The Outer Worlds | A Pale Horse - Part 2/2

[@mcbadrobotvoice8155]

You know a game is lacking for content if the patricianTV reviews only add up to 2 hours

[@Jesus_Offical]

Lmao

[@Floris_VI]

💀💀💀💀

[@Balls_on_Chin]

i wouldn’t value a game on quantity, but quality.

[@virulentscot6627]

​@@Balls_on_ChinAnd The Outer Worlds has neither

[@Balls_on_Chin]

@@virulentscot6627 agreed

[@Rextraordinaire]

This game is the equivalent of going to a store and finding a new flavor of something you really like and after taking the first sip/bite, you decide you'll finish this one but never get it again

[@HumbleHonkingEnthusiast]

I didn't even get that far. The game bored me into uninstallation within 20 minutes. Every single aspect of it, art style, tone, dialogue, felt like something I played before except worse

[@georger.4408]

Perfect description. I love rpgs and will typically play them over and over. I enjoyed outer worlds but I only did one solid run and then I uninstalled to clear up space bc I knew I would be bored playing through it again

[@Cocc0nuttt0]

I'm rarely bored by games, but holy shit I was falling asleep during this. After I went to that tiny moon literally 50x50m across all my motivation to care evaporated

[@Rextraordinaire]

@@georger.4408 Same. I can easily conjure up an itch to replay even Bethesda's weaker titles and go back to other RPGs where I've already experienced 100% of it's content, but have had no interest in Outer World's DLC or all the vanilla content I know I overlooked

[@dothatshi]

Yeah I was excited when I installed this, and granted, I love Obsidian RPGs and therefore resistant to their long winded plots, but boy, by the end was I as confused as I was bored of it.

[@alexanderthemagnifcent2573]

I killed ever last person on the rich people planet and was very disappointed the ending slides didn’t acknowledge that.

[@sharkyjeff]

you should try killing a bunch of rich people in real life, you get a lot of acknowledgement

[@ThorneAshwell]

God bless you

[@pavelskrylnikov9658]

Yep. I was even more disappointing that the guards in the next room did nothing when i killed the corporate head honcho whatshername. The other problem of emulating New Vegas in OW is that it frequently forgets that "choices and consequences" isn't something you just write on the box because you have slightly different ending slides.

[@alexanderthemagnifcent2573]

@@pavelskrylnikov9658 so true

[@ATigerShark]

"The government absorbed their collective assets and sent them into deep space to aid another solar system."

[@CirclMastr]

When I did my Board playthrough, I didn't have to destroy Edgewater. I think it's because I did the sidequests for all the people at the botanical garden before forcing them back. Akande had a line about being surprised the cannery was meeting quotas, and then it moved on.

[@stills5deep]

Same

[@kinsan89]

Doing the sidequests and then convincing Reed to step down and have Adelaide take over, it becomes a very productive town and she compliments you. But it's not as fun cuz you don't get to blow Adelaide's head off

[@CirclMastr]

@@kinsan89 I got the productive line without putting Adelaide in charge, so I think it only cares about the sidequests being done.

[@magmos6346]

Fun fact: Way back when, a bunch of mystery writers got together and made a list of rules to avoid when writing a murder mystery. One of those rules was no Secret Twin Siblings unless the audience has been duly prepared for them. After this, and Glass Onion, I'm inclined to agree on that note.

[@marshallscot]

That sounds like good advice. I find it funny the amount of people who think Rian is such a great mystery writer when his whole shtick is basically just withholding as much information from the audience as possible.

[@katdeasyy]

one of the reasons I didn't like glass onion lol, I don't see twins I see janelle monae in two different wigs

[@shorewall]

@@onus_ For the Chinese rule, it could be a response to overused cliches at the time.

[@morningwoody4514]

@@onus_The “no Chinamen” rule was based upon an obviously evil ethnic character, usually Chinese, being the murderer in the story as it ruins the intrigue and mystery. It was an extremely overused cliche at the time that rule book was written, but the modern version would simply be “don’t have the obviously evil character be the murderer.”

[@constantanxietyattacks6878]

​@@onus_The Chinese rule is specifically "No Chinaman must figure into the story" which is specifically referring to a mysterious, inscrutable yellow peril foreigner character ending up as the villain, or using his "oriental mysticism" to progress the mystery. It's pretty clearly meant to be warning people against including overused stereotypes in their stories, though the wording today makes it sound *concerning*

[@glennhengist3977]

I'm a film people When you shoot in grayscale, you create harsher and more distinct shadows which helps make subjects come off as more defined. Tonal contrast in black and white gives the impression of a more distinct image that comes across as more detailed; this is of course also possible with color photography but you have to either do a lot work with on set lighting or do a decent amount of work in post, but shooting in black and white naturally does a lot of the work for you. Basically it boils down to lighting, and as you know lighting + modern video game dev that doesn't understand the ins and outs of their engine = muddy garbage most of the time.

[@mrrooter601]

I think all videogame devs should have to write a paper on a game like TF2 before they are allowed to do any lighting or modeling work.

[@tupamas]

Fun fact: Grayscale is also used in manufacturing for machine vision and humans to better distinguish surface details of components (mainly for quality control).

[@TheSergio1021]

No. I think the black and white part of the scene is actually a pre-rendered cutscene. The first shot that is done "in engine" is when she's pointing the gun. That's why that part looks noticably worse.

[@RibbyCribby]

Thank you for that explanation that's super interesting

[@Syt1976]

Thanks for the explanation. It probably also explains why I greatly prefer playing L.A. Noire in black & white - the color version looks weirdly garish, with the b/w looking a lot more "real" to me.

[@saidordep]

To me one of the main problems with this game was both the level and graphic design of it all. It seems they didn't know what they wanted the game to be, but knew they wanted it to be BOLD. So you get this mish-mash of 50's sci-fi serials, mixed with art-nouveau décor, industrial revolution themes and architecture, snarky post-modern characters with a pink Skrillex haircut, and monsters that look like they were put together by an outsourced studio. Guess what, none of these elements go well together. It constantly pulls you out of your immersion as well. People give New Vegas shit for it being brown and depressing to look at, but at least its aesthetics re-enforce how harsh survival in a post-nuclear desert is. Are you telling me people in the outer colonies are severely malnourished and poverty-stricken but they have the means to buy moustache wax, hair dye, makeup and maintain state-of-the-art weaponry? Also, why does the loot you get in a Marauder camp is the exact same thing you can expect from a town or a high-class manor in Byzantium? It makes 0 sense for a corporate overlord in the metropole to stack shitty pistols, ammo and grenades when the whole city is packed with police and borderline unreachable to most people in the colony. It's such a basic oversight from a studio with tons of experience making immersive RPGs it just boggles my mind

[@zzodysseuszz]

Finally someone mentions it. I see this all the time in games but nobody acknowledges it. The aesthetic and art direction do not combine or contrast well leading to a very messy design Edit: grammar

[@Jebsucks]

Yeah, I think the very first thing thought that crossed my mind when looking at Outer Worlds' art direction was something like 'this looks like a bad Fallout 4 total conversion mod'. To be honest, that might have been giving it too much credit if anything.

