The Outer Worlds is NOT AS GOOD as You Think!

what's going on ladies and gentlemen it is Michael here with Scott and today we're going to be presenting an extensive analysis of the outer worlds explaining why we believe the game is not as good as everyone thinks if you tuned in to our YouTube livestream where we discussed our thoughts on this topic and thank you to those who stopped by then you'll know there's no cause for alarm we're not here to say that the outer worlds is a bad game because it's not it's definitely a decent game and we both enjoyed our first playthroughs a lot however it isn't as nearly as deep or profound or fleshed out as many people are giving it credit for today we're going to explain our thoughts as to why this is the case breaking the video down into sections that we can judge different aspects of the game on with timestamps in the description of course it's worth addressing the concept that everything is subjective and whether or not you think a game is a 10 out of 10 or a 7 out of 10 does come down to preference somewhat however at the end of the day we're still striving for some sort of objectivity by looking at various features that are known to define what makes an RPG good things like in-depth choice and consequence options that impact the world around you smart build mechanics that encourage replayability and diverse character creation flushed out world building that explores NPC's in factions in a multifaceted way and well-written memorable companions who have certain ideals and can be impacted by your choices and perhaps may influence your own decisions you get the idea if one game has more impactful choices and consequences than another that's something you can definitely measure in this video we'll be comparing the outer worlds to other RPGs such as fallout 4 Skyrim and especially fallout new vegas fallout new vegas is looked at by many as a benchmark for what a good RPG should be like and to got around the same rating for some of its reviews as the outer worlds did and in other cases the outer worlds was even reviewed with higher scores reaching nine out of ten s and so on people are calling it the spiritual successor to new vegas and saying it's the ultimate RPG experience yes the outer worlds is a good game but it's definitely not a better RPG than New Vegas and while both games have their faults and no game is perfect we think New Vegas is a clear-cut winner and keep in mind this is a view we've developed after hundreds of hours of combined playtime on the outer worlds many many playthroughs and loads of story choice testing the thing about the outer worlds is that while it's enjoyable it could have been way better and suffered when it came to replayability due to many factors to large ones being that it was short and another being that there was a bit of an illusion of choice and meaningful impact we'll discuss the issues with the length later on but basically you can do everything without rushing in twenty to twenty five hours and upon further replays you can cut serious lengths off that time will explain the illusion of choice more soon but in a nutshell the game feels like there's lots of choice and impact and options if you only play at once we made a few Twitter polls which helped confirm these thoughts basically 70% of responders had only play the outer worlds once if you add in those who have played it twice you've got two combined 88% of the total so 70% played at once and then interestingly 72% of people felt like their choices were actually meaningful and changed things a lot in the game with the other 28% of people more than 1/4 feeling like it didn't then when you look at what people would rate it out of a hundred fifty four percent of people rated it between 80 and 100 and 31% between 70 and 80 now we don't have any sure way of knowing who picked what but I have a sneaking suspicion that generally speaking those who played the game once other people rating the game highest I mean my internal rating for the outer world was probably around 8 out of 10 the very moment I finished my first playthrough 2 we also know the game didn't necessarily have the resources that a triple-a game would have behind it so good on them for making what they did but it was sold for a full triple-a price so we're judging it in comparison to other fully priced RPGs please do share the video with your friends if they've played the outer worlds too so let's dive in first starting with what makes an RPG good in the first place also it should go without saying but spoiler alert so what is an RPG and what makes it good well at the simplest level a role-playing game is a game that lets you play a certain role in a fictional world but it's not as simple as the name suggests we think the term RPG has been watered down over time and applied to many things the term RPG often gets conflated with what are essentially role-playing mechanics in action-adventure games when people are referring to RPG games where RPG elements are the defining features they tend to be talking about things inspired by tabletop role playing games like D&D games where you can craft a character to take on one of many roles perhaps choosing classes and having a story for your character and then you can take this character through a world that you have the ability to impact RPGs focus on things like choice and consequence to different play styles and approaches to missions world building and statistical elements to build your character with these elements such as perks and skills even reflected in choice and consequence possibilities so a great RPG ends up being an amalgamation of many features that translate into an experience that allows you to choose a certain role in a world to play and does it well a huge appeal is that obviously in your own life you're limited by your genetics and you can only be you but escaping into the world of an RPG game let's you be people who are completely unlike you or just one facet of you but super enhanced so let's do an analysis of choice and consequence in the outer worlds did they nail it or is it a weaker area than some people realized alright so this is one of the biggest topics to discuss and it's of pivotal importance to most RPG players as we said part of what makes role-playing games appealing is the ability to play through the game differently by making different choices and getting different outcomes but we aren't just talking about be a good guy get X or be a bad guy get Y choice and consequence is more complicated than that the idea of role-playing is essentially living out another life in a fictional world if you screw over some friends in real life they may come back to bite you or if you spend all your time in the gym you may get a lot stronger but not have as much time to make your brain sharper everything has choice and consequence but before we talk about choice in relation to the outer worlds let's look at some examples to show the different ways choice can be approached in RPGs the way we see it there are generally two main ways that developers deliver choice to the player the first is the choice of path so this would be more in line with open-world games like the Elder Scrolls series in the Elder Scrolls v skyrim you begin the game and then the world is your oyster you can choose to just go hunt deer or you can choose to wander off to Windhelm and join the Dark Brotherhood or you can follow the main storyline and fulfill the Dragonborn prophecy or you can just ignore all of that and go become a master wizard it's the kind of open-world game format where you have an incredibly vague backstory a simple setup and the potential to roleplay almost whoever you want now on the flip side with scarves questlines there's rarely a lot of choice sure Imperial verse Stormcloaks is the main example of questline choice but as for the dark brotherhood or the Thieves Guild or the main storyline at the end of the day those questline outcomes and consequences all look the same Skyrim would be an example of a game that has lots of choice via the path you take but not a lot of consequences if anything the consequence just becomes the opportunity cost of choosing to build your character as an Argonian assassin in the dark brotherhood versus an orc member of the companions now obviously every single RPG has not been or does not even need to be an open-world game but there is a catch when you make the decision to create a more hub based game a more linear experience where you're assured along a certain path consequence becomes a lot more important because you