The Outer Worlds in Close Critique [Spoilers]
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Channel: Noah Caldwell-Gervais
Views: 182,300
Rating: 4.9135103 out of 5
Keywords: Outer Worlds, Obsidian, Critique, Review, Retrospective
Id: TpxidRlZyXc
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 48min 18sec (2898 seconds)
Published: Thu Mar 12 2020
Please note that this website is currently a work in progress! Lots of interesting data and statistics to come.
Outer Worlds is, as Noah succinctly puts it, too safe.
You can do pretty much everything there is to do. You don't feel challenged by the narrative. The quests are often short and lack long term consequences or fail at provoking any long term thoughts or regrets. The plot is also somewhat predictable and the humor is played out by the time you leave the settlement of Edgewater where you start the game.
The combat is decent enough. But enemy variety suffers greatly. Gun variety suffers greatly. The companions have good writing and acting tied to them, but their personalities are bit too one note and their quests are often short affairs with minimal impact. And even the longer quests are only as such because of the fetch quest nature of them. Longer term meaning, impact, and scenes to follow being not that great.
There's an overabundance of looting. But there's no crafting system. So you loot to sell to get money to then upgrade your weapons operating on a diminishing returns scale. Every character effectively becomes a kleptomaniac scrounging for cash to upgrade equipment, but only sparingly so since you'll keep lightly upgrading everything as you keep finding better base stuff to equip and upgrade as the game renames guns with higher tier names to justify their power differnce.
It's a solid game. If you like RPGs you should play it. But you'll likely never want to replay it which makes it a strangely tough sell to someone who isn't chomping at the bit for a New Vegas-lite experience with a bit more modern sensibilities and a new coat of paint and change of scenary, even if it is otherwise is lacking in other areas.
Watching this now the loot grind of Outer Worlds always stuck out to me since it felt so Fallout 4 where every scrap of trash is useful for crafting something for the big drive of the settlements.
But Outer worlds lacks that so 99% of what you loot is either ammo or vendor trash. There are unique weapons and gear but upgrading them to your level cost all of your money unless you spend skill points so it only costs MOST of all of your money as I stopped running up to every enemy to hit E.
So 2/3 of the way through the game I stopped looting all together and just bought ammo, combat got slightly more difficult but wading through the hordes of enemies got so much faster.
I hope Noah does Disco Elysium someday. The biggest reason why I even bought that game was that Outer Worlds left me feeling high and dry.
Usually, when I watch a Noah Caldwell-Gervais video, I learn of a couple of details that I had no idea even existed. There was nothing like that in this video. Even though I only played through Outer Worlds a single time myself, I still saw every plot point and story beat that Noah showed and it seems our ending montage was identical. And that should be surprising because I went into Outer Worlds with the mindset that I was going to do a lot of damage with poorly considered choices. That was the kind of protagonist I had decided on for my first playthrough. But, in general, the compromise solutions are so optimal, so free of nuance, and so obvious that it felt completely unjustified to do anything else. Here I had a protagonist whose primary method of interacting with the world was murder, and he was still hailed as the hero who saved the system. I didn't have to be clever or skilled to secure a better future for the system. I was just one guy with no attachment to society willing to kill as many people as it took.
Noah continues to be my favourite content creator on Youtube.
I cannot wait for his thoughts about Disco Elysium.
The Outer Worlds was mediocre at very best and represents how stale this formula has become:
Every single aspect feels dumbed down and meant as a casual gamer's intro to WRPGs or something. The hype around it when it dropped was ridiculous, everyone sucking it off just because "Fuck Bethesda", and now does anyone even think of this game? I stopped playing and picked up Disco Elysium and Prey 2017 instead and I felt SO much better.
I see we've reached the phase of analysis of the game after all the Bethesda bad hype had people acting like it was the greatest thing ever. Now we can look at the game a big more objectively.
I've just discovered this guy and I'm sure this is asked frequently but I couldn't find an answer elsewhere - is there a reason why he keeps in the verbal missteps and other mistakes in his final videos? I like the content a lot but hearing those really take me out of what he's saying
I dropped the game after leaving the first planet, and arriving on the space station. Since uninstalled the game too, just no desire to go back. And in theory i should've enjoyed the game, i'm a huge fallout fan.
I had the same feeling playing this game as I did the new God of War (although that game is head and shoulders above this one imo). They both feel like proof of concept games. They're using the first outing to show people "heres our take on this type of game and our unique touches on it. Please like it and buy it so that we can go hog wild on the sequel."
The looting in both of these games feels basic. The combat feels basic. I cant remember if it was Joseph Anderson or Matthewmatosis who said it, but most of the leviathan axe upgrades you get should have been available from the start, and hopefully they will be in the sequel.
Same with Outer Worlds. The weapons are basic and the upgrades are the same goddamned thing. Theres a lot of potential here, but they couldnt tap into it because they were building the game itself. Hopefully the sequels swing for the fences.