Mr.Placeholder

Agree to disagree, but to me there is no push besides "because game" for your actions. It feels rushed regarding pacing, makes you the lynchpin to everything very inorganically, and doesn't give you any personal stakes narratively or via your sandbox background. You are a blank slate but the game attributes motive to your actions regardless. Companions sadly are the worst example of this. You know these people for hours yet their small fetchquests cause major life changes for them. Comparing it to the standard obsidian set for themselves through marketing, they entirely miss the mark compared to new vegas. There companions had small storylines, not small quests. You learn their backstory at a believable pace for traveling with them for a few ingame days-weeks and they have their own motivations. If you play any role in their story it is a small, believable one or they are dovetailed into larger questlines like the BoS or NCR. Comparatively you could speedrun say the vicar in an ingame day/20 minutes of play and he'd go from straight laced to your chosen life changing end path. Even moreso for Ellie- you don't even have to shoot anything.

The answer is supernova isn't balanced properly. The AI can't handle it. Companions die despite gear or settings regardless of if you tell them to stop charging into melee. Part of this is that they only have 2 weapons slots. If you give a companion a light machinegun and it doesn't do any real damage to an enemy they'll rush into melee or sit there useless for an entire fight. At least you don't have to give them ammo for their weapons. Hardcoremode/survival/supernova is a good concept but it shouldn't reduce everything to bullet sponges or sinks. Humanoid enemies in the same armor you're in should take the same number of hits from the same weapons to die. I've beat the game on normal and halfwayed the game on supernova and neither feel satisfying in this regard. Enemies go down in a realistic number of bullets on normal but you never go below 3/4 health unless you're afk, whereas on supernova you need 5-10 rounds to kill marauders and your companions get killed 1v1ing mantis queens or anyone in heavy armor.

Tinkered weapons are the same damage/defense stats as their MK2/gold/ultra versions at the same level. Rather than have weapons of different levels spawn in world they are bracketed to 2 levels of "advancement" despite being the same with potentially more modification slots. It just comes off as artificial progression because they didn't want to make more weapon and armor models. Each company could easily have entire gear sets dedicated to their design philosophies (****ty gear for spacers choice for instance- good starter gear) and be used to pace the game flow but instead you get 3 sets of armor and a 2 weapons per type the entire game.

You have no reason to trust who is your savior and also no dialogue options besides the ability to betray him and some fluff about the Hope no one knows about. Neither law enforcement or the regional leader knows **** all or even has dialogue options about what you would be caring about. Arguably the Hope. But muh power coduit. You have no direct antagonist. Also but none of that matters because you don't have any reason to specifically follow any of these plot points. Hell, you should have a more direct "I'm going to kill the pricks who left me out there" yesman plotline if you want to bring up player motivation. Unlike new vegas where you have a direct immediate motivation to kill the guy who tried to kill you (or not and **** around in that sandbox) OW you have no motivation. You shoot some guys and end up in a town, then can get your ship, then could technically do anything... but can only do what the game wants you to. Why no "help the marauders overrun edgewater" plotline? You have no frame of reference and considering your potential anti board sentiment could be pretty easily sided with the runaways and anarchists you mow down whenever they respawn. Where are the khans or fiends who you can interact with in the outer worlds? It has some good beats and shades of grey. But almost everything ends up binary decisions around the linear plotline. Not being able to get to any planet or location is a failure compared to NV where area level naturally directed the game.

There are a lot of foundational problems with the storyline and in general everything feels rushed or forced or too on the nose. From the outset: You have no motivation. And they never fix that. You start as a blank slate character, but there is still a linear narrative to the game you're being forced down. That is a bad combination. Your character might have an implicit sense of duty or people he wants to save or something on the Hope, but the player doesn't. Like your character you have no frame of reference for this world or motivation to do what the doctor says or go down either branch of the storyline. There is a simple fix to this, a ticking clock. "You need one way or another to get more of chemical X or you'll suffer cell death from your freezing" and you need to either do what Rick Sanchez says or sell him out to the government to do that. Bam, you now have motivation for the game to happen. A reason besides "because the game has to happen" for you to want to fix the ship, get off world, do the doctors dirty work, etc. etc. Without a reason to do anything in the game besides "because game" everything else feels offbalance with the story.

