Evaluating The Outer Worlds - Obsidian's Aggressively Average Adventure

[Music] in 2010 obsidian released what pretty much everyone regards as their magnum opus fallout new vegas nobody has stopped talking about it since and probably for a good reason as the strides made really defined obsidian as a developer who knew how to build a fantastic rpg now obviously they had already made waves with kotor 2 and continued to roll out hits such as south park the stick of truth pillars of eternity and tyranny but new vegas continued to be that shining beacon for most people and many wondered if obsidian would ever create another action-oriented fps rpg to contend with the crowd favorite finally in december of 2017 an announcement was released which many were waiting for even if they didn't know it yet the announcement was for a project known as the outer worlds one year later obsidian's new game made headlines at the game awards as a trailer showcased a brand new setting teeming with goofy characters and fun looking ideas fallout creators tim kaine and leonard boyarski took to the stage to present the trailer the trailer itself made sure to press upon the audience that obsidian created new vegas and fans exploded over the idea that they were finally getting something to immerse themselves in for hundreds of hours the way that they did with new vegas finally the game was released in october of 2019 and the reception was yeah i mean it was by no means bad many lauded the game as one of the greatest in the past few years others saw it as just okay at best but most seem to come out the other end going oh the outer worlds yeah it was pretty decent and hey there's absolutely nothing wrong with that but a lot of what i heard from friends of mine and others around the internet was that it was an okay game that was relatively disappointing when stacked up against the amount of pre-release hype that it received i myself played it for around four or so hours and it didn't really i guess i just didn't really get into it but i couldn't quite place my finger on why that happened and that curiosity only grew as people messaged me on discord or patreon or wherever to ask me about the outer worlds since it often was one of their favorite games so i figured since the second game was coming down the pipeline at some point i might as well go through it and beat the first one to see where i stand on it so in this video i'll be playing through the story of the outer worlds looking at the mechanics getting to know the setting and characters and generally giving my feedback on what the game does right and what it does wrong as a brief disclaimer i want to say that i tend to make a few of my points based off of what the game presents in chronological order so i wind up adding on to my previous points as the game progresses also i have an ad for micro center at the end of my video which i'm stoked about because i love micro center anyways let's play the space game now so the main thing to know is that the corporations have now taken over and monetized every resource that they can get their hands on in space which to be fair is probably exactly what would happen if they were left unchecked looking at you and your space ride bezos anyways the corporations began promising people that they too could be part of a new life out in the reaches of space if they signed on to their program while agreeing to spend 10 years in cryogenic sleep during transportation i'm sure it'll be explained where the government is in all of this but for now it seems like the corporations have all but taken control of everything that they can possibly take control of our guy is one of these colonists who was on his way to join the corporate workforce which launches us right into character creation so the base stats are divided into three sets of two and cover pretty easy to grasp stuff like strength decks intelligence perception and charisma which is called charm the only one that sticks out as odd as temperament which is just your health regen per second i would divide potential builds here into a melee a shootie shoot and a companion build based off of the descriptions alone here with the mind category affecting crit chance and weak point damage and the personality category affecting companion ability refresh in addition to faction wrap pretty straightforward stuff so far you get 6 points to distribute among your attributes and you can reduce your stats to below average for a penalty if you want an extra kick to another stat it's worth noting that dumb dialogue options make a comeback from older fallout games if you tank your intelligence which is always fun but you also have to tank your crits for that which kinda blows either way i decided to run with a charismatic melee build which takes a hit and perception to max out charm and dumps the rest of the points into temperament and strength next up we've got our skills there are a whopping 18 skills but obsidian did something a little interesting with them here so i've kind of touched on this here and there in the past but a trend with a lot of front and center rpgs which have released in the past 10 plus years or so have outright scrapped the excess of skills in favor for either skill trees or a handful of attributes to sink points into this is particularly noticeable in action rpgs which are more shooter oriented instead of giving you 15 skill points to distribute every level they give you a single point to put on a tree or a couple of points to put into very broad skills like strength decks etc this shift has even been seen in previously point-heavy series like fallout as ford ditched the points altogether maybe i'm in the minority but i've always liked having a lot of points to distribute over a lot of stats every level i guess the industry must have noticed that a lot of players don't like spending a bunch of time plotting out a character's progression and just want to shoot stuff asap and if that's the case i guess i'm okay with it but what obsidian did here was compromise in a different way instead dividing the 18 skills into seven core skills you can choose two of these core skills for now to give a one-time boost to and then later you can only invest in the core skills until you get them to 50 and then after that you can specialize by choosing one of the sub skills underneath the core skills i like it even if it is a bit weird because while i would normally say that i hate that i'm investing into one-handed and two-handed melee weapons even though i only want to use two-handed melee weapons i understand the logistics someone who practices and focuses on their defense is bound to have a pretty good understanding of blocking and dodging at the same level for a while before shifting into one or the other and besides the fact that i get 50 points in the other skills under these core skills is more of a bonus rather than a waste who knows i might actually like one-headed weapons more so this gives me a little wiggle room to experiment next up we've got our aptitude which does more to set up how tongue-in-cheek this game is rather than actually give you a substantial boost all of the boosts are a negligible plus one bonus or plus three percent resistance or the like and they all set you up to be a pretty average human who was working their job as a cashier or a janitor or mascot or so on my personal favorite is the bureaucrat which gives you a plus one to your block skill next we've got perks which you don't start getting until level two and then every two levels after that perks are generally pretty helpful stuff and encompasses bonuses like more health better vendor prices faster movement speed and a quicker slow-mo recharge which by the way there's a slow motion ability which we'll get more to in a bit all of that said though they're also some of the most boring and straightforward perks which someone could come up with compared to fallout's really fun and fringe perks which can affect a whole build the outer worlds kind of struggles to come up with anything really interesting like black widow cannibal terrifying presence animal friend mr sandman and so on either way lastly we've got our physical appearance which is pretty par for the course as far as preset character builders go and doesn't really matter because the only time that you ever see a third person camera in this game is when you leave the game idle for a bit after confirming everything we're treated to a cutscene where a mad scientist type named phineas wells plucks your pod from the thousands of others and basically man naps you away from the corporation drones which are after him when you awaken phineas explains that you've been asleep for 60 years longer than the 10 years that you signed on to be knocked out for as your ship took a hit out of light speed somehow and made its way to its final destination a lot slower as a result [Music] normally reviving someone after so long leads to some quite horrifying results it's called explosive cell death but it's really more of a liquefaction something wrong oh yes well not to worry i've pumped your body full of a special concoction i devised to keep you from dying so horrifically i've managed to hire a smuggler to help you out he'll be oh i see we're in position good luck yeah so this game is pretty immediately set up as something less serious and more of a fun-filled romp which i'm all for if it's done right this is further exacerbated when we land on top of a smuggler who was instructed to wait for our drop pod our ultimate goal does seem to be to free the remaining colonists from the ship which we got rescued from but it's kind of hard to care about that when it seems like more of a side objective after being set loose on the planet of tara two the planet is aesthetically pretty and packed with strange creatures sounds and sights along with a spectrum of colors which make looking around pretty fun though this is just the tutorial so far obviously controls are pretty straightforward and include a sneaking function which i don't plan on using much and a quick heal inhaler function that i'll probably use a lot further in we meet our first npc that isn't a crazy science man our character is silent which is about par for the course and the ensuing conversation has us able to make a skill check to patch up this dude who is attempting to take on a group of marauders in addition to wrangling his weapon from him the voice acting is fine but the facial animations the lips seem to sink fine but everything above it doesn't keep up whoa miss parvati hey you're uh what um how are you hi hi hello plus a lot of these npcs look the same in a way like it's not a one one-to-one or anything but there's always a hint of the same general face shape to them which is a little jarring it doesn't bother me a ton but i could see it taking me out of the game a little bit after a while so anyways this guy sets up one of the big corporations who has a large stake in this planet spacer's choice the way that he describes it makes it sound like someone who's part of a walmart type family who puts the company first and is always trying to get others to join it this is furthered by the guy's boss who we meet up ahead she's a walking parody of a soulless company drone who criticizes me for patching the last guy up because i'm not an authorized company physician and then rambles on about a ship parked here without permission then she pretends like she's going to take out the marauders up ahead before backing down and saying that she needs to catch her breath this kind of furthers the idea that any sort of seriousness that you're going to find in characters and plot is going to be sparse which again isn't necessarily a bad thing at this stage if it's done right you can coax her into charging in if you feel like it and the results are pretty impressive it's time we cross those marauders off find whoever owns that ship and file a full report then it's gonna be [ __ ] laminated here we go [Laughter] the combat in this game is a serviceable mixed bag it feels like an average 2012 era shooter on the surface enemies don't really recoil much from a bullet unless you kill them and then they do these really realistic ragdoll flips which is kinda cool the marauders in particular feel like re-skinned borderlands psychos they explode into instant limbs if you chop them up sometimes hearkening back to the tried and true bloody mess and fallout you get a slow motion bullet time type power to slow your surroundings temporarily which doubles as a more real time that's allowing you to see enemy weaknesses target specific body parts and dodge incoming attacks it doesn't always feel like a combat system that released less than three years ago but at the same time it kinda does it's a little hard to convey because if i'm just running and gunning it doesn't really feel very impressive but if i'm focusing on trying to dodge and block and target certain limbs it feels a bit different than anything else that i've played it's not bad by any means but i feel like the game is missing something that i can't quite place my finger on like you know those over the top doom 2016 slash eternal moments where you're fighting for your life and bouncing from enemy to enemy everything is so in your face things are dying in ridiculous ways enemies are switching tactics and when you finally get a break you feel accomplished with the outer worlds i never really felt that but elements of it are there the corpse explosions the ragdoll physics which are realistic but somehow goofy knowing when to duck into and out of combat these all mirror a lot of what the more recent doom games bring to the table but i never really felt like a cold-blooded badass like i did with doom there's a game feel that's missing here a certain element that's absent that made me feel like a warrior if i were to guess at the issue i'd say that it would be a lack of versatility and just poor ai enemies don't really back off and shoot while i run at them with my hammer i mean sometimes they back up a little bit but eventually they'll just kind of stop which is silly when i'm again swinging a hammer oftentimes they don't even notice me sprinting at them like a raving madman if my companions are shooting at them they don't really try to live and because of that i wound up hacking away at enemies like i would in a game like borderlands at least your weapons and armor all have different damage ratings and additional skills depending on the piece which is nice and there's also a flaw system in place where if you sustain a certain type of damage repeatedly or eat too much or encounter a certain enemy type too much and so on you can choose to take a permanent negative effect in exchange for a perk point which is actually a really cool system on the surface the big issue that i have with it is that these perks are again uninspired and oftentimes i can't really see it being worth taking a potentially catastrophic flaw like being afraid of robots because i have no idea how many robots might actually be involved in the later stages of the game so honestly i never even took any flaws because of that lack of knowledge either way after clearing out the enemies i can board the ship which has been parked here this was the ship that belonged to the guy who was squished underneath our escape pod and likewise is only authorized to be used by him fortunately the ship's ai is willing to work with a loophole by designating you as the same guy who died and notes that you'll need to retrieve a power regulator if you want to get this hunk of [ __ ] moving again we'll do that in a bit and move on to grabbing some other quests first the citizens are about what you'd expect after meeting everyone else so far and it's already starting to wear its welcome if i'm gonna be completely honest like i said i'm all for a less serious game if that's how the devs want to go but when every single npc that you meet begins babbling like a brainwashed lunatic it's hard to become immersed in the idea that you're just a normal dude who got esek hide into a world where wackiness is completely normal chester d higgins the d stands for definitely not insane i use it as a reminder you've tried the best now try the rest spacer's choice yes nailed at that time accidentally brutally shot themselves huh unbelievable second time this month you will also report to me in the event of your death i think i feel the plague spreading oh lord in my spleen now i can feel it the whole area is obviously a parody of what corporate culture could turn into if it was allowed to run completely rampant and it makes you miss a couple of npcs who are willing to tell you that you're not the crazy one here either way i pick up some side quests to do stuff like collecting grave rental fees from a corporate graveyard and agreeing to stop the so-called robot uprising while they aren't the most riveting quests they do help me to better understand the dialogue system here and how it works exactly so depending on your skills you might get some skill checks which you'll always want to choose because they reward xp but beyond this conversations always tend to go the same direction barring a couple of small details which could affect them in very minor ways for example the best armor that i can wear at this moment without scrounging around for more is some marauder gear which i picked off of the corpses at the start of this area wearing it tends to cause a few npcs to remark on the fact that i look like a [ __ ] lunatic and that it would be better if i didn't wear it if i wanted to be treated well now when i first played this game for a bit i let that line of reasoning trick me into equipping a civilian set of clothing which had shittier stats but didn't get negative comments this time i decided to see what would happen if i continued to wear it and nothing negative happens or positive for that matter i can waltz through the ritziest corporate parts of this town and no one attacks me on site or treats me with disdain beyond a potential opening line or make speech checks any harder on me and i can approach a marauder camp while wearing full marauder gear and no weapon out and i'll be attacked as soon as they notice me so while the game tries to make you feel like clothing really matters it doesn't and i'm willing to bet that many were fooled by that initial dialogue at the start and switched their gear out like i did especially given that disguises were a thing back in new vegas even worse is that this system of pointing out my marauder gear is front loaded towards the beginning of the planet the grave keeper points it out two of the people who owe money for the graveyard plots pointed out the leader of edgewater points it out and then nobody else does it it's a letdown because you can tell that this was a system that they were attempting to go for here and they never really went through with it secondly the dialogue itself really only goes one direction like i said when it came to