What Did We Play Yesterday?

Outer Worlds was the only game really on my radar this year, and I use radar in the loosest sense because I didn't realize it was out until this morning. I went to see some reviews.

When I saw a dev interview titled, You can kill everyone in The Outer Worlds. It’s a development nightmare, my heart sang because

yes, please.

And as I go down a rabbit hole of articles I'm seeing things like:

Romance, he said, has a tendency to funnel gameplay and temper the decisions players make in the game in unusual ways. For that reason, they opted to leave it out.

“We had to pick what we were going to put our time into,” Boyarsky said. “Other people have explored the romance angle in different ways. We felt like sometimes it kind of waters down your roleplaying for your character because it turns into this mini game of how do I seduce this companion or that companion. So it was just one of the things we felt wasn’t really what we wanted to focus our time on. [...] We’re really trying to be focused on a specific experience so that we can polish that experience and give players the best version of that experience that we can.”

And

There will be a modicum of character customization options, Boyarsky said, but players should expect a more old-school approach. For instance, you’ll rarely see your character on screen outside the inventory menus. They won’t have even have a voice. That will leave room, he said, for the developers to spend their time and treasure crafting a complex narrative adventure. Early gameplay shows branching dialogue paths with plenty of nuance, a composite of memory mechanics from games like TellTale’s The Walking Dead and stats-based rolls common in isometric RPGs.

And

“It’s a typical Obsidian game,” Staples said, “so it has a lot of choice and consequence. A lot of building your own character and playing the way that you want to play.”

“Along the way,” he continued, “the game watches how you’re doing and what happens to the player and we call it a flaw. Say that I’ve been fighting a lot of robots and here’s an opportunity of where we say, ‘You can take a flaw and have robo-phobia where you’re scared of robots and all your stats will go down when you’re near robots. If you accept that, you can take a perk right now.’

It's like Obsidian heard my lamentations and said, "Don't worry, Ren. We'll make it all right."

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Bethesda is still breaking everything and I guess hoping we somehow won't notice, I don't even try to understand anymore.

Bethesda is dead, long live Obsidian.

Now to wait and see how the Switch port goes. Maybe. I think I might be willing to snuggle up with my PC again for this one.

After posting a glowing review of Hollow Knight I ended up abandoning the game 7 hours in. I died twice in a row, losing all the geo I'd been diligently stockpiling, and was already struggling mightily with the platforming (specifically the bouncy mushrooms, which I just couldn't figure out how to time right) and the escalating boss difficulty.

Well, my Big Gaming Mood has returned and I decided I would like to take another stab at some of my abandoned titles, so I started a new game on this. I expected to be totally back to square one, having not played in a while, and was a little surprised at how quickly it came back to me. My first game I spent a lot of time aimlessly wandering, as I kept just missing the map guy, but this time I knew more or less where he was and that helped tremendously. The first boss, False Knight, seems a bit much for what it is, but I beat it and I'm now to the forest section. The boss of this section was very difficult for me the first time, I died... a lot. A lot a lot. And I don't know I have the patience for it. But I do think this playthrough I'm being a lot more careful with timing and that is serving me well.

Meanwhile, I'd just like to point out this game has multiple GUI skins, but no difficulty settings. I'll never stop grinding that old axe so just enjoy the screeching sound of metal on stone every time I post about this game.

Also, last night I died 5 times in a row in the same area and put the game away. It's an optional area and I'm a bit under the weather and not playing my best, so I'm just going to collect my spirit and move on, but let's be clear. If that happens again, I'm Marie Kondoing this thing and hitting the delete button. I'm not even going to archive it. It will just be g o n e.