don't have the ability to just up and leave and become a professional thief in Riften it becomes about how you approach the situation and also the outcome of the situation which leads to new scenarios so imagine one developing method is about how many different paths you can take from the origin point and these paths lead down a rather simple quest line and then the other developing method creates a single path from an origin point but at certain points throughout the game path there are multiple doors all of which lead down separate new paths that branch into new scenarios and so on here's a visual idea of what I'm talking about now like we said games often have a mixture of both but one philosophy is usually predominant ultimately I think a good way to measure the degree of choice delivered in a game would be to ask people what their experience was and see how much it lines up with yours in Skyrim for example it is common for people's first experiences to be radically different now that's simply because they chose to go do different things or go in different directions in other more focused RPGs the differences are more like I chose to kill him which caused her to betray me so I did X Y Zed versus another person's version of events so clearly the outer worlds from a design perspective and virtue of it being a hub based somewhat linear experience it should align with a latter method of delivering choice it seems the outer world set out to give players a different experience by allowing them a great deal of choice over each step in the path to the end but this ladies and gentlemen is an endeavor that I feel they didn't reach as well as they could have or as well as people have praised them for so the outer worlds does not have great replayability take this from someone who has personally done over ten playthroughs and spent well over 100 hours playing once you've played through the game twice a board and a Phineas playthrough you've essentially seen it all in terms of meaningful choices so why Scott why is there no replayability well in RPGs the main idea behind replayability is consequence and opportunity cost so for example if I'm to play a dumb melee guy that makes these three pivotal quest decisions then I should end up with a very different experience to someone else so when I go to replay the game as an intelligent smooth talker I should end up with a very different experience but the problem is that I don't in the outer worlds there are essentially only three big decisions you have the deserters versus Edgewater MSI versus iconoclasts and then Phineas versus the board now the first of those two decisions can be easily reconciled my first character an intelligent charismatic character managed to broker an alliance between MSI and the iconoclasts as well as help Edgewater and return Adelaide to help them grow better food but it was disappointing when I realized Michaels be female a character achieved to the exact same outcome with a mega 55 persuade check which only requires a base 30 persuade + companion skill bonuses from Parvati and Felix I mean surely reconciling two ideologically opposed factions should require a little more diplomatic finesse than that I didn't really seem to have an edge in that regard - polar opposite characters managed to do the exact same thing and get the best outcome per se so ultimately the only decision with any necessary sacrifice is choosing between the board and phineas with whom by the way you spend very little time with actually getting to know him the worst part is that it has the fallout problem where you can basically play all the factions off one another until the very end and then just pick a side but at least in Fallout 4 choosing a side at the end had to wait to it if you sided with the railroad you had to go blow up the Brotherhood of Steel or if you were with the Brotherhood of Steel you had to go the railroad it at the very least gave you consequences for your final decisions for example when I first decided to go with the Brotherhood of Steel I was kind of gutted that I had to kill deacon and the rest of the railroad it was a heavy choice I wanted to bring peace between them but it was just not an option so I was forced to consider where my loyalties lie but in the outer worlds you never really put in that position what goes down on monarch or even Edgewater is relatively unimportant to your final decisions why would me helping the iconoclast while also helping the board not become a point of conflict where I'm forced to pick aside the board seems to have no problem with you helping a bunch of dissident revolutionaries the antithesis of the corporate regime it doesn't make sense the only time I was ever confronted with a big choice moment was when working for the board if you put Adelaide in charge or diverted power to the lab in Edgewater then a Conde asks you to kill the entire town as my companions had a big reaction but when I went and actually did it and followed through with it with those same companions they didn't seem bothered at all not even a peep from them outside of that one time in the whole game across all my playthroughs was I ever put in a kind of position where I really lacked one faction like Edgewater a place that I had set up for success but then had another faction I was working with asked me to wipe them out forcing me to consider my loyalties this all ties into one major point and a major nono for me and RPGs which is that the outer world lacks real consequence the whole game is very non-committal you don't have to make any choices with serious wait until the end this lack of weighty decisions harms it in the long run there is not enough polarization but I think this will be best explained in comparisons let's look at obsidians previous work Fallout New Vegas at the start of New Vegas you wake up in good Springs and the town is being harassed by a group of criminals called the powder gangers now you can help defend the town against the powder gangers causing you to become hated by the criminals now when you come across the powder gangers they will attack you on sight but little did you know at the time that if you instead chose to side with the powder gangers you will get pointed in the direction of the NCR correctional facility where their base is and you can start a mini quest line working for them something that you would have otherwise entirely missed this is an example of a polarizing decision at the start of the game you make a choice and as a consequence you were closed out of certain quest paths whereas in the outer worlds you have the edgewater as the first area and it has the whole deserters versus Township dynamic so there's ultimately three options divert power to botanical lab helping Adelaide and dooming the town you can divert power to Edgewater and convince the deserters to return or you can do the same but convince Reed Thompson to step down and then Adelaide runs the place here's my problem none of them actually have weight the game is too afraid of giving you consequences even if you screw over the entire town Reed Thompson just gets mad at you and says that you aren't getting the regulator to which you can just intimidate your way in or force your way in but really I just destroyed your whole town you should have me arrested and hung or you should try and punish me kill me report me to the board get hostile do something the game is too afraid to dole out consequences for your actions the game has choices for sure but it does not have the weight that makes the choices truly meaningful without sounding too masochistic like punish me please it's what makes RPGs exciting if they show you there are consequences early on you will assume that is the case for the rest of the game and treat all these decisions with gravity I can help the iconoclasts an anti bored anti-establishment anti OSI dissident faction and no one cares I mean at the last minute I can decide to screw over MSI but then only MSI gets miffed the board the actual board of corporations do not care if you help what they would essentially view as heretical terrorists what look to new vegas for contrast to the more polarizing faction you join so for example the legion the more consequences you are going to have I mean if you join Caesar's Legion you are going to have to assassinate the head of the NCR government joining the legion makes you pull the trigger and pick aside I mean simply put in order to follow through with the NCR legion or yes man questlines you have to kill mr. house if you join mr. house you have to destroy the