The Outer Worlds

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The Outer Worlds – During a conversation about the development of The Outer Worlds with Gamasutra in 2019, Leonard Boyarsky mentioned a rather harsh truth about what the development team at Obsidian Entertainment wanted to aim for this judgment.

He and co-director Tim Cain were the pillars of Troika Games, the developer of fate behind three illustrious titles in the Western RPG genre: Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura, The Temple of Elemental Evil, and Vampires: The Masquerade – Bloodlines.

They have four things in common: they are the masterpieces of the subgenre to which they belong; will only be validated until later; their value continues to be inherited by contemporary products; and both are… unfinished products!

Although all three games have a great influence on the world of classic Western role-playing games and even embrace an untold amount of mods to this day, their quality is not decisive was the fate of the Troika Games in 2005.

The content was cut off and the widespread error was the “disease” that stuck to all three games, and the disappointing revenue of Vampires: The Masquerade – Bloodlines was the “waterdrop”, causing the company to stop working in 2005.

Boyarsky and Cain pour their blood and mind into their “darling”, and the end that they directly receive is the praise too late forever …

And so, many years later, The Outer Worlds was born with the motto: “innocuous, innocuous but safe, better than daring but difficult to receive”, because masterpiece means when it does not keep. Is the roof of individuals born into samsara for it to be born?

And also from that spirit of safety, we also witness the knife “critically stabbed” into the temperament of the most talented RPGs in history …

Despite the efforts to convince the fans that The Outer Worlds is “modern Fallout”, the game is essentially a combination of the familiar shooting – running – loot gameplay of the Borderlands game (but the latest version is Borderlands 3) and Mass Effect’s task design with dialogue is more.

The first “stumbling block” of The Outer Worlds lies in its overall gameplay.

The game “parodies” the interface and how to “loot” Fallout 3 / New Vegas / Fallout 4 / Fallout 76 items, in which each item is a separate object, placed manually in each box. Containers are scattered inside the environment.

This fits the pace of modern Fallout because half of its focus is on discovery.

They have a slow tempo because direct combat always causes a lot of damage to the character and has a small number of resources, which leads to the behavior of the player having to grop for every corner to pick up everything need.

Nearly every item from small to large in Fallout has a role, if not ammunition, it can be used to craft accessories, create resources, repair equipment.

Mechanism “loot” slowly and calculated to help players determine what is what they need.

On the contrary, on the other side, The Outer Worlds manipulates this mechanism … arbitrarily at the core of the main gameplay, which is not “driven” by the item system.

With fighting for 90% of content like Borderlands that players immerse in, the items that are not weapons/armor / consumable items are listed as “waste”.

These “garbage” items cannot be manipulated or reused to make meaningful items, but can be sold quite a bit for other purposes, making the picking mechanism “slow”(Fallout-inspired) does not suit the way The Outer Worlds wants you to pick things up.

The game also “handy” applies weight limit to the inventory, but is it necessary when the item system is too lack diversity, lack purpose, except for the single role-playing mechanism The simplest is “the big number should wear it”?

You just feel free to pick everything up by hand, run out of space, instantly teleport to the nearest Hub, sell for money, and then continue to work on the lack of vitality of The Outer Worlds.

Gradually, exploration in the game becomes a reflection loop – press E repeatedly when the “loot” interface pops up – instead of strings deciding what is the scraped “disguised” savior, you need!

This is both a corollary and the cause of the superficial fighting mechanics of The Outer Worlds.

It has a pretty * good * shot when compared to Fallout: New Vegas, the enemy responds quite well to being hit (physically), the weapon feels good, and the VFX effects are many.

But this Borderlands-inspired combat mechanism lacks too many options in how to take down the enemy.

The player does not have grenades, mines, or regardless of explosives / secondary damage devices in general, making fighting in The Outer Worlds merely aiming – shooting – jumping – commanding teammates to do so move on one target.

