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Impressions: The Outer Worlds 2
When it comes to The Outer Worlds 2 (TOW2), when compared to the original game, there have been some marked improvements in some areas, and some continued nonsense in others. What follows are my initial impressions after about 12 hours of gameplay, still on the first planet.
One of my gripes from the first game came from what I considered stunted exploration:
Outside of combat, things are so formulaic that I don’t even know why Obsidian bothered with exploration elements at all. There are three ammo types for all guns (light, heavy, energy); there are multiple damage types (physical, corrosive, etc) but they map 1:1 in a cookie-cutter resistance way; 99% of everything you find is either currency, unnecessary food, and more copies of generic guns/armor to break down for generic parts to repair the guns you chosen to use; mods for guns/armor sound important but are again generic nonsense (your melee weapon deals plasma damage now!) that just ticks the customization 101 box. Even the Perks are boring.
I am pleased to report there are now 10 (!) ammunition types! But seriously, there is a much bigger emphasis picking up random pieces of junk to break down into useful materials and then crafting them into other items. I cannot exactly recall if the prior game already had a similar system or not beyond repairing/upgrading, but it certainly feels much better in TOW2. Additionally, there have been several unique “playing cards” sprinkled about that grant permanent buffs when picked up. Overall, it is not on the same level as Fallout whereby you shout in excitement at discovering an Aluminum can amongst a bunch of Tin ones, but it does make general exploration more worth it, with a knock-on effect of making navigating the game world more engaging. The Avowed-style vaulting certainly helps too.
Sadly, one of the things making the world considerably less engaging is the Skill/Perk system.
Not sure if this qualifies as a hot take, but I despise Skills checks in games. “It encourages roleplaying and specialization.” No, it does not. There is nothing more nakedly mechanical and abstract than a Skill check. What is the difference between Speech 3 and Speech 5, from a “roleplaying” perspective?
To me, roleplaying is all about choices you make. When you defeat the bandits, do you forgive them or do you execute them? Do you accept the quest from the shady merchant, or do you turn them in? Or do you complete the quest, keep the item, then kill the merchant yourself while pinning the death on an innocent bystander? Those are meaningful roleplaying choices. Imagine not even having the option to turn the merchant over to the authorities because you put one too many points into Lockpicking last time you leveled up.
To Obsidian’s credit, TOW2 is not entirely binary in the Skills checks thus far. A stuck door can be opened with Engineering 3 or the Brawny Trait. Special medicine can be synthesized via Medical 4 or just winging it via the Lucky Trait. Sometimes just finding incriminating evidence is enough to trigger additional dialog choices. But there are absolutely single Skill checks in quests or conversations and you either have the number, or you have the deficiency rubbed in your face. Which means if you want to roleplay “someone in an RPG who can talk to people,” you need to hyperfocus on maxing out Speech. That’s 20 points, accrued at two points per level. Since there is a level cap of 30, that means you can max out just 3 total skills (out of 12) with everything else being zero, or perhaps max two with some scattered levels in other things for flavor.
To state the obvious, this is not a fun way to play the game. “Yay, level up and… another 2 points into Speech.” Or, in actuality, just leveling up and not choosing any Skills at all because I don’t feel that I have enough information to even make a meaningful choice. Is Speech 4 good enough for this area of the game? Can I afford to raise Sneak to 2 in order to get past this skill check and break into the building in front of me? Or am I going to immediately regret it the next time an NPC starts talking to me?
This is a real scenario I encountered: exploring the map, find a befuddled man in front of a locked house. Don’t have Medical 2, so I fruitlessly exhaust the dialog choices with him. I can see items in the house through the window, but there is no way inside as none of the doors are powered. Up the road is a power sub-station that is malfunctioning, presumably the cause of the locked house. The sub-station repair kit is inside a locked building, and you need Sneak 2 or the Nimble trait to squeeze through the vent. On the roof of the building is the malfunctioning panel, which requires Engineering 3 or the Innovative trait or the repair kit mentioned earlier. If you don’t have any of those… fuck you, I guess.
So, anyway, I’m still running around with 2 loose skill points and about to level up again for a total of 4. Could I put two points in Sneak and solve the area? Sure. How many more Sneak checks will I encounter though? This was literally the first one. Conversely, Engineering has come up quite a lot, so I’m more inclined to put points there instead. But I also have to acknowledge that since I know there will be Speech 20 checks in the game, I only get one other max skill (because I put a point into Guns and Observation), and that was originally going to be Hacking and/or Lockpicking.