brotherhood of steel no questions asked these are the kinds of polarizing decisions that make you stop and think and consider your loyalties and decisions you have to realize if you destroy the Brotherhood for house you are jeopardizing your relationship with Veronica and she may abandon you I mean if you have boon as a companion he will shoot caesar's legion members on sight how's that for a polarizing choice there was only one time in the outer worlds where I genuinely thought my companions were going to leave me for my choices and that's when I had to clear out edgewater and guess what they didn't even budge after the fact not to mention that Edgewater is provide his hometown I didn't even have an argument with them we'll talk about companions more later but the point here is that there is no consequence in order to get a companion to leave you actually have to try really hard by doing the most obviously horrific thing to them but even with high enough leadership skills you can still get them to stay I mean even fallout 4 has more companion polarization there for example deacon and anti railroad aren't compatible or anti brotherhood and paladin dance aren't compatible the outer worlds possesses the illusion of consequence but often without any substance behind it even in new vegas when you try and pull off and everyone get along state you can't and you have to make certain sacrifices and compromises we will expand a lot on this in the world-building and factions but another point there which affects the overall plot and weight of choices is the lack of interconnection like you can easily easily be in a position where you help every faction and barely disrupt any others the factions don't have the interconnectedness to make the choices about them have consequences for others for example the whole situation on Edgewater is isolated from the whole situation on monarch which is isolated from the whole situation on Byzantium or groundbreaker like I mentioned previously you would think doing a bunch of quests for the dissident iconoclasts may create some conflict in your working relationship with the board or even MSI the game doesn't want you to feel locked out by making any decisions and I can understand that's nice but ultimately it causes the game to feel like you aren't making any meaningful choices the opportunity cost aka what you lose out on by making a certain choice is what makes the choice meaningful it's the commitment and the sacrifice if joining the iconoclast means you have to forsake the luxuries of the board and put surely lose even friends like Vika max perhaps then the commitment to the iconoclast cause becomes more meaningful because of the sacrifices whereas in the game you can actually just work with every faction with essentially zero repercussions people may fixate on the idea you can shoot pretty much everyone and yes that's a choice it's something I appreciate but it's not a choice in the forefront of the experience if you make a game where a big appeal is meant to be choice and consequence then you want to put that at the forefront of the experience the choices should exist in the main storyline that along with the consequences what is put in front of the player not just oh well the game has choice because I can kill everyone that's a nice touch but not a replacement for the main experience which should be full of choices and consequences that affect the course of the game we'll talk more about factions later on but the fact that this game had a board of corporations all with potentially varied ideologies and motivations but gave us no opportunity to influence the future of the board by helping certain corporations over others or helping MSI back on the board it's a shame and ultimately it leaves us with little meaningful choice and consequence there is choice about gameplay method the standard combat lockpick hack stealth convince etc which is all fantastic but unless that's coupled with the role-playing choices and consequences it leaves you wanting for actual character impact on the world okay ladies and gentlemen it's time to talk statistics all the numbers and such that are representative of your character here is where the outer worlds stuffed up in our opinion like in regards to choice and consequence the outer worlds often suffers because it's afraid to polarize and force the character to commit to a role that they chose I mean this is abundantly clear in the cheap respec option for skills and perks but let's first have a look at all the elements of character creation and we can talk about each one as we go so if you don't know we made about 6 builds for this game that are on the channel and personally I've played about 10 different playthroughs so there's my credentials and I can tell you without a doubt that the outer worlds does not have great character creation at first it may appear so because of all the numbers and various skills but it's not the case starting with attributes the big problem here is the limited functions of each attribute they don't seem to affect a whole lot all of the starting attributes effect starting skills as is the case in new Vegas but the attributes themselves don't do much strength increases melee damage and carry weight capacity dexterity increases melee swing speed and reload speed right off the bat two entire attributes that aren't really necessary unless you're playing a melee character reload speed is overrated by the way the third of a second or the second you save are not worth the 3 points invested into dexterity to achieve that bonus so we have the mind attributes intelligence which increases critical hit damage that's fine but it doesn't affect skill points available per level up and doesn't do anything else perception increases headshot weak spot damage which is fine but it doesn't improve general accuracy or ennemy mark a distance or anything like that you have the personality stats charm which gives you high reputation bonuses and companion ability refresh and you have temperament which is just passive health regeneration however the bonuses you get for high investment in many of these attributes just isn't worth the trade-off for lowering other attributes the penalty is given for lowering attributes are often too large and the gains are too little the limited effects of these attribute values in combination with lowered incentive to increase many of them results in a system where some attributes can be considered redundant or not worth the investment and other attributes such as intelligence are clearly superior to the rest in terms of the benefits they give so this creates a situation where instead of polarizing your character to achieve a specialized but powerful build you can just create a powerful build by investing in intelligence and maybe some perception and charm the sacrifice required to achieve a very powerful build in a certain area is practically zero because sacrificing attribute scores is really not worth it nor needed to achieve the best build setup who is going to actively disadvantage themselves if the payoff is not worth the price let's take a look at Fallout New Vegas I may want to play a dumb brute explosives build so I could just dump points into strength and endurance making me far beefier and stronger character but I can only do this if I take from elsewhere so I make charisma and intelligence 1 I will suffer for it with weak companions and low skill points on a level up but I am far stronger for it in respect to a melee play style I'm playing a certain specialized role whereas in the outer worlds I could make intelligence below-average which gets me dumb dialogue but what it also does is reduce my critical damage massively a negative effect that could be mitigated with a single point investment but say I made intelligence that low what bonuses am I going to achieve it's not even good for a male a build because I get my critical damage and if I'm not even a male a build strength and dexterity aren't necessary so that leaves me with investing in either perception charm or temperament temperament a lot of the time is made redundant as you collect copious amounts of Audrina from looting and once you get the harvester perk it's all over so you have perception which can give you 35 percent bonus to headshot and weak spot damage now that's probably the best option for a combat character but here's the other caveat the outer world is ridiculously easy in terms of combat a lot of the time it's just not necessary which in our case would leave us with only charm left but what if I'm a dumb