Ok ok… on to important spoilers and choices I’ve made so far.
I finished up all the quests for the starting area before leaving on the ship, chose to side with Edgewater for the power distribution, but talked it out with Reed so that Adelaide will be taking over the town and all the deserters coming back. Took off into space with Vicar Max and Parvati, dinged level 8. Loving the game!
I sided with the botanical group, because I figured the space hippies would stick it to the man! But then I got all this sad runaround from bowler hat guy and Pavarti. I did just about all the side quests before I got tired of the place, I think there were still two finger/bounty hunts I left undone. Guessing can come back to those at some point. Now I’m in space about to hit a new location, things are looking up!
Finished it at 21 hours, 24 hours when I reloaded from before the point-of-no-return and finished all the companion quests. Game probably had a chapter/planet or two cut. Feels tidy, but not incomplete. Could have used another 20% I figure with better loot. Got to level 30 on Story difficulty bypassing a lot of combat.
Spoiler for Byzantium: There was no payoff to the retirement killing people.
Spoiler for endgame: No build-up or investment in Minister Clarke, Chairman Rockwell but least of all Sophia Akande. Each got an epilogue screen and voiceover and I barely knew who Sophia was.
I did all the companion quests to change their endings except for one. Felix’s didn’t change. I suspect his might change if: you side with Graham on Monarch?
SAM has no companion quest!
I don’t know how anyone can gripe about the quantity of side quests. It felt just right. Only a handful per planet.
Sided with the hippies, killed every last soul in Edgewater. Hey, they kept attacking me! Pavarti didn’t bat an eye. Still think the decision to shunt power to the dissidents was the best of two bad options, given that Reed, as naively honest as he is, is still a corporate shill, and the town is a fucking labor camp worthy of the Reich.
Other than that I’ve tried to be diplomatic, and I even brokered a peace between factions on Monarch. Mostly though I’m just shooting stuff.
Am I supposed to know who that lady who apparently the final villain even is? Because she sent me one communication, I told her to F off and hung up on her, and the next time we speak she is acting like we had this long history that was going to finally come to a head.
I feel like I missed some crucial piece of information. Or several pieces. I’ll be honest, that last act is almost Bloodlines level of messy.
Yeah, exactly my feelings. They cut content, which would’ve broadened our exposure to board members. There were 3 planets that never opened up also: Olympus, Eridanos and Typhon. Possible DLC? Hard to say.
Personally I hated the ending. Hated! I don’t want a 10 minute report-out from the Narrator on how everything wrapped up. There easily could have been another 10 hours of game play there, with the Hope and unfreezing some more people. Since I went through the hassle of rescuing Phineas, we should play that out a little further to the point of getting more people from the Hope. I was shocked the game ended at his rescue. And that final battle? The Robo-Warden? Lame. Then my companion shot and killed Akande before I even got into the final room.
Overall I enjoyed the game. I like most of the quests, and the fact I had to make meaningful decisions. This could have been much better with just a little more content at the end.
I seem to have missed just one side mission, The Demolished Woman one from Byzantium. And the one or two ones that appear if I side with the Adjutant (Sophia).
It does feel abbreviated for Phineas to suddenly take an evil turn based on that choice if you side with the board.
Why would anyone join that lady? Sofia? She is introduced in 2 seconds out of nowhere, she is shocked you won’t immediately betray the one guy who has been kind of helpful to you, and at the point in the game the offer is made you have just been on Byzantium and presumably seen the Chairman’s video and also what their “retirement lottery” really is. They are straight up nazi-level villains.
It isn’t presented as any kind of real choice unless you are just playing a crazed murderer for the chuckles.
She appears out of nowhere and Phineas Welles does an abrupt heel turn into a evil scientist suddenly which is supposed to cause you to side with the board. Yeah, totally unearned on both accounts. I’d say Clarke and Maxwell (I think that’s their names, I can barely remember) also have unearned narrative weight for the ending.
The Board’s “Lifetime Employment Program” is presented to the player by Sofia as more of a necessary evil, than something you actively side with. Sofia immediately acknowledges that it’s their fault the colony is in the situation it’s in, but also says that, nonetheless, this is the only choice they are left with - freezing most of the colonists indefinitely. Seeing Rockwell’s video certainly makes it clear that it’s more about saving themselves than anything, but the reality of the situation still stands.