[@wile123456]

So basically a bunch of late 30 year old, early 40 year old thinking they are punk and anti-establishment while working for a mega corporation on a tight deadline and selling out at every chance? It really is impossible to have I vocative art or good political commentary in AAA games. The studio has to be independent like with disco elysium or the teeth of the 9roject will always be sawed off

[@saidordep]

@@wile123456 it seems every other AAA game that comes out now has to have lines of dialogue in the vain of "I'm so broke, capitalism bad" or "Student loans, amiright?" but without going any deeper than that. These games never present an alternative or solution to working class problems, because then you'd be poking the hornet's nest a bit too much and the media conglomerates who own Obsidian, Bethesda, Gearbox, etc wouldn't like that. These corporate products present the horrors of a hyper-capitalist society as bad, but as an inevitability of life, a little veneer of social consciousness to paint the main characters as underdogs and nothing more. It's blue checkmark liberal twitter hot takes in game form

[@wile123456]

@@saidordep it's because every naturally feels and suffers under the problems of capitalism but unless you're a leftist you can't offer any structural change. And AAA games need to sell 5 million copies atleast to make a profit, so the boring, enlightened centrism message is always chosen. Individual developers are leftists. But the leadership is always neo-liberals. I don't think the issue is Microsoft wouldn't allow a radical piece of art to be released under them for ideological reasons, it's simply for profit and mass market appeal. Disco elysium did well because it was expertly written and made by radical socialists, but scale that concept up to AAA levels of budgets and sales targets and it wouldn't work.

[@WilltehGreat]

There's a Larry Niven novel called Destiny's Road, about a distant colony on an alien planet where a background setting detail is that colonists have to regularly ingest "speckles" or else die of some poorly defined disease, unless they regularly eat organisms or plants that were originally transplanted from Earth. It's common in this society to plant a fruit tree on the grave of beloved family members, because graveyards are one of the few places on Destiny that Earth plants can actually grow. Later on in the book we find out that Destiny's alien ecology doesn't use potassium - "speckles" are the seeds of a rare plant that uses potassium as a defense to poison predators. I feel like The Outer Wilds' "invisible food crisis" was written into the story by someone who read Destiny's Road a long time ago and didn't quite remember why the colonists couldn't subsist solely on native life.

[@MannyNamiro]

I had the exact same experience with the hunger twist. It was supposed to be such an earth-shattering reveal, but all I could think was "Huh, just like that lady in that one side quest said."

[@seand7042]

I had that experience too and I found it so odd you couldn't tell anyone about the food issues

[@logangustavson]

I actually liked that it was foreshadowed a bit

[@gobomania]

Think the way games misunderstand skill-based speech checks are that they don't make them a knock-out for a dialogue exchange. Like take the scenario, you are (role)playing as an engineer-type and you have taken skills accordingly to such, in this case (MECHANICS). You then get into a situation where a guard refuses you to enter a back area of a ship. Instead of frontloading the (MECHANICS) option, there should be a set-up dialogue of "hey, I was called in here to check the engine in the back" and then when the guards response with "oh we had a check-up days ago" you can then choose the (MECHANICS) dialogue to say something like "oh yeah, but the filtration filter is a Wehrncraft model series 600zx, requiring some very specific backup parts we had to order, which just arrived today" or if you don't have the (MECHANICS) skill for that, you can (BLUFF) "oh yeah, but you know how it is with the management, if it ain't done 100% according to proceedure, we have to do it aaaaaall over again and Tim, you know Tim right? yeah he ofc fucked it all up, so now I'm here on my off day, trying to undo all of that mess!". These two choices have the same starting point, but different flavour of what you wanna roleplay. Moreso, it gives the choice to try playing into the character you are trying to convince, maybe a non-sense persona would still refuse the bluff, but the mechanics check comes for place of authority and professionalism.

[@stickinittotheman1]

Excellent summary, It really makes a difference having conclusive checks, rather than aversive ones! Love and Peace folks 🤘

[@pavelskrylnikov9658]

tl:dr it is just not a well written game.

[@TheKueiJin]

Tbh i'd go a step further: Have speech checks be introspections, bluff/persuation/w/e be influenced by them i.e. a 30% boost to bluffing, or something like that, but otherwise they come off as hey this specific model of Wehrncraft spaceship had a manifold that was designed to be removable by the hinge right above the handle, on the interior. This makes the manifold just a staticwall for those without mechanic knowledge, and it's easy to implement (coding wise). Hell, you can even design the luck skill to be integrated, such as have bonuses if you're unlucky, but the fact that you try to pull the hinge has a chance to sometimes (key word: SOMETIMES, only some actions have a chance to fail) and lock you out of said path, or, even better, have the guard/crew alerted. Imagine TOW having checks for engineer where the otherwise static background turns into a plethora of boxes hidden behind panels or stuff like that. And with the low luck from before, these actions have a 50% chance (but only a random number from 10 tries) of it being faulty, and thus turning into a trap. But, alas, all criticism of the game are done in very poor taste. Each and every single take on the "hey it's written like it's for toddlers", when in fact no one even understands the monumental task it took to have a game progress with how much you can fuck around, like in TOW. AND IT'S SMOOTH AF, with so few bugs, and issues. Like it's frigging Obsydian... dude... I still dread playing KotOR II because of how often my saves were corrupted. I get that the story/scope of the game is limited, but it's obvious when you look at the big picture: It's a vast game, with beautiful art, few bugs, plethora of companions, with a huge number of quests, and all done to interconnect. That's a monumental task for AA that had the budget of maybe 24 frigging million. When the entire coke budget for Cocks of Dooty is 20 times that. Hell just google the marketing budget for that game, srsly. It's insanely distasteful to complain of shoddy storytelling, when the game does it so well (it's a good silly story), with just a fraction of the time/cost/logistics needed.

[@massgunner4152]

Sounds like my playthrough of fallout 3, i would pick up a dialogue then get my skill based choices.

[@GoblinKnightLeo]

I never bought into the food thing at all. If the nutrition really was that much of a problem, how have children grown into full-sized, seemingly healthy adults?

[@Wolf_ManJack]

All they really had to say was "Yeah, turns out the chimera meat is slowly making us all stupid due to micro-prions" or some shit, then they'd have a genuinely respectable lampshade for the ridiculous decisions made by many theoretically intelligent characters and could also show off the insidiousness of the actual harm done by overly influential centralized systems of power when they have no accountability to keep them on their toes When the problem is instead, "We don't have the physical building blocks needed to keep our cells alive," the lack of system-wide migraines, sudden-onset comas, wounds reopening and going sour despite medical intervention and so on really does nail home Pat's point that the concept was almost entirely unconsidered outside of seeming appropriately senseless for a world with such advanced technology that they should have been able to avoid this entirely

[@keatonkitsune4064]

You and me both. I think my first thought was "BS!" then like Patrician I flashbacked to the dude talking interstellar shipping.

[@AlanGresov]

If the food were an issue, it'd be extremely readily apparent

[@codexmachina1358]

When the ALIENS came into the equation I was like finally now we're getting somewhere! Imagine my disappointment

[@RafaelSantos-pi8py]

And why can't artificial food suplement be delivered, like vitamins and minerals, into the food? And why didn't the early colonists brought earth crops and used those along the indigenous food sources? And how exactly frezing the working population is a solution to the food crisis when you need workers to produce more food in the first place? That made no sense to me since the first time i heard it.

[@SlipMaker]

3:33 “they didn’t want to work with a criminal organization” that was me when I got my last recommendation only to discover illegal teleporters brazenly in the lobby of the Arcane University

[@AbstractTraitorHero]

Those filthy criminals breaking the law with their magical power, the whole system's corrupt SlipMaker, we gotta take em down.

[@ericc9321]

I thought Byzantium was a pretty on the nose jab at "byzantine bureaucracy" which is shorthand for needlessly complex and obtuse government or other organizational structure. With a bit of "byzantine politics" thrown in, which connotes backstabbing and conniving court politics that would fit in with the Board.

[@SirDerpofCamelot]

I thought so too.

[@MadisonRamanamabangbang]

I already said that

[@Duchess_Van_Hoof]

Hear hear.