non companion focused character charm without companions loses a lot of its value especially when you consider that reputation boosts a at a high level are overkill good charm with all the side quests and completion of style of play should pretty much get you revered all the time and be reputation bonuses aren't really going to matter for any character that actually picks aside and becomes hostile to another but like we said before the AdWords doesn't really make you pick sides until the end when the game's over besides allegiances the only benefit of reputation is better vendor prices which aren't needed because a there isn't much stuff to buy in the outer worlds that is useful or needed and B bits are plentiful through looting and questing and if you got to spend them they're much better spent on tinkering your weapons or something so ultimately if you play a dumb character without companions or melee you don't really have much to invest in besides perception or temperament this is just one example but it highlights how it can be hard to make a niche character build because a lot of the attributes are not that valuable you Vegas obsidians previous work had a much better stat system and there were lots of trade-offs that you had to balance for example you may go I want one strength because I'm not using melee and I don't need heaps of carry weight well the other thing you have to consider is the strength requirement of weapons each weapon has a strength requirement and if you didn't meet it your handling of that weapon was very poor you couldn't be very accurate but because the advantage of 10 intelligence is so high you may actually consider trading the points and suffering the consequences of low strength if the outer world's attributes carried a wider variety of effects you would more variables to consider making each attribute have a trade-off rather than have a situation where there are a few clear best attributes and the rest are pretty met look at endurance in New Vegas endurance determines a character's environmental resistances like poison and radiation hit points and healing rate it also determines the number of implants you are allowed to use so when you're building your character you need to consider all of these things whereas in the outer worlds you can just look at temperament and choose your health regenerate essentially there is no attribute that just increases your raw based health and resistances so it's hard to start as a beefy tank without getting the toughness perk increasing your base health by 50% but every character can get that so say I have a dainty charismatic intelligent dexterous kind of character and you have a big strong male a brute character guess what they both have the same base health see the problem the attribute differences are not meaningful enough if you look at our captain build what we call the best build it had one point investment into every attribute and ends up creaming the game with companions but can also deal out solid damage on his own which in itself is another problem like I mentioned combat is easy but to be honest a lot of the time I found investing in combat skills to be unnecessary from a statistical point of view obviously from a fun point of view they're good for example our gunslinger build is the most fun I had in combat in the outer worlds period but weapon skills just decreased weapons ways and increase critical chance but if you're say a dumb character with low critical damage who cares the flat damage is enough but by not having skills where attributes interact with ranged weapon damage it means your gun slinger build does as much flat damage as your melee character with a pistol obviously high intelligence and perception factors in with crit damage and weak spot damage but there aren't many variables the game is not as deep as people think now let's talk skills in general in the outer worlds you invest into a skill group for example dialogue which will increase all of those skills why intimidate and persuade by one point when you select it however once it hits 50 you then have to invest in the skill by itself so say you invest in dialogue persuade hits 50 and the lie intimidate are at 35 well you can either invest stim persuades singularly or invest in the dialogue group but it will only affect skills below 50 so lie and intimidate the idea behind this group investment system is to give you a feel for what you like before you specialize more but this causes some massive problems for replayability and diversity of builds let me first address the problem of companions skill bonuses for a second I like the idea behind it but by adding it as just a passive boost to your skill it makes you very overpowered especially when these bonuses are effectively doubled by the inspiration skill level 60 ability our best build with all rounder attributes effectively uses companions to become a master at everything you can easily get by with 50s or 60s in plenty of skills and achieve an effective level skill of a hundred with companions and gear combos it's quite opie simply put if skill groups didn't exist this wouldn't be as much of a problem for example because I can take the stealth group from 20 to 50 with 30 skill points aka 3 in-game levels I can get effective levels of 80 or higher in hacking and lock picking with companions so it cost me 30 points to go from 20 to 80 or 90 you can see how this is overpowered but if companions skill boosts remained the same but there were no skill groups it would default make it more balanced because it would have taken 60 skill points aka 6 levels to get hacking and lock picking both 250 therefore increasing the opportunity cost this is our criticism of skill group investment as a whole it forgoes opportunity cost and commitment for the sake of making it easier on the player but by removing barriers that lock you out from being great at everything you diminish the replayability and individually different role-playing experiences the other problem here is that the skills themselves just like the attributes aren't that great leaving a clear few skills that are fantastic and the rest can be thrown to the wind in my opinion the most useful skills are science lock-picking inspiration and persuade they managed to make science one of the most opie combat skills for two reasons one it increases the flat damage of plasma shock and later corrosive and NRA weapons meaning this tech skill is the only skill that actually increases flat damage reason number two this skill sharply reduces the tinkering cost of weapons which means you can upgrade your chosen weapon up to five levels beyond your own constantly keeping its flat raw damage nice and high the wig out here is that the science skill is the damage skill it's a far better combat skill than any investment into the actual combat skills when you consider other trade-offs and by virtue of investing in science you will default get large boosts to engineering and meta pool because of the skill grouping lock-picking is the best skill for access to loot and convenience and comes in handy far more than hacking does but guess what if you invest in lock-picking aka the stealth group you're probably gonna have hacking at about 50 anyways as I mentioned before the inspiration sixty ability is overpowered as doubling skill bonuses from companions making these utility skills even higher we also have to consider that besides the skill group investment already making it so you can be broadly proficient at the few play styles there are the outer worlds is also entirely missing certain play styles and skills unarmed or hand-to-hand is completely missing from the outer worlds and it's a play style that is loved by many RPG players who want to try and be that kung-fu killer even if it turns out to be quite a challenge there is also no explosive skills as well as no mines no grenades or other throwable explosives the explosive type weapons are the grenade launcher and the plasma launcher which are governed by the heavy weapons skill ultimately an explosive character isn't very feasible we just think there are some cool skills missing and the skill group idea harms the game more than it helps it by making it easy to be good at everything therefore d incentivizing taking on a specific role to play in a role-playing game the stealth skill was also made somewhat redundant through the use of the holographic shroud tool the hologram did enhance a diplomate playthrough because you can infiltrate places with more of a double agent vibe but it came at the expense of giving stealth