Jackalgirl

Would Obsidian/Microsoft consider releasing a purchase-able asset kit (and personal-use license) of assets for those of us who are building in such sites as Resonite (VR social/building sites)? I would love to remake my cloud home in Resonite to look like the penthouse in the Grand Colonial, and could probably build something like it on my own, but it would be very nice to be able to just import, say, materials, so that I can give the space that Halcyon look & feel. : )

Thanks to you both for the response -- that makes sense, and I figured that there would be a legal worry about copyright infringement if someone viewed an unsolicited pitch and then ideas from that pitch leaked into something they did down the line (or there was some kind of "convergent evolution").

Thanks for your reply, ShadySands -- it's not recommended by whom? Have Obsidian reps specifically posted this? (I wouldn't be surprised if so.)

Howdy, Is there an established process for pitching a game idea to Obsidian? I see at least one pitch in this Forum, but I imagine that for legal reasons, there probably has to be something formal and possibly less public. Or does one just go hog-wild here? TIA -- -- JG

What a very interesting observation, thank you -- you've given me a lot to think about. (This is not snarky--I mean it.) I think that if I had to hold up some outliers, I'd note that Sophia Akande is an antagonist (if you're anti-Board, that is), and Phineas Welles is a protagonist (again, if you're anti-Board). There are some other examples of quests where you have male protagonists and female antagonists, or at least jerks (I'm thinking of "Cupid of the Laboratory" and the Early Retirement Program quests -- though they are very much side quests and not tied into the main arc or subarcs like getting in good with SubLight). However, none of this IMO invalidates your point, which is (correct me if I'm wrong!) that generally speaking, major male characters (in particular, the antagonists) are portrayed in a more tropey fashion in the game. I will point out, though, that from my own personal experience*, I at no point got any sense that "the colony's broken because of men and the solution is to kick out the men and put women in charge**". I always had the personal impression that the people in charge of the colony (including Sophia Akande) were a bunch of people who placed no value on the inherent value of people (non-elite people are resources, to be used and discarded when no longer useful to those in power) and who valued utilitarian ethics, and it never crossed my mind that they were that way because of their (apparent) gender***. Again, other people might draw different conclusions according to their own experience -- it's just an observation on my part related to my own experience. * Your mileage may vary ** In the Board Ending, you essentially put Sophia in charge (as I understand it -- please anyone correct me if I'm wrong, as I haven't played the Board Ending yet, myself). My understanding from the Good Ending is that your character is more or less in charge (unless you choose the Ice Cream ending), leaving a group of people probably including Phineas, Junlei, Zora, and maybe some others (I don't believe it's explicitly laid out, but I might be forgetting) as your "small counsel". If your player-Captain is not female (and you haven't chosen the Ice Cream ending), then that means the colony is now being lead or at least directed by a not-female person. *** And I might not have noticed it due to implicit bias, to be sure. Thank you for the post! -=-=-=-=- Edited to add: I didn't want you or anyone else to think I was minimizing or glossing over your other salient point, which is that by portraying this kind of behavior as being largely carried out by men, it could reinforce/normalize negative stereotypes about men, which can be incredibly damaging to actual men. I agree. I was just trying to get to my points.

I've noticed this also. Sometimes she says something, but now it seems that all of her "welcome aboard" barks that announced some kind of other companion interaction (such as Max/Felix/Ellie arguing) aren't happening.

Well, I ran all over the Vale and explored as much as I could and did not find anything. That doesn't mean he's not there, of course. However, it doesn't surprise me, because if you were to find his body, it would kind of be a spoiler for later.

That's a great question! I haven't found it, but I haven't gone looking for it, either. I realize I have some places I haven't been to in the Vale on my latest run-through; I'll go back and wander around and if I find it, I'll come back here and post about it. : )

Oh yes, that is some really really realness right there! LOL

Tumblr: < long speculative discussion of pets in The Outer Worlds, pet-based commerce & culture, pets that NPCs and personal characters might have, and in particular pet sprats, sprat breeding and showing > Brain: You know, there once was a magazine called "Rat Fancy"... Me: NO. I AM NOT MOCKING UP A COVER OF A -- < several hours later > Me: GODSDAMMIT