[@Hodoss]

Ah the good old "We have interstellar travel but we are too stupid to ensure our basic subsistance even with the ridiculous amounts of resources we have access to".

[@Drizzit57]

Resources do run out you know. It happens all the time in science fiction. Plenty of civilizations wiped out from famine or over population.

[@Hodoss]

@@Drizzit57 There sure is a lot of shaky sci-fi, if you can even call it that, that's what I was snarking about. People struggle to grasp the massive quantities of ressources an interstellar civ would have access to, could even be infinite if our universe is infinite. How would there be over-population, people can just move to surrounding stars. Just our galaxy is estimated at between 100 and 400 billion stars.

[@Drizzit57]

@@Hodoss Not every planet is habitable. That’s how overpopulation occurs. And terraforming would be a very long process and while it’s happening children are still being born. And from our current understanding humans can not last on space stations for long periods of time. So evolution,either natural or forced,would also have to take place. Try looking past the surface of concepts and in to what actually needs to take place to make a concept a reality. Right now we are at roughly 3.5billion people. Do you realize how much resources it takes to support that number for a single day? Now apply to a galactic scale. Just because a species is interstellar does not mean the basic problems of life go away. Right now we are stretched thin on our little planet resource wise but yet people keep having 3,4,5 or more kids without ever considering the effects it has on our entire population.

[@Hodoss]

@@Drizzit57 Don't really need planets, and their gravity wells are constraining, extra costs for your space industry. A space civ would likely evolve towards a Dyson Swarm model. Most stars would be usable. Could even have a situation where systems without habitable planets end up the most developed, whereas those with habitable planets would be limited by a more careful exploitation, like nature reserves. You can have artificial gravity with centrifugal force. But sure, genemod and cybernetic space adaptation could be a thing too. Hell, humanity may end up mostly as virtuals living in computronium Dyson Swarms, directly feeding on stellar radiation. One megastructure could have hundreds of time Earth's surface. And there could be hundreds, thousands, millions of those... Failing to look past the surface of concepts, again that's what I'm mocking in bad "sci-fi". You're projecting the constraints of a relatively small, semi-closed system, aka current Earth without interplanetary/interstellar imports or emigration. But the universe is practically infinite for our small scale, and may actually be infinite. Population can boom exponentially, and so can production, even more so than population. That's the Post-Scarcity concept, often linked to Interstellar Civilisation, you can look into it. The Orion's Arm website, or the Isaac Arthur channel, can be fun starters to such concepts. Your numbers are a bit off btw, right now we're at 8 billion people on Earth. Yet more than one third of the globally produced food is wasted, we have an oveproduction issue actually. Food is often left to rot or destroyed to maintain prices. I'm no economic expert, but to me this rather looks like perverse economic incentives than physical limitations. Not to say Earth population can grow infinitely, there would eventually be a physical limit. Heat, probably, even if the greenhouse gases issue is solved. But even just our Solar System is exponentially more real estate than one small rocky planet.

[@Drizzit57]

@@Hodoss Yeah you are right on my number,it was late but no excuse. But I think we have strayed from the point and are purely speculating.

[@connorhobson6293]

Black and White cinematography enhances contrast. The highs and lows are so sharply pitted against eachother that it creates a very clear divide. You're also not limited (as much) by color choice and your mind can fill in the blanks without the game having to do the heavy lifting.

[@Wolf_ManJack]

Black and white is a genuinely powerful aesthetic choice for darker or more dramatic stories, where the characters are sorts of embodiments of ideals moreso than people, and it's a shame that the association with a more "primitive" style of art leaves it stigmatized and seen as generally inferior by many

[@codemonster8443]

So can I just day that the art style is so badly executed that audience assuming colors is how things look beautiful?

[@connorhobson6293]

@@codemonster8443 not really. even with how far things have come, textures still have a hard limit on how much detail they can provide. the contrast and shadow provide a more intense lighying that can be used thematically to explore dark themes and ideas cisually as well

[@TheSergio1021]

No, I think that section is actually pre-rendered. And the first shot that is actually in-engine is the shot where she's aiming the gun

[@zzodysseuszz]

Well it’s not contrast. It’s tonal values. With colour the tonal values are too diverse, making it look bland. But in black and white you get better shading with better highlighting

[@Darkflo23]

I really think that the best way to play this game is a full genocide run, it was pretty interresting to see the game restructure itself after each quest giver death, and will probably be the only thing i remember about it in detail in a few year.

[@TheMarc1k1]

My first reaction to the starter zone was to murder everyone, then I quit.

[@krazer9515]

@@TheMarc1k1 Honestly, while i played through the entire game, my first reaction was to break the world illusion with the first character you interact with in person. The Spacers Choice kid. I just could not see anyone in existence being so brainwashed by corporate jargon and buzzwords that they would even think of refusing treatment for injuries. To me that set up the game, not as a "haha funny, look at how indoctrinated these people are", and more as a "no one in this game is a person, they are just props for some stupid message". The squad leader just after reinforced that message.

[@juicejooos]

@@krazer9515 If you haven't seen people like that in real life by now, you're lucky or downright naive. Or both.

[@babyatemydingo574]

My understanding of the design philosophy for this game is all summed up in the smart-ass finger-guns in the ad campaign and that's it.

[@jakel2837]

I love this game for one single reason: It made it abundantly clear that Obsidian is just an empty name. Every single drop of talent has long since run away from the company

[@beethovenlivesupstairs4182]

Nope, they still have Josh Sawyer who created Pillars of Eternity 2 and Pentiment; two of their best games in the past 5 years.

[@ingrowsmith5148]

The fertilizer plotpoint is hilariously revealing about the writers and the writing. Any true nerd, sooner or later comes across the wonderful topic of plants and gardening. 1., Because plants are actually interesting, and watching stuff grow from seeds that you plant is rather exciting. 2., It's fundamental WW1 and WW2 technology. Modern chemical fertilizer can be traced back to Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch in the early 1900s'. The main goal of the process was to somehow fix nitrogen in concentrated forms that were greater then it was naturally available. This came in the form of ammonia, which as it turns out, explodes pretty good too. This is why peacetime industrial agriculture can be switched out for war-eceonomy bomb production with 0 effort, and back when the conflict is over. This was the main driving force behind cheap food in America, and heavily subsidized agriculture after WW2. The government had to get rid of all that military surplus, so they funneled it into your BigMac's. The more you know. Oh and Haber developed a very rudimentary nervegas for pest control, since inscets started to swarm all the suddenly abundant crop fiields. And since he envisoned it as the mighty storm of science sweeping away the hardships that plagued agricultural humanity for millenia, he named the gas Cyclone, AKA Zyklon in german. To kill pests. Naturally the military had their own definitions of "pest". But all this info, now in 2024, is literal ancient history. Both fertilizers and pest-control has been heavily developed since, and is hotly researched field in organic chemistry. If push comes to shove, we can cook up stuff in a lab, purely from inorganic compounds to keep stufff alive. We can even synthesize baby formula that actually doesn't kill the baby anymore. Sure it's very rough on the infant, but it can survive. So the fact that writers decided that the futuristic space people can only make fertilizer from dead people as opposed to using the tech WE ALREADY HAVE IN OUR OWN WORLD AS OF 2024, speaks volumes of their ignorance or at the very least dis-intrest in science and the story and histroy of scince. Also, what happened to composting? And proper soil science? While humans do rot away real neat when they die, they don't automatically turn to plant chow without a whole host of bacteria, fungi, worms and insects to help both our bodies and dead plant matter along the way. Hell, tha majority of the soil IS dead plant matter, and only a very small portion of it has the hard and lumpy bits of tigers and monkeys that had an unfortunate run-in in primordial jungles of old. tl;dr The writers are South-African-junta-tier who after being asked where their food will come from if they kill all the farmers, promptly answered: the supermarket.