collecting graveyard fees which was the first side quest that i picked up i confront the body exhuming guy and tell him to pay up he goes ah [ __ ] i'm broke yeah i can't pay they're gonna take my license away and my only options are to either go well what if you gave them an iou as some kind of collateral or to just walk away you can't threaten to take stuff from his shop you can't report him to the corporate people you can't pickpocket him for money that he actually had all along you can't even offer to pay on his behalf you can only do this one thing despite there looking to be multiple options at the start of the conversation it's unfortunately been a trend in games which are nearly fully voiced like this one is but i kind of hope that being able to replay and choose a different outcome for these smaller side stuff would be something that the outer worlds provided given obsidian's track record buying and selling in this game doesn't rely too much on interpersonal connections at first and instead has you buying and selling off your gear at vending machines which are placed everywhere it's kinda weird but i'm okay with the concept there are human vendors but they're definitely rarer than the machines which litter the game the side quests themselves range from decently put together fetch quests to pretty interesting stuff which fills you in on a lot of the world's finer details like i said most people are kind of crazy in their own way at least from the perspective of a normal human who got transported to this time and location the heavy hand of the law and its seemingly endless list of rules and tedium affects pretty much every single facet of civilization here people are overworked the food that they can afford is disgustingly streamlined slop the weapons and tools that spacer's choice manufactures are liable to malfunction and break down the whole colony suffers if a single person commits a crime including committing suicide if someone does die the whole town has to pay for what they would have been worth to spacer's choice the common flu is referred to as the plague and is a constant worry for everyone who thinks that it's impossible to survive without advanced care the whole town is a mix of factories and machinery junk piles and boxes and cluttered homes and businesses it's just an oppressive dystopia of corporate culture cranked to parody levels so much so that the illogical on the surface decisions which these corporations make start to become something that i could see happening to a lesser degree with how a lot of the current world corporate climate is functioning in today's day and age it's not a bad setting overall even if it takes a bit to acclimate to so there are six companions in this game and each of them has one quest each besides the first one that you get which has two you can have up to two companions with you at a time and build your guy around making the most of them in battle if you so choose i'll talk about all of them in detail in a little while but for now our first companion parvati is a bit nervous shy and quiet until you talk to her about things that really matter to her when you do she tends to light up about doing the morally right thing in her eyes she's a mechanic type and likewise her skills include mechanically beating the [ __ ] out of enemies with a hammer i like her in battle you can set your companions to be aggressive or passive long or short range and anything in between you can set them up to be melee machines or long ranged killers it's definitely great to see this system in a more modern game and i do like the freedom to outfit my party as i see fit even if i can't adjust individual skills and the perks are pretty basic in fact i built all of them the exact same way like the exact same way so the idea is there but the execution is not the abilities are also a little weird in that you can tell one of your guys to use one and it'll just cut to a scene with them teleporting and using the thing on an enemy even if they were nowhere near it it's a great way for me to draw the aggro away from myself while i clean up with my melee attacks but it doesn't feel super immersive by any means especially when companions almost always draw away a lot of the aggro to them while i just run around with my club or hammer or big stick and just wail on the enemy without them noticing there's one more thing that i want to touch on before getting to the main quest synopsis here which is the actual exploration and what exactly you can do so think of say geez i don't know let's say think of fallout new vegas i don't know why i'm using that game as an example but let's just roll with it here so think about pretty much everything that you can do in that you can pretty much do it here too lock picking sneaking hacking junk collecting enemy killing it's all pretty one-to-one with some minor changes every here and there lock picking and hacking might require a certain amount of lock picks in addition to having a higher skill and don't require a mini game junk collecting tends to encompass stuff that you can still use no matter what as even actual junk can be sold for a decent amount stealth is kind of trash in that you can see a group of enemies with a clear patrol route spelled out but not being able to move bodies around means that you're going to be spotted eventually so it's more for just stealing rather than combat unless you combine stealth with slo-mo and take everyone out but more importantly the enemy ai in this game is so unaware at nearly any given moment that i often just walked around without crouching and was able to attack enemies without them knowing that i was there it's just a lot of little differences like that it's not riveting but it isn't completely boring either i do have to say that a lot of the mechanics can be just outright ignored on normal difficulty though usually when i play through games for videos i play on normal or whatever the developer recommends as the experience that they balance the game around so if something is too easy or too hard i tend to take notice and give feedback accordingly in the outer worlds case the whole game is probably about as close to a cakewalk as i've played in recent history at least not normal as much as i've always been one of those people who get a little irritated when someone insists that you're an idiot if you don't play on the hardest difficulty i have to say that a lot of this game seems to be balanced around the harder or hardest difficulty here the torrent of junk usually comes in the form of food and meds heals over time attribute enhancements armor increases etc and while i like to keep a stock around in case i run into trouble i never actually seemed to need it throughout my whole time playing but i'm willing to bet that this stuff would become pretty damn valuable on a supernova playthrough which is the hardest difficulty i'd be more willing to repair my armor and weapons constantly worry about the mods on them make sure that my companions are in tip-top shape and following the behavior that i want but as things stand i kind of ignore everything unless i happen to run into a workbench or if i get some spare armor for my companions i guess this isn't really a complaint as much as it is an observation as i do think the game would probably completely change how i would be experiencing it and playing through it if i did bump up the difficulty also i have no idea how overpowered my particular build turned out to be i didn't look up any recommended builds or guides and instead kind of just sprinkled points wherever i felt like i needed improvement but i did focus my initial surge of points into melee damage and then later into science when i decided i wanted to use the prismatic hammer i don't know if that weapon was broken but it kind of seemed like it was when i used it an actual complaint that i have about exploration is just how small and samey this part of the map is let's get this straight the player is dropped on a planet that is almost nothing like earth beyond the fact that life can exist and humans have settled on it and then you make the first map absolutely tiny like i could run from one end to the other in less than five minutes if i set my mind to it and on top of that the enemies are raiders with alien dogs and then some alien gorillas alien pterodactyls and sometimes robots really no gigantic monsters or chitness crawlers or strange humanoids to fight no ravines teeming with dangerous and active flora or forests with abnormal properties just a small box with the usual suspects to keep you from going off the map sheer cliff faces lava the ocean and of course the most natural barrier invisible walls i mean sure it's pretty to look at at first but good god what a wasted potential again i can't help but see a lot of this place as a slim down and hollow borderlands and i know that this is only one part of the planet but this is kind of the first area that the player sees the first steps that they take the first sights that they see the first buildings that they explore and my initial wow factor just flies out the window after maybe 10 minutes tops it is a bit sad but again maybe i'll change my mind overall later if other planets and the rest of terra 2 picks up the slack a bit eventually we swing back to the main quest which presents your first major choice of the game choosing between the spacer's choice town of edgewater or helping out a group of people who have deserted from the main group to start their own little colony it's not directly black and white as the leader of edgewater reed thompson claims that he understands the plight of his former workers and knows that he pushed them too hard while they were working under him meanwhile the rebel leader adelaide seems to be the kindest person that you've met so far she knows how hard it is on the workers who labor themselves to death every day she welcomes anyone without question to rest eat and heal and she generally has a very soft demeanor but little patience for reed and spacer's choice your reward either way will wind up being a power regulator you're just choosing whether to shut down edge water or to shut down these separatists i do enjoy the idea of this plight because you're not directly going against the big evil corporation you're going against a town who is trying their best under an oppressive regime it's like shutting off the power to one walmart sure the corporation will be annoyed but they're not going to be hurt by it the way that their workers who have made their careers there will be likewise reid seems to be just another superfluous cog who's trying his best to keep edgewater afloat after realizing his mistakes at least that's how he comes off your first companion parvati claims otherwise when you talk to her stating that reed very much views other people as replaceable and expendable she claims that these separatists are just trying to get by and that shutting off the power on them isn't right in her eyes this is when things start to become a little more good versus evil at least for now the very plainly good choice here on the surface is choosing to help the separatists to receive more power from the power plant and to shut down the main factory in edgewater whereas the evil choice would be to shut down the power in the separatist area to drive them back into working for spacer's choice let's see how each of these play out so you march into the factory and the robots are on the loose it's not anything special to look at or to fight through so i don't really have a ton to say here but i will say this i found myself playing this game a lot more quickly it's kind of a strange phenomenon because i wouldn't say that i'm hating my time playing the game it's got a pretty functional feedback loop that makes all the looting from room to room and quest completion fun in its own way a lot like a dungeon crawler but i'm not immersed by any stretch of the imagination i was reading every single bit of text that i happened to run across and trying to really get myself into the mindset of this dude who woke up after 70 years and was plunged into this situation but after a while the logs about maintenance robots security protocols corporate banter and so on just kind of stopped being interesting so i found myself mashing through logs opening my quest seeing what updated and methodically traversing the area for the next objective like i shut my brain off to play this part of the game and the weird thing is that that caused me to enjoy it a lot more and that's the problem here because while some people just want that kind of thing out of their games i was hoping for more but maybe this is the compromise here to make this work pay attention to the voiced bits the important lore and so on and ignore the superfluous stuff because it honestly hasn't been interesting enough for me to actually think about comment on and want to read anyways after taking care of the robot uprising which occurred at the geothermal power plant it's time to reroute the power to either edgewater or the splinter group as i approach parvati pitches in her two cents again stating that edgewater may be a corporate entity but there's a lot of good people in it who would suffer if we cut the power off she makes the point that i brought up before about these just being normal working people making this whole thing truly the only grey decision about this game so far i decided to cut the power off to edgewater i'm glad the deserters are gonna be all right now they got power but what about the town all those people we'll talk later i actually hate this outcome nothing like a wow this game sucks kind of way but more in a well it was really well written actually so basically you go back to read and he's angry but not the screaming at you pulling out a gun kind of angry just a disappointed kind you can intimidate him into telling his guards to stand down and he just kind of deflates so i grab my power regulator and head to the botanist area to maybe get some kind of cheer out of this whole situation and it's just bittersweet because the separatists are the good guys right they're the guys who stood up against the man and left town but adelaide doesn't tell you that she's going to build a new town with their own rules and less working hours she tells you that she's going to turn people away who may be corporate loyaltists it makes sense on paper but it doesn't feel very good to free the workers from their corporate shackles only to have some of them be determined to be too brainwashed to join the community when you ask adelaide why she did all of this she tells you that her son caught the plague a while back and was deemed not worth the medicine by reed to warrant curing even though the company did have the medicine on hand every single angle here is completely understandable completely human reed is under tremendous pressure by his bosses to produce better results but working his people into the ground has caused them to crumble a bit at a time only causing corporate pressure to build even more him denying medicine to certain people wasn't because he's an evil scumbag it's because he felt like he had no choice was it the morally right thing to do no not at all but it was very human likewise adelaide not feeling bad about the plight of the people of edgewater because of what reed did is also very human her demonizing the entire town as a byproduct of the rage that she felt when reed refused to treat her son is completely justified it's a really well written conclusion and i'm actually very impressed by it because it came seemingly out of nowhere and there is a reason for that the amount of dialogue that i've gotten from both reed and adelaide has amounted to one conversation each there is a log that i managed to find that provides a little more insight into how reid feels about spacer's choice corporate office only providing so much medicine to its workers and how he unfortunately has to go off of a merit system to decide who deserves it which is where most of my insight into reed's character comes from but that's about all that i could find so when this conclusion pops up it seems to come out of nowhere because it took what little information that we had and did its best with it it's a good save in this instance but it really did hammer home to me just how little that i knew about these people i mean at this stage i've been playing the game for about four and a half hours and about ninety percent of it has been unrelated side questing and exploring it's a mixed bag because i'm actually impressed with just how bad this particular route made me feel but i also realized just how little i cared until this very moment either way let's reload and save edgewater instead to see how things turn out so you head over to adelaide who is much less forgiving than reed she turns on you like you dug up her son and played field hockey with his corpse stating that you brought roon to everything that she's tried to build claiming that all of her people will have to return to the toil of edgewater now here's the kicker you can offer to either kill reed or talk him into leaving so that she can return to edgewater and start a new garden to feed everybody who's currently starving under his regime the best part about this is the secret to growing crops that she's figured out the secret is human corpses i've been grinding them up in my fertilizer for years marauder worker don't matter much to me okay yeah i love this outcome i know i'm ping-ponging quite a bit between disliking and enjoying the game so far but that's honestly just how i felt anyways reed takes the news like a champ well kind of at first he blusters with all the charisma of a middle management supervisor stating that he's done his best and that he'll continue to do his best but telling him that adelaide has figured out how to grow crops on barren soil and prevent the flu in her people has him humbly accepting the reality that he's a poor leader who can't face his people anymore it's sad but it's the best outcome and i really like it a lot i have always tried to do right by my town it has never been easy there is one thing to note here though as much as i hate to take the best part of the game and kind of dampen it a bit and that is the reputation system it's uh it's worthless i feel like a lot of devs tend to stick a reputation system into a game only because it should be there but there are really only a handful of times where you actually feel the consequences of pissing off one side and lifting up the other with the outer worlds the reputation feels about as useless as it could be without it outright not existing what it actually does is affects vendor prices and that's about it from what i can tell doesn't cause them to stop talking to me it doesn't grant me gifts from the side which likes me or new info or anything like that additionally when i went through with siding with the separatists i became revered with them and i think um the low end