I liked Nyoka a lot. She had a definite archetype going on, the whole drunken burnout with a sad history and a heart of gold, but she seemed self-aware in a way that felt honest, at least, if not necessarily the most original. She knows her alcoholism and aloofness aren't unique, so she's at least making the token effort not to be defined by them, however doomed that effort may be.
Felix and Ellie were the really type-y ones for me, the ones whose arcs felt very telegraphed from the beginning. Really, it would've worked better for me if they played those types harder, broader, cartoonier.
You can definitely feel where they drew the cutoff line and started shunting things into the DLC with those planets where you don't even go. Kind of feel like they also left themselves room to drop in more areas on Terra-2 and Monarch. And that's okay. That's what I want. I want this to get to the point where I can keep coming back to it, like FNV, and I think the potential is there.
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You can accept the quest without committing yourself to anything, but AFAIK you can't complete the quest without going down the evil path. Or at least I didn't try. The true branching point is the Hope. As soon as you jump it for one side or the other, you are locked into that path.
The weird thing is that we were told the developers had no plans for DLC until the game got super popular and they caved. So take that for what you will.
Edited by Fighteer on Mar 3rd 2020 at 6:05:36 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Yeah, I think the thing was that they weren't expecting to have a free hand for it, after getting picked up by Microsoft. So they didn't want to overpromise. But I think you can definitely still see the cuts in the game. That's very much part of Obsidian's design process, the huge game that eventually gets pared back.
I always dislike when games like this do that, like the Skyrim quest where the only way to engage it is to help a demon possess Balgruuf kid and plot his murder, with absolutely no choice or leeway in the matter but to either have your character suddenly be a monster or pretend the quest doesn't exist and isn't burning a hole in your quest log. It's bad railroading.
I had a similar feeling about Sublight here, as well. It's comforted a bit by how you end up being able to do good things far down the line after you get started, but you don't know that for a while and instead the entire main questline just fixes your character on being an amoral pirate for a while.
Anywho, finished the game. Screw that final boss (did a largely non-combat build, and paid for it), and screw the way the game handles lockpicking and hacking - I do remember that that's the way it used to be done, but this game feels like a good example of why people stopped doing it.
A very feel good ending. It's interesting that the epilogue makes clear that if there's going to be any continuation, it's going to be decades later when the characters are mostly dead or retired, because the next few decades are locked up around them rebuilding/saving Halcyon. I like that idea, of a game where you can explore meet organizations and institutions built by characters you played or assisted in the previous game - very Dragon Age-y.
Edited by KnownUnknown on Mar 7th 2020 at 11:28:42 AM
I'm looking forward to playing it at some point, but like a lot of people I initially got the game as part of the Game Pass. Now I'm waiting for the Steam release before I jump into the DLC.
Just a month left, right? The game came out last year 25th October, and I think the game was supposed to be a 12-month exclusive. In the meantime, I guess I'll just sit here, waiting. Doo doo doo. Hummmm.
I too am waiting for the steam release. I tried to finish it on PS 4 and... Idk, I just kept having a problem finishing it. It felt under-developed story wise, to me? It felt ok. Not blow my mind. But good-to-ok.
I might jump into it better when it's on PC I guess?
It's a bit mindless compared to others of its pedigree. Fun, but not as invested in chasing down its themes the way New Vegas was. Not as committed to its Decon-Recon Switch or to fully fledging its characters. A bit like a slightly shorter FO 3. I can get behind that, even if I still wish they'd gone further.
MSI's stuff is Aramid too, isn't it? The companies that make armour do seem to farm out their stuff to the other companies. Technically they're competitors, but they're also all part of the Board (or used to be, in MSI's case). They do need their uniforms to look uniform, and they do have to get them from somewhere.
Rizzo's also has a whole secret bioweapons division and spec ops team, so candy isn't all they do. It's just the main thing they do, hence the aforementioned spec ops team being called SugarOps.
Speaking of Rizzo, and I don't mind being spoiled on this : do we get more info on Project Ptero later on in the game ? Right now I'm assuming that Rizzo's sweetening agent isn't sugar but Ptero blood, but I was wondering if it was something that they had deliberately engineered or if they're just taking advantage of a quirk of the local wildlife ?
Oh, and apparently the game is coming out on GOG as well as on Steam, presumably this friday :
https://www.gog.com/game/the_outer_worlds
No word on the DLC though.
Hmmm. Sounds like something they'd do, but I'm not sure. I thought the main project in the secret lab was the one that eventually has Lilya ask you to kill Eva Chartrand before she can genetically alter Halcycon's colonists to... be able to digest the local flora so they don't all starve? I thought the manties and pterorays they were working on at Cascadia were being studied for their digestive systems and genetic structure. But it's been a minute since I played through that section.

I remember there was a point in the game where Cool Scientist Dude wanted me to fake nice with a Bad Guy Lady to undermine her, and she asked me to wipe out the Tutorial Town. And, like, this kind of shit always makes me paranoid because I don't know if I can just fake like Imma do it and then go undermine her, or if agreeing to it is going to lock me into some sort of Bad Guy Genocide Run and now the only way to progress in the game is to do it.
So I told her to eat shit and this turned into a firefight and I killed her. And then I was even more confused because she seemed like an important character. So I wound up reloading and just not going to try and fake nice with her, since apparently the only available outcomes from doing that are shooting her in the face or committing mass-murder, neither of which really satisfies my definition of faking nice.
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