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Old 11-11-2019, 12:20 PM   #1791
CorsiHockeyLeague
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So I beat Outer Worlds. Pretty much just binged through it. In brief, excellent game, very Obsidian, very New Vegas like, but more polished. There were a few visual glitches but nothing too crazy. I encountered one bug that would have been horribly game breaking in the last hour of the game but thankfully there was another way to deal with it.
Spoiler!

Basically, this is what Bethesda's games should be like in terms of story and quest structure. There isn't just one way to resolve any conflict or issue. In fact, there are usually at least three or four. It's not clear to me if it would have been possible to get through the game without killing anyone, but it would certainly be possible to do most of it without killing anyone. That optionality and variety of outcomes is the whole reason for playing this type of title and it immediately makes it worthwhile, where Fallout 4 was not. That said, I would have preferred some more gray area in the main story quest - it's pretty obvious who's good and who's awful, even if they have understandable motivations. There was a bit more gray in the local storylines (which faction in locale X do you support) but even there, it wasn't too tough to tell what the likely outcomes of your decisions were going to be. That reduces replayability because I also know pretty much what's going to happen if I go through and do the opposite of what I did.

I will say that the combat was super easy on normal difficulty, and I'm not even a FPS guy, so step up the difficulty if you want that to be more of a challenge. The bullet-time ability that you get throughout the game just makes it really easy to headshot guys and by the end of it, even large-scale skirmishes were pretty much a joke. All told, it took me a bit less than 30 hours on normal, doing every side quest but not all of the "errands" (fetch quests). Combat was... fine. Again, quite reminiscent of New Vegas. This is the first game I've played on a PC with a mouse and keyboard in a while, and it's very similar to what I remember but kind of jarring coming from the console games I've played - things like Horizon or Witcher or God of War are fluid, epic combat experiences that I think I prefer to this, honestly. But again, I've never been big on the FPS style. One of the other issues is that I ended up using the same three NPCs more or less all the time because of their combat abilities and the stat boosts I got from them. The companions you enlist were fine, all quite well acted, but I didn't really find any of them to be super interesting characters. I'd have preferred more of an arc for each of them and more of a reason to spend time traveling with and getting invested in them (the Mass Effect series did a great job of this).

All in all a very good game that's for pretty much everyone. I cannot think of anyone who wouldn't have a good time with it. The writing is clever and irreverent. Gameplay is good and not very buggy. Story is pretty straightforward, but it all makes sense and your choices matter. I think one review I saw titled it "Great at being Good", and I think that sums it up quite well. I say buy it.
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