of neutral with spacer's choice but when i sided with edgewater and stuck adelaide in charge i became revered with both sides what this tells me is that this is the outcome that the devs wanted here and it makes sense because that's the side that they guided me towards sure they ran interference by having parvati tell me at first that i should side with these separatists but right before i hit that switch she has a change of heart and tells me directly that i should side with edgewater in her opinion of course you have the option to ignore her but the outcome feels much worse in terms of reputation and in actual story consequences i know that's just my opinion at the end of this but it really does feel like the devs are whispering hey that's wrong this is right overall terra 2 is a rocky mixed start for the outer worlds the problem is that the game tries to just plop you into an open world but this open world isn't as interesting as you would expect it to be i know this is going to sound heretical but this game needed a touch of linearity to start it off if i'm going to be honest just a good 30 minutes or so of story with stress on mechanics factions and just plain intrigue i know this isn't obsidian's mo historically at least looking again at the ever-present new vegas because in that game you get shot in the head and just end up roaming after but you were familiar with the environment it's earth it's nevada you were interacting with humans who were trying to survive post-apocalyptic elements it grounded the player and allowed for exploration with all the intrigue of how has earth changed meanwhile the outer worlds makes a big promise in how it presents a brand new planet only to have that planet be filled with human raiders robots and alien creatures which remind me of earth creatures like dogs and gorillas the pretty colors and shapes are a distraction to make the player forget about this and it ultimately makes terra 2 feel stale fast now let's look at another game that isn't related to obsidian i know that's scary but hear me out i recently played through the latest god of war right and the front end of that game is extremely linear you run through mandatory puzzles learn how to use your gear and get associated with this strange realm but at one point you suddenly have access to just roam and explore you can't do everything but you can hop from place to place and just go at your own pace and that was perfect in my eyes the outer worlds just plops you in front of edgewater and lets you go nuts but doesn't give you much to go nuts on no intriguing locations no fun enemies to find no weird or generally interesting quests beyond the two human factions having a conflict that could easily have taken place in another game that was set on earth it tries to distract you with this weird disposition which people have and the idea of a parody of early american companies on steroids but it doesn't do much beyond that save for a handful of people which are more interesting to talk to at the same time though when you do dive into the actual story which is presented here there are some truly heartfelt outcomes some interesting tidbits to latch onto and characters to talk to i enjoyed myself after a while but it was only after making it as far as i did that i started to appreciate what obsidian was ultimately trying to convey and that's truly unfortunate because my initial impression of this game was that it was going to be a shallow husk of obsidian's potential and it might still turn out that way if i'm going to be honest but for now i'm relatively content with what's been shown so far story wise and very underwhelmed by the actual enemy variety a good chunk of the combat mechanics and the exploration value i know i've been poking at the combat every here and there for a while now but there's really only one more thing that i want to say about it and this might be one of the reasons why the game overall feels pretty easy on the default difficulty my guy was a cashier before he came here that's his background story that i chose and yet he picks up a 40 pound megaton hammer and just starts swinging it around with absolutely no prior training beyond maybe studying the blade in his backyard i mean i'm sure there's a thousand potential reasons why my guy could pick up any futuristic gun and just deadeye shoot people in the head or grab the nearest two meter long stick and just beat someone's ass with it but what i see is a cashier who woke up from 70 years of sleep got dropped on a planet and can now beat anyone's ass with no issue what i'm saying is that there needed to be some restrictions a certain amount of skill points to wield a weapon properly some kind of perk to improve accuracy or a proficiency xp bar with certain weapons something that penalized a level one nobody had made them think twice about engaging a group of ruthless marauders the fact that there are no limits on what you can do makes this game a lot easier than it probably should have been and again i'm sure this is solved by cranking up the difficulty but i don't want to be a softer target and or my enemies to be bullet spongier i want the game to make me feel like i'm playing as a [ __ ] cashier until i get some levels under me kingdom come deliverance executed this concept beautifully in which the game made you feel like the untrained peasant trash that you were and in the late game you actually felt like a competent knight with experience under your belt there is one final thing that i want to mention in regards to tara too and that's our second companion vicar max max seems to be a straightforward and honest clergyman whose job encompasses attempting to raise the spirits of the poor workers of edgewater at least at first he's a little disgruntled with the efforts made so far but keeps in good spirits nonetheless his initial task which brings him with you is retrieving a heretical book which he doesn't want to fall into the hands of the average person as he fears that it would cause them to stray from the spacer's choice heard retrieving the book isn't a big deal as he just marks it on your map and you just kind of grab it but this does lead into quite possibly one of the funniest lines that i think i've heard from a game just because it was probably the last thing i expected to hear this is fantastic well worth all the sacrifices i wait what the [ __ ] is this is this french i can't [ __ ] read french so yeah max here has been trying to figure out a bunch of [ __ ] that i'm going to talk about later and skip for now but he's not really the holy do no evil help all people preacher that he tries to come off as as his facade crumbles when this book that he's been after happens to be in the devil's language long story short the guy needs a translator to hopefully extract the book secrets and he's willing to join forces with me to get just that let's get off this rock i can call you captain got a captain so this is where our next step in the story is plotted out obviously we need to save the other colonists but the reason why we need to do that as stated by phineas is because apparently every part of this colony is doing just as bad as tara two's emerald veil which is scary to me because it feels like i'm just gonna be walking into the same type of story situation repeatedly from the sounds of it let me apologize in advance i'm about to ruin your day either way we're to try to thaw out our remaining colonists and take down the corporate baddies once and for all leading these corporations is a group simply known as the board which is a fitting name so we're to ship out to a moon known as monarch but we have to track down a nav key which will plot a safe course straight to the part of the moon that we want to be on well actually we don't have to do that you can land on a much more dangerous area of monarch if you so choose but you're warned in several different ways by the game that you're going to get [ __ ] by dangerous monsters if you attempt to do so actually it just turns out to be more raiders which is funny in its own way but yeah it's a dangerous spot either way i've always liked being able to do stuff that i shouldn't be doing a lot earlier than usual just as a general option so this is cool to see though that said i kind of want to get the dev intended experience here so i'm just going to hoof it over to a ship called the ground breaker to grab the nav key instead so the groundbreaker is this gigantic ship which is the only independent party in the whole system which has any sort of power apart from the board basically it's the first and the last stop into and out of the colony which gives it tremendous power that terrifies the board it's like a gigantic space marketplace packed with traders cargo bays restaurants bars and so on which is a really cool setting that i absolutely love the reveal of as we get to customs it appears that the former captain of my ship has invoked the ire of a board member who serves as a liaison between the rest of the board and the groundbreaker there are actually some emails on the ship's terminal which detail this udom fella getting really buddy buddy with the deceased captain hawthorne in an effort to try to get the good captain to reveal the location of doc wells either way we're now free to roam the ground breaker and pick up the slew of side quests which it brings with it we can't just let anyone walk in here side questing is relatively standard stuff like bounty hunting distress speaking exploring telling a person a thing finding a person and telling them to go elsewhere performing maintenance on the ship stuff like that none of it is particularly inspired though quite a few of them have me gaining objectives which take place on other planets across the system which isn't a huge deal it'd just be more annoying if i happened to miss an objective which i'd be able to naturally take care of later while i was on that planet anyways i will note that there's kind of an odd mechanic here which we gained access to right before landing on the ground breaker which is the disguise system known as the holographic shroud so this shroud is something that naturally disguises my guide to blend into otherwise restricted areas without standing out it's basically a more streamlined outfit disguise system from new vegas it allows you to infiltrate areas by disguising you and your party as members of whatever faction runs the area which is cool but the way that it's described to you makes it sound like you should only ever walk and not do anything crazy like running around and jumping like a lunatic which makes complete sense right but it doesn't matter what you do you can run jump or crouch and your disguise meter will deplete at the same rate as if you were walking by the same rate i mean that if you're running the meter will go quicker but you're also moving quicker and when you do get caught people will start to notice you like an enemy would if they decide that they've looked at you long enough they'll confront you and you can just go hey [ __ ] you and they'll just go oh oh okay my bad your meter refreshes and you can just continue on you can do this three whole times while getting xp for speech options every time after you get caught the third time around you can only attack the person who's confronting you because there are no failed speech checks in this game but if you do perform those three checks you can just walk out of the area walk back in and have three fresh checks ready to go which inadvertently can cause you to gain infinite xp if you have a lot of time and patience it's a decent concept that's just kind of muddled by the actual mechanics because there's no real consequence to your disguise failing unless your character is just bad at charisma based speech checks it again relies completely on the game telling the player hey if you do this thing this will happen and hoping to cause the player to play a certain way without testing the boundaries a lot like people pointing out your marauder getup at the start of edgewater either way the more interesting missions here involve my companions and their personal stories which i'll get to later so let's head over to this udom guide to see about getting the green light to leave again i was actually getting ready to really buckle in and prepare myself for the run around that i was sure that udom was going to give me after all this setup but um it takes me like three minutes with no strings attached i mean i'm not upset about it or anything i was just surprised because like i said there were these emails on the ship which showed that this udom guy was infatuated with captain hawthorne and hawthorne ghosted him most of the time so when you show up and say hey yeah so captain hawthorne died and i'm the captain now udom laments his loss continues to be a creep about how he felt about hawthorne and then just unimpounds your ship i don't even think unimpound is a word impound dm pound oh right yeah sorry a lot of this game's dialogue kind of just makes you fade in and out of paying attention because you uh keep thinking it's gonna tell you something important and then it just doesn't i do like the groundbreaker's design and level layout it's really fun to look at but quests around these parts are pretty run-of-the-mill here's an example we actually pick up two more companions here right what happens with the first one is that i approach this woman who's trying to get into a hospital to see her friend and the administration won't let it happen because of the friend's request to see nobody basically the friend locked herself up in the hospital because she's pissed off the board by fumbling a job to steal a priceless necklace now she's fearing for her life so against all odds it falls on you the player to do what no one else could possibly do i just talk to a member of the board and suggest that they make her work off her debt like that's it that's the quest no stealth mission where we have to steal a different necklace to make up for her shortcomings or to track down a master forger to forge a fake that will trick her clients or to try to weasel into a high security area and burn all traces of her being hired for this job just me running up to udon here and going hey i know that you're sending assassins after this woman but consider the following slavery that's not unreasonable and so we limped back to the hospital and the woman who put me up to this job goes wow holy [ __ ] you're so competent can i join you uh yeah all right sure here's ellie she looks like this and um she once raised a giant praying mantis on foot because someone bet her to do it that's uh that's her whole personality right now as far as i'm concerned so what about the second companion felix he got fired for punching out his boss who was bragging about his sports team beating felix's and then felix goes hey let me come with you because i want that it's just not horribly compelling by any stretch of the imagination now i do want to make something perfectly clear to those who had fun with this game and are just thinking that i'm being unfair here i am also having fun and maybe that's all that should really matter here right like i'm running around exploring checking off my quests grabbing power-ups and looting gear and again if that's the kind of experience you want out of a game or one that you're in the mood for currently then the outer worlds fulfills that in spades i've brought this analogy up in the past but it's kind of how i treat a lot of superhero movies they're fun for me to watch if i don't overthink them and just enjoy the ride and so far that's been my experience with this game but given obsidian's reputation i don't really think it's unreasonable for me to expect some really thought-provoking and interesting plot lines from this game and that's kind of how i've been going at this thing i don't intend to stop doing that for the rest but i just want to make this a little more clear for those who really love this game i'm not trying to be unfair i'm just giving my two cents obviously at any rate we can leave now that i got a mission to get the nav key from an old lady on this boat i can also outright buy it off of her for ten thousand space money but doing the mission would save me about um let's see uh carry the two divide by six um oh yeah ten thousand space money so i'll just do that instead the mission involves me heading back to a new part of terra 2 to investigate a distress call which was set off by someone who shouldn't have been there in the first place it's assumed that since this new area called roseway was abandoned by one of the main corporations a while back that whoever sent the distress signal was doing something shady before it all went to hell this means that if we can figure out what they were working on our nav key vendor may be able to blackmail the corpos for some fat cash the intrigue is pretty high and there is a good reason for me to describe this otherwise pretty straightforward quest so you arrive on terra 2 which looks about the same but with thankfully some new enemy types in the form of these raptor enemies you fight your way through the main thoroughfare while encountering bodies of scientists broken down robots and dead or alive raptors when you make it inside the walls a security officer tells you that all hell broke loose when some outlaws freed a bunch of raptors that were being used as test subjects for a top secret research project when you make it to the man in charge the one who sent the distress call he claims that everything is more or less under control now though he still needs help with his research when you grill him for details he finally caves in and tells you that his top secret research is appetite suppressing diet toothpaste i just went from being intrigued and caring about what was going on to not giving a single [ __ ] good joke as always obsidian thanks for undermining another great setup and i will save you the trouble here there is a main plot reason for this diet toothpaste to be as important as this guy's making it out to be but it doesn't feel that way at this moment in the game i just barring the very first main mission which only turned out good in the last 15 or so this is how nearly every quest has turned out to some degree so far i want to walk you through a scenario you're getting ready to hang out with a friend and they come bursting through your door and feverishly begin spouting off this story right it's my girlfriend she's been in an accident i need you to drive me to the hospital right now so you grab your keys run outside to the car and right as you open your door your friend doubles over laughing hysterically he tells you that his girlfriend wasn't in trouble and that he actually just wants you to drive him up to the gas station for some cigarettes yeah you're mad at him sure but he's always been goofy even if it's not always funny so you sigh and drive him up to the gas station for his smokes and hang out for the night next