characters a meaningful advantage in certain quest moments rendering the sneak skill far less useful than in other RPGs like Fallout games but now we've discussed attributes and skills which in summary we think are not as good as other RPGs because they lack the potency complexity and interaction that produce opportunity cost which results in interesting and diverse builds therefore increasing replayability from a gameplay perspective so time to talk about perks in floors let's address flaws which I think are a fantastic role-playing idea it's an excellent idea we love it so what's the problem they just never worth it you see the trade-off of taking a floor is that you get access to a perk point that sounds excellent but the problem is that the perks are really crappy or at best they're solid they essentially boil down to boring stat boosts that could easily be implemented as effects of attributes or skills now I'm very aware that the previous Fallout games such as New Vegas also had boring perks this is kind of unavoidable but there were also many interesting gameplay changing perks that could be cornerstones of entire builds so there is basically zero incentive to take on these floors because the trade off the extra perk point is just not worth it throughout all my playthroughs I was often looking for perks to pick that weren't dull instead of trying to make tough decisions between three good perks so as good as the floor system is it just doesn't work unless the perks ok the reward for taking on the floor are worth sacrificing for with the attributes being quite lackluster in many of the perks being simple stat boosts it seems like many of the perk effects should have belonged to an attribute or skill for example temperament or strength could have managed based health instead of a perk perception could have increased the maximum time-dilation meter as well as increase the range of interactable highlights charm could have affected vendor buy and sell prices as well as the effectiveness of companions like in new vegas and still have the leadership skills as a separate modifier dexterity could have affected movement speed as well as time dilation recharge rate the thick-skinned perk seems as if it should have been part of an attribute as well as other boring resistance based perks but ultimately what seems to have happened is that they limited what attributes do because you can't change them later in game and they don't want you to commit to any sort of build or playstyle so many of their effects were palms off to skills and perks but like we mentioned before this harms the game's replayability and role-playing experience and I want to clarify here I'm not against basic perks like toughness or cheetah they would be perfectly fine if the attributes already affected those gameplay functions but then these perks could be used to double down on your strengths or help mitigate your weaknesses even the good perks of the outer worlds don't really change the style of besides the ones related to having no companions looked in New Vegas for example perhaps he wanted to play a shotgun character but shotguns aren't the best weapons in terms of armor penetration making them hard to be feasible in the long run however you could get the shotgun surgeon perk that allows you to ignore 10 points of damage threshold making the shotgun playstyle work and when you combine that with the stay back perk shotguns have a 10% chance per pellet to knock down an enemy these two perks allowed you to make a very specific playstyle work well with a specific perk and attribute setup there were many perks like this which helped you create your own individual character to roleplay like if you want it to be a rootin tootin cowboy character you could get the cowboy perk which increases damage dealt with dynamite lever-action firearms hatchets knives and revolvers by 25% making some of those earlier game weapons that are weaker more functional in the late game it's a perk that helps create a specific role-playing experience the way I like to think of RPGs is in layers you have your first layer which is your attributes or special stats your fundamental genetics essentially then on top of that you have layer 2 which is your skills which is your experience and proficiencies with certain things adding another dynamic and then in my opinion the third layer is perks feats talents or whatever you want to call it in a certain game but this third layer is to add more specific individuality and bonuses to help craft the final touches on a build then you have gear and weapons into actual story choices and factions and such but those fundamental three layers help create a good base character but the problem here is in the outer worlds that the attributes are not complex enough to create a meaningful base layer of genetic individuality the skills are too easy to become proficient at which decreases individuality further among characters and then the perks of very basic boosts that don't really further the identity of the character armor master for example is a great perk but it's a great perfect pretty much every build it's like the default level 20 to boost not a specific choice to facilitate your specific style of play the last part I want to discuss is the aptitudes and lack of traits in the same spirit of adding layers through attributes skills and perks more complexity in Fallout New Vegas traits were additional perk lack characteristics that could be chosen at character creation in the outer worlds we have aptitudes which are essentially little comedic back stories featuring miniscule bonuses of +12 a skill or minus 3% damage taken from a certain damage type they are largely inconsequential and I was disappointed to find that they aren't even referenced at any point in the game like through a dialog option or something so to me this just appears as a facade of complexity or just a little character creation meme but compare these two traits in a game like New Vegas where you have the four-eyes trait or the good-natured trait or the far shot trait these are all perks that further emphasize your own unique characters identity so I was disappointed to see these missing at the end of the day the ad awards character creation and leveling system lacks the diversity and complexity to truly create a distinct individual experience outside of a basic combat dialogue or stealth dynamic once again this does not mean the game is bad and in fact it's better than a lot of other RPGs but these days that's not saying much and their previous work on Fallout New Vegas while even that has its flaws was much better at delivering you the statistical framework to facilitate role-playing a wide variety of individual and distinct character builds now let's discuss the world building and factions of the our worlds so the premise of the outer worlds isn't bad at all the whole idea of an alternate timeline where large business trusts were never broken up and therefore earth developed into a super corporate society dominated by mega corporations who have since begun to colonize outer space is pretty cool taking place in the Year 2350 5 in the house young system you find yourself as one of the passengers aboard the colony ship known as the hope which was abandoned by the board leaving it adrift with colonists unable to be revived the colony on Halcyon is on the verge of collapse running low on nutritious food for the people with disease and conflict spreading the border trying to enact an evil plan to reduce the strain of scarce resources on the colony the base idea of this universe is fine but the world building isn't as fleshed out as we would have liked for example in our 5 missed opportunities video we discussed how the board was kind of portrayed as this cartoonishly evil capitalist machine without much explore a of the different corporations what ambitions they may have their hidden agendas into various interests being this kind of evil poster child for extreme capitalism meant that the world building potential of the outer worlds was left unfulfilled yes the corporation's all want money and that's kind of the point but they'd also want power in various ways and it would be cool to be able to help the different corporations to achieve their specific aims instead of being presented to players as a logo a jingle and a color scheme more corporations should have been shown off as real organizations with their own company culture and real people running them who have a handful of unique goals like who are Rizzo's we just know they're a huge food and