[@JohnThems]

After watching all these videos about The Outer Worlds, I think I can safely say the only way The Outer Worlds 2 could ever improve on the series is to just scrap the entire fucking setting.

[@charlessmith5465]

1:35 that feeling when filling out the deductions board in Sherlock Holmes games and committing to an entirely, and verifiably, wrong line of reasoning. _Watson must be pregnant._

[@marshallscot]

The central conflict of the story, that this interstellar civilization is somehow unable to even grow enough food to sustain its people, is simply ridiculous. A conflict like this, fighting over basic resources like food, water and electricity, almost makes sense in New Vegas. It's the post nuclear apocalypse, in an already desolate region of America. In the Outer Worlds? It's just too stupid to even take seriously.

[@Zodroo_Tint]

There was that fat guy in the developer team, he is probably a city guy. I think he would disagree with you when 2 o'clock in the morning he don't find any fast food restaurant he thinks he is starving to death. But yes, even if we skip the sci-fi part which is they can probably grow food in a room without sunshine or soil they still have those animals around they could try to eat.

[@icollectbadgers]

I always assumed it was simply due to economic mismanagement. It seems plausible that a corporate monopoly on food production would have results similar to a state monopoly, ie. shortages.

[@marshallscot]

@@icollectbadgers Yeah, that is the funny thing about the "critique" that the developers were making. They attempted to critique capitalism by created a top down authoritarian system, ie. socialism lmao

[@Drizzit57]

So just because a civilization is interstellar means they can’t suffer from catastrophe? Don’t read/watch much science ficition do you?

[@jackboland39]

@@marshallscot bro thinks he can conflate authoritarian socialism with the modern ideas being advocated for in the united states like democratic socialism and non-market socialism that are growing in popularity and in fact function in significantly different (and more effective) ways

[@ByteMe619]

it’s been a while since I played so I can’t remember the details, but the meat cubes on Gorgon were the highlight of the entire game for me. realising what they were at the end of the dungeon, and then stepping outside and noticing that they were there at the front door before I walked in genuinely shocked me.

[@muffinboi4134]

I always look at the fashion in rpg’s and the lack of armor variety was such a bummer especially looking at what they had in new vegas.

[@kalampakos]

One of the weirdest parts about this game is the Exp system. It feels like they took Fallout's exp system and just multiplied everything by 10. I have no doubt that some manager went "Bigger numbers equals bigger chemical release" and then they just went with it.

[@versebuchanan512]

Fully agree. You see a vending machine- 425 XP. That's fucking wild.

[@Krataskull]

Funny thing is that it has the opposite effect. RPGs with small numbers feel way more satisfying to level in. Its one thing Bethesda gets right.

[@harperna3938]

They make it way more complicated than it needs to be, but, basically, the crisis breaks down like this: Due to mistakes made during the initial terraforming process (presumably because, without support from the Hope's geoengineers, the Board lacked the expertise needed to properly terraform the system), the GMOs used to seed Halcyon mutated into Halcyonic equivalents of their earth counterparts. The divergence was initially insignificant, but 70 successive generations of divergent evolution among the imported crops has caused a collapse in the bioavailability of essential vitamins and nutrients as far as humans are concerned. The nutritional profile of animals native to Halcyon are similarly incompatible with human physiology. In other cases, like in Emerald Vale, the local ecology is outright incapable of supporting earthborn crops. Although humans' caloric needs are still being met by-and-large, they are suffering from pervasive malnutrition; this malnutrition will get worse with further divergent evolution, to the point where most colonists will outright starve due to severe nutritional deficits. Board scientists only noticed the impending collapse 15 to 20 years ago, which is when Chimerists like Chartrand were tasked with solving the problem (in her case, by adapting humans for Halycon's ecology). Why they can't just genetically engineer another batch of compatible crops is not adequately explained; this is a glaring omission in the context of Halcyon importing food from other colonies with what seem to be perfectly compatible crops. That said, I doubt that the Board possesses either the means or the resolve to undertake the extensive geoengineering necessary to suppress Halcyonic crops, protect imported crops, and prevent further divergence among these imported crops all without causing a full-blown ecological collapse. They certainly wouldn't do that when other, cheaper options like the L.E.P. avail themselves to the Board. Regarding synthetic food/vitamins, even conventional vitamins struggle to compete with natural/organic options wrt the bioavailability of their essential nutrients. This is also why vegan diets, even when bolstered by synthetic vitamin supplements, are generally unsustainable in the long run. Most synthetic vitamins are derived from existing flora, fauna, and microfauna. In Halcyon's case, those options are already compromised. The Board also started stockpiling food from other systems around this time, which is where Byzantium's rations came from. Due to collapsing productivity within Halcyon, however, and a declining galaxy-wide economy in the wake of the Earth Directorate's disappearance, the Board cannot afford to import enough food to keep even Byzantium afloat in the wake of a systems collapse. This would also inevitably doom Adelaide's greenhouse--the plants she grows there will still experience a bioavailability collapse, assuming they haven't already. For the time being, they're better than whatever Edgewater has been feeding into its cannery, but Edgewater is literally surviving off of sprats, sawdust, and local mushrooms. The Board has undertaken an extensive coverup as the full scope of the crisis has made itself more apparent. In an effort to facilitate this coverup, appetite suppressants like the one on Roseway were developed. This is why settlements like Edgewater seem unaware of why they suffer from such frequent "plague" outbreaks. The widespread availability of appetite suppressants and filler ingredients (combined with a deliberately under-educated populace) has made it difficult for laborers to notice their own malnutrition, as food still appears to satiate them. The Lifetime Employment Program is an extreme attempt to postpone the collapse for as long as possible. By limiting the laboring populace only to those who are essential for the continued operation of Byzantium and its assorted research centers, the Board hopes that it can find a sustainable solution before a full-blown, obvious famine and the unrest that would accompany it can set in. Welles himself is aware of the impending famine. He is not aware, however, of the actual underlying reason (the divergent, incompatible evolution of Halcyon's foodstuffs) and the Board's plan to "fix" the problem (the L.E.P.). He also is not aware that Earth has gone dark. As to why the Board is pivoting to the L.E.P. instead of just "aggressive" population control, it's not like the two are mutually exclusive. If the L.E.P. fails, the Board can just commit cryogenocide instead. If the L.E.P. works, though, the Board will have a much greater margin of error when it comes to managing their remaining workers. Those surviving workers will also have considerably less leverage than they would if they were the sole surviving laborers, given that the board could easily threaten to have them iced or killed so another batch of popsicles can take their place. It's...almost internally consistent? Especially considering the events of Peril on Gorgon and how Spacer's Choice info-blackout mirror's the Board's (at the behest of Spacer's Choice parent company UDL, no less) own coverup. Max explicitly points this out when you learn Gorgon's big marauder secret if you've helped him reach enlightenment. Even so, the whole plot ultimately rests on the entire colony of Halcyon being founded around a giant idiot ball due to the dereliction of the Hope. This draws your attention back to an even weaker, dumber, and more fundamental plot point: why the fuck are the colony ships segregated by profession and expertise? Like, why would you make one boat for laborers and managers and one boat for scientists instead of just making two boats that are each capable of founding a sustainable, feature-complete colony on their own?

[@roxbox6721]

Woah woah woah, not even a premiere?!?!

[@firestormingfox4169]

Let's savor the moment of being early. Edit: The moment has passed

[@charlessmith5465]

A/B testing. We are observing science.

