I think I'm done with Outer Worlds
Jan. 12th, 2020 08:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hadassahintheshell I've been playing a game called Outer Worlds and I don't think I am going to finish it. Some spoilers follow for the plot, and I am mostly going to talk about what I didn't like, so... avoid if you want to see and enjoy the game untarnished.
---
Outer Worlds was a relatively well acclaimed game of last year. If you are familiar with video games, its world is akin to pre-collapse Bioshock in space, but plays more like Fallout 3/New Vegas. If you aren't familiar, its more or less set in a space colony run by ten or or so companies who manage the various habitable planets and people via capitalism. Its gone bad, of course, and you, as a single member of one of the colony ships that went adrift in transit, are awoken to help out.
The game is smart and funny and overall is relatively anti-corporate-owns-and-runs-everything, in a black comedy sort of way. I like several of the companions you meet, and its nice and bright and colorful as far as gameplay goes.
I'm just not having a whole lot of fun with the gameplay, and the setting is getting more depressingly realistic for me, and isn't quite self-aware-grim for me to think the game is taking its own premise seriously enough.
I was getting tired of the gameplay loop before I ended up in the big capital in-universe, which primarily was: find decent gear, upgrade it and equip it for yourself and each of your companions so you can just trounce through enemies, kill your way to objective, make slightly difficult choice that has a clearly *better option*, get new quest and new planet, and re-gear everyone. Sure, you can stealth some, but you don't get experience or any prize for avoiding fights and its a remedial (Stealth score + avoiding direct line of sight + Crouch) system, so its slow too. I mean, Its fine, but I've already been feeling myself just stop bothering for subtlety or carefulness and just waltzing into fights.
Almost all the enemies are beasts, robots, mindless cannibal marauders (the game assures us that there is no moral concern for killing these former humans), and occasionally a few paid mercenaries. Almost all people, except those who have an explicit quest role, have no names either. Just 'Resident' or some such, making me, the player, feel a little like the corporations, reducing people down to their value to the player.
But I think what broke me was making it to the Big City! Everywhere else had been a satellite colony or a small homestead answering in some form or another to big daddy corporate. Now, though, I'd see the heart of the beast, where the evil happened. And its just a bureaucracy trap. It sucks for the people here too! Poorer people are paid to wait in line and the buildings and walls have holes and exposed conduits, because maintenance requests didn't use the latest form- Ha ha! (you dont see these lines or non-working maintenance folks anywhere, you are just told).
I am sounding really dismissive, but I think part of my problem is that I live and breath a corporate-bureaucratic-capitalist nightmare company and... they are not like this. Yes the paperwork sucks, but the companies would do everything in their power to give the veneer of perfection so people would think things were still going well. There were just rich people complaining about how their vending machine stole their quarter, talking about suing the technicians.
(editor's note: note, I went on for another eight or nine sentences, nitpicking issues with this all, and realized I was just belaboring. Consider the above my restrained commentary).
Bureaucracy traps should have at least half the people chained to their processes, sure, but half the people in this city must also be subverting the rules (not just with bribes, hyuk hyuk) to patch walls in the city, because they know that if they don't, they lose their job, and there was just no evidence of that in the game (at least to where I played). There was no desperation in this city, and I know that there should have been so many tight smiles to strangers who could be corporate thought police, and muttered conversations about how they are going to survive on luxury silk, corporate lies, and exposed sewage leaks.
---
Its fine that the story I want is not the story being told. I was just sold on a story that was pretty brutally anti-corporation, but found it was a little more Monty Python or SNL than I wanted. I caught myself selecting a dialog option and shaking my head in a *this doesn't make sense* way too many times.
Its a good game. I finished the companion stories and felt satisfied. The Outer Worlds is just not as biting or engaging as I need it to be.
---
Outer Worlds was a relatively well acclaimed game of last year. If you are familiar with video games, its world is akin to pre-collapse Bioshock in space, but plays more like Fallout 3/New Vegas. If you aren't familiar, its more or less set in a space colony run by ten or or so companies who manage the various habitable planets and people via capitalism. Its gone bad, of course, and you, as a single member of one of the colony ships that went adrift in transit, are awoken to help out.
The game is smart and funny and overall is relatively anti-corporate-owns-and-runs-everything, in a black comedy sort of way. I like several of the companions you meet, and its nice and bright and colorful as far as gameplay goes.
I'm just not having a whole lot of fun with the gameplay, and the setting is getting more depressingly realistic for me, and isn't quite self-aware-grim for me to think the game is taking its own premise seriously enough.
I was getting tired of the gameplay loop before I ended up in the big capital in-universe, which primarily was: find decent gear, upgrade it and equip it for yourself and each of your companions so you can just trounce through enemies, kill your way to objective, make slightly difficult choice that has a clearly *better option*, get new quest and new planet, and re-gear everyone. Sure, you can stealth some, but you don't get experience or any prize for avoiding fights and its a remedial (Stealth score + avoiding direct line of sight + Crouch) system, so its slow too. I mean, Its fine, but I've already been feeling myself just stop bothering for subtlety or carefulness and just waltzing into fights.
Almost all the enemies are beasts, robots, mindless cannibal marauders (the game assures us that there is no moral concern for killing these former humans), and occasionally a few paid mercenaries. Almost all people, except those who have an explicit quest role, have no names either. Just 'Resident' or some such, making me, the player, feel a little like the corporations, reducing people down to their value to the player.
But I think what broke me was making it to the Big City! Everywhere else had been a satellite colony or a small homestead answering in some form or another to big daddy corporate. Now, though, I'd see the heart of the beast, where the evil happened. And its just a bureaucracy trap. It sucks for the people here too! Poorer people are paid to wait in line and the buildings and walls have holes and exposed conduits, because maintenance requests didn't use the latest form- Ha ha! (you dont see these lines or non-working maintenance folks anywhere, you are just told).
I am sounding really dismissive, but I think part of my problem is that I live and breath a corporate-bureaucratic-capitalist nightmare company and... they are not like this. Yes the paperwork sucks, but the companies would do everything in their power to give the veneer of perfection so people would think things were still going well. There were just rich people complaining about how their vending machine stole their quarter, talking about suing the technicians.
(editor's note: note, I went on for another eight or nine sentences, nitpicking issues with this all, and realized I was just belaboring. Consider the above my restrained commentary).
Bureaucracy traps should have at least half the people chained to their processes, sure, but half the people in this city must also be subverting the rules (not just with bribes, hyuk hyuk) to patch walls in the city, because they know that if they don't, they lose their job, and there was just no evidence of that in the game (at least to where I played). There was no desperation in this city, and I know that there should have been so many tight smiles to strangers who could be corporate thought police, and muttered conversations about how they are going to survive on luxury silk, corporate lies, and exposed sewage leaks.
---
Its fine that the story I want is not the story being told. I was just sold on a story that was pretty brutally anti-corporation, but found it was a little more Monty Python or SNL than I wanted. I caught myself selecting a dialog option and shaking my head in a *this doesn't make sense* way too many times.
Its a good game. I finished the companion stories and felt satisfied. The Outer Worlds is just not as biting or engaging as I need it to be.
