slopesandsam

I don't think that's a good idea. I have no love for Bethesda - I can get quite sad when I think about what they've done to the Fallout franchise - and even if, behind closed doors, the staff at Obsidian also have no love for Bethesda, I don't want to see them get into some petty fight with the other company. I know a lot of people think Obsidian have already taken a few jabs with the "from the original creators of Fallout and the developers of New Vegas" thing, but come on, as if the marketing wouldn't have stressed those two points anyway. Those are major selling points, not veiled insults aimed at Bethesda. I'd be happy if this game had a similarly iconic intro in the same vein as the "War, war never changes" thing from Fallout, but it should do its own thing that its future sequels can iterate on. Each Outer Worlds game can open with a different Spacers' Choice commercial, or something like that.

I thought romances were a cute addition when they appeared in Dragon Age: Origins, but it annoys me that they seem to have become a staple of the genre. They always cause me to stop thinking of the companions as characters, and start thinking of them as systems to be gamed. It breaks my immersion.

Looks good - could do without the guys talking over it. Wonder if other sites have the same footage?

Based on the gameplay footage, it looks like maybe the timed dialog thing only happens in certain situations, such as when someone declares that you've got one minute to explain yourself.

I think if they've played Fallout 4 and 76, they're already used to somewhat shonky graphics. And I think the trailer does a really great job of evoking the general look and feel of Bethesda's Fallouts while still looking like its own thing. As I said in another thread, I think they set out to purposely evoke Fallout New Vegas so people would make the connection. And then they also outright said it in the trailer.

I've only encountered dialogue timers in Telltale games, where I found them really off-putting.

The graphics look great to me, and the faces look better than anything from Bethesda's Fallouts. Maybe I'm just old, but I'm long past getting excited by ever-more photorealistic graphics in games. I remember thinking that the original Doom looked so photorealistic it was like someone had videotaped actual demons, which is obviously laughable when you look at any screenshot of old-school Doom today, but it definitely seemed that way to me at the time. But these days? I'm hard pressed to care about the difference in photorealism between the last gen and the current gen. It all seems incremental to me. And the Outer Worlds definitely looks good enough for current gen. Looks great, I think. (These days I'm much more likely to take notice of an interesting art style, like SuperGiant's games. Or the way they stylised everything in Tyranny. Or Prey. where all the characters look like oil-painted caricatures. That sort of art really appeals to me.)

There's a screenshot on the Steam page that shows a conversation, which is very reminiscent of New Vegas. Which, as far as I'm concerned, bodes well.

I wouldn't be surprised if this was already in the game. I imagine they'd like for you to be able to admire your own avatar. Also, there's a bit in the trailer that maaaaybe implies it: when the old guy is saying "that's why I sought you out" and we see the back of someone in a "HOPE" spacesuit. I mean, it could be anything, but the framing of the moment suggested it was supposed to be the player.

This is almost exactly what I imagined it would be. And pretty much what I'd been hoping for. (And hey, I was right about them pushing the "from the creators of Fallout and developers of New Vegas" line.) So I'm pretty happy and excited right now.

This reveal is easily the most anticipated for me. The last Dragon Age killed my interest in that franchise, and none of the other rumoured announcements have really piqued my interest.

I had no idea RDR2 was so bleak and gory.

If you think about it, "RPG" isn't particularly specific either. We all know what an RPG is, but if you didn't, and you took the label at face value, you'd be forgiven for thinking it could be applied to almost any game. Surely you're playing a role in Sim City...that of the city planner. Or playing the role of Doomguy in Doom. How are those not also role playing games? "Immersive sim" is a bit like that, in that it's applied to a loose-ish collection of games that were inspired by System Shock and Deus Ex, but they're far from being the only games that are immersive or present simulated environments to the player. Mentally, I tend to define them as being "halfway between FPSs and RPGs", but I'm no arbiter of what is or isn't an immersive sim. Like a lot of these things, the definition is a bit blurry.

I quite like having interesting companions around to talk to, each of whom is a puzzlebox of secrets to solve. I don't think anybody has ever done it better than Planescape did, though. However, I'm pretty much with you on the parties thing. If there were some way to do companions without dragging them around everywhere with you, that'd be cool.

Doesn't the Witcher 3 also do the over-the-shoulder thing? And Assassin's Creed? It's probably not that far out of style. Personally, I think it'll be first-person with the ability to zoom out to over-the-shoulder. I'm basing that on absolutely nothing though, just a wild guess.

Having never played System Shock or the original Deus Ex, I can't claim to be an expert on defining immersive sims, but my general idea was that they were essentially FPS games merged with RPG elements, but that the RPG elements were usually streamlined. The original Bioshock leaned much more towards being a straightforward shooter, but it still had a lot of RPG elements like the stealth, the inventory management, the various skills, the hacking minigames (and lockingpicking too?), while Bioshock: Infinite shed most of that and probably doesn't qualify as an immersive sim. Prey, on the other hand, is pretty much impossible to play if you approach it as a shooter, and you need to engage much more with its RPG-like systems. But neither of those games are full-on RPGs. They don't feature character creation, or heavy emphasis on character choice (you can make some significant choices in Prey, but nothing on the level of reactivity you get in most of Obsidian's output), nor are there character stats that influence your success or failure at various tasks. I might be splitting hairs. But I'm guessing that the new game will be what I consider to be a full-on RPG, rather than an immersive sim, just based on what Tim Cain has said in the past. That's not to say I'll be disappointed if the game is nothing like what I'm expecting when it's announced. I'm just enjoying speculating and making (poorly) educated guesses.