[@SinaelDOverom]

47:57 the answer is "materials", or rather rendering of materials - the PBR. In b&w pbr looks better since it has to do less of the heavy lifting for our brain to interpret the presented materials as "real", which conversely is harder to do in color.

[@TheSergio1021]

You're overthinking it. The greyscale scene is a pre-rendered animation that switches to in-engine with the shot that transitions to color

[@SyndicateOperative]

Fun fact: The eliminate edgewater quest doesn't happen if you leave the corporate representative in power. Tl;dr: putting the filthy hippy revolutionary in power and then siding with her enemy may've not been a great idea.

[@PrismTheKid]

What weirds me out is the NPCs I know like new vegas didnt have the best looking characters either but everyone in this game is like a fey-faced supermodel to start with, and then they paste an amount of wrinkles on them depending on how old they're meant to be, but it just ends up looking like they left a 19 year old out in the sun. It's also the really bright irises and defined pupils, it's oddly unsettling

[@Corad006]

I think you are the first person to cover the dlc on outerworlds and now I know why

[@TheSergio1021]

Film guy here, its not about film. I think the "black and white part" of the cutscene is a pre-rendered cutscene which is why it looks better. The animations and AO are much better than what the game normally handles. It does a good trick with having most of the frame out of focus on the shot where she's pointing the gun though, they do that to hide that it went from pre-rendered to in game. THAT is where the in-engine cutscene starts. They wanted it to look good to set things up, but had to find a way to transition to the full color game world, and that's the best they could do. You can tell uts different even by the shadows on her face when its black and white riiiight before the door opens.

[@mr.machina5306]

Its kind of funny these videos will do a better job at reminding people that this game exists more than the actual game itself.

[@minerman60101]

The reality of planets with rings in the skybox is so much more mundane. The vast majority of large moons orbit the planet coplanar with the rings so really you'll just be seeing a super thin line along the center of the planet.

[@Zodroo_Tint]

Yes it is cartoonish but everything in this game is cartoonish so I don't think it is matter.

[@Lucky_D3]

To your point around 16 minutes, I would like to add on. If we were able to communicate with Phineas during Edgewater (as you mentioned in the 1st part I think), we could have ran some quests that had us test food or something. We could have been introduced to a problem early on, miss opportunity.

[@krazer9515]

I feel like the entire game was missed opportunities. Almost every segment started out feeling like it could be an interesting world or city or something, but nothing interesting ever really developed. Obsidian had the ability to craft fantastical worlds separate from the Fallout earth, remove limitations on almost anything through hand-waving future tech, but everything just felt... dull. Colorful, but dull.

[@Palemagpie]

Ah yes. The two DLC for outer worlds. Outer worlds: Serenity Or Outer worlds: Glass onion

[@unfilthy]

It's so weird to me to think of this game as in any way relating to NV or Firefly, both of which I loved, because it just reminds me of FO4, only smaller. Playing Outer Worlds gave me the same feeling I got when I spent a while meticulously planning an ambush for the DLC raiders I was supposed to be making a settlement for, only to find out that I couldn't kill them, and was only allowed to turn on them in the pre-scripted time and place. Or realizing that it made no difference how high I climb in any faction, I won't get a chance to even try to convince anyone to change anything. It was a recurring "hey, maybe I could- oh, I guess not" feeling.

[@SeanCrosser]

_to the tune of Spacer's Choice jingle_ "It's not New Vegas, it's Outer Worlds!"

[@chillfox420]

It's been so long...please come back...need...content...

[@pedroseba8753]

The Outer Worlds is a serviceable game that didn't meet my expectations and didn't overstay it's welcome. I played it once, moderately enjoyed it, and never touched it ever again.

[@logangustavson]

Well put.

[@okagron]

The issue is that for many pople they didn't wanted the game to be that, they truly wanted the game to be akin to something like New Vegas (it didn't helped that marketing kept reffering to New Vegas in its advertisement). I think sometimes a game being mediocre to average is honestly far worse than just being bad, because with a bad game you can have fun picking apart all the big issues. With an average is harder to do that and at the same time you see all the potential to be a genuinely great game, but yet the writers and design didn't tried hard enough.

[@gonzoGnostalgic]

Having not played the Murder on Eridanos DLC, I can't believe the plot is basically the "Who Violently Murdered Simon S. Salty" episode of Smiling Friends

[@Rainbowhawk1993]

2018: “The Outer Worlds has killed Fallout 76 and Bethesda!” 2023: “Fallout 76 is still alive and Bethesda is readying to release their most ambitious title yet. The Outer Worlds is forgotten and fans are already disappointed with Avowed.”

[@cycillak4918]

It's weird people still want obsidian to make the next fallout when the outer worlds exists

[@TacticusPrime]

Fallout 76 is still garbage and Bethesda is about release a generic sci-fi game.

[@Rainbowhawk1993]

@@TacticusPrime 😏

[@jigglypuff3311]

​@@cycillak4918even if they got Cain and Boyarsky back, it'd have been 30 years since they had anything to do with a Fallout game brand loyalty is off the charts😂

[@Mirthful_Midori]

Fallout 76 killed itself with how bad it is. Obsidian was handed a golden opportunity with that timing, but they completely botched their chance.

[@michaelpsellos770]

Your speel about how stupid the starvation plot is really highlighted how decadent both the developers and detached really are. They have no actual idea of what actual starvation looks like and couldn't be arsed to check. So they just assume a toothpaste that stops your tummy aches would actually be enough to mask it. Ironically the reason they can't write an evil detached decadent city is because they have no self reflection.

[@pavelskrylnikov9658]

"Decadent" isn't the word i would have used, but they seem so... inexperienced in life. Like with Edgewater, where everyone has to pay a fee for his own grave and burial - sure the circumstances make it look cruel but pray tell, what in their opinion happens irl when someone dies? Hint: funeral isn't free. Ironically, company-run cemetery is the closest thing to the social security that Halcyon has. A form of insurance really, and at least you are not scammed on it like at that Sublight-operated firm on Monarch.

[@JH-fb3mp]

Pat farted in my front yard in 2013 and still hasn't apologized

[@gucciguy3408]

I am still amazed this game is widely seen as a great game by so many people.

[@thepancakemann]

It's a great example of a 6 or 7 out of 10 game. It is truly average in all ways and it's a marvel of mediocrity as a result. For what it's worth, I found it an extremely enjoyable 6 or 7 out of 10. In classic Obsidian fashion, the writing is the best thing about it and the inventory systems are the worst.

[@beethovenlivesupstairs4182]

because it is a great game. I had fun with it despite some annoying flaws.

[@arkgaharandan5881]

who are they? I havent seen any of them, i know there are people who say its great but do they actually exist or they are bots?

[@PapaRoboto]

It gets some credit for being a non-Bethesda Bethesda-RPG.

[@niemand7811]

@@arkgaharandan5881 it is funny how people that like this game are called bots by fundamentally flawed people like you. Funny.

[@akjsdhgakjsdgkajk]

besides human waste, chicken waste is some of the most common and best fertilizer before the industrial revolution.

[@Texelion]

You know, hearing that npc talking about "slowly stop living" instead of using the word "dying" reminds me of the french ministry of economy talking about "negative growth" instead of economic crisis...

[@EvilHomer101]

Hms erebus and hms terror didnt cheap out on food. The expidition was stocked for 2 and a half years at sea with new canned foods. Problem was canning at the time used lead solder and over time it poisened the food, and then they got trapped in pack ice off the coast of prince william's island* (i believe that is the name of the island that is called the "hand of franklin" in the passage that they got iced in at.)

[@ajomagurd]

The cheapness was in the quality of the food, not the quantity. Lead was not the only problem, it was also likely botulism from improper seals. They sold the contract for the rationmaking to the lowest bidder.

