I also played this a bit over the weekend, and I think it’s got a lot of charm. I don’t come to a game like this for actiony bits – I like the stories and character aspects, and I feel like it succeeds on those levels.
I just landed on Monarch and am really enjoying the game.
I finished this a couple of weeks ago. I think my feelings on it align with @divedivedive. While the game should have grabbed me, it never really did, other than in a “This is kind of satisfying the ME\Beth itch, but not really.” I think one of my issues was playing on a Normal difficulty, but I’d like to think that’s the fault of the devs more than me - if a game’s mechanics are bland enough that they don’t really engage at a default difficulty, then they need something to fill that void. Halfway through, I realized how much I was breezing through the game, just grabbing loot for little reason, and not paying attention Perks and stats. I just couldn’t be bothered to up the difficulty, though, because it felt like a bit of a slog.
The combat was pretty fun, but always really brief, and just fun in a shooty shooty way, not an “Ooh, this is cool, my party has cool abilities” way. Too generic, too simple (on the difficulty I was on). I picked a character with pretty high Persuasion abilities, so I also skipped on a ton of combat. The exploration (such as it was) was also fairly lightweight; much of it was loot focused, which wasn’t really important for my playthrough.
The quests were forgettable, nothing really felt interconnected, and the world was pretty nondescript. In some bigger RPGs, I get a sense of the world via small vignettes that are placed into levels, whether just via art, layout, reading materials, or combinations thereof. They kind of tried to do that here, but largely failed. The stories never clicked for me. By aiming for a short experience, they shot themselves in the foot by writing characters and situations that needed more breathing room. I don’t mind a short RPG - but if you’re going to make it brief, make the stories “smaller”. I shouldn’t have resolved any planet’s issues on a single visit; things should have been spread out, requiring more bopping back and forth to really make the system feel like a large, connected colony, or the stories shouldn’t have been about affecting the whole colony.
Finally, I found the game to be pretty ugly. Like - the modeling for the level art is interesting and cool, with some nice alien shapes and landscapes. But the materials and color usage were hideous.
I’m hopeful for a sequel; I’m sure I’ll play it; it’s a good time waster. I’d like if it was improved, though.
Why I don’t get is “It’s not the best choice, it’s Spacer’s Choice!”
That’s just not good marketing in any reality. Can someone explain it to me? I feel like it’s soaring over my head. I get the general gist of the company is that they make cheaper stuff for you, but marketing is still going to say it’s the best in any reality, right?
I think they’re just trying to be funny. That’s the joke, they aren’t even claiming to be the best.
I think it’s because most people don’t have a choice. It’s a company store, these are company people.
I agree with everything here except I didn’t mind the look of the game (though at the same time, it was nothing special).
That being said, I only played about 4 or 5 hours of it. Don’t really care to go back to it, but I’m sure I will at some point just to be “fair”. But it’s been the only Obsidian game I’ve played that I haven’t connected with. In one word, the game is “dull”.
I think @nijimeijer is on to something with saying that the content of the game didn’t align very well with the size of the game. It could have been a pretty tight experience but there’s all this space out there that’s just … there. And that doesn’t normally bother me, I love having worlds to explore. I liked that mission that involved going out to find all the beacons except you … didn’t actually have to find them. The waypoints take you right to their location. That could have been something interesting but it was just a connect-the-dots mission.
Anyway yeah, I’m hoping they get a chance to bulk this out with a sequel, or maybe pare it down so it stays in the mini-RPG area, I wouldn’t object to that either. But I think it really needs to be one or the other.
For something with the stakes supposedly so high it felt like just a middle chapter without much narrative inertia and then suddenly game over.
Then why market at all?
Maybe, but I think the ad people need to all be fired. :)
I guess my biggest problem with it is it’s obviously supposed to be a joke about the universe they created but it’s just not funny at all to me. Also there’s some suggested theming for the other corps but it was so mildly presented that I can’t even remember the other ones. Maybe the one that’s all about candy that has pink and white armor I guess? In any case I finished this game like a month ago (less?) and I can hardly think of anything to tell someone that I figure would get them interested in it. Maybe “the opening planet is pretty well done?”
Because everyone wants a jingle, no matter how oppressive the situation. Also marketing people can only be marketing people if some employees them to be marketing people.
I figure half of the marketing profession is convincing companies that they need marketing. And then the rest is just justify their jobs.
Actually imagining the meeting where they sell the execs on that jingle does make me laugh a bit.
“This jingle is terrible!”
“We’ve measured your user base and if you adjust for the target demographic’s affinity for less monetarily intensive…”
10 minutes later
“… and that’s why we really think this jingle will capture your core customer.”
“Ok, sign us up!”
This has been a problem since Oblivion. I get around it by not having whatever I’m trying to find be the active quest. I only did Edgewater, but for example, when I had to find something along the road to get the medicine for the guy, I didn’t make it the active quest, and just went out and explored, and I ended up finding it. That was a little (not much, but a little) more satisfying than just following a waypoint. It’s what I hated most about Oblivion. I think they addressed this Skyrim, maybe, or am I mis-remembering? Wasn’t there a game that took you to the general area instead of taking you to the specific quest for a game? Maybe I’m thinking of Fallout 4.
I believe Warhammer Online would indicate quest objectives with a circle in the region in which you were supposed to investigate. But since that game is defunct you can’t check that now!
Recent Ubigames drip feed you directions - West of Smoke River, North of Cousin Wade’s house.
Nice to see them learning the lessons of Morrowind.
Not defending the writing per se, but there’s a theory about famously shitty but extremely popular (in the sense of being used a lot) European budget airline Ryanair that they deliberately spread stories about their own shittiness on the grounds that it makes customers think “Oh they must be really cheap then”. Half the time the stories don’t even pan out. They’re just creating buzz around their own crap service.
A friend who worked in the plane industry pointed out you’d be looking at a six-figure sum to get the coin mechanism certified to be used on the plane, so it was clearly a planted story.
(Anyway, agree it got a bit rushed towards the end, but loved how putting points into buffing the speech skills really paid off in terms of a satisfying ending - there were very few truly evil main characters in the game; it was the system to blame.)
So last night, in between watching the Clemson-LSU game, I was tooling around the Groundbreaker picking up and completing quests, and I stumbled blindly into the Parvati character development storyline. I soon abandoned the football game (LSU was clearly going to win at that point anyway) because in between killing space pirates, mutant bugs and logic-fried robots in the bowels of the ship, it became obvious as Parvati’s story slowly leaked from her in bits and pieces that this was something different.
Without spoiling anything, I will say that it was without a doubt some of the best written and most maturely handled character development writing I’ve ever seen in a video game. Kudos to Obsidian, Chris L’Etoile (who conceived the character), Kate Dollarhyde (who then wrote all of Parvati’s character development) and Ashly Burch (the voice actress) for creating such a deep character and presenting her in a such a meaningful way. I liked Parvati from the start, as she is very reminiscent of Kaylee the engineer from Firefly, but as her story unfolded my connection as a player to the character deepened to a level I don’t often see in games, or even in movies and TV for that matter. Nice job Obsidian.
Yeah, Parvati’s character quest really fleshes that character out, and she’s just fantastic.
The writing for Parvati is far better than anything in Firefly for me.