Oooo, this is a good, good catch. I'm immediately taken straight to Game of Thrones where Cersei gets in league with the Sparrows and it does not turn out particularly well for her. Although I imagine that the relationship between OSI and the (other) corporations is more stable and collaborative. I think that Spacer’s Choice would like to think that OSI is its loyal (and domesticated) defender, and I’m sure OSI likes that Spacer’s Choice (and the other corporations) would think that, but I’m absolutely sure that OSI has its own agenda, too. In my own headcannon thinking, OSI has a sizable intelligence arm that it occasionally brings to bear to the benefit of individual corporations (or of HHC as a whole), but I think it absolutely has its own agenda as well. (Back to Game of Thrones: vibes of Varys.) Thank you for pointing this out!

(1) Agree for needing to eat & sleep in other modes. It would be a nice add to the DLC if a) it isn't already and b) isn't too late to add into the game.

Maybe not a hamster (though I admit that would be cool), but it would be great to have a Ship's Sprat. : )

If you press on the Options button, you should get a menu; select "load". Those are your saves. The game autosaves at several points, so you should see several of those, and you may have to scroll down to get to any saves you have made. But you have to make the saves to see them -- Options > Save > New save (or you can overwrite an old one).

I see I'm of the same mind as everyone else here -- I saw a lot of stuff in the noclip documentary that I'd love to actually see in the game, and I'm intrigued by the stuff that was cut out -- the 6-month project, the expanded Terra 2 map. For some reason, I really have Hephaestus on my mind, though. I'd love to see what they do with that. I keep thinking of Kim Stanley Robinson's "Mars" series and wonder if they'll have something like Terminator -- the city that rides on rails so that it's always on the night-side of the planet (as the sun heats up the rails behind it, they expand, and "squeeze" the city along the cooler night-side rails). Also, we've seen canines, primates, insects, reptiles, and something like birds, as animal foes. Where are the cats at? I would love to see some cats. I did some speculating on my own...

I've noticed that on the PS4 at least, the character name field is limited to 16 characters. Could you expand it to 32? My character's name is longer and I'd love to use it, for all of the four or five opportunities to see it in-game, and it might be fun to play a game with "Arthur Septimus Higglesworth III" (Occupation: tossball mascot). Thanks for considering it!

If you belong to the Venn-diagram intersection of "TOW fan" and "Military", what little snippets of unique-to-your-world dialogue would you love to see happening in the background in future installments of TOW? You know, those things that people in your branch always seem to say? I'm thinking something like: or or, of course, any Chief Petty Officer starting a verbal counseling of any kind with the wielding of said knifehand and "Shipmate -- " I'd love to hear from other military folks as to the kinds of verbal or visual memes that you experience in your day-to-day that you'd love to show up in the game! [ Edited to add: I should mention that this is US Navy. Absolutely would love to hear from other branches and other countries' militaries. ]

Are you talking about permanent deaths for you, or for your companions (or both)? For the latter, that's supernova difficulty, so you can do that. And if you're talking about romancing NPCs, yes, well, there are a lot of us who are in line with you on that one. ; )

Just wanting to note that I found the Community Guidelines for IP use for Pillars of Eternity (here: https://eternity.obsidian.net/eternity/legal/ip-use); however, there's nothing specific to The Outer Worlds and I'm not sure where Obsidian stands wrt licensing (especially with the Microsoft acquisition).

So very well-earned!

...and now I have to know: ARE THERE TEDDY BEARS IN THE OUTER WORLDS?