week it's the same thing dude i know i joked before but i mean it this time we gotta go please you jump to action get to your car and the exact same thing happens this is what it's like to play the outer worlds you keep finding yourself in these scenarios where the game's characters keep prodding you to do something of the utmost importance only for you to find out that it's just an elaborate joke in some way or another this guy tells you that he's working on something that the corporations existence depends on but he's really working on [ __ ] toothpaste this one screams for you to save him but when you make it through the locked door to him he berates you for breaching protocol by bypassing the security to get to him then there's sublight so sublight is a group of contractors who dabble in breaking the law for money you can do a string of missions involving stuff like taking control of a factory hijacking millions of space dollars worth of gas and taking over a derelict ship it's great and it makes you feel like a black market badass having you encounter dangerous situations and people like this dude who might be one of my favorite side characters ah but catherine would admire a man of my inclinations and skill that is what you imply yes she will supply the worship i so rightly deserve and it's all for money right so it's like a string of heists that you can just clown around in and kick back and enjoy so what's the culmination of everything after completing these jobs which ramp up over time aliens i'm talking about aliens when i lined up the evidence in my spreadsheet there was only one possible conclusion looking back at me this is my data talking not my anxiety or lack of sleep yeah all right this completely serious badass of a woman who's been all about money is now spouting conspiracy theories about aliens because haha what a laugh what's even worse about this is the end of this mission is actually really interesting this woman who lilia thinks is experimenting on humans to create aliens is actually trying to save the colony she tells you that the colony's natural crops aren't fit to provide the proper nutrients to humans but with a little genetic engineering humans could adapt to halcyon's crops as soon as next generation it's a cool concept but why did we have to assassinate lilia's character for a joke if she could have just told you that she thinks that the board is performing human experiments and that they need to be stopped instead this goes on and on until the game ends with the occasional mission that has a decent amount of seriousness and or intrigue to it sprinkled in at some point you just become exhausted at the idea of investing yourself in the quests because the devs thought that good satirical writing is just taking a serious matter and turning it on its head non-stop with no breaks a good story needs a backbone a set of quests which might have a funny bit or two but ultimately have very serious and far-reaching consequences to make you feel like you're participating in something important for as much as this game is a parody of how horrible corporations can be the message seems to be more about making jokes rather than trying to fix it in any sort of way and maybe that's my own fault for expecting something more or for wanting a story with a bit more substance but i still can't help but feel this way imagine if new vegas plopped you into the mojave after you got shot in the head and you fight your way to novak where boone is sitting with his sniper and he tells you about what happened to his wife and you investigated and find out that it was the innkeeper who sold her off and right before boone shoots the innkeeper she brings out his wife and starts laughing because it was all a prank boone puts his hands on his hips and shakes his head before his wife tells him to accompany you because they're out of nuka-cola and she craves a few cases of it this is what the outer worlds does constantly and it gets grading when every part of the story is written like old world blues nothing is going to be taken seriously it's why old world blues was a dlc that lasted a few hours and was only as effective as it was because it took all of those funny wacky moments from the base game and amplified them at any rate enough bitching for now the writing here does bolster a bit when you return with the science man's research and he tells you that the reason that he was told to look into diet toothpaste is so that the corporations can market it to the lower class and hope that it eventually leads to food restrictions this means that they can work the laborers just as hard on less food saving the corporation's money and creating a band-aid for food shortages the guy has a kind of a change of heart he's like oh my god what have i been doing i'm worried that i'm risking people's lives by making them work too hard on less food and then the conversation just ends is he going to not submit the research is he going to anyway will he just run off from the colony we don't know we just know he's upset weird way to drop the ball there but all right when all is said and done we leave with a trove of xp space dollars items weapons and the final component to activate the new companion that's been on the ship the whole time sam sam is a repurposed cleaning robot and i'm not really going to talk about him later because he just gives pre-programmed lines about cleaning and death he was modified by the late captain hawthorne which makes sense because it would be kinda hard for hawthorne to do it after he died human you are in violation of cleanliness ordinance eight eight eight five human you are in violation of cleanliness ordinance eight eight eight six human you are in violation of cleanliness ordinance eight eight eight seven boss i don't mean to alarm you but i think we might be in violation of a cleanliness ordinance alright so where do we stand well i kind of didn't complete the whole intel gathering the correct way as i turned over most of the proof of any shady dealings to the people that they originally belong to likewise i just gotta buy that 10k nav key from the quest giver instead which is fine because i'm pretty loaded at this stage also worth noting that i can tell udom that i know where phineas wells is this is a really weird one because i kind of figured it would explicitly be me siding with the board in this game but it's not that decisive as it instead allows me to travel to the board's headquarters of byzantium on tara2 so byzantium as you might expect is packed with wealthier looking buildings red carpets embroidered tapestries the whole nine yards though that said a lot of it is just kind of a cardboard kingdom unfortunately there's this main thoroughfare with a decorative sphere and shops and wealthy citizens everywhere a tour beacon here tells you that the shops here are open all day that it's a luxurious epicenter of shopping and um like six out of nine shops are [ __ ] closed what is this cyberpunk regardless the right hand of the leader of the board named sophia greets us through a screen before stating that she doesn't know if she can trust us yet the only way to know if you can trust someone is by getting them to ruthlessly kill someone who you want killed i learned that one from fallout 1. this has us going into the target's apartment building and talking to the receptionist who seems to be either in love with the target in a relationship with her or he's just a [ __ ] buddy based off of the information that's on the target's terminal so of course the guy gives us the key to her apartment despite him knowing that she's away for no reason other than it being a speech option hey person i've never met oh you to go talk to the woman that i like a lot well she's not here you want to go into her private room then while she's gone well i guess since you asked nicely but what's even funnier is that this guy was also hired to kill her and he's been the receptionist for a while now so he follows you into the maintenance tunnels where the target is hiding and then he goes alright let's split the bounty uh are you just incompetent why would i split the bounty with you you haven't done [ __ ] you gave me the key to the room where this lady's been staying oh all right the anticipation is killing me though get it because i want to kill her i've always been a competitor when i was in high school i was playing baseball i hurt my arm so then i picked up madden and at first i was really bad i was getting blown out online but i kept at it i put more and more time into it eventually i made my first tournament but i had a big decision it was the same time as my graduation you know my friend that's a fine point anyways yeah i take her off her and she leaves and that's it i report back to the right hand of the board and she's like i can't believe you let the target live i literally hired you to kill her and then take the paperwork alright yeah you've proven yourself to be reliable i yeah yeah it sounds about right okay you know what yeah that sounds about right at this stage why fail a quest when failing quests make you feel bad i want to feel good when i play a video game not bad thanks obsidian anyways she wants me to send out a signal relaying the location of dr wells whenever i get the time by the way wells has literally done nothing to warrant me betraying him so far besides waking me from my nap so yeah i guess i could just be upset to be awake but i'm hoping that i can use this beacon i was given to set up the board here instead of betraying him thankfully felix is here to yell out that option for me in the lobby of people that we're trying to set up so that's a nice touch there's a lot of side quests in byzantium which i did nearly all of and none of them really stuck out to me besides one i'll set this one up for you so here's this insufferable woman she points out to you as being a nuisance for existing as poor trash in this beautiful city she explained some [ __ ] about her being a wealthy beautiful elite who earned her place by inheriting money from her dad despite looking like a raider from fallout new vegas or a bloodlines vampire she tells you about something that the board is calling early retirement in which randomly selected poor workers are entered into a program to retire early into a part of a city which no one else can enter this woman's jealous is all hell and she wants you to go scope out that retirement area so you get into the place and the lead-up is beautiful promises of everything that you could ever want fills your ears as you traverse this gaudy and elegant hallway when you get to the end you take an elevator down and the music fades as the walls darken with stained concrete when the doors open up bodies are everywhere a janitor bot is hosing down a corpse combat drones patrol the area it's a really cool setup alright here comes the pitch it's a beautiful throw right down the middle obsidian steps up to the plate readies the bat swings and throws the bat into the front row hitting a small child in the head yeah this is literally all there is to this place no logs from the upper crust no survivors to tell you about what's going on no guards to tell you something happened that shouldn't have there is a dead guard who had a log on him that says that he's mad about his weapon not working properly when it has his blood in it because haha that's a funny joke good one as always obsidian all of the intrigue is just immediately lit on fire which i shouldn't be surprised at at this stage i like that i accidentally just walked past the robots and thought that they weren't hostile but they just didn't [ __ ] see me because i was walking upright with my 24 stealth while i was looting everything let's come up with an alternate situation here just for shits and giggles say everything plays out pretty much exactly the same way but at the very end of this area there's a guard who's still alive who managed to hide himself away in a spot that isn't obvious he calls out to you and asks if you're corporate if you tell him that you are he tells you that a group of early retirement workers managed to get the jump on the guards wrestle control of their weapons kill them and escape they swapped their clothing with the guards and infiltrated the ranks of byzantium establishing a secret base in the sprawling society among the upper crust from there you can decide to bust in and kill them all or to help them continue to live a better life than they were used to by covering up their tracks that's just one semi-interesting way that this could have gone instead of a trope that's been done repeatedly in media for a while now the whole thing just felt like a discount vault 11 in its presentation honestly either way i fight off the robot waves escape and make it back to the lady who wanted to know about this place where i can lie and tell her that the area was paradise and she'll try her best to get into it or i can tell her the truth which brings her tranquility in the fact that poor people are being executed and that she isn't missing out on a secret luxury and that's the last side quest in this game that i'm going to mention unless something great happens because this is exhausting what do those anemic [ __ ] know about dialogue anyway i should have mentioned this earlier but the fast travel system in this game is actually one of the best things about it you can travel from just about any safe area directly to where you need to be or at least somewhere close by as long as you've been there once already of course it just saves a lot of the mailman back and forth that many of the fetch quests bring to the table it's like they optimized fetch quests huh might be the only time i've complimented fetch quests at any rate hopping aboard phineas secret lab has you talking to the guy in an in-depth conversation for the first time since like the start of the game he needs some special chemicals to revive the rest of the colonists on the ship that you arrived on when you tell him about the board wanting you to relay his location he tells you to do it with a corrupted signal that will give him more time to prepare i was hoping i could relay a totally different location like some kind of dummy ship that's packed with explosives or whatever but i guess this works so you can choose to relay the normal signal or the corrupted one and because i'm curious i decide to relay both and figure out what happens in each and it's the same thing except the right hand tells you that she's going to monitor the signal for a while and attack later or she tells you that wells somehow corrupted the signal before it was sent to her and that it'll take a bit to figure it out which if he noticed there was a [ __ ] signal being sent from his place wouldn't he just disable it whatever you know what whatever writing at this stage all roads are leading to monarch as the right hand wants me to head there to cut off some propaganda that's being spewed against the corporations aligning perfectly with dockwell's mission from before monarch is pretty cool looking gloomy gassy mushroomy i like it it was mostly abandoned by corporations after they attempted to terraform the moon into their primary colony which then caused the native species of the planet to mutate dangerously creating an environment so hostile that the board gave up and ordered the evacuation of pretty much every corporation nothing gets by him he sucks up every ball that comes his way our first objective here is recruiting our final companion yoka oh well well let's get down to brass nuts then shall we brass wait that ain't it nyoka's a [ __ ] drunk who's to be our tour guide for getting what we need from monarch she's great i like her a lot after sobering her up we can have her escort us to death mountain it's not called that but whatever it's a big [ __ ] mountain surrounded by crazed bandits raptors big ass mantises acid pools and probably at least one other dangerous thing and there's a big set of rock formations that look like horns on top so yeah death mountain environmentally monarch is about what i've described so far but i do enjoy its looks a lot as a desolate and dusty [ __ ] of hazards and danger the empty husks of formerly occupied buildings that used to be part of the colony gives a western ghost town sensation fallbrook feels like an extension of fallout 3's little lamplight in the way that it's set up though obviously with grizzled contractor adults instead of children the outcast society of amber heights feels like a gloomy run-down epicenter of sad survival the music is somber and fits a lot of the downtrodden rebels who refuse to live under corporate rule any longer i do like the area i also wish the enemies weren't non-stop raptors and raiders but hey obsidian designed those enemies from scratch and you're going to enjoy fighting them either way our business is climbing death mountain and progressing both of my main quests in addition to nyoka's personal quest all at the same exact npc this guy is just the questing apex apparently so on one hand the guy is close to getting the chems that doc wells needs but he's waiting on a transmission with the info the problem is that two of the factions here are clogging the airwaves with their own signals in an attempt to draw new people into their towns this means that getting the information transmission is impossible at this moment i'm not sure about the logistics of that but whatever i guess the other thing that we have to do here is to shut down any propaganda which is coming from the station for the board and the setup is a little strange given the context of me just talking to him about these special chemicals for dr wells so we just had this big conversation with this guy he talked about helping out yoka since they're old friends he talked about shutting down the two factions from broadcasting in order to help out doc wells and then i go also i work for the board and we're gonna have to arrest you if you're broadcasting propaganda and he of course backs down and cowers and tells me that he's the most corporate corporate man who's ever worked for a corporation felix and nyoka both admonish him for being a two-faced coward in the face of opposition but how much sense does that actually make i mean honest to god i'm literally working for the board my companions know that they seem to be okay with it to the degree where they're still here by my side but then they also berate the guy for giving in despite being my partners think about how confusing that's gotta be to this guy who was just sitting here doing his thing before three people burst in and tell him to shut down the signals or else but also that he's a cowardly pile of [ __ ] for doing so this game needed an optional board companion or two because these guys sure go along with a lot of [ __ ] that they're normally completely against either way the guy isn't the source of the signals he just hasn't tried to stop them until now and he tells me that those signals are