missed the ability to do whatever the hell I want, and feel like there are a ton of different ways to solve a quest - I've hit a good 4-5 points now where I can already see myself going back and doing something different the next time, and there are a few points where I've sat there for minutes, trying to decide how I wanted to handle things.

If there's one nitpick I can see people having, it's that it isn't really, truly open-world, per se. You have to bounce around between planets, moons, asteroids, and all that. There are definite locks on places before you have the ability to get to them - passcodes required to land, learning about other landing spots on planets you've already been to once before, and all that. Fair enough if that's the case I suppose. There are some people that hate the field of view and a few other graphical things, but as it's UE4-driven, people had fixes for it 15m into release. None of those have bothered me in the slightest though.

I don't remember the last game I paid full price for, and generally hate doing it. This was the best $60 I've spent in a long, long time.

 

Oh My God!! You guys have to play Disco Elysium. Right now.

I have never played such a mentally stimulating game as this one.

I genuinely have no words to describe the game. All I can say is that if you love PlaneScape Torment, then you owe it to yourself to play this game.

Its perhaps the most unique Role Playing Game I have ever played.

I think this video does a passable job of trying to explain the game, so check it out

 

Kind of a game related TOMD, I guess.

Finished the OG KOTOR. Hard difficulty on Android is an exercise in misery. I've no doubt the experience would have been much better on PC. Ultimately I skipped doing most of the companion quests and other side quests besides. The BioWare RPG formula is obvious for anyone who's played a BW title. And I know I'm speaking from the perspective of being 15 years too late to the party.

By the BW formula I mean of course the party, the skill system, companion quests and the structure of the world. Literally, Endar Spire is an Origin, Taris is Ostagar, Dantooine is Lothering, Tatooine/Manaan/Kashyyk/Korriban are Mage Tower/Brecillian Forest/Orzammar/Redcliffe, then the Rakata planet is The Landsmeet and Star Forge is Denerim in the final battle.

I appreciate the game's contribution to gaming and pop culture. Mass Effect and Dragon Age could not have existed without this game and DAO especially is KOTOR's formula tuned to as close to perfection as the Doctors had been able to reach. I'm glad I experienced it.

The combat system is a bit weird to me (though not entirely alien), but the visuals of it are super cool, especially in one on one fights, where I could actually see what's going on. It really did look like lightsaber duels.

It's hard not to compare it to Mass Effect especially, which I think did a far better job of worldbuilding and making the world feel populated, like there really is a whole galaxy of systems out there. The biggest part of immersion imo is your own suspension of disbelief, and I did get into it--although I gotta say, I found endless enemy spawning on the Star Forge to be cheap, aggravating bullshit, especially when I did the Dark Side ending, because then I was limited to 2 Force users in the party instead of three.

Good game, but tbh I doubt I'll return to it, at least not the mobile port.

 

I've been playing A Plague Tale: Innocence over the last few days, and finished it last night - it's a strong contender for my game of the year, and I really wasn't expecting it to be that good. You play as Amicia de Rune, teenage (like, 13, 14, maybe) daughter of the noble de Rune family in 14th century France, on the run with her sickly five year old brother Hugo, who is wanted by the Inquisition for unknown reasons. As if that weren't enough, the region is in the early stages of the 100 Years War, and a plague brought on by the vicious swarms of rats covering the region. So not exactly a laugh riot.

It's primarily a linear stealth horror/adventure game, with a few more action oriented set pieces, and for the most part it works really well. Stealth sections are mostly a matter of following clear signposting to a timed routine, with occasional variation along the lines of 'do I go the longer, safer route through that long grass there, or do I go the shorter, riskier route through that long grass there', or 'do I spend the resources to make an alchemical knock out gas, or do I wait for the guard to move' - I realise such fixed routes aren't to everyone's taste, but it worked really well for me; having it so tightly focused really helped build the tension. Being spotted isn't (usually) an instant fail, but you are a young girl armed with a sling hiding from heavily armed soldiers, so fighting your way out isn't exactly ideal. The action set pieces break things up nicely for most of the game, usually nicely balanced between respecting your character limitations, being thrilling, and being horrifying.