[@Wolf_ManJack]

The Outer Worlds sapping name recognition from The Outer Wilds due to adjacency alone really sums up the complete karmic curse Obsidian decided to inflict upon us all with this game - the true sin wasn't being Borderlands 3 sweetened with aspartame, it was eclipsing literally the first game to ever hit me with such a sense of cosmic terror that I still shudder whenever I imagine some of that game's visuals and scifi suppositions I think I could go a few more years without ever seeing someone fall *between* space again

[@TheSergio1021]

Outer Wilds will be remembered in 10 years without a sequel. The Outer Worlds needs a sequel to be remembered in 5.

[@skylerdama]

I haven’t played or seen Outer Wilds… can you elaborate on falling between space? Is there somewhere I can see this?

[@TheSergio1021]

@@skylerdama huge spoiler. Play the game if you want to know.

[@deaj8450]

I personally don't even like Outer Wilds but there is zero question that it's a thousand times better than Outer Worlds.

[@lelagrangeeffectphysics4120]

@@TheSergio1021 Honestly also after having heard a bit of the story behind Fallout told by Tim Cain... ill be honest... Fallout was mostly just luck, the times it came close to crashing and burning and the type of people who worked on it, id say we had a lot of luck on the end product. My guess is that while having competent developers, Obsidian has become a bit full of themselves over the years, Obsidian works best when they are under pressure and Vegas is a proof of that, Outer Worlds is just what happens when some devs get to make the game they always wanted, cool exterior but a rotten core.

[@calistianzathos7910]

I always thought Outer Worlds was an alright game but your points in these videos have kind of awoken me to the fact I never got past Monarch, I met Nyoka and quit, that's as far as I ever got. Really concerns me for Avowed, but at least I enjoyed Pillars of Eternity 1, maybe it's just the team who made TOW that is bad but yeah, really tired of the bro drugs haha nihilism bro so cool trying is futile in a lot of media. Love your stuff Patrician keep up the amazing work.

[@ChaseAudiGrues]

I remember I had gotten to Byzantium and a quest in the main story wanted me to go somewhere and do something, so instead I just started blasting. Ended up just killing basically everybody in my way until I got to the credits. It's a shame the story and game weren't good enough to make me want to keep role playing, and instead drop the act and try to finish as fast as possible.

[@Mr_Twiglesworth]

Im glad someone was able to summarize why i only played 1/3 of the game and cant bring myself to care enough to finish it

[@XBullitt16X]

I wasn't expecting a part 2, fucking sweet. Glad I found his channel, I love long form content like this.

[@crylec6534]

You know how in NV they had multiple currencies? Thought for some reason since the game focused on corporate towns they’d have corp bucks as they were a means to pigeon hold their workers into staying as their money is only valued in territories the corporation controls.

[@tastethecock5203]

That will make harder for corpos to trade between themselves, and push people towards bartering and commodity economies. That would be very interesting as a concept, but htat would require game actually comitting to an idea or a theme.

[@rogerloger1935]

They are more junk that clog the inventory/junk Tab. A lot of effort for northing.

[@crylec6534]

@@rogerloger1935 It’s about world building than utility

[@rogerloger1935]

@@crylec6534 As a saying go on the writter Community go"Kill your Darling"

[@xotl2780]

@@rogerloger1935 Not everyone looks at it that way. Certain people in the playerbase will happily build giant junk-collections and appreciate the game for accommodating that urge.

[@tmacka]

16:57 "The signs are always obvious, especially to anyone who's educated" My wife nearly died of scurvy because it got misdiagnosed so its not quite so obvious apparently, though luckily one doctor actually did check and saved her life, so maybe he was the only one actually educated?

[@FlorkGnubbler]

How do you develop scurvy in current year? Literally just eat some fruits or vegetables, the doctors probably misdiagnosed because that's such a strange and antiquated thing to have you'd assume the symptoms are from a more common disorder

[@tmacka]

@FlorkGnubbler multiple gastrointestinal disorders causing malabsorption

[@FlorkGnubbler]

@@tmacka Ah gotcha

[@thekaiser3815]

The chicken is an all powerful master race. Us eating them is just helping them ascend

[@Galloglaigh.]

These videos made me bite the bullet and finally watch Firefly, if nothing else I'm grateful for that.

[@cjsoh2508]

patrician i am hoping and praying that for the past month you have been cooking up the most devilish and detailed retrospective on stairfield

[@Serahpin]

16:14 Scurvy, beriberi, anemia, marasmus, etc. There are a LOT of diseases caused by malnutrition depending on _what_ you are lacking.

[@Harry_S._Plinkett]

Gogon gives me hope for The Outer Worlds franchise. But then again, Far Harbor gave me hope for Bethesda Fallout, and then we got Nuka World and 76, so I guess only time will tell. As of now, I am cautiously optimistic.

[@Harry_S._Plinkett]

@@SimuLord Isn’t Will Chen one of the lead writers or quest designers or something on Starfield? If so then that gives me hope

[@Dawndreams174]

Im surprised you didnt like wastelanders, which Will Chen also had a hand in.

[@detrik01]

@@Harry_S._Plinkett Once upon a time people thought Emil wasn't a 1 note hack. Admitedly this was like 12 years ago, but still. Even if Chen somehow gets promoted and Emil fucks off, it won't stop the culture of nepotism and echo chambers that define Bethesda's writing style.

[@wile123456]

​@@SimuLordMicrosoft won't effect starfield much so late in to development. They may affect elder scrolls 6, but Microsoft is also more hands off than some other Publishers. They didn't cancel the trash game Redfall after Arkane lost 70% of its workers over terrible management and development hell. So don't out much hope in Microsoft.

[@rawhide_kobayashi]

@@Harry_S._Plinkett AHAHAHAHA AHAHAHHAHAHAHAH AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA WOOOOOOOOO

[@onomatopoeia7505]

I remember being hyped for this game. I don't remember anything from playing the game.

[@krikun98]

New Vegas is one of my favorite things ever, so I got this on release day and started playing. About halfway through I got Disco Elysium because the GOG newsletter looked intriguing. It was so much better I thought quite hard about even going back to TOW afterwards...

[@peefmcgoose2908]

This is like the third comment I've seen under this video saying that someone quit OW for Disco Elysium and I love it lol

[@dante6605]

been lovingly obsessed with this channel for a couple weeks now, ive watched almost every vid. commentary and analysis is absolutely unmatched on yt. you should do a video on the skyrim mod Enderal, if you've never played it, it's an absolutely breathtaking standalone (from skyrim) rpg.

[@nagger8216]

If you're looking for an Enderal analysis, Warlockracy made a couple amazing videos on the topic. One's the analysis, the other's more of a discussion of the story specifically. I highly recommend them if you haven't seen them already.

[@Left4Coragem]

I remember playing this game when it launched and being sorely disapointed. Every aspect of the game, from writing, to gameplay, graphics, character design, music...it's all mediocre. Nothing is so awful to be funny or make you angry at it, but nothing is good enough to make you want to play more. The perfect example of what people today call "mid".

[@shemsuhor8763]

I found the attempts at "meta commentary" contrasted against how insanely stupid some of the characters and problems in-game are to be absolutely rage inducing. This largely contributed to me never finishing this even after 3 attempts.

[@Cassandra112]

yeah, I got the food reveal before the cut scene as well. I think its odd that you haven't brought up the Earth is not responding part yet. That was also bread crumbed in. I put that together when the gunship crashed, and Sanjar mentions how its odd the gun ship was not getting repairs. The shortages are colony wide, not just board opposition. prior to that, you also had the groundbreaker earth com mission. telling you no word from earth for 6? months, and the prior 3 months were all encrypted. this story is ALSO a major flaw in the game, as the game focuses on the food issue, but also laces THAT giant plot point in. which is arguably a bigger and more terrifying reveal. not sure if you'll get to it, but theres a big plot hole with the "human's for fertilizer" and the hope as well.. stasis, or wake up.. where is the "use the hope's people AS fertilizer" option?