the exact same signals that i got to shut down for doc wells anyways so it's like the same quest they just i'm doing both paths at once so i run around for both stellar bay and amber heights dealing with the two factions who rule over each i'll give you the reader's digest stellar bay is ran by the corporate group who never left known as msi that's a real world company they manufacture like hardware and [ __ ] computer parts wow i have an msi account they exploited a loophole in corporate orders to remain behind in the hopes of getting a leg up over the other corporations and were promptly shunned by the board more or less now this sanjar guy is trying his best to hold the territory that he has while attempting to make msi relevant again by initiating a little corporate espionage to hopefully restructure the board from the inside he's terrible at it but his ideas are okay the other faction is known as the iconoclasts which is run by a guy named graham graham is a bit of a preaching zealot who's trying his best to attract more people to his cause of being completely free from corporations so much so that he's foregoing basic necessities for his people like food and medicine instead he's focusing on stuff like getting a printing press running to attract more potential recruits i helped both of these factions and in exchange they agreed to stop broadcasting but hey we can't possibly conclude monarch without choosing a side right as we get the transmission to phineas going again while also forcing monarch to stop broadcasting propaganda against the board a gunship comes crashing down both factions now want the targeting module from that ship to further their own cause and i have to choose between them now there is a slight hitch here as much as i'd love to blame the game and just kind of claim that it lulled me into a state of not paying attention i probably should have been a little bit more diligent here uh basically i never followed through as much as i should have with the iconoclasts there are several points where graham argues with his second-in-command zora and it always sounded to me like graham is being irresponsible while zora is the level-headed one but i didn't realize that if i had followed through with that a bit more i could have put zora in charge eventually instead which would have led to a solution here where both factions work together but as things stand i do have to choose here because of my own mistakes i like that there's a bit of consequence here to not being fully attentive but again the game's filled with a lot of innocuous stuff that makes it hard to stay on top of things if you fall into the habit of knocking out quests without thinking too hard either way i sided with sanjar and msi sanjar is actually trying to overcome the corporations and rewire them from the inside out which i could actually see happening even if he is a bit pencil pushy graham on the other hand has been very idealistic with his motives and it's caused him not to think too hard about a lot of the consequences of his actions even leading up to a massacre which took place under his order this massacre is revealed to you in a quest that i couldn't obtain due to not getting food and medical supplies for zora when graham asked for high-capacity data cartridges in a previous quest while i do like the long-term consequences for not choosing one side over the other i also think that it's strange for that type of replayable option to crop up now of all times this far in i mean sure you could claim that any other little event which involved you choosing aside is replayable in that regard but the game really didn't lock me out of the option of merging the choices before now so it's kind of odd that it's a mechanic now suddenly especially because the reason why i locked myself out was because i chose to side with graham over zora before i don't know i guess i would have liked to have had a tough speech option at least if i didn't do zora's quest but even when i do ask her for a truce she outright denies it yeah sure good luck fighting a war now that msi has exceedingly more firepower it looks like the iconoclasts followed you i'm afraid we've got to fight them friendly friendly same team damn it [ __ ] [Music] [Music] uh [Music] yeah my build is so overpowered on normal that it feels like cheating it's not even fully optimized yet but hey man science and the prismatic hammer apparently does it also i checked my reputation after the battle and the iconoclasts are now nervous about me for some reason weird but yeah that's it for monarch it was okay the environment was interesting as seems to be the best thing that the game brings to the table the music was good as always i liked the initial introduction of what monarch is to this colony but the rest of the writing was mostly miss with a touch of hit turning off my brain was the best thing that i could do to make things enjoyable as i went through a spree of quest completion before figuring out that i botched a quest the actual main conflict was decently told but ultimately fell short of territoo's emerald veil i think stellar bay's msi was fine for the most part but the iconoclast didn't bring enough intrigue to the table for me personally i guess i just found myself lulled into a state of apathy and the enemy variety wasn't interesting enough to keep me sated during my exploration while i was initially impressed with the dusty mushroomy acidic landscape it really doesn't change at all which is sad because there's a guy in a bar around here who claims to have trekked to the hot pole and the cold one of the planet which makes you think that there's maybe a little more variety but overall i would say that this is probably the worst area of the bunch so far terra 2 brought better writing the groundbreaker brought a really cool set of sights in its promenade area the clean and rich looks of byzantium were really fun to look at as well monarch just dragged on and on for way too long in comparison either way now that we're back on the ship with all of my lovely companions let's run through their personalities in writing along with their personal quests and all that jazz normally i would do a little power rankings kind of deal but i'm kind of forgoing that with this video because you'll see why either way let's start with parvati like i mentioned before parvati is a mechanic likewise a lot of the perspective that she has revolves around seeing the dirtiness and gunked up bits which make up a city or its people as something natural when she stumbles into max's parish she remarks on it being too clean to live in noting that it seems more like a museum and is likewise completely out of place in the dirt ridden factory town of edgewater when she remarks on the plight of other people around the veil it's with a certain kindness and empathy that kind of general insight is rare in this game and it really helps to ground the player a bit more there are so many goofy wacky people which seem to be less human and more cartoon characters in this game that having someone like parvati is pivotal in keeping the player invested so her being able to see the good and bad in people despite being kind of quiet and mild-mannered a lot of the time is a good trait to keep orbiting around the player this becomes particularly clear when she changes her mind about sending the power away from edgewater noting that more people would suffer because of it she knows that the separatists deserve better but edgewater shutting down would be a disaster for the population there and her heart goes out to the people who are trying their best to survive despite the corporate working conditions i just think when you gotta make a decision that'll hurt somebody it's best to think on the right and wrong of it either way parvati's journey is more about becoming confident in who she is and learning how to make her way from a backwater town into a big sprawling universe likewise her first objective in this journey is meeting with and talking to the captain of the groundbreaker who specializes in keeping the ship running i didn't expect her to be so tall and did you see the size of her arms yeah she's got a bit of a crush on june lay which is really cute to watch play out and joon lay immediately reciprocates which is about as fast as everything else in this game it's something that's been a trend since the beginning of the game but the outer world seems to be in a hurry more often than not to just convey an idea in this case it isn't just in oh i'm flattered that you think i'm a great engineer we should talk a bit more sometime it's oh i'm flattered that you think i'm a great engineer we should talk a bit more sometime also nice tits i'm soaked yeah okay not that directly but joon lay does lay down pretty thick towards this awkward girl which again sure fine but it would have been nice to have heard about some messages back and forth before june lay begins writing love poems to parvati which happens immediately upon getting back to the ship after meeting june lay there is actually a really cool representation that i can honestly say that i've never seen in a triple a video game before though obviously i haven't played every video game and that's the fact that parvati may be romantically interested but she seems to be asexual even if she doesn't really know quite how to phrase it i'm not much interested in physical stuff never have been way's not like other folks seem to be it's not that i can't i just don't care for it i don't think it's pandering by any means as it's not the source of her personality it was just a topic that was brought up that she responded to which makes it done right in my eyes either way junlei soon sends another message to parvati drunkenly explaining that old parv reminded her of a previous relationship that she had she basically twists parvati's stomach around by more or less confessing that she still has feelings for that old partner which pushes parvati to want to go to a bar to drink despite her being sheepish about the idea of you drinking earlier in the game on edgewater so like a good friend you get [ __ ] wasted with parvati on the ground breaker i'm here to drink okay maybe you're right i am a little woozy hydration here i come yeah she's a mess of emotions but after mulling it back and forth for a while she decides that she's going to ask june layout in the most romantic way possible too via text well she was gonna but then june lay apologizes for spewing out [ __ ] while drunk and they make up and all that isn't she sweet i don't know i know this is all sappy [ __ ] but i really like it a lot it adds something tangible to the game it makes at least part of it feel a lot more grounded and human the whole thing concludes with parvati wanting to get dolled up properly to ask june layout which you assist her with by shopping around for a nice soap helping her track down ingredients so she can present a dinner of joonle's favorite foods and finally finding a dress for parv to look her best well she doesn't actually wear a dress unless the dress is um a hillary clinton pantsuit but yeah the date goes well and parv tells you all about it when you get back i asked her to be my girlfriend and captain she said yes it's [ __ ] adorable few things make me grin like an idiot but man was this doing it parvati is a very bright spot for this game and i think that going through everything that the player does with her strengthens her character even if it isn't a quest where you have to hunt down her dad's killer or anything like that she's obviously not the deepest character ever i mean hell no character really is in this game but she is a really good one fun to talk to to get a reaction out of and to travel with i like her a lot and i don't think this game would be as good without her so if you don't mind i'm just gonna head to my cabin and happy screaming to my pillow for like an hour max is a roguish talker who initially presents himself as a holy preacher who wants to tend to his flock but ultimately is using that getup as an excuse to further his scientific knowledge he's actually a little hard to get a handle on at first but that's not necessarily a bad thing max believes in the order of scientific inquiry also known as scientism scientism is basically the belief that everything is preordained in accordance with science that the religion's god known as the grand architect set everything into motion and then just disappeared afterwards likewise this belief extends to the idea that every worker no matter how miserable has been set on their path because of the initial surge in predestination with the belief in science above all else darwinism plays a role in the idea that the weak will die and the strong will survive members of the osi believe that if they can study and deduce the properties of every single particle in the universe that humanity will reach an ascended state in which no one questions their role and a lasting peace will prevail but it's also a lot more than all that as the true nature seems to be to keep the workers working which is where abuse by the board comes in the corporations are strong proponents of scientism and as such its tenants are preached to the workers under corporate rule take solace and work be content with your lot in life do what needs to be done in the position that you found yourself in i would love to discuss the finer points of my religion with you oh wait no i wouldn't standing in the osi's way is the opposing religion known as philosophism the philosophists who follow this religion believe that the universe is chaos and that there is no path no predestination weirdly enough it doesn't even really sound like a religion as much as a belief in general i guess it's kind of like atheism in that it's more of a worldview rather than a religion but basically the philosophists believe that as soon as one accepts the universe as a chaotic force with no meaning then they become awakened to the truth which makes them the sworn enemy of the osi you would think that this would cause max to be at odds with philosophists everywhere but that isn't the case the reason why max became a vicar was because he didn't understand how his parents were able to just happily accept their role as another link in the chain of workers under the thumb of corporate rule so instead of rejecting the osi he embraced it hoping to find the same happiness that his parents found this led him to going about his knowledge quest in a relatively abnormal way compared to the usual clergy crowd who either wholeheartedly believed in the osi's pillars or wanted to use that position for power and wealth so you might see how this ties into max's character as his pursuit of knowledge comes first and foremost to him and he's willing to put up with a whole heap of [ __ ] and acting to get his way it's like someone rolled a character who was invested heavily in charisma intelligence and a bit of melee fortitude [ __ ] this dude is just like one of my characters in most games huh either way his knowledge quest eventually runs into the french issue which he so eloquently expressed to me and him joining my crew was more of a means to an end rather than him caring about my mission as he wants to try to track down a translator to hopefully figure out the meaning of the universe through this journal that someone wrote this translator is actually a philosophist scholar who he associated with during his journey one who is well versed on the subject of the book that he had me tracked down though max pretends to not know who he is poorly for a bit while you search for the guy eventually you track the fella down who max immediately begins threatening now where were we oh that's right i was about to beat you severely yeah so this guy isn't a philosophist scholar he's just a dude who told max about the book as a joke knowing that it was in french the whole time max flies into a french-induced rampage as most heroes throughout history have done at some point or another but we step in and get the guy to cough up some info about where a translator is anyways thus extending this ride for another step at least when next i talk to max he apologizes profusely thanking me for stopping him from killing off the trickster who sent him down this path he claims that he wouldn't have been able to live with himself and he appreciates everything that i've done for him despite him being on a warpath and using me to get to this dude that is literally the most character development in this entire game and i welcome it with open arms this is the kind of stuff this game needs to be at its best and vicar max is a shining example of it it does make me miss it a bit more in other people but that's alright at least we got one whiff of it speaking of whiffs when we make it to the hermit who can translate the book's cryptic texts she states that we gotta inhale some hardcore space weed to fully comprehend the french language that makes complete sense to me so he blaze it so hard that we understand a language that should have died hundreds of years ago which of course has us also seeing max's dead mother if i vomit on you i want you to know i ain't sorry that is a [ __ ] power move all right let's stop screwing around here and try to take this seriously this is a very big step in max's character development and platitudes from a figment of my imagination unless what the [ __ ] are you talking about okay i'm laughing but it's really hard to keep taking this seriously so the brass nuts here is that max's mom tells him that she wasn't happy because she let the osi's truth control her she was happy because she made her own happiness in this chaos which is the core of what philosophism is then max's perfect vision of himself appears the one that he's aspiring to be none of this makes any sense because nyoka and i can see all of it but hey man space drugs either way max's perfect vision tells him that he's too hell-bent on trying to come up with the answers to the universe and that he's trying too hard to just become controlled soon your character passes out and reawakens to a new max he's less angry now and more accepting and he's completely converted from scientism to philosophism i mean it kind of makes sense seeing as he's been teetering on that line for some time now but now he accepts the chaos of the universe and is ready to make his own happiness the moral of the story is that copious amounts of space drugs is the cure for religion i guess nah i like max a lot his story ends abruptly but it does have a conclusion one that's a lot more fleshed out than the companions which will follow his character arc is fun to witness unfold but i wish i could have had a few more conversations with him either way let's move over to ellie i threw away my life chasing fairy tales will punishing you fix any of that of course not but by law it will make me feel a whole lot better all right so ellie is by far the most simple companion in this game personality wise i'm