The Outer Worlds
Sections:
0:00:00 – Introduction
0:14:45 – Gameplay
0:31:48 – Emerald Vale
0:35:48 – The New Virginia
0:40:12 – Groundbreaker / Roseway
0:51:09 – Companions
1:09:30 – Monarch
1:27:00 – Credits
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The Outer Worlds | A Pale Imitation – Part 1/2
If they wouldn't have toned the "incompetent corporate bureaucracy" from a 12 to a 5 or 6 it would have been so much better.
"Janitation" seems like the sort of rebranding that perfectly fits in The Outer Worlds
Sounds like someone tried to make fallout new vegas, but didn't play it.
People like being given agency early on and prefer to not be locked into tutorials.
This game is almost as good and sea worthy as Assassins Creed Valhalla
Game so bad not even a patricia video can make it interesting
Honestly the thing that stopped me from buying this game was the old west in space theme
I just find that rather too America centric to apeal to me. Like the USA is the only nation that went into space and some how it managed to involve a bunch of half educated low lifes.
I bought outer worlds on the switch, and it might have been the first switch game I considered selling back to GameStop. And that's saying a lot since I haven't done that in over a decade.
I quickly understood the narrative obsidian wanted me to follow so actively went against it.
I got the workers to return in the first city, killed that psycho woman, wiped out the Iconoclass upon first meeting them and then at some point I stopped playing.
Also, I hated that last companion whatever her name is, because I knew obsidian want me to love her, I left her drunk ass at the bar.
It's so funny that I was forced to kill the best companion cuz I cut off the power in Edgwater before fetching the book for Max 😂
I personally loved the gameplay, but the story of "excess Capitalism" when we are physically living through are own "Insane Capitalism" turned me off. I prefer the Good vs Evil story with Space Houses of Nobility and Knightly orders….. I guess I prefer Sword in Sorcery in Space. lol l
I don´t get the shitstorm with this game. It´s a Fallout-inspired game, made by ex Fallout devs. As someone who played ALL Fallout games, especially 3 & New Vegas, I absolutely loved this game and how it has been implemented.
Feminist propaganda the whole game, if you plays a male every woman that's not on your crew will hate your guts, and your crew is nothing more than a lesbian dating simulator game .
So this is basically if Seth MacFarlane wrote a Sci fi rpg. Repeat the joke that wasn't funny the first time a hundred more times to make it extra unfunny.
They aren't really jokes, even if they are so pitiable you laugh. These are Company Towns! They are the reason the US came up with Sherman Anti-Trust Laws and Unions. Just like Instant Water (just add water) they really happened in US History. And yes, they really were like that, and really that bad about fleecing the workers out of their money.
The rest is a combination of seriously uneducated workers and a major End Game plot spoiler (Food Crisis). Plus, they are separated from Earth with no supplies to fix the most glaring material supply problems. Everything has to be supplied local, or recycled from old parts. Even the vending machines are generations old and barely functional. Just like Fallout.
"I owe my soul to the company store." ~ Sixteen Tons (popular Country song)
are those the same guys who made new vegas ?
outer worlds is like the opposite of new vegas, you feel your soul vanishing while playing, its like so boring and so empty my god
I played it to completion with the traditional "best ending" approach (i.e. both sides of each conflict unified) and being extra helpful and friendly to all of the companions. I spent close to 100hrs on one playthrough scavenging every corner of the maps, doing all the sidequests availiable to me, etc. I did this pretty much as soon as the game was out and despite all that time spent and how intimate I got with the world I can only remember a handful of experiences.
And even those weren't all remembered with fondness! Most of the time it was just vague interest, like the beginning town mayor being surprisingly okay with bodies being used as fertilizer. Or parts that made me laugh, like the "Is this fucking French?!" interaction or the whole exchange with Ellie when you take her to visit her parents.
And as I write this I am given another perfect example of how boring this game is. I forgot Ellie's name so I looked it up on the wiki and completely forgot that Nyoka was a companion!
In short The Outer Wilds is much like a quaint little town you pass through on a roadtrip that takes you through the midwest. It's a big enough town with some quaint little antique shops and other historic sites, but you don't bother to stop and look at the histories or look into the little shops. You just pass through towards your ultimate destination and by the time you've come home you already forgot all about that tiny and dull milquetoast mapmark.
I'd have happily bought outer worlds if it had 3rd person available. New vegas was great until I got the great Khans glitch, I couldn't complete it after that.
I've tried and failed three times to finish this game. Aside from vicar max, I either kicked off or never let any companion on my ship in the first place.