All consumable items temporarily increase the character’s stats, meaning that their strategic impact is rarely worth considering.

The time-lapse feature (or the so-called “cheap version” of the famous VATS in Fallout) doesn’t match more than half of the weapons in the game, and indeed you can finish the game. … without it!

And so, fighting in The Outer Worlds narrows itself to the most basic of the FPS genre.

The lack of variety in combat tools also extends to the enemy design and each fight in which 90% of the enemies the player encounters will either be Marauder thieves (which no one explains. where they migrated), either the Raptidon salamanders or the Primal apes with caricature-like faces about… people with diarrhea!

They gather in groups, scattered in empty places or clusters of residential houses with a similar layout, and of course, there are very few factors that surprise players in each fight.

It all starts with the player’s opening shot, and the rest takes place with the coherent progress of a regular gunfight in… Borderlands!

If the gameplay core of The Outer Worlds is “sugar-free milk” then the character development system is … “water”!

Despite being a heavy fighting game, weapon stats are divided into two equal ranks: melee (Melee) and long-range (Ranged), with the second level consisting of only three types of weapons: lightweight – heavyweight – energy.

The next confusing point is that the player does not choose to level up for the single weapon he wants to master.

This feature only appears when the Ranged hierarchy reaches 50 – that is, for some reason, The Outer Worlds does a very paradoxical thing that makes players … do everything well first and then focus on the small specialties.

This also applies to the 5 remaining Perk skills of The Outer Worlds, and it starts to give rise to a new problem: the game is completely non-role-playing.

The reason is that the amount of skill points awarded per level is too much, plus the main skills are added up early in the game, causing you to miss the content or witness your dialogue choices not being able to “unlock” on the first play is … impossible!

You can “clear” The Outer Worlds without adding points to the Melee branch or Defense.

Going further, you don’t need Stealth (since the game doesn’t have any stealth action other than the effect of the opening shot).

All you need is high weapon stats, six conversation stats of two ranks Dialog and Tech, points for Leadership to increase your teammate’s firepower, and The Outer Worlds will always make sure you always have enough points to do not miss any options that the game offers!

The latest mechanics of The Outer Worlds are also affected.

“Flaws”, are the negative characteristics the game will measure through the player’s actions.

Jumping down too much?

Dexterity, Perception, and Temperament.

Shoot down too many Marauders?

Increased bullet spread and gun shake.

Too… voracious?

Now if you don’t eat much, you will have a temporary stat decrease.

In theory, Flaw is a cool system that is out of the player’s control … until it asks you: do you want to take a defect?

The variable “defect” is a given option, the only thing you get when you take a defect is an extra skill point, which is redundant as mentioned above.

This is the moment when we should ask the question: if a game is too permissive, too generous about its barriers, too vague about the depth of its mechanics, should we … care?

I am sure to claim that this is the most shallow role-playing mechanics and gameplay in Obsidian’s entire portfolio of games, by one simple conclusion: an RPG is a series of choices and the consequence, and The Outer Worlds is what we get when choices are encapsulated in computational patterns in the most stereotypical possible way, and the consequences are not uncertain variables, but simply the answer to the terrifying “respectable” player when the game said “NO”!

And since then, The Outer Worlds continued to fall in freefall …

The Halcyon Milky Way has a “little” problem: first, its inhabitants are acting as “balls” in the table tennis game of six corporations under The Board – golden faces rule Halcyon treatment in the palm.

Second, a “chosen one” just appeared, preparing to destroy everything and topple The Board with lead bullets, lasers, and unbelievable persuasion!

In Halcyon, every human being is a resource, human rights are a treasure, and freedom is a luxury.

The Outer Worlds is an anti-capitalist work that satirizes the cruel reality that ultimate power is in the hands of the 1% part of this world.

Its sarcasm is hidden behind the screen of a harsh but overly ironic perspective, through anecdotes that make people laugh and suddenly look back “wait, is it serious?”.