a surgeon by training and a pirate by inclination not much else to know captain she's straightforward doesn't mind bending the rules breaking laws killing people saving people and drinking whatever is in the cabinet like a rogue raccoon likewise she also doesn't care to open up to you about who she is personally at first stating that you should probably keep a professional distance from her that's probably one of the most normal things anyone has said in this game eventually she reveals that she's about as rebellious as she unshockingly appears to be and she states that she's from byzantium and that she wants to check in with her parents and by check-in she wants to irritate the [ __ ] out of them you see ellie hates byzantium because of its non-stop rules and red tape it does make sense it's kind of the source of the board's rule but her being a top tier surgeon and yet being restricted at every turn drove her into madness for as unimpressed as i was with her at first i do think that she grounds the game a little more which is always welcome it's exactly what i want from key players like these because for as much as i initially went ah she's closed off and straightforward and doesn't seem to open up to me immediately that is a good thing people spill their guts a lot in this game and almost immediately at that having someone who's like i don't know who you are why would i talk to you on an interpersonal level is kinda refreshing though to be fair she also kind of just jumped on board my ship after i did one favor for her so it's a little more mixed than that still i did like her addition to the game after our initial conversations now unfortunately that was my feeling before the actual encounter with her parents so ellie wants you to come in and just start being a menace spit on the floor drink their booze just terrorize them and you start to do that and her parents are just impartial so it turns into this embarrassing display of a brat from a wealthy family trying to act out against her parents who don't give a [ __ ] about her we'll drink your expensive hooch wear our outside shoes all over your nice floors yeah it's uh awkward and the parents soon reveal that they only seem to care about what their neighbors think of them and that they told them that ellie was dead before collecting on her life insurance policy to gain even more wealth the problem is that okay so these people are so insufferable that it actually takes me out of the game like there's not even a thread of parental bond to their daughter there's no background story about how ellie's mother cared for her when she was sick or how her father took her on trips to the park or whatever only for ellie to turn out the way that she did and for them to cut ties with her it's just a pair of people who are so uncaring that it makes you think of them as caricatures and then the worst part is that you can't even take it out on them you can't come in and just start smashing the place up or steal their nice stuff or terrorize them in any sort of way ellie's just like fine i'm leaving forever this time then actually you can steal their bottles of alcohol that you can find anywhere else and the result is the dead sprinting up to you and giving you the same exact dialogue as any other npc what do you think you're doing let's just put this unpleasantness behind us i don't know it was a good start for ellie but then the story just kind of flounders i was kind of hoping that she would reflect maybe realize why she needed that kind of attention get through all of those issues somehow and then grow as a character you know standard quality writing but uh they've got no idea what a real double cross looks like much less a feastian triple cross or an inverted olympian blind cross ellie what the [ __ ] are you talking about at least we get to go set up an insurance account to transfer the life insurance policy payouts to ellie under a different name but that's it she gets the money realizes that friends are neat and that's that let's move on to felix i guess alright so felix is by far the most simple companion in this game personality wise wait hm all right fine he's tied with ellie his background story is that he was an orphan who was abandoned and spent his whole life in the backdrop of the groundbreaker while still having to play by the board's rules he hauled boxes around to make a living as soon as he could work and that's all he did until you showed up personality wise he's impulsive a bit manic and violent towards those he feels deserve it he's basically just a street rat more or less in fact i'm actually so neutral about felix's existence in this game that i'm just going to give you quotes from him and let that explain his personality instead he got some secret plan to double cross the board i knew it sorry i probably shouldn't have said that out loud is this about me ending up in the wrong bunk because i swear i wasn't that drunk the hallway's disorienting if we wanted the board's attention we got options piracy vandalism maybe some light arson it's up to us to protect it you ought to worry about protecting your eyes what happened are you running with scissors board cover-ups vessels disappearing into the aether sounds like the work of aliens to me i was starting to get bored listening to you until you said the phrase extremely powerful ordnance i don't understand a word she said but i don't like her tone one bit yeah he's hot-headed pretty funny short-sighted a little naive and pretty violent at times especially towards the board but that's really all the depth that he has as a person felix's personal mission involves a friend named harlow that he hasn't heard from in years contacting him out of the blue telling him that he urgently needs his help this mission is a little weird because harlow greets felix like they've been talking every week for a while now and then he goes alright in order to uh trust you i'm gonna need you to kill a traitor uh can you like pretend you haven't seen felix in five years or whatever let me tell you though this mission takes place on an asteroid named cilla cilla is [ __ ] cool i don't know why but the colors of this place just hit my eyes in all the right places it's like watching a living instagram filter plus cilla was my main when i played smite doesn't really have much to do with it i guess i just like the name because of it basically this place has a big old oxygen-filled barrier constructed around parts of it to help people live on the thing but it also has asteroid gorillas i don't know where they came from but hey asteroid gorillas so you can ask this guy why he came here and what he's trying to do and all that you just have to wait until after he gives you the quest basically he was a laborer for his entire life on the ground breaker and was biding his time and resources until he could jump ship to this mostly abandoned mining facility he then took it over with his men and are now gathering power and waiting for the board to collapse when they do eventually collapse he intends to try to seize as much power as he can i have to say this is probably the only faction in this game that i could see having a much bigger role in the sequel so far the so-called traitor that you run up on basically states that the board bought off harlow and that he found evidence on it stashed away back on cilla when you confront harlow with the evidence he denies it then states that he has to work for the board occasionally since they own the whole system and that he needs to feed and outfit his men i decided to reload here and approach this differently if you admit that you work for the board he gives you the exact same dialogue except if you tell him that you think the board is swell felix is appalled that you would ever say such a thing and harlow tells him that not everyone can be a revolutionary so i'm guessing he is telling the truth about using the board for money alone it all ends with felix deciding whether or not he wants to stick with you or jump ship and join harlow and he chooses you if you decide to leave the option up to him which surprises me because i basically just told him that i love the board and he absolutely hates the board what a ridiculously contradictory character but yeah that's it felix is still himself he's just a more confused version of himself you know what's [ __ ] up felix's story actually makes me think that the second outer worlds game could be really good if they actually expand on these characters and give them real honest-to-god personalities accomplishments detailed dialogue and the like because what felix is to me is a lump of clay that could be molded into something really [ __ ] awesome but we'll see let's round this all out with gnocca if there's one word that i'd use to describe nyoka it's confidence but she's also pretty goofy in her own right she's a powerhouse but not the stereotypical strong and humorless type it's interesting because her personality is also kind of hard to pin down as seems to be the tradition with quite a few of your companions i actually thought we'd get a jekyll and hyde situation where she's all serious mode when she was sober but she's just a little less goofy and more focused when she goes sober mode which apparently is as easy as taking caffeine pills for her as such her personal mission pops up immediately after recruiting her she claims that she used to run with a group of friends before the corporations pulled out of monarch and she lost track of them a couple definitely died and she's pretty sure all of them have at this stage but she wants to go bury them or at least a personal effect of theirs pretty straightforward so far so we trod through this dust bowl to pick up an effect off a dead person and then try to track down the rest of nyoka's missing friends along the way she reminisces about how weak she felt when she gave up hope of finding her lost comrades which explains why she turned to the bottle it's okay i guess it's just very direct in how it's handled and a pretty basic background story overall i mean i do like gnyoka but only because she's likable and that's really all there is to it it just kind of feels like all of the effort went into fleshing out parvati and max with the remainder of the companions being kind of an afterthought or just underdeveloped in general which is kind of why doing my whole power rankings thing kind of fell by the wayside with this game oh and just for shits and giggles i cranked up the difficulty too hard to see how that looks and it kind of looks like this [Applause] [Music] but regardless the next two members of nyoka's former friends wound up abandoning the rest of the crew to try to find an easier life on terra 2 only to have the townsfolk of edgewater refuse to feed them they basically had the exact same life in a different shade of grey here and wound up dying with marauders pounding at the door nyoka's pissed at them for making the decisions that they made seeing as one of them had a sister who was part of the group and she wound up dying thinking that they were trying to get to monarch asap but nyoka takes their medallions all the same to bury them on monarch when we get to the group's old base gnyoka gives one last insight into who these people were to her it's actually pretty touching the way that they had to try to survive on this hostile planet and the amount of detail that she goes into makes her a lot more believable as a person if anything it's a good way to show that even a basic background story that's immediately available with no major plot twists can be told well and i do appreciate the efforts here to make miyoka stand out a little more from the last two companions overall the outer world's companions really help push the game into a better state i do like all of them even if some of them aren't as fleshed out i think without all of them being the way that they are i'd have a much harder time latching on and pushing through some of the more humdrum moments that said i do wish that they at least had one more quest to them each parvati had a couple and she's by far the most interesting and fun to talk to character because of it vicar max's quest stretches on a bit longer and that also helped his character but the rest peter out after a single quest which only lets you see one facet of their personalities i guess a follow-up would have been nice to see how they've grown or changed though all that said they do speak quite a bit both to you and to each other it's fun to see how they might collide or vibe off of each other depending on the topic at hand and it adds a lot more to the game's replayability alright so where were we well returning to the dock points us towards byzantium again where it's revealed that the minister of earth for this colony has hoarded all of the colonist reviving chemicals that he can get his hands on which is pretty much all of it so we're now to meet a contact on byzantium and discuss how we can steal it all if we can it's worth noting that this is pushing towards the end game and i haven't touched any dlc the problem is that i'm playing this on game pass which did not include the dlc and i've got to be honest here i don't feel like dredging through another however long analysis of the dlc also i've heard that one of them is just okay like the rest of the game but that the last one was pretty good but i don't think i'll buy them for this by the end of the vanilla game i completed 66 quests out of i believe 69 and i just well you've seen how i felt if i were playing this game in my free time without a review i wouldn't buy the dlc with how i felt about the game so far so sorry for those of you who wanted me to do it i just don't feel like it at any rate let's go meet with phineas's contact to see how we're going to haul away enough chemical compound to wake walt disney from cryostasis i'm golden eagle i named you cuckoo oh oh can i be chicken because chickens will adopt any critters baby and keep them warm so i have to give the writers some credit with their limitations if that's what made parts of this game the way that it is so you know how before when i was like two-thirds of byzantium's shops are closed well at this stage our contact tells us that something's wrong with the corporation's ability to replace repair and generally maintain their infrastructure it's an okay cop-out but it still makes a lot of byzantium emptier than you would hope that it would be and i actually noticed this earlier but it only stuck out as something that was going wrong so when you go to get parvati measured for her dress the game gives you the option to say hey how do you know her measurements you don't have any measuring tape and the shopkeeper tells you that she's such an expert that she did it by looking with her eyes alone but there's a problem with that if the player wasn't already thinking about this kind of technicality they are now and the next logical step is so you measured her by i alone while she was still in a full suit of armor i don't know the development history of this game if it received the amount of time that devs wanted or funding or whatever but stuff like this screams that they had limitations that they needed to work around and instead of dialing down the scope they interjected these little excuses into the game to make it seem like it was intentional a lot like the whole hey you can't wear a marauder outfit here that you get from the front end of edgewater to fool the player into thinking that there's an elaborate outfit system or doc wells telling you that you shouldn't run and jump while utilizing the holographic shroud i couldn't put my finger on what exactly bothered me about these in-game explanations but i do get it now i see you're back with us feared we lost you there never seen anyone pass out yet stay upright before so earth's minister is all over the place with his mood he starts by berating me claiming that i'm here to get him for an interview or the like then when he figures out that i'm here for the chemicals which have been ordered under his name he realizes that the chairman of the board has been using his name to do stuff like this while keeping the minister under house arrest he gets excited by the prospect of me breaking into the chairman's office to find evidence of this kind of thing and then begin spouting off about how he can set things right in the colony again also this is the longest conversation i've had with someone else in quite some time why did you try to shoo me away at first then so the main thing here is that the minister of earth hasn't been able to actually do his job and report back to earth in years well the way it's worded he hasn't received any messages in years so the assumption is that the chairman has been reporting back for him but in this time the minister has been recording meetings gathering evidence of corruption and so on while putting it all on a drive that he wants me to upload and send back to earth which will then theoretically send reinforcements to clean up the colony in a couple of months to a few years well better than nothing i guess let's go meet the chairman good afternoon i'm chairman rockwell and i'm here to address a serious issue facing us we've recently discovered that our food supply will not be able to sustain halcyon's population in the long term everyone will die everyone will slowly stop living from malnutrition i [ __ ] swear if someone doesn't give you something to read that will placate the masses soon all of you will find yourselves violently unemployed how many times do i have to tell you we can't say [ __ ] like that fire whoever wrote this every healthy night can be part of the important work of saving our colony by testing paperweights sorry i couldn't resist let's go again yeah that's uh that seems accurate actually anyways i didn't go directly to the guy as you might have been able to parse remember earlier when i was talking about the final sublight mission which had me meeting the scientist who was doing her best to stave off starvation of the entire colony yeah that's still happening and their solution right now is to freeze a fat chunk of the colony until they can figure it out you remember when that scientist was all up in arms about the future of the colony with his diet toothpaste which suppresses people's appetites this is why and i get that this is supposed to be the message of the game right it's supposed to be that corporations are so short-sighted that they would sink their research efforts into temporary band-aids instead of focusing on the potential permanent solutions but it still rings hollow when these guys are so intent on monitoring every little change in their colonies and they don't see that adelaide came up with the crazy and unheard of solution of using fertilizer to grow crops the solution was presented to them on a silver platter in the first couple of hours in the game but the message is that the corporations are so blinded by greed that they couldn't figure