beverage corporation and we know a few products they produce and that they have an abandoned lab on monarch but why not take it further and let us meet a bunch of higher-ups and help them in some way auntie Cleo's was explored a bit on ROS way which I appreciated but it's not like we got to meet her or whoever is in charge more instances of meeting the Zuckerberg behind the Facebook so to speak would have been appreciated of course we made the CEO of UDL because he's also the head of the board chairman Rockwell but outside of this and some spaces choice stuff in Edgewater which was neat there wasn't much discovery of what each corporation was truly like in the outer worlds we quickly find out that the corporations seem immoral and bad and they are outside of the CAMAC saying the board helps to create a much needed order your perspective of them doesn't develop that much and isn't really challenged obviously MSI is better than the board but they're not even a faction on the board anymore and we can't help msi get back on the board and then work under Sandra's guidance to convince the heads of other corporations to move toward a new direction or anything like that that could have been really cool and with Sanjar being a pretty well written character you can see how more examples of strongly characterized corporation leaders would add more juice to the world I would have loved to explore more of the inner board politics for myself maybe some corporations are truly evil but others are just a tad morally gray and perhaps some are even a bit forgivable even if they do end up having a net negative impact on the citizens of the halcyon system anyway why is having the board painted as one big body and not explored in enough depth such a letdown for well building the problem is that the corporation's own the system they not only own it but they founded the colony there and in a way they are the world end of the writers should have characterized them as much as possible and made them impactful even a game without super strong RPG elements Borderlands 3 makes you get a feel for exactly what the Jacobs corporation is like for example through Jacobs himself same deal with assisting the head of Atlas as melih Wan competes against them viciously it all helps with giving the corporation some character it felt like things started off well with spaces choice with Repub s'en and Edgewater and the wounded guy you meet at the start and so on but then it kind of just faded away it should be extremely clear who every single member of the board is and we should have a better idea of what they're like even strong characterization of half of the corporations on the board would have been so much better moving on to other factions we have the iconoclasts who as a standalone faction are all well and good the downside is that this is the only substantial counter faction in the entire game that's properly against the board think about it your reputation can improve with the deserters spaces choice ground breaker auntie Cleo sublight MSI the board and to the iconoclasts the deserters are just a little inconsequential group who left Edgewater auntie Cleo and spaces choice are subsidiaries of corporations on the board groundbreaker doesn't like the board but still cooperates with them and MSI is a not in their good graces but wants to rejoin them sublight is a pretty cool faction with presence underground breaker and monarch but they're allowed to operate through a legal loophole so even if they sometimes act at odds with the board they're not exactly anti board and adjust in the business of doing grey activities for profit they're also one of the only factions you feel like you properly join versus other factions where you more or less just help and improve reputation while serving as a kind of freelancer having the iconoclasts as the only significant anti board faction is kind of limiting if you don't really agree with their philosophies and besides they can't make any lasting impact in the story anyway they're only relevant to monarch and they're just not formidable enough of course Phineas is anti board but he's not a faction is he and he's the only main story end game option for siding against the Boy and he's not very fleshed out anyway obviously his character has helped by having some mystery but he still could have been integrated into the world and story much more overall with both Phineas and the board not characterized strongly it puts you in a scenario where the two big main story options didn't really dive that deep I feel like there's some factions I'm missing out on here but there isn't really the only factions that had actual weight were MSI the iconoclast and the board but with the storyline a bit short opportunity to really expand the law on these factions and other factions became limited another thing I found a bit disappointing was the lack of perspectives that unfold with the world building so let's take New Vegas is most conventionally morally abhorrent faction Caesar's Legion you first hear about Caesar's Legion as this brutal slaver almost barbaric kind of faction then you get to Nipton and vulpes has crucified half the town and killed the rest but then he contrasts this by speaking kind of eloquently and saying he won't kill you this piqued my interest a little bit then you get exposed to characters like Boone and other NCR characters who espoused their hatred for the faction and talk about the ongoing conflict but when you eventually find your way to caesar's fort it gets a little interesting talking to the trader there he talks of caesar's controlled lands being very safe and secure saying Raiders are never a problem and most civilians get on peacefully just do what you're told if you're asked or face the consequences then when you finally meet Caesar you can hear his spiel about her Gale in dialectics and how Caesar's Legion is a necessary evil for the future of mankind and how conquering NCR lands will create a societal solution through synthesis so as you played through new vegas the world unfolded as many different perspectives came at you caesar's legion are still the baddies so to speak but you see their warped perspective and how they logically come to their conclusions compare this to the outer worlds you start in Edgewater and you start to see the negatives of corporate overlords and extreme capitalism as you would assume but I never learnt anything new about them or had my perspectives challenged some characters did have off-the-cuff lines about how they bring purpose in order but nothing convincing there was never a situation where say I meet a character in Byzantium perhaps Minister Clark who may we could have turned out to be a really fantastic charitable guy who believed in bettering house yawn for everyone but also believed in due process and patience he would be a far more sympathetic character and may convince you to side with the board but as the game Stan's siding with the board feels rather morally rotten the worlds and planets do look really cool in the outer world although I must say there wasn't enough of them to explore and the game would feel more in-depth if there was her face this and maybe Typhon or something as well also we're not the biggest fan of Scylla we can appreciate it being there but it's pretty underdeveloped and feels a bit like we need environmental diversity and somewhere else to send you for quests so here's a bear asteroid another thing to talk about in regards to the world building is the enemy types in the game the enemy creatures are pretty cool and while there's not a huge variety there's not a lack of it there's men to saw based enemies and wrapped it ons and primals and canids and tera Ray's then you've got order mechanicals that is all the different robots however there is a lack of variety with the human enemies such as the plain Marauders Marauders are very shallow in the outer worlds when compared to say the Raider gangs all Fallout New Vegas none of them in the outer worlds have any character they all look the same and just fall into different build categories like you've got the heavy unit ones the lighter marksman ones and the more standard ones there's also the generic outlaws but there was no personification of any outlaw or Marauder group and they didn't have any cool hideouts or different factions you know realistic world building elements gangs don't just stand in squads at various checkpoints along the road amongst generic ammo boxes and wait for you to come by I liked how in New Vegas you had actual gangs with stories and law the