On a supernova playthrough at lv2 I got caught stealing something on the landing bay goodies room and had to kill the auto attacking guard, who proceeded to drop a set of heavy armor. Serendipitously there was a top end heavy helmet in a chest in the same room. On other playthroughs I've found gear like that just in trunks packratting around the starter area. Yeah yeah "ultra" and "gold" but once you find a vending machine in Byzantium thats a moot point too. My point being you can find some of the best gear in the game effectively immediately. This is a massive problem in game. It could be they intend weapons and armor progression to be less central to the game (with things like no 3rd person) less like FO:NV and more like Doom, but there are hints they just didn't make the amount of weapons and armor they intended (like visual changes to only some guns upon upgrade.) Little polish things like the monarch marauders and the terra II marauders having the same armor just feels a bit sloppy, same way Antie Cleo troops aren't supposed to use spacers choice products... but can be found dead or walking around with spacers choice brand weapons due to loot table. There needs to be significantly more item variability and the lack of official mod tools doesn't spell well for longterm replayabilty or letting the community solve that problem on their own.

They need to unlock custom difficulty settings. I like the stat effecting sleep-food-water system from supernova but the enemies are ridiculously spongy. It's not immersive when marauders need to take 10 bullets or shrug off stealth headshots and drags down the flow of combat when you're just magdumping into stunlocked or cowered enemies who refuse to die. Ideally you should be able to set damage/health scaling. Can't go wrong with 1:1 either. On normal you take down most enemies in 2-3 shots and something like a mantis queen is a fight. On supernova a marauder with a sword takes a mag of light ammo to the chest to die and a mantis queen is just not fun; you're just emptying magazine after magazine of heavy ammo into it. There isn't a way to play that tactically. Deathclaws as a bellweather they would almost instantly rek you in FO:NV but you could via mines, explosives, and a proper loadout go toe to toe with them. In outer worlds the random mantis queens in the road you option on supernova is... come back in 10 levels when it doesn't matter?

If they re-balanced survival/supernova and added the ability to recruit say sublight mercs on monarch to eat some of that "your companion AI refuses to do anything but LEEEEEROY at mantis queens" it'd be a cool little add-on. In game fashion maybe depending on stats if they die you don't have to pay them, or if you had low speech skills you get bent over by a contractual payment for their deaths. Same for when you get in good with a faction. Would make some of the endgame actually make more sense if you were getting military assistance from spacers choice/deserters/monarch/iconoclasts/the pmc government faction the whole time. They didn't really leave room for a romance option. Maybe Ellie, there are rushed hints of that, but you're already a 3rd wheel for parvati if you're a girl. It's sad the one thing lacking in this game seems to be companion interactions. Their quests take no time or skill and everything moves lightning fast for the developments. In new vegas companion interaction was small in scale to match being on the road together for maybe a few ingame weeks. Boon opens up about what happened to his wife to you and you could call yourselves almost friends, you learn about the BoS from veronica and her arc dovetails into that questline, etc. In Outer worlds you're at the center/facilitator of major life shifts for the companions... despite knowing these people for literal hours. days at most.

Bottom line, there isn't enough gear to find or buy in this game. On my first play through I went spoiler and wiki free to experience the game and the primary thing that stuck out to me was the lack of weapon variety. I cringed a bit inside when I saw "mk2" and "gold" or "ultra" tacked on the end of the same gun I already had with it's only improvement being an increased item level. I held out until the end hoping there would be endgame gear but... As it sits 2 assault rifles, 2 pistols, 2 revolvers, 2 plasma rifles, 1 bolt action rifle, 1 semi auto rifle, 1 light machinegun, 1 heavy machinegun, 1 grenade launcher, 1 plasma caster, 1 electric heavy gun With most not being a direct upgrade but a different play style of damage and magazine size. Wasting a lot of money tinkering to the same level as an "ultra," a gun you've been carrying from the starter area will do the same damage. Rare variants are same model same texture too. A quick, partial fix would be new gun models for the second tier of weapons, but even that doesn't address the massive dead zones where you don't upgrade or swap out your gear if you aren't specced for tinkering. The game at it's current size and number of planets could easily fit 5+ different guns per type. We expected something more like New Vegas's gun runners arsenal. Even the F- of a game that is anthem has pallet swap custom textures and custom effects on their same model diceroll abilities weapons. Narratively I can see why you're trying to get away with all the corporations using the same armor and weapon models, but it doesn't mesh with the established corporate rivalries. Spacers choice wearing top of the line aramid ballistics heavy armor in a backwater? Immersion breaking. There should be more armor variants that aren't just paint jobs. The deadzones of upgrading mean gear you found 10 minutes into your playthrough will be on your character at lv15+ the current weapons/armor table makes the game seem very empty when your inventory regardless of planet/region gets filled up with the same low sell price gear dropped by the same enemy types.