out the easiest way to save their colony i just know that there's gonna be a you don't get it man it's actually a brilliant satire of the politics revolving around corporate culture kind of comments and i'm all for taking big companies down a peg we just watched microsoft amazon disney and so on just start absorbing huge franchises with no repercussions this kind of commentary is a good thing but again for as much as this game is supposed to take these goofy things that you hear about to their absolute extremes i feel like this message would have been so much more impactful had they just brought a little bit more reality into the game rather than constantly having corporations trip over themselves as if they suddenly forgot to be successful after getting to the stage it's aggravating because the pieces are all here for a thought-provoking interesting and bold message about corporate elitism and the rich trampling the poor by using any conniving way that they can think of to further their status but when you have the situation where the right hands of the chairman is just sitting here claiming that she wants to do everything that she can to save the colony from starvation and that she wants to use you because you can work outside the lines of bureaucracy only to then go oh by the way you put a rebel in charge of edgewater and now every single person in edgewater needs to [ __ ] die it's just so absurdly short-sighted that you can't help but feel that the message is completely lost keeping the people killing adelaide and taking her research secrets to grow food would be the better way the only real way that would completely and unequivocally show that the corporations are ruthless masterminds who will do anything to keep themselves on top instead this is just well they're not us so kill them which isn't how you stay on top what a frustrating way to drop the ball so yeah i take the job to wipe out edgewater and then head over to the minister's former office to send off his message to earth the secretary follows me to ask me what i'm doing and i tell him with no speech check then i'm just admiring the office and he's like yeah okay cool dude thanks cartoon character i then head out to pick up the chems that wells needs the chairman's offices are [ __ ] pretty there's really something to be said about a game having dirty greasy stained surfaces in most of its infrastructure only to hit you with the razzle dazzle in just one or two luxurious areas so the big thing that's happening behind the scenes is that all of these doctors are down here working out the board's idiotic plan to freeze most of the colony and have them rotate hibernation shifts until they can figure out how to not starve that's what the chemicals are for since they've been proven to be able to wake people up out of long-term stasis imagine that [ __ ] dystopia man staying awake and alive for 10 years reporting for hibernation waking up 50 years later christ cool concept though our option here is to take 100 of the chemicals and kill everyone that they're experimenting on now or to take like 26 to not do that i don't know these people ah [ __ ] i didn't think i'd have to watch them squirming around and [ __ ] oh well i stick the full canister of absolute zero monster into my pockets along with my arsenal of weapons closet of armor and convenience store of junk food and then walk out when we make it back to doc wells we determined that the best course of action here is to skip the colonist ship straight out to the doctor's base to start thawing people out as the board has now implied that they're going to kill everyone aboard the colonist ship to make room for workers which will be put to sleep i was thinking there might be a way around the whole wipeout edgewater thing where i could stab the board in the back but there wasn't so i wiped out every colonist in edgewater yeah at first i was like oh no i don't want to do that but then when i thought about it i um i didn't really care i'm actually more wondering if parvati will stick around at this stage if she leaves i'll feel bad but um she doesn't even mention it i even brought her back to town to make sure look there's amelia there's stefan that one's a robot oh here's constable ray's any of this doing anything for you yeah huh right okay just um just making sure that there was literally no consequences here that would be silly after all and poor writing really i sure wouldn't be upset about this she's an outcast right she probably wanted this to happen good work boys so this is it the final stretch after you wipe out edgewater the quest that you have for phineas transforms into one for him or the board and i have to deliver the colonist ship to phineas to wake up the people on it or to the corporation so they can toss out the vegetables and make room for fresher ones oh by the way i know i've called this thing the colonist ship the entire time but it's quite literally called the hope so i have to deliver hope to one faction or the other subtle all of this is just so bizarre to me still i only went down both paths to see how far i could get while playing both sides and you can literally do everything in the game in one go it's like they tried to make the game less replayable plus i've had felix with me for most of the game because of his speech boost and he's been pissed at me for a while now but he still hasn't left what a strange set of choices when developing your game it's like they were afraid to upset the player or give them real consequences the only time i got someone to leave without asking was when i myrtlized ellie's parents which made sense but i've literally been playing nice with the board for the entirety of this game save for the very start i feel like there should be both consequences and board supporting companions which would leave if i started opposing the board and vice versa when i help out the board as things stand i can't believe this is an obsidian game at this stage at any given point after the first stretch of the game you can head to your captain's quarters on the ship and there are these signs from each area of the game that you've been through giving you a little commemorative trophy to mark what it was that you did in each colony or zone and the text that they pop up with when you read them really conveys how the devs thought of their own storyline for example when i described the ambiguously grey story of edgewater's conundrum i applauded the way that it played out i was happy with how i was able to dismantle both sources of conflict and merge them to create something new and better but the signage which depicts my edgewater excursion doesn't state anything like that instead noting that i chose edgewater and i impressed upon the deserters that they should never dream it's really weird and off-putting because to me i felt like i improved both factions in a way but the sign itself says hey you chose edgewater and taught those filthy idiot outcasts to give up their hopes this extends to everything else no matter how down the middle you were hell even when i chose msi over the iconoclasts i got a patch from zora that says hey i know that you killed graham and he was a good guy who was trying his best to start a revolution but uh next time you're in town drinks are on me it's also muddled when you know what really happened like the devs had a very direct thought about each area of the game and they probably only cooked up two memoirs each it really only makes this volcanic obsidian skull all the more appropriate when it says sometimes when faced with a choice the only proper response is to annihilate the people asking you to make it alright let's get this over with so you begin the process of hooking the hope up to your ship along the way you can thumb through records of phineas trying to revive people or crew manifests in logs a couple of things here one phineas real name isn't phineas wells which isn't an important detail but still cool to know and two i never actually explained this but there is a log stating that earth crops will flat out not grow on halcyon soil it's kind of weird how the hope was the second ship to arrive in the system and yet it was never relayed to them that they can't grow [ __ ] here by the groundbreaker when it arrived first i mean unless it departed like a month later but the hope is described as prettier and sleeker than the groundbreaker so i imagine that that isn't the case unless they had an upgrade raring to go then again even if it did take off years later these jackasses never figured out the idea that bringing earth soil or making fertilizer would do the trick so whatever i guess so we get to the main console and get our big decision easy enough let's go for the good ending i mean obsidian has been piloting us towards it the entire time this unfortunately tanks my reputation with the board from revered to understandable ever tell you how worthless the stupid reputation is outside of vendor prices oh yeah i think i did when we arrive the board is instantly notified and begin attacking dockwell's lab by the time you arrive he's been carted off and you have to hack your way into his terminal to proceed further in oh and if you don't have a hack of 90 you can walk four steps to the left and take the passcode instead what a nice little time save for those idiots who invested into something like hacking so we head to the back and grab a key to tartarus which is a maximum security prison planet that nobody has ever escaped from you come out we shoot you full of holes and then everyone goes about their day worry free except you you'll be dead finally so this is probably one of the most anti-climactic final stages i've played in a while but i can tell it's definitely trying really hard and i think my experience might be due more to how i approached it i mean what i did is an option in the game right so i persuade this prison man who radios to our ship to tell me that i'm under arrest for landing here and that i'm going to die but obviously he needs to put in a request to kill me and get it approved and all that he tells me that if i simply walk off my ship they'll shoot me i persuade him with the assist of a pretty nice hat and a bottle of vodka to send me a copy of his id which i then plug into the holographic shroud to use as a disguise so now the final push kinda looks like this [Music] [Applause] oh that's great thank you sir [Music] all right msi i'm not once arousing speeches but the captain needs our help you're new here anything we were hiring more stats oh [Music] well look who it is i don't know why msi is helping me i mean sanjar had an entire espionage plan that's now completely [ __ ] i guess maybe he saw this was an alternative plan to taking down the board but you would think that he wouldn't risk it oh well they're here to cause a ruckus while i just walk through everything i guess like i said the game is trying pretty hard but this mechanic is just making this a walking simulator for me i think okay so the holographic shroud isn't an awful mechanic from an idea level but because of its leniency with giving me four whole bars to work with i never feel like i'm in trouble at all i think for this mission in particular it needed to be reduced to one chance and that's it or two maybe depending on the difficulty i guess and it should be possible with one bar as long as there's areas to refresh it you'd have to stop moving look around and plot your optimal route but as things stand i can just goof off with no repercussions so after a leisurely five minute walk i saunter into chairman rockwell who's a gigantic [ __ ] obviously he tells you that waking more people means that there's only going to be more mouths to feed but then concedes that there might be some brilliant minds on there to help sort this mess out your options here are as follows 1. use a high speech check to convince him to support you if you go through with it felix will leave because he doesn't want anything to do with the board he has now grown a spine after all this time i guess it took getting to the literal boss for him to do that so cool or two refuse rockwell's help and he just lets you go to attempt to rescue phineas also you can kill him much like the majority of this game it's a super odd set of outcomes and situation overall for as much as felix trusts you and for as far as he's come with you why can't you make a speech check or a determination check to keep him around why does rockwell just let you walk by him to potentially go rescue the doctor how does a man who's willing to sacrifice the colony suddenly go oh all right yeah i'll help out if you just tell him the right words seems to me like rockwell should have jumped into a wolfenstein mech suit to fight you or that you should have had to do some background work to find some blackmail or some other motivator to get him to comply as things stand this has such a strange set of outcomes that it doesn't feel like i've accomplished much of anything i guess i'll keep with the reality where felix is with me and the chairman is dead but i'm not super satisfied with it alright let's enter the labyrinth and then get the hell out of here as i get to the beginning of the labyrinth the true boss reveals themselves this seems familiar but i can't quite put my finger on it guess i'll never figure it out anyways i do have to say that the non-violence route here does require three different speech checks involving different skills which i managed to pass i do like that because it lends a little more importance to my skill spread in my case i used to persuade science and intimidate it's kind of cool how that worked out and i don't feel like it was a fluke that i tripped my way into like some of the previous options so far i do have to know what the other route is like though i mean it is called the labyrinth this prison is equipped with an auto mechanical warden [Music] and what a labyrinth it was i mean to be fair i actually did have to use my allies abilities and some slo-mo stuff so it wasn't quite the usual fight but uh yeah i'm not super impressed i still don't know why this place was called the labyrinth like it was gonna have some minotaur maze of [ __ ] i do find it funny though this whole time this game has been tricking me into thinking that something else was going on the imaginary faction outfit system the tailor measuring parvati with her eyes through her suit of armor being discouraged from doing anything goofy while using the holographic shroud byzantium's shops being closed despite one of the npcs stating that it was a bustling marketplace of 24 7 commerce well even at the end i heard that there was going to be a labyrinth and i was close to closing out the game right it was like 5 am when i was still recording and i thought man a labyrinth [ __ ] yeah it's gonna take at least an hour and i got through the entire prison after getting off my ship in 12 minutes [ __ ] at any rate if you talk sofia down she just leaves the key on the table to wells chair and if you didn't she tries to fight you instead of holding the gun to wells head not that i expected more from the game here wells claps you on the back and then tells you that the earth has been silent for three years and that the mother ship has disappeared on the way to earth two years back and then that's it the game plays you out in a fallout-esque slideshow which depicts everything that happens as a result of your work doc wells revives a handful of smart people to help stabilize the colony sophia is said to have a change of heart donating to the cause anonymously though no one knows for sure what happened to her msi was the guideline for several other small communities which became self-reliant with its influence edgewater's still [ __ ] and sprats took over the ground breaker is led by june lay and parvati who spent their years at each other's sides max went on to guide others in his newfound understanding of the universe ellie got her own ship and started making deliveries and [ __ ] felix went back to work helping out the colony because what the hell else was he gonna do niouka went back to monarch to start up another group of survivalists and exterminators sam is still a robot eventually the colony stabilized and began to prosper under your guidance it's all very i don't know what you would expect i guess but it still doesn't cover everything it doesn't mention all the corporations that you got to know along the way or harlow's rebels on cilla or the scientist who i let go so she could try to solve the food shortage problem the one whose sublight's boss thought was creating aliens or all of these little factions groups and people who are actually interesting to a degree in terms of potential which scares me because like i said they seemed like they could affect the next game a lot if the devs were thinking that way [Music] i wasn't gonna do it but i have to know i have to know what happens if i go the other way with this whole thing inside with the board [ __ ] so i send the hope to tartarus and chairman rockwell contacts me stating that they've captured phineas but that he somehow managed to incite a prison riot and took over the prison with sofia hostage somehow he's more competent this time around i guess i was thinking i would be part of the strike team who hit the doctor's lab but i mean i guess that would have been a really short level either way it's the same [ __ ] level because why wouldn't it be oh and remember when felix left me because i decided to make the board work for me in the last run yeah he doesn't this time when i'm working for the board no one leaves they're just like oh okay cool it feels like someone took a good chunk of the companion's personalities here and just kind of [ __ ] crumpled it like paper but it doesn't stop there even the speech check to get the guard to give me the biometric id to disguise myself as one of the prisoners is the exact same thing because he doesn't want to break protocol it's the same [ __ ] mission it's just re-skinned the prisoners replaced the corporation guards msi and the groundbreaker still help though i don't know why the people on the ground breaker who have been adamantly against the board for the entire [ __ ] game are helping now the chairman is dead when i get to him so there's a bigger difference i guess and phineas and sophia switch places because why not there's even the exact same speech checks but what i will say is that this ending to this conversation is a lot more dramatic like in a good way actually because it made me feel really bad i'm sorry about all this i'm sorry about everything it's just i just wish we could have never mind it doesn't matter see i knew they had it in them too bad the game has done its damnedest to push you into siding with phineas instead of giving you a strong reason to fight for either side the rest of the ending is pretty much the exact same thing with a really really sad shift regarding your companions byzantium became pretty much the only