This is all very fun, I’m having so much fun, can you tell? So much fun I’m seriously considering deleting 10 hours of progress so I can pick different traits – why did I think Witty was going to be useful if I’m not trying to kill everyone I meet? – and bypass some of these dilemmas. Unless, of course, there will be some future dilemmas with different Skills rendering everything moot.
By the way, I understand that there are indeed real people out there who either don’t care about being locked out of content, or who appreciate the “enforced roleplaying” aspect. I want you to know that I see you… and I don’t understand you. In fact, I may actively hate you. For one thing, the “enforcement” mechanism of discrete Skill checks could have stayed inside your roleplaying mind; you can still commit to your Chaotic Neutral space pirate fantasy without Speech 10 checks sprinkled about. Just, you know, pick those dialog choices, shoot empire guards on sight, or whatever. Hell, I’m more fine with a morality bar governing choices, because at least that is based on prior actions made inside the game world rather than the UI. Where is the fun picking answers before you even get to the questions?
Ultimately, if you have designed your game such that players would rather run around with unspent Skill/Perk points lest they miss out, you have failed IMO. Either by not making them exciting enough to want to pick straight away, or by gating too much content behind them.
Other than, well, all that? The Outer Worlds 2 is pretty good thus far. Time will tell how annoying it will continue getting with Skill checks as we get further into the game. My guess is “loads more annoying.”
I Get No Respec
The Outer Worlds 2’s game director believes implementing 90+ perks with no respec option will lead to role-playing consequences.
“There’s a lot of times where you’ll see games where they allow infinite respec, and at that point I’m not really role-playing a character, because I’m jumping between — well my guy is a really great assassin that snipes from long range, and then oh, y’know, now I’m going to be a speech person, then respec again, and it’s like–” […]
“We want to respect people’s time and for me in a role-playing game this is respecting somebody’s time,” Adler argues. “Saying your choices matter, so take that seriously – and we’re going to respect that by making sure that we give you cool reactivity for those choices that you’re making. That’s respecting your time.
Nah, dawg, having an exit strategy for designer hubris and incompetence is respecting my time.
Imagine starting up Cyberpunk 2077 on launch day and wanting to role-play a knife-throwing guy… and then being stuck for 14 months (until patch 1.5) before the designers get around to fixing the problem of having included knife-throwing abilities with no way to retrieve the knives. As in, whatever you threw – which could have been a Legendary knife! – just evaporated into the ether. Or if you dedicated yourself to be a Tech-based weapon user only to find out the capstone ability that allows tech-based weapons to ignore enemy armor does nothing because enemies didn’t actually have an armor attribute. Or that crafting anything in general is an insane waste of time, assuming you didn’t want to just print infinite amounts of currency to purchase better-than-you-can-craft items.
Or how about in the original release Deus Ex: Human Revolution when you go down the hacking/sneaking route. Only… surprise! There are boss fights in which hacking/sneaking is useless. Very nice role-playing consequences there. Devs eventually fixed this two years later.
The Outer Worlds 2 will not be released in a balanced state; practically no game is, much less ones directed by apparent morons. Undoubtedly we will get the option for inane perks like +50% Explosive Damage without any information about how 99% of the endgame foes will have resistances to Explosive Damage or whatever. In the strictest (and dumbest) interpretation I suppose you could argue that “role-playing” an inept demolition man is still a meaningful choice. But is it really a meaningful choice when you have to trap players into making it? If players wanted a harder time, they could always increase the game difficulty or intentionally play poorly.
Which honestly gets to the heart of the matter: who are you doing this for? Not actual role-players, because guess what… they can (and should) just ignore the ability to respec even if it is available. Commitment is kind of their whole schtick, is it not? No, this reeks of old-school elitist game dev bullshit that was pulled from the garbage bin of history and proudly mounted over the fireplace.
But I’ll tell you, not every game is for every single person. Sometimes you have to pick a lane.”
And yet out of all the available options, you picked the dumbass lane.
It’s funny, because normally I am one to admire a game developer sticking to their strong vision for a particular game. You would never get a Dark Souls or Death Stranding designed by a committee. But by specifically presenting the arguments he did, it is clear to me that “no respecs” is not actually a vision, it’s an absurdist pet peeve. Obsidian is going to give us “cool reactivity” for the choices we make? You mean like… what? If I choose the Bullets Cause Bleed perk my character will say “I’ll make them bleed”? Or my party members will openly worry that I will blow everyone up when I pick the Explosion Damage+ perk? You can’t see it, but I’m pressing X to Doubt.