This was evident early on in the game’s first major venue – Edgewater, a small town packed with canned food factory workers.

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Its tone is quite promising!

A worker here has just ended his own life, and the person closest to him at the time (near physical distance, not social relationship) has to pay the fee to build a grave for him because, for Spacer’s Choice, the death of a resident means a loss of company property and the general obligation of the town is to repay that physical debt.

What Edgewater showed quite promising about the content of The Outer Worlds, most notably the conflict between the Edgewater management and an autonomous group of defectors at the artificial botanical garden outside of town.

The player’s choice to divert the power supply towards Edgewater or the botanical garden is mainly based on the sympathy for the leaders who are trying their best to support this … “out of cure” town or spend for those who have decided that they do not want to endure being treated like iron within the machine.

Until…

… at the moment of making that pivotal decision, Parvati – the player’s only companion at the time, gave you her opinion wishing you would do the right thing.

This is nothing new because if you are familiar with Obsidian games, the characters must accompany ideals and prejudices when the player is facing an important choice normally.

But if its original purpose was to make the player even more deliberate, this time in The Outer Worlds, Parvati’s opinion unintentionally revealed early the game’s “manipulative nature”.

The Outer Worlds is a humorous game, but its comical aura is less ironic and purposefully insensitive as Fallout, but more mischievous and more self-aware.

It’s quite ingenious at times, but most of the time, The Outer Worlds are more amusing than it is a strong criticism of the subjects it is pursuing.

The reason is that the way the game describes the super corporations – here mainly The Board, is very unstable and lacking in lines.

The Board’s poor rule is the premise of The Outer Worlds, but the threat comes from not just The Board, but nearly every element of the game’s world, so little that the entire storyline of The Outer Worlds has almost nothing to surprise players.

Entering a heated argument between the two leaders, you will decide to put… a bullet into whose skull.

Entering an apartment on the side of the road and being invited to dinner in an overly friendly tone?

The game should place a signboard “HERE HAS A HUMAN FOOD” so that players don’t have to guess what to do!

From Monarch, Groundbreaker to Byzantium, The Outer Worlds tries to specify corporate pillars that they have good intentions and are willing to compromise.

On all of these planets, we meet people who have better leadership of Halcyon, and of course play a more complete, complex villain than the leaders of The Board – who exist just to give the game a “good” and “evil” storyline, through a ridiculously ridiculous project!

The ultimate goal of The Outer Worlds is to describe corporations as “inevitable catastrophe”, because they are the reason that the population of Halcyon has a place to live, fatten, preserved first. Marauders and cruel creatures from the outside, prompting the player to decide between potentially dangerous freedom and ruthless protection.

The story of the game makes the player suspicious of the “word of mouth” dictatorship over time, but the lack of seriousness in tone, plus the inconsistency in the balance between the two properties, causes Gray arrays of The Outer Worlds to exist only in theory.

The impression that the residents, leaders, defectors, and insurgents in Halcyon left to the writer was not “honest”, “simple”, “enlightened” or “mean”, but ” stupid ” and a few other variations of these two words.

So if the story of The Outer Worlds is not convincing enough, will the choices that players make difficult to make or not?

The answer is… 50/50.

The delineation of each situation is up to each person’s point of view, but no matter how persuasive, lying, or threatening the player, those dialogue choices will never return and “Stabbed behind you”.

There are very few consequences that the player will suffer over the length of The Outer Worlds.

Fortunately, the characters of The Outer Worlds salvage a little bit of the content of the game.

Parvati not only has an inspirational voice (performed by Ashly Burch), but the legendary love story between her and the engineer Junlei gives a sincere, human love a rare atmosphere in The Outer Worlds.

Father of Max has a complex biography and many of the game’s most witty lines.

And Ellie’s storyline, while not long, features formal materialism and insatiable bureaucracy in Byzantium, one of the most well-designed areas in the game!