And the game is horrifying. The rat swarms are always grotesque at the very least, even later in the game once you've got access to a variety of ways of getting them out of the way (at a very late stage, they start to lose their effectiveness quite a bit, but then the plot develops and suddenly they're back to being horrifying again), but they don't have a monopoly on freaking you out - whether it's villagers driven mad by fear, trying to burn you at the stake, or relentless soldiers chasing you through burning buildings, or 'simply' the logistics of making your way across a battlefield that's more corpse than ground, there's a constant sense of unease and dread punctured only by moments of genuine shock. The only thing that offsets this is the well developed relationship between Amicia and Hugo, and the friends they make along the way, who are all done very well, particularly by the general standards of videogame children.

On the negative side, a few relatively minor points. While never entirely routed in strict reality, the story and tone dials up the weirdness in the final stages of the game, which was a lot less scary than the earlier stuff, although still effectively grotesque. At the same time, the action gets dialed up over stealth, which isn't what the game is designed for, and not what it's spent the last 12-13 hours doing; it's not so much that the action is bad, but you don't get the time to adjust to it properly before it throws you into big setpieces. Of course, that might vary depending on how you've approached some of the earlier sections, I suppose. Also, there's a couple of later stealth sections which reduce - or remove entirely - the signposting, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but definitely threw me a bit.

Other than that though, it's easily one of the best games I've played this year. Definitely recommend.

 

A bit of an update on COD now that it's been out for about a week:

1. I think the hype has died down a bit. A LOT of old COD players are bitching about things like skill-based matchmaking, crappy maps, camping, people actually using the directional sound, OP guns, etc.

2. As someone who has never given a shit about COD (long-time Battlefield player), I'm enjoying it. Don't get me wrong, it definitely has flaws (chief among them being the way that they implemented footsteps/callouts), but overall, it's a lot of fun. For me, it's scratching an itch that Battlefield hasn't been covering for a while (modern FPS), and doing it well. Battlefield V being the shitshow that it currently is, I'm happy to set it aside for the time being. The maps are actually pretty good, though visibility is a bit crap on some of them, and the complaints about skill-based matchmaking come off as people wanting to be able to pubstomp every match - I play more or less the same way that I always have in every FPS, and my stats are about the same as they always have been.

3. The exclusive game mode is worrying, but only in an abstract sense. The current implementation I don't see as a real problem - it's only one game mode, and not one that I'm personally interested in. It could become a problem if they decide to make other, more popular, modes exclusive in future iterations though. However, I don't see that as a very likely outcome due to the implementation of Crossplay - what's the point of having cross-platform play if big chunks of the game are platform-exclusive? Bottom line is they're trying to figure out how to make the game sustainable without lootboxes (which I see as a good thing), and this is one way of doing that.

 

@coleam

Fair, and I'll grudgingly say "well done" to the devs as I continue to show Activision both middle fingers. On the specific issue of "just one gamemode", the problem is that the games industry is a real world example of the slippery slope. They started with horse armor DLC, look where it is now. Just one gamemode being exclusive for a year becomes two gamemodes being permanently exclusive to X platform and so on. That's why I'm personally opposed to continued schemes by the big publishers to sell games piecemeal.

 

I agree - the slippery slope is what worries me as well. However, I think that with Crossplay as the default, it's less likely to become prevalent since they're kind of counter-intuitive philosophies. Overall, I'm supportive of trying to find ways to piecemeal games less - DLC is beginning to fall by the wayside, as are lootboxes, so they need to find SOME way to generate the revenue needed to keep up support and continue to release new content. Ultimately, I think the real solution is going to be to raise the price of games significantly. If you think about it, games have been ~$60 at release for 20+ years now. At the same time, there's been inflation and production costs have gone up. It wouldn't surprise me if the revenue per user required for an "acceptable" profit margin is double (or more) the retail price of the game now. So that means that they either need to find a way to convince the user to fork over an additional $60+, or find someone else willing to cover that amount (in this case, Sony).

 

Yeah, no. That's a fat load of bullshit that the publishers desperately want everyone to believe. The actual price of games has most definitely risen, to around $80-100 on average, they just disguise it with the "Gold edition" bullshit so they can pretend that it's still $60. Add on top of that that the gaming audience today is multiple orders of magnitude larger than it was in 1995, with the sales figures inflating accordingly, and it's never been more profitable to publish games. Game publishers are swimming in cash, and there is no shortfall for development costs that is being made up for by microtransactions. All you have to do is look at the output from places like Devolver and that becomes immediately obvious.