part of the colony besides msi which refocused to supply the citizens with luxury seafood byzantium citizens continued living in luxury while all the other colonists were frozen more or less and you lead the board into an age of concentrated wealth ellie sam and yoka do the exact same thing but felix disappeared after becoming disillusioned with life after you turned to the board max was offered a job at the osi but his new views on life had him refusing the job instead trying to preach philosophism to people who wouldn't listen in byzantium he disappeared too parvati was so terrified about being frozen that it put tremendous strain on her relationship with june lay and they broke up what kind of monster is this ending for jesus christ the lifetime employment program with a lifetime employment program the lifetime employment program the lifetime employment program the lifetime employment program anyways that's it oh man how do i begin this summary so the outer worlds is one of the most average games i've ever played wrapped up in a layer of pre-release hype that it never deserved and didn't even remotely live up to the puzzle pieces are all there but instead of solving the puzzle obsidian threw the pieces at a glue-filled board and hoped that something would stick and some pieces did but the rest fell by the wayside as much as i tried to force myself to care and to focus i just couldn't do it for a lot of the game and that's a latent issue that i have with the writing first and foremost i know this is going to sound weird because there are really only three main questing hubs if you don't count cilla but it's almost like the devs went for quantity over quality they spread a lot of areas thin instead presenting big ideas with little dialogue by comparison to back them up the biggest example of this comes in the form of your companions like i stated earlier your companions in this game are the biggest bright spot for the outer worlds their personalities their quests their interjections into a lot of your adventure it's all good stuff but if you compare the amount of dialogue that they truly have to other successful franchises which have a variety of companions they fall woefully short of becoming fully fleshed out they might have a smaller side to comment on during your questing every here and there but you can hardly ever actually turn to them and say hey what do you think about this mission or hey how do you feel about the iconoclast's plight or anything along those lines they don't even say anything in those final moments of the game when you rescue wells or face down sofia you can't ask about their interests about parts of their past most of the time about how they're doing and so on you might notice that i said most of the time because there is a line with parvati about her mother that i never was able to ask her about because of my below average perception so the idea of asking your companions for a little more background was there but it really only applies to the ones that the devs put a little more effort into which again makes me think that parvati was the companion that they really focused on the most when creating the bunch that you got before some sort of limitation stood in their way the outer world's environments and landscapes have the potential to be the de facto best part of the game and oftentimes the planets ships moons and so on do have a strong start with how they're presented you have an array of colors tones themes flora and topography which is really interesting to look at and it really helps you immediately get immersed with the area that you find yourself in but that immersion wears off pretty quickly when it becomes clear that that's all there is to it think about the sheer amount of biomes on earth alone planes tundra deserts mountains swamps and so on and now you have a distant set of planets which could have anything on them and we get locked into one biome each i get that you only land on one part of them i get that monarch specifically was a moon that had been partially terraformed but you have the creative freedom to do anything to come up with really wild concepts and ideas which might take root in reality but branch off into the extraordinary i just feel like it was a good start that didn't really quite reach its full potential and the enemy variety didn't do the game any favors there either as there were really only five core enemy types in humans robots canids raptodons and mantasaurs and three lesser enemy types which popped up here and there in the form of sprats terra rays and primals even the game points this out i've always been fascinated by birds if you ever research earth species there are thousands of them so colorful and distinct here we got 11 flavors of terra rays and not much else that kind of variety i mean gosh seems almost impossible you can create a whole new set of worlds in a game setting and give it a lower reason as to why it's so sparse with the wildlife but at the end of the day it's still gotta be fun to play with these enemy types combat in general is some of the most blown potential that i've ever seen in a game and maybe a lot of that stems from the difficulty i won't completely repeat everything that i said earlier but it comes to mind that the weapons and armor themselves aren't super abundant in their variety either i used the same hammer from about 30 into the game until the end and it wasn't because i was a stickler for it i just never saw anything else that piqued my curiosity there were a few experimental weapons which seem fun in their own ways but it's kind of hard to decide to experiment when i kill nearly everything in one to two hammer swings on hard difficulty and i couldn't test out supernova difficulty because i couldn't change to that after the start of the game even most of the guns seemed like reskins with higher or lower dps values though i can't comment for sure on that i did like the overall presentation though in terms of potential the slo-mo system is a fun idea for a revamped real-time vats kind of thing but again with the prismatic hammer it felt more like a way to get an auto stun the last thing i think i have to say about combat is that the looting just stopped feeling satisfying after just under halfway through the game i still did it for money but i realized that even when i killed the biggest creatures in the game i was rewarded with generic meds guns armor and junk i will say that fallout 4 actually did this well in that you were always guaranteed a legendary weapon when you killed the biggest enemies it's a simple system but it felt good to find something that was somewhat unique even if it wasn't a great piece of equipment itself there have been very few times in this game where a host of skills have really truly mattered at least on normal to hard difficulty sneaking hacking and lock picking are the worst defenders for different reasons sure there's plenty of boxes to pick but i've had such a wealth of resources for this entire game that i spent 40k of my money on upgrades that i didn't need at the workbench during my last mission i've never hurt for armor weapons or money which is why i never really focus too much on putting points into my lock picking i guess if you just like lock picking then sure knock yourself out but i just found that i never really needed it that much sneaking is its own can of worms which i explained earlier i'd actually extend this a little to engineering also but at least that popped up in conversation and questing pretty often and then hacking seems like something that you would actually use pretty often throughout the game but i only remember using it maybe i don't know less than 10 times the entire playthrough there just weren't a lot of times where i needed to hack into a computer meanwhile speech options are a powerhouse in this game you're gonna want to get them as high as possible to bypass a lot of extra running and fighting if that's your thing what i'm trying to say is i don't think i'd change my build at all if i want to play this game again for some reason besides maybe switching to guns i guess the dialogue of this game is such a mishmash of interesting fun boring and nonsensical that i think i've ever seen the focus nearly always seemed to be joke's first story second and it made actually listening to a lot of the story kind of wear on me this was especially true when an npc would outright contradict themselves make no sense or just not adapt to the player what i mean is that most npcs would force the player to be passive this passive dialogue meant that i wasn't steering the conversation at all my speech options didn't matter i could tell someone that i was a famous toss ball player who was on tour to meet fans and the npc would light up and get really excited about it but then they would just reset and i could ask them about a murder that happened in town like i didn't just reveal to them that i was a pro sports player i could intimidate someone after having a pretty pleasant conversation and the npc would shake in fear or get defensive only to immediately shift back into a normal pleasant tone when i asked them about something else and even when i did talk someone into a change of heart at the end of a quest or got them to think differently usually the dialogue would just outright end with no way to see if i made a genuine difference lots of conversations seemed like they ended just way too soon like you are about to get to a satisfying conclusion but then suddenly the npc just runs out of dialogue it was almost like nearly every conversation needed just one more line of dialogue to get them to arrive at a satisfying conclusion but more importantly there were few times where what i said mattered where the conversation was active and where i felt like i was guiding it in any sort of way that normally happened with companions which made them stand out even more because they actually transformed the dialogue into something more desirable plus i've never seen a game reward you more for getting caught trespassing or stealing as much as the outer worlds does there really is no reason to side with the board or to be against phineas and while i do understand the whole evil run you're still playing into the hands of utter incompetency with the board it would be like if caesar's legion was just a big [ __ ] group of disorganized raiders yeah sure they're evil and they want territory and they want to rule but there's absolutely no redeemable qualities to them no kind of organization no kind of competency and at that stage the only reason that you would side with them is because you want to be evil because you just want to see what happens which isn't a great way to present a side that you can choose likewise phineas is this kind soul with zero downsides he feels horrible about the people that he's experimented on to try to awaken them the ones that died after screaming for minutes straight they gave him nightmares but he persevered he has an actual plan that isn't hey let's shut down everything and just give it to the one percent he's unequivocally the good side the side that most will choose if he had a really checkered past or was doing all of this for personal gain after all maybe you'd feel a bit more conflicted about choosing the evil that you know and this kind of short-sighted writing in terms of decision making is really felt when groups outright aren't mentioned in a slideshow of the game's outcomes and it's not like they ran out of time because again there's still image screenshots with a voiceover so even obsidian didn't think that they were worth mentioning if i were to come up with one final comparison the outer worlds feels a lot like a mix of borderlands in new vegas in terms of what it was attempting to do in regards to how it told its story but it failed at emulating both and it's fine to not emulate a game right i'm not saying that the only way the game would have been a masterpiece is if it was just new vegas with guns but when i think of borderlands i think of this non-stop over-the-top goofy game about crazy-ass people who would only fit in on an entirely different planet and knew what it was and it was still able to slip in an emotional moment or two without compromising its story it didn't try to have this stronger message of well this is what happens when corporations get out of control it kind of just told its story and stuck to what it knew and maybe that's what the outer worlds was trying to do but it didn't seem that way to me and if it was then maybe it just wasn't written well enough now let's look at new vegas there are many messages revolving around very thought-provoking and human stories which could be related to there were these moments where the game really grabs your attention with high stakes somber tales or heartfelt conclusions but then you have those crazier moments the ones that really made obsidian stand out the old world blues dlc the kings sending a rocket full of ghouls into the wasteland my boy fisto and so on and you have a laugh at those moments and a bit of fun it breaks up that heavier stuff perfectly and makes you appreciate the game that much more but when you mix the full throttle craziness of borderlands with the bigger messages of new vegas and you try to create a story that's generally more zany but still super serious at times those sudden full stop serious moments become a lot less impactful because you're waiting for the other shoe to drop and for everything to go back to being ridiculous when you're trying to take in the serious tones and messages the more heartfelt and grounded moments only for the game to spray seltzer in your face while squeaking a clown horn you're gonna become exhausted which was generally what i felt while i played the outer world started off pretty strong it invited the player into this universe of brand new ideas factions planets and consequences while i do have my own gripes about how terra 2 started the first major decision of the game which you made was done quite well at the end it was ambiguous morally grey and every consequence was interesting and then you head to the ground breaker and while it wasn't the most interesting chain of quests the game was still generally enjoyable to look at run around in and just play but then the outer worlds just collapses in on itself it was like the devs either ran out of time or shifted focus entirely options started to become much more direct more black and white any moral ambiguity was thrown out the window say for a very small handful of times and even when i got to those minor moments the game was so intent on kneecapping its own dialogue with 14 layers of satire that i just couldn't bring myself to care this game is worth playing if you want to shut your brain off and just mindlessly quest and fight and loot it's not worth playing if you're looking for a thought-provoking decisions matter kind of game which really sticks with you in a way that obsidian has proven itself capable of in the past i do have to say that if the devs can literally improve nearly every facet of this game by just a bit they would have a setup for a really good second game and i'll stand by that the universe that they created isn't a bad one the ideas the themes the background information all of it could make for a very good setup for a wonderful sequel if managed correctly i'm not personally excited for the sequel but i would still love to see the series flourish from here on out the potential is there it's just up to obsidian to capitalize on it [Music] alright before i wrap up this video let's talk about micro center when i first started attempting to build a pc i built it so poorly that i eventually gave up and started looking around for stores that could help after trying out a few other known quantities it was clear that i needed a place that was a little more focused when i hold my rig over to the closest micro center the guy was so impressed that i ever managed to get the parts into my pc the way that i did i was embarrassed but the worker did help me put everything into its proper place and i happily carted my pc home since then i've been in love with micro center and i'm actually really stoked that they reached out to me for this ad seriously if you ever need help getting into pc building or are an expert who just needs to shop around for parts these guys have you covered usually in the same day that you order it online as long as you can swing an in-store pickup if you're just trying to swap out a part or need a new peripheral or have a desire for anything related to desktops laptops monitors tvs networking equipment and probably at least three other categories microcenter's the place they've always been pretty damn competitive with their pricing both online and in store which is a huge plus for me personally if you need any help with building your own pc but don't want to lug your rig to the store you can always check out their online community and talk tech with other enthusiasts plus microcenter is giving out free 240 gigabyte ssds to new customers who sign up with my link in the description so if any of this sounds like something you need in your life feel free to check out microcenter thanks guys thanks for watching i know this might have been a bit of a slog for some of you especially the ones who really like this game i'll never be one to judge others for their preferences or perceptions of the game if you love the outer worlds then seriously more power to you but for me i'm glad i'm done with it i'm unsure what i'll hit next but i do have a couple of ideas until then though i've still got merch at my merch shop it's all shirts i should call it a shirt shop plus it's an alliteration i've also got a twitch where i stream nearly every monday tuesday and friday i've got a twitter where tweets most assuredly happen i've got a discord where people discuss all kinds of [ __ ] like um games and media and i don't know memes and i've got a patreon and that's it have a good one

Channel: The Salt Factory

Views: 1,636,966

Keywords: Terra 2, Emerald Vale, Edgewater, Spacer's Choice, Auntie Cleo, Rizzo's, Probably some other corporation, Parvati, Vicar Max, Ellie, Nyoka, SAM, Felix, Groundbreaker, Halcyon, Byzantium, The Board, The Outer Worlds, Monarch, MSI, Iconoclasts, Stellar Bay, Amber Heights, Sub Light, Junlei Tennyson, Scylla, Hope, Phineas Welles, Sophia Akande, Chairman Rockwell, The Unreliable, Prismatic Hammer, Obsidian, Other tags, I'm tired lol, Worked 18 hours yesterday, Boarst

Id: 4smXx-IzAeg

Length: 146min 59sec (8819 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 25 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/firipim]

This guy's videos just repeats the most popular sentiments among the Bethesda fanbase.

[u/dreadpiratesleepy]

The salt factory indeed, I think we can all say fallout series is far above average and my experience with Outer Worlds is it’s fallout with improved systems and outer space so like double points.