I was trying to get a lock on the story timeline and finally read through the parts of the various wikis that talk about the background history of the worlds of The Outer Worlds. All of them mention TOW's first point of departure from our own history as taking place in 1901, when President William McKinley wasn't assassinated, and Theodore Roosevelt didn't become president of the United States. (Yes, I'm slow to the party.) This kinda majorly blew my mind. I've read Edmund Morris' Theodore Rex series, although it's been a while, and I need to read it again. But it's super intriguing that this one person's absence could be what leads to the throughly hyper-corporate culture of TOW (the gist is that without "Theodore the Sudden's" monopoly-busting activities, the growth and development of super-powerful corporations would have been unchecked, leading to the society we see at play in TOW). That got me thinking of a lot of things. One of the other things that Theodore Roosevelt was passionately interested in is a topic that's near and dear to my own heart: the US Navy. He's the one who instituted the sailing of the Great White Fleet in 1908, and I've always felt that this was one of the starting points (for good and for ill, in retrospect) of the United States' growth as a global superpower. Roosevelt, thoroughly onboard with Alfred Thayer Mahan (contemporary author of The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783), realized that dominance at sea was critical to a nation's prosperity, security, and power. There's no indication that Alfred Thayer Mahan was also absent in the history of TOW, but without a no-holds-barred leader like Roosevelt to act upon Mahan's ideas, what would the US Navy of TOW have looked like? Clearly there's some form of some kind of Navy/Marine Corps relationship (not necessarily the US Navy, mind you), because we run into the descendants of a Marine Detachment in Groundbreaker. But without Roosevelt, how would the growth of the United States as a global power be impacted? Would some other country have stepped in to bridge the gap? What would World Wars I and II looked like (I imagine that they still would have happened, especially WWI)? Would there have been the Battles of the Coral Sea and Midway, without the earlier effort to build up the size & effectiveness of the US Navy? I sort of imagine that governments would have had their own proprietary military forces for a while, but eventually the corporations would have become so powerful that governments would have had to contract out to the corporations for military services (sort of as if the British Crown had hired the military arm of the East India Company instead of maintaining its own Navy) before ultimately becoming subsumed themselves by corporations (a unified corporate takeover of governmental functions*?). It also reminded me strongly of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. If you haven't read it, I can't recommend it strongly enough. But I think I can safely say without spoiling it too much that it's set in a speculative world in which strong encryption has lead to the growth of cryptocurrency (a theme explored in another of his books, Cryptonomicon, also excellent), which in turn has led to governmental collapse and a world which is largely run by...you guess it, corporations. I need to go reread my Morris, and I can't help but wonder if the folks at Obsidian are Stephenson fans. I was absolutely delighted to find out this detail, though, and I have to think that they've thought about all of this, and I wonder if any more details about the much-earlier history of TOW's Earth will be part of the DLC (or maybe TOW 2)? I sure hope so. I am just on fire to learn more, and for me it really underscores why Obsidian is just so dang awesome. : ) * Do historians in the world of TOW talk about the "Instruments of Corporate Power" as opposed to the "Instruments of National Power"?

Now that the poll is over, I'd like to say that my favorite lines were based on the reactions of the companions or NPCs, typically Max, because Dave Mitchell is amazing. You: "Can Parvati get that treated by a sawbones?" Max: "I see today we'll be conversing without metaphors." And my absolute favorite: Max: <speaking to Reginald Chaney> "Well, guess what. My goodwill's exhausted, along with my temper." You: "Max, if you're exhausted, maybe we should rest and look for the scholar later." Max: <does a double-take at you> "What? You never cease to amaze me, you know that?" Part of this quest is getting him not to kill Chaney, and I love that in this case, you say something so incredibly stupid that it actually snaps Max out of his fury. I laughed and laughed. : )

Looking for a member of the Dev team to answer this one: I'm kicking around the idea of putting together a site that has craft projects from the perspective of a character who's not in the game, although she's related to characters in the game, starting with a mock-apple pincushion. It would wholly be from the POV of this character. There would also probably be short stories, all of which involve the characters and storylines from the game. I'm curious as to what Obsidian's thoughts are towards fan-generated content, in particular written stories taking place within the worlds of The Outer Worlds. It's likely that there's nothing anyone could actually do about it, but what's Obsidian's preference? Nothing? Go hog-wild? Or "it's okay, just include a disclaimer and spoiler warning"?

I realize you're running out of buttons, and this is absolutely 100% not a big deal, but it would be nice to be able to carry the weapon at the ready (in particular, rifles). I guess that putting it away sort of counts (I mean, it's in your hands once you go idle), but I'd like to be able to see that the muzzle is angled downwards. This is completely non-functional, which is why it's not a big deal -- it's just that I absolutely hate flagging my companions, and trying to dip the gun results in a wildly slewing and disorienting viewpoint. Its a story thing and it is 100% aesthetic, so feel free to disregard.