The whole thing with microtransactions and live services is because publishers are, and have been for years, trying to drink from the same well forever, where they can shit out a product and then have customers pay for that product indefinitely with no further investment from the publishers. It's the ideal end-state for all businesses. It's just that the gaming industry for some baffling reason is far more tolerant of attempts to get there than others.

 

Tbh I spit at the argument that games have stayed $60 therefore that justifies all the bs predatory practices the industry has cooked up in the 21st century. I'll gladly pay $80 for triple A releases if it guarantees the full game at release with no MTX of any kind at any point in the future. The industry could easily propose that deal to consumers, but they won't because they are perfectly happy to charge $60 for the bare minimum version and $240 for the Deluxe Version with some concept art and a shitty plastic doll and MTX in a premium game.

 

I'm pretty sure that most people aren't buying the $80-$100 "Gold Edition". That's one part of trying to recoup costs, for sure, but it doesn't cover all of it. And yes, the audience is larger, but more players (especially in a multiplayer game) means more costs. If you profited off of 1 million players with the last version and now have 2 million, the extra million customers aren't pure profit - you have to spin up servers for an additional million players (or whatever fraction of them you expect to play at any point) and have the bandwidth to support 2 million players downloading your 200 GB file at 100 Mbps on launch day.

I think the takeaway from Devolver is more that you don't need massive production costs to make a great game, not that production costs are low overall. While they make really good games, they don't have anything that qualifies as a "AAA" game in terms of graphical quality or scope. I'm not in the video game industry, but I don't think it's much of a stretch to say that their development budget per game is much, much lower than someone like Dice, Infinity Ward, or (current) CDProjekt.

I agree that MTX and live services are shit - I'd rather pay more up front for a guarantee that I can access all content. Case in point, I happily paid the extra $60 up front for BF3/BF4 "Premium," which just bundled all of the DLC into one purchase at a slight discount. Neither game had any MTX (that I remember - BF4 added some later, I think) at launch.

I'm not trying to justify anything here - just explain it. Game companies, for whatever reason, have decided that there is a significant fraction of their audience who are unwilling to pay more than $60 for a game - as well as a significant fraction that will happily spend a LOT more than $60. So those are the two audiences that they cater to.

 

They can try to spin it whichever way they want, but the fact is that game publishers have mountains of money and they cut costs where they can. Servers, bandwidth? Fuck, look at post-launch support of some of the biggest titles of recent years. You think EA's Anthem is running on anything but a skeleton crew now?

 

Honestly, server capacity is nothing. Nowadays, there's functionally no difference in per-player cost for 1 mil vs 5 mil players; there's a large upfront cost to set up the infrastructure, which you'll pay regardless of audience size, but expanding it, especially if you leverage services like AWS, is fairly trivial. Subtracting the fixed overhead, the per-player cost is measured in cents, often even fractions of a cent, while each one of those players adds another $30-80 of pure profit to your coffers, after retailer fees and the like. And that's without making use of things like Steam, where the distribution costs are bundled into the retailer fees.

Kinda sorta, but not in the way you're thinking of. The game industry at large has realized that they can both have their cake and eat it too. They've realized that the audience at large is perfectly willing to buy a game for $60-100, and then a subset of that audience will happily get nickel and dimed for an arbitrarily high amount after the fact. The basic business model is "we can take a complete product, cut it into pieces, charge people for the skeleton that's left, then charge them again to add back all the pieces we cut out".

I don't blame them overmuch for doing it, after all, their job is to maximize gains while minimizing expenditures, and making people pay 3-5 times for what they once paid once for is a fantastic way to do that. But the fact remains that that's what they're doing, and the gaming audience at large is happy to take it, for some utterly baffling reason.

 

Blizzcon is great

Spoiler

 

Cool Interview with Lead of Larian Studios. GIves some minor insight into what to expect for BG3

https://www.gameinformer.com/interv...-vincke-talks-the-long-road-of-larian-studios

 

With the post-blizzcon-blues going around I think this kind of video is warranted.