I always get to byzanthium before just….. stopping.
While I loved the game, I understand why it's mediocre. A lot of places are REALLY DAMN SMALL, and bland as well (Scylla especially). There's only 3 areas that I explored without being disappointed. Honestly, I don't have much to complain about. I'm easily entertained.
Sounds like you just didn't enjoy the humour. You don't even point out why. The closest you come is to saying "the ramp should have stopped and then continued after one button press", which is just the same joke but without the exaggeration. I don't understand the comparison to Firefly either. Apparently it was funny in that case because it was relevant to the story? Did you only find it funny in retrospect then? Or did you laugh at the time? Because personally I would have found it funny at the time but then serious in retrospect since it's breaking down due to serious poverty issues rather than careless free-spirited neglect.
It honestly seems like you're intentionally missing the point of the humour half the time. It's sarcastic parody. Think "The Onion". You read the title and it's something ridiculous but it's delivered with a straight face, the content is something close to real but absurd in a specific way. It's funny because it mocks something. In The Onion's case, usually a news headline trope or some aspect of society. In The Outer Worlds' case it's mocking capitalism and the extreme of a capitalist driven society with no government to regulate it. Spacer's Choice, for example is sarcastically referencing cheap crappy products/ knockoff products that sell only because they're the cheapest option. Most of edgewater is a reference to company towns, which were a real thing with abusive practices like cutting off their employees from the outside world by paying them in company credits and then charging high prices in the company store, the only place they could redeem those credits. Just taken, again, to the extremes by having even graves be something you have to pay for. And yes, the suicide joke could be considered insensitive… But that's the point! The point is that they don't care about mental health. It's again referencing the way companies will distill people down into numbers on a spreadsheet with productivity values. Then, the women finding that dead person being responsible for them is both a bit of wordplay, concerning the "closest" living person, but also another reference to the immorality of an unregulated company and how they honestly don't care who is affected as long as it doesn't impact their bottom line.
Sure, you can say a lot of the jokes are repetitive because they're often parodying the same thing, but that's not really a valid criticism. The jokes are all different enough, show different hypotheticals or play on words in different ways to be distinct and different jokes. For example, in an episode of Mock The Week's quickfire round at the end, each comedian makes jokes based on the same prompt. The subject of the jokes are the same but each joke is different and funny regardless of the other jokes told.
As I said before, you either just don't get the humour (which is fine) or you're purposefully misconstruing it to make this game look worse.
I just think you're coming down way too hard on this game. A lot of people played it, it wasn't some small release as you say it was… It had it's issues, sure, but it was a pretty solid game, both gameplay wise and story wise. Mostly character-story wise rather than grand-story wise, but even the grand story was a satirical extrapolation of selfish wealthy business CEOs and their attitude of exploitation for personal gain. Just because you don't like the humour doesn't mean it isn't funny or 'clever enough' to be good.
You make a really stupid point about 25% of players falling off by the end of the first area… You do realize that SKYRIM, freaking skyrim, has 59.5% of people having gotten a standing stone blessing. Literally the first thing you do after finishing Helgen. Only 69% have "unbound" which is literally for completing the tutorial. So it's doing much much better than skyrim to have 75% of people after the first whole world. Those are the stats from special addition, btw.
OG skyrim has 88.9% for the "unbound" and 79.3% for the first standing stone blessing. For completing the first dungeon "bleak falls barrow" it's 75.2%.
So even going by that it's at least on par with skyrim. 25% of players didn't make it past the first dungeon in skyrim. 25% of players didn't make it off the first planet in Outer Worlds. I'd say the planet is a lot more work than one dungeon so it might actually be doing better than skyrim!
But hey, cherry pick a Dark Souls stat because it's the exception. I'm pretty sure Dark Souls is like that because the people that picked it up knew what they were getting into and were therefore expecting to struggle for a good while before quitting.
Also just the disdain you talk about the area with. It's not a chore tutorial area that holds your hand and doesn't let you do anything. It's the fecking game! You're not trying to make it through edgewater to have the game open up… It IS the game. The people that enjoyed it enjoyed edgewater. They made it through edgewater not just so they could get to enjoy the 'real' game but because they were enjoying it.
I honestly shouldn't even bother writing a comment because I kinda feel like you're shitting on this perfectly good game just because you know it'll be divisive and the positive and negative engagement alike will make it a successful video.
25:00
The game was extremely boring, and i quit playing when it got to the space part.
I simply don't like Felix because he came across as flat.