Applying real world logic, it actually makes more objective sense than Welles’ plan, which is essentially “thaw out the engineers and scientists, and hope they can think their way to a solution before we all die”.
Welles is never really portrayed as an evil scientist - he’s portrayed as someone who killed several of the frozen colonists while trying to figure out how to wake them, is haunted by the guilt of that, and thus dedicates himself to waking the rest of them up so the sacrifice wasn’t for nothing. Between him and the Board, it’s not even close who is the more morally compromised - and that becomes even more clear when Sofia straight up gives you a mission to wipe out Edgewater (if you put Adelaide in charge), because now it’s a haven of “dissidents”.
I finished the game’s story on Hard last night. As for my major choices:
Put Adelaide in charge of Edgewater, and convinced Reed to leave town.
Took out Graham, and convinced Zora/Sanjar to work together in Stellar Bay
Took all of the chemicals, at the expense of the hibernating subjects in Byzantium (half-measures aren’t going to save anyone!)
Sent the scientist lady that Ilya thinks is an alien, to work for Welles.
Talked my way past Chairman Rockwell and convinced him to be my puppet (I believe this requires a massive speech check), AND talked Sofia into standing down without a fight (which required a 100 Lie check).
I played basically the entire game with Parvati, Ellie, and Nyoka. Max, SAM, and Felix I never touched once, including companion quests. I finished pretty much everything else.
Overall, I really enjoyed the game, although it felt short, and sorta like it ended abruptly. I’m super-excited to see a sequel that Obsidian can hopefully spend more time/manpower on. Obviously the game gets a ton of comparisons to Fallout, but if I’m honest, this game feels way more in the vein of something like KOTOR, but with active combat.
Criticisms?
Visuals are really uneven. Some things look good, but outdoor environments (especially Monarch) can be a bit rough. The cookie-cutter nature of a lot of the settlements and stuff, didn’t make for a ton of visual variety (though I get this is explained by the game itself, as these are all basically pre-fab buildings). Byzantium was the only real exception to this rule, but it was also eerily devoid of life.
Too many closed-off buildings. Even in Byzantium, only about 10% of the buildings can actually be entered. The rest all have those bars saying “EVICTED” or “CLOSED FOR RENOVATION”.
Writing is sharp, but the storytelling feels very abbreviated - main plot, companion bonding, all of it.
Small environments. Monarch is the one sorta-exception here, but is also mostly filled with a lot of nothing. I don’t need a full open-world, but something more akin to the size of Borderlands 3’s environments would be nice for a sequel.
Do you contact her somehow after briefing Welles and putting on a corrupted tracker? I don’t recall the option of agreeing to that subterfuge and didn’t get the “kill Edgewater” mission.
The “retirement” facility sidequest (which you would not see if you missed/ignored the side quest giver NPC) and the alien-conspiracy-for-Sublight quest are two optional ones where you can miss out on how dire things are for Halcyon.
I don’t know how I can keep the Chairman or Sophia alive if they’ve knowingly done that “retirement” program up until now.
I can’t recall the exact series of events as to when she gave me that mission. I know she gave me permission to land on her private landing pad, I went to see her in person, and that’s when she eventually gave me the mission after discussing other stuff. Maybe it’s because I didn’t immediately rebuff her?
Anyway, she gave me the mission, which I promptly ignored and went to the Hope.
I had forgotten about the “Retirement” mission, which I did complete. It’s definitely the closest the game gets to plain evil, although I was never clear on who knew about it, or what the purpose of it was. Just to cull numbers, due to the food shortage, while they worked on the plan to freeze everyone instead?
I kept the Chairman alive, so that he could continue to be the public face of the government, while I was the real power behind the scenes. Sofia I kept alive because a) I assumed something requiring a 100 Lie check would be good, and b) it allowed me to avoid fighting a room of guys at the end, haha. It’s implied during the epilogue, that Sofa anonymously donates a bunch of equipment to Welles in his effort to solve the food problem, so I guess keeping her alive contributed to a better ending.
Wait, what? I never attacked the actors in that quest, lol. We exchanged a few lines of hilarious dialogue, and I didn’t get the part. I saw there was an option to attack them at some point, but I never did.
The stuff about the Hope was interesting. I guess there was basically a civil war on the ship.