jackals the Vipers and the fiends you know the Vipers are a group of tribal type Raiders with a shamanistic nature who originated from vault 15 and then you've got the fiends who are this psycho gang of Raiders who are addicted to Kem's which are supplied to them by the cons and they're in control of vault 3 and they've got these influential leaders with personalities like motor honor violet cook cook and drivin fi who are all characterized in their own way and the Jackals are these kind of opportunistic savage types and there's members who have filed their teeth to sharp points and sometimes carry out cannibalistic acts and you can often find them trying to ambush you from smart hiding spots like behind billboard I can really remember distinct encounters with the Raider gangs in New Vegas but compare it to the outer worlds and the generic Marauders who just stand around locations or along the roads are made to look so plain by comparison the outer worlds could have done Marauders really well too with tighter hub spaces to work with Fallbrook brings some mercenary type vibes to the world but they're not enemies obviously I'd also give credit to the bounty collecting quest you can get an edge water where you track down and eliminate three different outlaws but beyond that characterization of human enemies pretty much stops there now we've talked about companions a bit already but what else is there to say well whether or not you thought a certain companion was interesting more largely come down to preference in terms of their raw straight-up appeal some people just see a companion and hear them say a few things and bam they really vibe this character so I'm not really here to say a whole lot about the characters themselves but what I can do is focus on more objective aspects like how deep their development was and if you can actually impact them one thing we noticed was that companions don't really have any strong convictions it is possible but it is very hard to get a companion to leave you unintentionally as they're just so agreeable you can literally slaughter Parvati's hometown after she recommends that you don't and she'll still stay with you and won't even care you literally have to go out of your way and kill her lover for her to want to leave you and even then you can persuade her to stay compare that to new Vegas where you have companions like Boone who will refuse to work with you if you side with Caesar and just shoots Legion soldiers on site or if you want Veronica as a companion it's very hard to just blow up the Brotherhood of Steel and have her stay so if you're doing a house playthrough and he wants you to destroy the bunker it creates a situation where you're forced to make choices choices that will actually impact your companions and perhaps choices your companions will make you reconsider Parvati partly convinced me not to divert power away from Edgewater but that's pretty much it Vic you can see the use in the board seeing them as a necessary force of order but doesn't mind a few side against them Felix despises the board and will approach you about it if you help them but nothing really comes of it and he'll still help you as you them and if you side with the iconoclasts and decide to take the fight to Stella Bay yoga just says she hopes her drinking buddies don't die and stays with you as well you can choose to help any faction do criminal activities such as steal have any philosophical stance and none of your companions will leave you even though some companions were quite likable the game does treat them less like characters with real decision-making power and more like tag along mercenaries who will do anything you want it is also hard to make meaningful impact in much of their development for Parvati her quest is all sweet and cozy and cute but the fact that her big companion quest is a fetch quest involving collecting stuff for a date with a woman she just met is a bit of a letdown sure it adds to a character but it should have been a little side quest as it's just not enough development for a main companion quest it's being able to talk to your crush kind of development and with Ellie her development is kind of just sometimes you do need help from people which is a good thing for someone to realise but it just feels a bit Elementary as a main companion development arc now with vicar max he came across as a very interesting character because he actually seemed to have a strong ideology about how the world works and argues it passionately but then his development is pretty much I took DMT and realized I was wrong all along I was such a jerk there's no pacing with the development or having them change their minds about some really heavy themes gradually over time there should be some catalyst points along the journey where characters constantly reflect and you have a chance to cause impact by trying to sway them one way or another they will ask to talk from time to time but what you say to them doesn't actually matter all that much of course there's the end screens which change depending on what you do but there's not heaps of change reflected in the actual game if you look at Raoul in New Vegas he is dealing with growing old and feeling useless he can be convinced to make peace with his age and focus more on being this kind of old chill ball with lots of wisdom and skills or you can have him live on with his passionate young gunslinger vibes all the way to the grave both choices are reflected with differing companion perks and companion aesthetics with Verone you have the interplay of ideology and family with Boone you've got his struggle with PTSD coming from his direct involvement in the bitter springs masca and he also had to make a sacrifice killing his wife instead of seeing her taken into slavery even in Fallout 4 you've got heavy themes for example paladin dance finds out he's a synth and that everything he stood for goes against his very being he has to struggle with the uncertainty of where he's manufactured life and real life begins and ends there's also not a way to influence the character's views very much sure we want part of their views that are removable but then some parts you should be able to shape more there was nothing like Knights of the Old Republic to where you can use your influence to turn a companion more into a dark side or light side oriented person the idea is to have companions that have their certain perspectives that can be changed over time through your and their experiences together think about it like a relationship with a person in real life you grow together and influence each other or perhaps you grow apart which would also happen in a game if they continually disagreed with what you did but of course people have those hard limits and convictions that cannot be changed as well which can cause conflict but by making the companions a bunch of yes-men it makes them feel less characterised now let's talk about the problems with the length of the game in more detail I'm not sure if there were time constraints in the game's development but the outer worlds is a short game and can be comfortably completed in 15 to 25 hours if you do every quest and take in the game however if you're not a completionist you may find yourself finishing it even quicker now some people may be thinking come on fudge Muppet what do you want you've said before that you wouldn't mind a tighter RPG so that developers can focus on more quality over quantity and now you've got a shorter game and you're not happy well that's the thing it's shorter than other RPGs but it's not higher quality there's more attention to some details like conversation integration between NPCs and companions which was awesome but ultimately in the key areas of a good RPG experience it's still fall short no Cora bleach art it's just no masterpiece as far as pacing goes you really sucked in at Edgewater and you're getting an idea of life under the rule of corporations and when you're on this smaller groundbreaker place and you start to learn more about the world and doing a few quests and and maybe you visit this little asteroid called Silla which appears to be one of the many planets you're going to be visiting then if you sided with the board you hop over to Byzantium and it's beautiful and you don't realize it at first but it's actually a very small place with very little to do but otherwise it feels like everything slowly starting to open up and then you're on monarch and things do get more interesting for sure and you're quite impressed with that planet but then BAM its