[@pavelskrylnikov9658]

>which is arguably a bigger and more terrifying reveal It's just a sequel hook.

[@danielcook8480]

I've recently played both this game and disco Elysium and its staggering to see the difference in writing quality and how the game talks about different ideologies . Even comparing the coalition to the board really shows the difference .

[@helter1234]

I literally dropped this game to play Disco. Another way that game triumphs over this one is that it actually succeeds at being very funny.

[@JimmyMon666]

If you compare those two games it would seem one was written by adults, and the other by young teenagers. Those games are like night and day regarding maturity level.

[@andrewbaiocco304]

@@helter1234heard good things about it. worth getting?

[@pintolerance785]

Yeah, they're also 2 completely different genres and styles of games. So there's that. You mean to tell me that the game, which 99.999% dialogue, reading, and skill checks, is better written. I am flabbergasted.

[@andrewbaiocco304]

@@pintolerance785 this game is supposed to have a strong narrative, with strong choices and consequences; they marketed on this (basically) with the name dropping of new vegas. it's almost like the point of what the guy was saying, was that eylsium succeeded at what it was trying to do, and this game, which was an overhyped skill check simulator did not even come close.

[@rustyshackelford7025]

I was probably a little too excited to see this got posted today. I really enjoyed your first part and it explained pretty much every issue I had with the game thoroughly and much more well spoken. Def subbing to you, I would love to see more content

[@flickflack]

Watching this all, it feels very much like Obsidian saw how well received Old World Blues was and tried to duplicate it for an entire game.

[@okagron]

Old World Blues did random humor far better. The Think Tank are a group of people (brains to be more accurate) trapped in the same place for literal centuries, the random humour fits because their sanity is long gone. Plus the random humor is used to mask some pretty dark stuff hinted at or outright confirmed, so it's not like the reddit humor where it's just random for the sake of random.

[@TheRealNerdTyler]

I beat this game and all dlc. It felt like an absolute chore to get through and only did it because I felt determined to finish the game

[@angelmessenger8240]

I had issues with Vicar Max. His character didn't develop from the bitter man. He irritated me. That said, I'd like to play the DLCs Murder on Eridanos etc. The faces are creepy too, they seem to have used the same facial base for everybody so no matter what their hair, eyes are etc there's always that creepy feeling they're all related.

[@BrandonsUsername]

Not a film person, but did a semester of Graphics Processing Algorithms in college. The black and white part of the Murder on Eridanos looks so much better because of the lack of color in the reflections in all of the objects. Very noticeable on the cheeks, under the eyes, and the hairline. The color of a reflection adds dozens of cycles of calculations, per pixel, per frame, per light source, per entity. Think of a color by number book where the number zones are super tiny, and you have to mix and match Red, Blue, and Green to make a skin tone-but-lighter-kind-of-depending-on-the-angle, versus various shades of grey. Shortcuts get taken with the coloring, shading, saturation, etc. that just dont need to happen with the greyscale segment.

[@J0hnzie]

'Finally sold out' being the last line before the patron credit-roll I'm really hoping was intentional, because that got me cackling.

[@marcfranquesa2868]

A note about Byzantium: I think it's much more likely that it's named for WB Yeats's fictional, somewhat mythical Byzantium from his poems "Sailing to Byzantium" and "Byzantium". Especially because those poems in part discuss people being transfigured beyond humanity into immortal constructs forever, which I could see being bastardized into comparison with the workers being shoved into eternal stasis tl work forever.

[@austinkaras3866]

Been waiting for this bad boy 🫡

[@alexeyeliseev6322]

Didn't expect Part 2 to drop so quickly, certainly a good watch!

[@GregInTechnicolor]

I remember finishing the game after TAKING MY TIME looking through everything and doing all side quests and been like "That's it...? It's over...?"

[@niemand7811]

Maybe you didn't do all you could have been doing. Maybe you didn't achieve anything at all. Who knows. You people complain in such ways it makes me realize you have no idea what you have been playing if you ever did.

[@GregInTechnicolor]

@@niemand7811 You sure? Cause I did 100% and replayed it a second time. I enjoyed it, I was just left feeling like I was being edged the entire playthrough and I never got to fully goon.

[@AlexanderSheffield-xz5ci]

​@niemand7811 stop the cap. You're only defending this trash because it's Obsidianz, if it were made by Bethesda you'd be shitting all over it.

[@GregInTechnicolor]

@AlexanderSheffield-xz5ci I mean its funny because no where in my original comment did I say I thought the game was bad, just short...

[@kenanureeves2693]

Thanks for the very reasonably fast upload time. If this had come out any later, I probably wouldn't have finished it, just like how I didn't finish this game. Time to finally see how it ends.

[@kenanureeves2693]

wow the games ending is boring and lame glad I didn't waste my time

[@kozhedub]

the fertilization conversation reminded me of when Yeonmi Park claimed that North Korea doesnt have access to fertilizer technology lmaoooooo

[@OuroborosChoked]

I wonder if this is what dementia feels like. Having played all the way through The Outer Worlds starting the day after it launched and not playing any of the DLC, being completely unable to remember large portions of the game feels mildly distressing. I have memories of various sections, but either they're out of order or were changed after launch or... something. I remember Edgewater, Byzantium, the general structure of the plot, and most of the characters... but specific events, missions, and choices are just... new to me. Is it just that this game leaves so little of an impression? _Was_ the game actually changed after launch? Am I actually starting to decline, losing the ability to create long-term memories?

[@pintolerance785]

I think you've got a tumah.

[@Xalantor]

Our brains discard irrelevant portions of our memories which is why no one remembers their commute. Outer Wilds being on the same relevancy tier as a commute says it all about the game.

[@thefalconflame]

@@Xalantor Outer World, dude. Not Outer Wilds...

[@MikeZeroX]

*Game developers not knowing what vitamins are tracks.*

[@xotl2780]

All those late nights at the studio offices chowing down on pepperoni pizza. Damn it, I made myself hungry.

[@QaysSyed]

I bought this game for my birthday around the end of 2019. I played it, enjoyed my time even though I felt it had a lot missing compared to New Vegas. I completed the game, started another playthrough, then said out loud, “Nah I don’t feel like it”. It’s been 3 years since then, and I still don’t have the desire to replay it.

[@kemasuk]

Do you have any plans to do a video like this on Kingdom Come: Deliverance? I think it would be another good candidate, and I'd like to see your opinions on it.

[@soulsmith4787]

I'll be intrigued to see how critics compare and contrast Starfield with The Outer Worlds. The Outer Worlds was supposed to illustrate how Obsidian could beat Bethesda at making open world RPGs and Starfield looks to be the most unintentionally effective rebuttal in gaming history.