This game was pretty decent all things considered, the science weapons were really neat and fun to use. But like the dialogue isn’t entertaining. I didn’t care about anyone. I could only really tell you a little about a dlc quest and some early quests if you felt the need to ask me. Making my character look unique and cool was impossible it was just color swapped guard armor pretty much.
Damn, I honestly enjoyed this game very much. It’s not Fallout NV but then again what game is? It may not be as good as Fallout NV but I think it’s still a pretty good game.
I'm part of that 25% who never made it out of the Vale. Too bad, I played New Vegas to death, but just couldn't get into it
The writing for this review is actually crazy good and comprehensive for a youtube video. I always wonder if game devs watch some of these videos, i find myself finding out new things about how game mechanics can naturally flow instead of being dorced.
Personally, I thought the ramp was silly.
I personally think the only reason people didn't really play it is because of the art style, it just doesn't look like a game I wanna live in
I enjoy your videos Patrician but Jesus Christ I have never seen someone fly so far off the hinges at a 2 second gag bit, I found the joke funny 🤦♂️
When daddy government oppresses me: 🥰
When the corporations oppress me: 😡
🙂 I would just LOVE to say, based on intuition and the overall quality of your channel, that this is an incredibly insightful take, but I haven't played the game yet. BUT… You definitely made me want to play it to be able to make an assessment of my own – before trusting yours and congratulating you. THAT is quite an achievement, in my book!
(Also: Capitalism isn't logical! Maybe this is why you are struggling with the humor?!)
Lol, do they have over complicated sex androids in Bizantium?))) And a certain Pilot character.
I wonder how many people's experience of this game was like mine. I remember immediately getting pissed off that I was being railroaded by Phinneas (the game) and thinking "who the hell IS this dude? Leave me alone". I've never played a game so immediately devoid of player agency. I'm a nobody who just got unfrozen and this idiot is already using me as a super-soldier errand boy. And then the game doesn't even really let you turn him in. It's just an endgame box to click. Great.
The complete lack of consequence lead me to just see if I could murder everyone in Byzantium. Like if there's no satisfying role-play in this whole scenario at least I can try to play god, I guess? And that was fun until, what felt like not even the half-way point, the game just outright says "the narrative is about to end, do what you need to do on that other planet, d00d".
I have to say though, I still think about Outer Worlds, which I usually don't with bad games. It's just so fascinatingly shallow. Like, why didn't they just make a Tell-Tale style point-and-click adventure? Or really polish the combat into an addictive game loop? Usually you can tell what aspect of a game the developers were actually passionate about, but here I honestly don't know, other than maybe the art direction, which is alright. The action feels copy/pasted from every other open world shooter and the story and characters rarely (if ever) have any spark of inspiration.
1:24:10 and on was brilliant! I used to be that guy. If I had a time machine, I'd smack my younger self in the back of the head! Brilliant analysis so far, Pat. The most okay game I've ever played. Great Value New Vegas.
53:56 absolute gold
So I watched a buddy play this and he didn't make it far past edgewater and I stopped watching even earlier than that. I have a question, can you just kill the mayor and take the damned power thingy and disregard all the dumbness that is the starting zone? Cause I honestly don't know if I'd be interested in this experience if it's just gonna jerk my chain around with no actual method of saying "No. Fuck your dumb ass laws I didn't sign up for, fuck your stupid ass company, fuck all these people I don't know or care about. Give me the damned power thing and get out of my way." The place seems boring and patronizing as all hell and I can't imagine myself tolerating it for long. Not funny, not interesting, kinda just dumb and boring and real preachy, that's how it feels to me and is mainly why I've not bought the game.
I only made it a few hours before quitting and never relaunching. The entire game just felt like it was trying way too hard to be funny, often failing to do so, and it reached the point where all of the tedious chores they make you do only to find that the entire thing was just a setup for a one liner made me lose motivation to care about the story or world.
Outer Worlds is that game we unanimous know is good. But not world shaking good. This is just like the new saints row, its fine, heck its even fun, but its doesnt make the splash the hype made it look like it would make. This is a video game through and through
I need the time stamp 1:24:00 remembered forever 😂
Without a doubt, the biggest problen of the intro joke is that it shows the beginning of the tone of the game, which is mostly the advertisement image of Fallout, NOT the reality of New Vegas. Its riding on New Vegas kino, but its really a vault boy skit.
Also i was fucking flabbergasted when i heard you mention Malcolm Reynolds, and it took me a moment to realize you are not talking about the Dark Souls Malcolm Reynolds. Dudes fucking everywhere.