final mission time the end maybe you went two rows way to do some quests but there's no other planets that you can go to monarchs the most fleshed out thing you can go to experience and it turns out that the Emerald veil the starting area is the second largest area to explore in the game it's a cool location but the fact it's large compared to everywhere but monarch is a bit disappointing also for some reason if you do side with the board and go to Byzantium early on you seem to be getting heaps of xp for doing quests so if you're taking on in completing heaps of side quests after about three hours of the game it's possible to be around level 16 that's no exaggeration and it ties into the stuff we were saying about the world building being a little bit shallow because obviously the more time you can spend in a game the more opportunities there are for the law to unravel in a deeper way if there were more planets to explore even just one planet the size and depth of Monarch you would have way more time to sink yourself into the world building and care more about the characters and companions simply put there would be more opportunity for various factions and corporations to be characterized people build attachments to places when they spend time there hardly anyone is connected to Dorne star in Skyrim as they are to the bigger cities like Whiterun they have far more detail put into them and you spend more time there doing quests meeting more characters and so on I honestly think some of our critique would be minimized simply if there was actually another monarch sized planet and another emerald Vale sized area in the base game because just by having more content the game would last longer the law would be expanded upon more and you'd have more time to form attachments to people and places companion quests should have also been a lot deeper or at least we could have more than one companion quest for example say you wanted to keep the whole dinner date thing with and that would be much more palatable as a companion quest if she had another companion quest that was much more epic and impactful it would slow down the character development pace and make it more realistic and the character would be fleshed out more as wooded the world by simply having additional content the problem with game lengths can extend to other characters - such as Phineas sure he's meant to be mysterious but having more interactions with him due to increased story length would have really helped you enjoy him more in games like fallout new vegas he spent a lot of time talking to faction leaders like robert house or even characters like yes man yes man may not be incredibly deep but it's easy to form an attachment because you spend time around him I mean put it this way I ended up with more of a relationship with Sandra than most other characters in the game and he's just one faction head of one planet he's not even an integral main story character by the end of things but because I spend so much time talking to him and doing quests on monarch I got to explore his character a lot as Michael said in our 5 missed opportunities video about the outer worlds it would have been much better if we could have spent a monarch amount of time on her face TISS potentially with Graham and the iconoclasts if they were instead located there and there was something else to replace amber hides her face tiss is the closest planet to Halcyon son and was claimed by the Hephaestus Mining Corporation from Reading terminals we know people live there and I really hope we can go there in a dlc but given the length of the base game we feel like it should have been in it and we have a little suspicion that the iconoclast were meant to be a faction of miners rebelling against the corporations on her face TISS in the original vision for the game it makes more sense if you consider that they're all wearing pieces of her face dust mining company armor and it would fit in with a mining planet really well they also have name titles such as iconoclast rioters agitators and revolutionaries and this implies they take part in some rebellious violent action which they don't really until prompted by later events but if there were a rebellious ex minor facts in on her face dust rioting against the Hephaestus Mining Corporation these titles would make a lot more sense spending a lot of time here with grey and more than what's possible on monarch would have made you more attached to him and his ideologies would have been more convincing if you were witnessing the iconoclasts fighting against a corporation that is much more tyrannical than msi but then if Byzantium wasn't so small you could go there and meet some intelligent and likeable board siding characters who you also get attached to then your decisions feel impactful and difficult because you've spent lots of time attaching yourself to characters both strongly for and strongly against the board and it's extra time is only possible with a longer game now let's talk about the gear so weapons armor consumables mods all of that stuff there are some really cool designs in the outer worlds from inferno sides and plasma cutters to the auto mag pistol and the plasma carbines some of the weapon and armor models are really dope but you don't need a pair of binoculars to see that the outer worlds doesn't have a huge variety of weapons in armor I'd say the variety is nothing special but it's not awful if you actually look at a list of weapons in the game it seems extensive enough when you consider it in scale to the length of the game which is a bit short however in a similar way to fallout 4 one of the problems is that you can turn the base weapon into other weapons through the use of mods for example you might find a unique pulse hammer unique in the sense that it does shock damage but you can just find a normal pulse hammer and apply a mod to make it deal shock damage many of these unique weapons in the game weren't truly unique for this reason and were just modded up versions of base weapons you could modify yourself there were some true eunuchs but not a ton there were the five science weapons which had some wacky and fun things to play with and were true eunuchs which we can appreciate even if they are a bit Mimi to be slightly nitpicky I'd also say I would have preferred if we got some newer weapons in place of things like plasma rifle 2.0 and Deadeye assault rifle - the armor was also a bit weird statistically it didn't feel like heavy armor really penalized you unless you were a stealth character you still get to run around and dodge and feel very agile so there wasn't a strong incentive to using lighter armors instead yes some of them did have good skill bonuses which was neat but then again the armor rating given by heavy armor far outweighs any opportunity cost plus they have the same amount of mod slots and heavy armors can give great skill bonuses - on the other hand there are a lot of consumables probably too much variety to the point where it becomes overwhelming and you don't really use many of them and often their advantages aren't that great anyway on top of that you don't really to use consumables to easily win battles outside of Audrina perhaps so the incentive to use them goes down further the mods were solid enough I don't think there's much else to say here here isn't something that was make-or-break in this game but we thought it was worth mentioning and that concludes our thoughts on why the outer worlds is not as good as many people think as we said the outer worlds is definitely not a bad game it's decent but it's definitely not the pinnacle of RPG potential either thank you so much for listening to everything we had to discuss we really appreciate that you really hear what we're saying and take everything into consideration what did you think let us know in the comments below and if you're interested in following us on social media our social links are also in the description with the timestamps a huge thanks to everyone for supporting fudge Muppet we're super grateful that people out there were as interested in this stuff as we are this was Scott and Michael and we look forward to nerding out with you again next time [Music]

Channel: FudgeMuppet

Views: 159,417

Keywords: outer worlds, the outer worlds, the outer worlds is not good, not good as you think, fudgemuppet, the outer worlds review, outer worlds not good, outer worlds bad, fudgemuppet outer worlds, outer worlds analysis

Id: e42A61IqL_U

Length: 60min 58sec (3658 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 04 2019