[@jordanford9320]

The problem is the outer world isn't an open world RPG and it never claimed to be just like avowed won't be an open world RPG Just like I'm guessing the outer worlds 2 won't be an open world RPG Obsidian has only made a few open world RPGs New Vegas and grounded. The rest of them are small biomes that are connected via a teleport system

[@soulsmith4787]

@jordanford9320 There were more than a few pieces of marketing material that said, "From the creators of Fallout: New Vegas.", with a heavy implication that the The Outer Worlds would be a spiritual successor of sorts. This 2-part video essay includes metrics which show that many players who were intrigued by The Outer Worlds didn't even get past the introduction, and fewer still made it to later parts. I suspect that these players were disappointed by what the game delivered. Bethesda is often clowned on by many gaming communities, but no other studio is making games like they do. All the other games that are among the best sellers with 10s of millions of copies sold have various studios seeking to emulate that success. Where are Bethesda's competitors? Why don't we see clones of Skyrim like we do with games like Minecraft or Call of Duty? There is a considerable incentive to make a Skyrim-esque game, and yet we have no examples that come close to the scope and scale of The Elder Scrolls series. The reason is that Bethesda's games take a monumental effort and investment to make. I would be unsurprised if Obsidian wanted to make such a game, but ended up curtailing it once they discovered what it would cost. A lot of people were absolutely hyped when The Outer Worlds was announced because many believed that Bethesda finally had a competing studio and we could get our fix for this style of game elsewhere. It certainly makes a reasonable person wonder how much of the heavy lifting Bethesda did for Fallout: New Vegas.

[@JoshuaKevinPerry]

lol. imagine thinking Bethesda makes good games. Streamlined Skyrim, Fallout 4, 76. Bruh. And Starfield has the same junk No Man's Sky failed to deliver...for years after its release. By all means, waste your money on a company that doesn't make games, they make empty canvases for modders to fix.

[@Plainsburner]

​@@JoshuaKevinPerry I enjoyed my time with skyrim and fallout 4, definitely found both of them more memorable Outer worlds and completed multiple playthroughs. New Vegas is still my favorite, but I've always had a rough time running that game, frequent crashes a few corrupted saves and whatnot.

[@MrPoeGhost]

Well That aged like shit.

[@TheARMichJFrog]

I really liked the Outer Worlds when it first came out. I had a lot of fun with it, but when i tried to play it again recently, i just couldnt get into it. I guess this videos give a good explanation as to why

[@roxbox6721]

52:00 This is really weird because when I did Murder on Eridonos, it was revealed that Helen killed the Constable because the constable was going to arrest her for "corporate espionage" when Helen told her the situation.

[@archaeologistify]

congratz on no longer alternating Fallout 76 and Outer Worlds

[@Seer_Of_The_Woodlands]

watching this video makes me worried about the sequel considering it's rumored to be bigger than this... if the red thread of the plot breaks loose and catches fire on this scale what if the scale is bigger ?

[@Dawndreams174]

the cringe borderlands writing filled trailer tells you all you need to know

[@TheManeymon]

tfw you watch the video game industry slowly die over the years and all you can say is, GG NO RE

[@detrik01]

If you side with Reed in Edgewater, you don't have to wipe the town off of the map in a Board playthrough

[@jordanford9320]

If you fix all of the outcasts problems and have them go back and pick the other lady too then you also don't have to kill them

[@sealthesymbol419]

very nice series! Personally, I saw obsidian's quality drop since Pillars of Eternity 2, so Le Outer Worlds stank from 100 miles away.

[@Wzrd8]

How did so many people work on what is essentially borderlands lul so randum but with out even the shitty memes and think it was a good idea?

[@Redem10]

I went through all this and the best I can give to the people of Halcyon is the week-end off and somehow that's suppose to be the best ending.

[@ipeefriely3034]

The one good experience I had with this game was the very end right after its absolute zenith in my playthrough. I got the robophobia perk which was funny up until I didn't have enough speech skill to Legate Lanius the tv screen talking down to me at the end, so she summoned a giant killer robot that KO'd my companions repeatedly while the shitty repair drones from the Ulysses fight in Lonesome Road made it basically unstoppable against my melee science weapon build. But BECAUSE of my character's robophobia, her intelligence was lowered in the final slew of dialogue checks. I'd made intelligence (or whatever) my dumpstat, so the debuff put me under the threshold to get the idiot dialogue options, and my character had the option to end the game by demanding ice cream and setting the Unreliable on a collision course with the sun. After fuming at the terrible boss for an hour or more and having checked out long before then and just wanting the whole experience to be over, finally piecing together in my head what had just happened to my character was funnier than any joke the developers actually wrote on purpose. If I had actually been playing a stupid character on purpose the ending would have felt obligatory, but for a brief moment the game was emergent enough to actually surprise me. My character was traumatized by the experience and longed for the void and for there to be ice cream, relatable.

[@quilto1234]

hearing that outer world's dlc is the best part(I finished main story but I didn't played dlc), It just reminds me of fallout 4. fallout 4's best part was dlc(far harbor).

[@niloofarrafatpanah2]

One thing that bothered me so much was how uninspired the dark comedy would be, like wow there is a secret evil thing going on in Byzantium, and its, robots killing people 🤦🏻 not torturing, not crazy scientists doing unethical experiments, no slavery or prostitution, just, simple killing Broaden it to the whole game and every aspect was as uninspired as much, or worse

[@TacticusPrime]

If there was one phrase for this game it would "on the nose" or more simply "unsubtle."

[@WashupCyclone]

Although predictable, I did find the implications of that quest to be more disturbing than any of the board’s other actions. What I found incredibly disappointing though is that you can’t talk to ANYONE about it afterward. They’re committing genocide right under their capital and literally no one cares to know about it.

[@max7971]

@@TacticusPrimewould evil corpos doing evil things be subtle tho?

[@niloofarrafatpanah2]

@@WashupCyclone i get what you mean, but by the time I reached Byzantium i had already been told by the story howwww evil corporations are and, compare to their past stories, like OG fallouts, it’s so mild

[@niloofarrafatpanah2]

@@TacticusPrime hitting you in the head with the message, exactly

[@Pdasniper]

Oh right, your point about skillchecks made me remember why I dropped many rpg games. Its always a bummer to find out in a dialogue heavy game that all of the good responses are locked behind one or another skillcheck. It's so difficult to continue playing the game knowing that in the future you will be locked out of one or more quest resolutions because you didn't spend last 10 hours leveling up hacking. I'm not big on replaying games immidiately after completion in order to see other options. It just feels so restricting knowing that you can never talk your way out or into something, there will always be an arbitrary skillcheck. The third Deus Ex game had a little episode where you could talk to a character and the answer hid in carefully choosing what you wanted to say in a branching dialogue without checks. Rest of the game didn't have the same complexity, but this one moment made me so happy.

[@justaes9547]

I’m genuinely curious on what the legacy of this game will be if Starfield delivers on even half of what they’ve marketed

[@Rainbowhawk1993]

“I rise, you fall.”

[@element1111]

This game has no legacy irrespective of what starfield does or does not deliver.

[@shadowdragon1396]

“If” My man’s wondering if Bethesda is going to deliver Lmao.

[@robertclive491]

@@shadowdragon1396 They'll deliver cause Todd is never wrong.

[@Mecrobb]

Lmao Starfield will go down as the biggest bust in video game history

[@F.Castle93]

Literally just finished the first part. You are magnificent sir. Thanks for this. Been wanting a good retrospective about this game.

[@invghost]

I played this not long ago, and I think I ended up having the best possible gameplay experience. The character ended up being a dumb as bricks murderhobo. The "Dumb" dialogue in this game is hilarious and by chance, I think he may have ended up stumbling into the best solution. Killing every person they came across, other than the Iconoclasts, meant that the cryo survivors would have a clean galaxy to awaken to. The end game dialogue talked about several groups I had completely eradicated, so I just head-canoned my own ending cos the game wasn't paying attention to my actions. Running around with heavy weapons, ignoring every single person and just treating it as a shooter was so much more enjoyable than listening to the horrific tedious dialogue.

[@tomdeneen4880]

What's sad is when I played through this about 9 months ago. I was so burnt out having done most of the main quest and Airidanos that I dropped the game and never borhered with Gorgon. What a shame