I loved the writing for her character, but she was a perfect example of how the writing in the game didn’t match the game design at all.
You take her to the Groundbreaker, and she meets someone. You maybe do a couple quests on the Groundbreaker (quests in this case meaning maybe talk to a few more people), get back to your ship, and she immediately is like “I’ve been talking and talking to this person you potentially had me meet literally five in game minutes ago.” I understand that games require some suspension of disbelief, and ability to think “More time has passed in game world than in my world,” but this game took that to the nines. Because they didn’t really seem to think about how a player may engage with the game, there was no pacing to her story, or any of the other companions.
On top of that, they wrote them all to be (depending on your actions) fawning over you and acting like you’d been through thick and thin within maybe an hour or so of unlocking them. It’s symptomatic of them writing a big game, but making a small game. The characters all act like you’ve been on some epic adventures together, and have become fast friends. Because of that, it all fell pretty flat to me, because it just was so artificial. It really felt like the writing team and the design team never communicated what they were each working on.
Extremely fair points. With Parvati, at least, the quick kinship didn’t feel artificial – by the time you get her off-world, you kinda HAVE been through some (potentially) big stuff, for her at least. Changed her life pretty drastically. The others I haven’t spent as much time on their quests yet.
You’re right about her courting of what’s-her-name being INCREDIBLY fast-paced, though. That kinda made me chuckle as well, but it didn’t break the fun for me.
And I don’t know how many times I encountered Nyoka teaching Parvati how to aim a gun in the hold of the ship, with the same dialogue each time. I get that there are only so many possible interactions, I just wish I wouldn’t see the same one so many times.
That’s not my experience playing through it right now. I mean, yes, the Parvati storyline does seem like it happens pretty fast if you view it in relation to time passed as a player playing the game, but I just write stuff like that off as time advancing between my play sessions or while I am out doing in-game quests or whatever. It’s not uncommon in games at all.
As for them fawning over you, or acting like you’d been on epic adventures…when I first encountered Parvati her comments while we wandered around town and out in the wilderness were almost always observations about my behavior and interactions with people, stuff like “You handled that pretty well.” or “You seem like you’ve done this before”, the kind of things someone getting used to my character would say. By the time we leave Emerald Vale, and have the conversation about her joining me, it actually does feel like we’ve been on some pretty epic adventures together.
Same thing so far with Ellie, Vicar Max and Felix. Initial interactions make it obvious they are unsure about my character, but as we travel around together doing stuff they make little comments that indicate they’re getting used to me (and interact with Parvati as well). Sure, it’s a little rushed, it’s a video game after all, but I haven’t yet felt like it was out of sync with what was happening, or poor game design.
I know I should be concentrating only on Horizons: Zero Dawn right now, but I can’t help keeping my Outer Worlds playthrough going.
After passing my Xbox playthrough on PC, with my persuasion character, getting quite a different outcome at Edgewater, I finished my first pass through Groundbreaker yesterday.
I really like what they’re doing here. I didn’t realize the whole game was going to continue the theme of corporations exploiting people as much as they can. I thought that was just a starting theme on Edgewater. It’s a very compelling theme since it resonates so much. With this particular character, my reputation with “the board” has been going down a lot without having actually met them. It does make me curious to continue my Xbox playthrough and see how much work they put in to work favorably towards the board.
I know I said I was done with this game, but I recently found a video of someone who speedran the whole thing in about 20 minutes and now I kind of want to try it.
Monarch is next. I finished the quests in Groundbreaker and Roseway.
I’m really enjoying making decisions in this game so far. The fact that things aren’t just good vs evil is quite liberating. It feels like I can choose whatever I want, which I haven’t felt in a game in a while.
Most assuredly, yes. TBH, it’s been too long since FNV for me to directly compare, but in general they can make very significant differences to the factions and the overall plot.
Yeah, I feel that way too. I’m still working through it as well, generally at the pace of a few hours each weekend, and it’s working for me. It’s certainly not The Best Game I’ve Ever Played, Evar, but it’s a solid entry. The decision making really is well done – very little black and white, good guys vs. bad guys kinda stuff. As someone who really enjoys the talky bits of an RPG, I’m having a great time.
I finished this last night. After everything that led up to it the ending felt a little bit rushed, but I absolutely loved this game from the opening scenes to the end summary wrapping up the story and characters, hell even the end credits hit me in the feels with the amazing theme from the soundtrack featured full length.
I really enjoyed the feeling of playing Fallout 3/4 with a Firefly theme. I played my character as much like Captain Mal as I could, and the game gave me plenty of opportunity to play a roguish charmer with a sense of honor and lean towards the greater good when possible. I found all of the NPC crew members to be entertaining and well written/acted, and I liked that you had to walk a fine line to make them all happy. Even at the very end, there was a moment when talking to an NPC where I started down a path of compromise and Felix jumped in with something like “Captain no! If you let this guy walk then I can’t be a part of your crew.” and I thought about it then said “Felix, you’re absolutely right, thanks” and shot the NPC dead instead. Moments like that made the whole thing feel more real, like there was a cost to your actions that needed to be weighed carefully.
The game isn’t perfect. Things seems to happen out of time sync with one another, as others above have mentioned. The final area, a prison planet, has you storming the facility (with some very cool cameos along the way) and yet you never once see a single actual prisoner (until you reach the one you’re looking for). It would have been really cool if you could have hacked terminals and picked locks along the way to release prisoners who could have armed themselves off the dead guards and joined you in your fight. But that’s a small nitpick.
Overall I loved The Outer Worlds. From the plot to the characters to the music and especially the atmosphere. I would rank it as one of the Top 5 Games of 2019. I hope it sells well, as I would love to play a sequel as a new character investigating the mystery hinted at at the game’s end.
Rats. They’re finally actually making me pick between MSI and the iconoclasts on Monarch. I’ll have to think about this one. It finally made me quit the game for the night. Both approaches to Monarch were much more nuanced than they first appeared. I wish I could have made them talk to each other and come up with a combination approach, taking the best ideas from each one.
So I came across a video someone made of a 20 minute pacifist run on Supernova difficulty and I just had to try it myself - and it does work, you can follow along with all the steps the guy takes. Some of them are tricky, I couldn’t get through the geothermal plant without drawing attention of some robots, and had to destroy one of them (so mine is not a purely pacifist run), and also had some trouble stealing the seal from Gladys, had to bump up my lockpicking skill higher than the guy in the video did. But I did it, got through supernova just to say I had, I guess. Here’s the video, if anyone else shares my morbid curiosity:
Yes, that ended up being very satisfying. Now I just have one final trip to Monarch left for Norah. Overall I was expecting Monarch to be more of a pain given how much I’ve read people stopped playing there.
Me too, and I ended up loving it. I suspect Monarch was the first planet the development team created as it seems to have the most depth in terms of design. From the slowly decaying facade of Byzantium to the company town feel of Stellar Bay to wild west vibe of Fallbrook, all the major towns have a distinct flavor. I also liked traveling along what used to be the main roads, with the remnants of suburbs and settlements and the glowing signs and the areas overrun by marauders.
Monarch ended up being my favorite part of the game, with Emerald Vale and Terra 2 a close second. The planet/area I disliked the most would have to be Scylla. It felt like it was tacked on at the end to accommodate additional side quests for the player. You can literally see from one end of the explorable terrain to the other, and in-between is just crammed full of all the same enemy types on every other planet, just more dense and seemingly random.