[Fake Edit]
I just came across developer interviews on Flaws and Character Building. Flaws are bonus/penalty choices you get presented with after a specific criteria is met during gameplay. One example was Sungazer, where you after looking at the sun too many times, you can choose permanent vision damage (bloom and/or lens flair all the time), +100% ranged damage spread, but you can passively heal to 50% HP when outside in the daytime. The other is Foot-In-Mouth where if the game notices you quickly breezing through dialog options, you can opt to get a permanent +15% XP gain in exchange for only having a 15-second timer to make dialog options, after which everything is picked randomly.
While those are probably supposed to be “fun” and goofy examples, this is exactly the sort of shit I was talking about. Sungazer is obviously not something a ranged character would ever select, but suppose I was already committing to a melee build. OK… how often will I be outside? Does the healing work even in combat? How expensive/rare are healing items going to be? Will the final dungeon be, well, a dungeon? I doubt potentially ruining the visuals for the entire rest of the game will ever be worth it – and we can’t know how bad that’s going to be until we experience it! – but even if that portion was removed, I would still need more information before I could call that a meaningful choice.
“Life is full of meaningful choices with imperfect information.” Yeah, no, there’s a difference between imperfect information because the information is unknowable and when the devs know exactly how they planned the rest of the game to go. Letting players specialize in poison damage and then making all bosses immune to poison is called a Noob Trap.
The second video touches more directly on respecs and choices, and… it’s pretty bad. They do their best and everything sounds fine up until the last thirty seconds or so.
Yes, you can experiment and play with it a bit. And you may find something… ‘I try this out and I don’t really like it too much’ you know… you might load a save. You might want to do something different, you might try a different playthrough.
This was right after the other guy was suggesting that if you discover you like using Gadgets (instead of whatever you were doing previously), your now-wasted skill points are “part of your story, part of your experience that no one else had.” Oh, you mean like part of my bad experience that can be avoided by seeing other players warning me that X Skill is useless in the endgame or that Y Skill doesn’t work like it says it does in-game?
Ultimately, none of this is going to matter much, of course. There will be a respec mod out there on Day 1 and the mEaNiNgFuL cHoIcEs crowd will get what they want, those who can mod will get what we want, and everyone else just kind of gets fucked by asinine developers who feel like they know better than the ones who made Baldur’s Gate 3, Cyberpunk 2077, Elden Ring, and Witcher 3.
In An Age 
Of All Time
Dec 9
Posted by Azuriel
I was browsing a Reddit thread called “We haven’t seen a good space opera game where you play a spaceship commander with a loyal crew since 2012”. The image in the post was for Mass Effect 3, to remove any doubt of to what space opera they were referring. Quite a few people pointed out that, in fact, the Outer Worlds series has been released since then. Amongst the pushback that the Outer Worlds is even remotely close to Mass Effect quality, was this rejoinder:
It’s funny to imagine being a part of a cadre of human beings for which it’s somewhat possible to have a comprehensive experience on a matter. Like, if you were to ask what is the greatest adventure novel of all time, you would have literally a thousand years of human written storytelling to go through. Conversely, the first videogame RPG came out in 1980, depending on your definition of RPG. Even if you limit it to “classical” console-style RPGs, that moves the needle to 1986 with Dragon Quest.
My own personal experience with videogames started in the late NES era, and only really kicked off in the halcyon Squaresoft/SNES days of the mid-90s. Although, even then, there were gaps. For example, I never played Final Fantasy 4. Indeed, I tried playing it a few times in the last decade or so, and couldn’t really bring myself to get particularly far. Which shouldn’t be too surprising considering how few modern videogames (that I even paid for!) I complete on average.
And that sort of brings me back to the quote. Obviously young people exist – I hear their distinct cries of “six SEVEN” down the road all the time. And there is always a conversation surrounding whether old games hold up to modern play, even by the people who profess their greatest of all time status. But it nevertheless feels… tragic? Is that an appropriate word? It feels tragic to imagine a young person’s entire view of quality being limited to such a small time horizon.
That is, of course, how everything works. Has always worked. “GOAT” has always had asterisks galore, even (or especially) if denied. Greatest (in my subjective opinion) of All (that I’m aware of) Time (up to this moment). GIMSOOATIAOTUTTM just didn’t have the same ring to it though.
P.S. This makes me officially old, doesn’t it?
P.P.S. I already had an Officially Old tag from two years ago?! I’m actively turning to dust right now.
Posted in Commentary
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Tags: GOAT, Mass Effect 3, Officially Old, RPG, Space Opera, The Outer Worlds 2