In case it's me you're talking about - I never said the art didn't look Bioshock-ish, only that I thought it very unlikely that the game is related to, or even a spiritual successor of, Bioshock. But that doesn't mean they can't be aesthetically similar. I also don't think it will be like Bioshock, gameplay wise. Or like Prey. Both Prey and Bioshock are spiritual successors of System Shock, and are generally considered to be immersive sims (or 451 games), rather than RPGs. Nor am I positing that the game will be like Fallout, aesthetically. It may well have a look that is very similar to Bioshock Infinite...who knows? At the moment I'm expecting something inspired by HG Wells' "The First Men on the Moon" and CS Lewis' "Out of the Silent Planet". But what I'm expecting from the gameplay is something similar to what Cain and Boyarsky have done when they've worked together before.

That link doesn't provide any real evidence at all. And I just highly doubt it'll be a Bioshock game, or even a "spiritual successor" to Bioshock. If this game is a spiritual successor to anything (and I'm not at all sure that it will be), my bet would be FNV. Why? Well, largely for commercial reasons. FNV was Obsidian's most successful game, and the Fallout franchise is huge, so they'd want games journalists drawing comparisons between FNV and the new game when they write up their impressions. Also, the new game is created by two of the people responsible for the existence of the Fallout franchise, which is also something they probably want journalists talking about. And finally, 2K gave Obsidian AAA money to develop a brand new IP (which I'm pretty sure has only ever happened once before, with Alpha Protocol), and I wouldn't be surprised if the pitch involved capitalizing on Obsidian's Fallout pedigree. Again, I'm not trying to claim that any of this is correct, just that it seems much more likely to me than Obsidian making a Bioshock game.

https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/92420-tim-cain-at-reboot-develop-2017-building-a-better-rpg-seven-mistakes-to-avoid/?hl=%2Btim+%2Bcain Thanks! Followed with... I am suddenly much LESS excited for this game. Pretty much every single thing he said... I disagree with. I will wait to see what is said in the announcement... but... damn, now I am not sure at all if I will like this. I had literally got my hopes up that it would be Arcanum in space... and now that seems VERY unlikely... I think people misinterpret a lot of what Tim says in this talk, thinking that what's he's talking about is Bethesda-esque streamlining (ie: removing features from a game to simplify it for novice players). But I don't think he's talking about streamlining. He's talking about making the game more intuitive for novice players, which is something I can totally get behind. (Then again, maybe I'm the one misinterpreting him.) EDIT: Just saw that Tim himself commented in that original thread saying pretty much what I just said.

It's hard to guess what aesthetic exactly they're going with other than retro, but it doesn't look like conventional raygun gothic to me (whereas part of the original FO aesthetic was pretty on-the-nose raygun gothic). The stuff after the Auntie Cleo ad looks slightly too retro for raygun gothic (though not way too retro), but more to the point, the gun after the Spacer's Choice ad looks like something from the 1980s or early 1990s visual-design-wise, though the ad it is in retains the strange faux-1870-to-1920 advertising style. Either way, it works for me. I'm a big fan of the "weird alternate history" vibe. I loved it in Fallout. I'm a huge fan of the Bioshock games (even though I'm banking on this new game not being Bioshock related). So yeah, a Jules Verne-esque RPG with Cavorite powered spaceships is totally fine by me.

Also, I've seen a fair bit of talk elsewhere speculating that this might be some sort of Bioshock game, which...I hope not (I'm also pretty sure it won't be, since they've stated several times that it's a new IP). When Obsidian started working with 2K, I did think it'd be really cool if they made an RPG that let me explore Rapture when it was still a living city (I also thought a Borderlands RPG could be great), but I'm much more excited about a whole new retrofuturistic space opera. Right now I'm extrapolating a sort of spiritual successor to Fallout, with the raygun gothic aesthetic applied to space rather than post-apocalypse.

That would make little sense. It’s not Microsoft sponsored game just yet, and I doubt Obs and Take2 would have much business limiting game release to console. Even if Microsoft will inherit the project with Obs purchase (I can’t see Micr logos anywere in the teasers, so my guess would be that it’s Obsidians pre-purchase commitment to Take-2) the buyout happened very recently. Doubt it would have much influence on development a this stage. Good to hear. There was just a lot of talk about Microsoft buying Obsidian and inXile in order to have them make console exclusives, so it seemed plausible that they might shelve the PC version of this game (at least for a while). Although Microsoft also make this niche OS for PCs, and maybe they'd want to release it on that simultaneously.

What do you think the odds are that it'll be a console exclusive? Because that would be a crushing blow for me. I'm just way too much of a keyboard + mouse guy to ever make the switch to consoles. Every attempt I've ever made to use a gamepad has ended in frustration.

I've never played a pen and paper RPG. I'm interested in them, but I've never really had an opportunity to play. In high school I was a huge nerd, and I hung around with other nerds, but for whatever reason none of us was into pen and paper games, and playing one just never really came up (in fact, my impression of D&D was that it was an old game that had been popular in the 80s, but which was out of fashion by the time the 90s rolled around). BUT, I am fascinated by their mechanics, and I've been wondering recently why the norm for most of them (as far as I can tell) is to use twenty-sided dice. Is there a strong reason why the games don't use standard six sided dice? Like, why not give the chartacters lower stats (say, between 1 and 10 like in the original Fallouts) and resolve everything with 1d6? Given my inexperience with actually playing the games, I feel like there might be some really obvious reason that I'm missing. Is there some problem with the odds, or the spread of possible outcomes? Or is it purely because leveling up a character means that their stats will get higher and thus require larger dice-roll scores to properly resolve stat checks or combat?

I've been playing Tyranny and loving it for the last week or so. A major draw for me was the atypical setting and premise. When I read a piece on Polygon about it being set at the end of a Bronze Age/start of an Iron Age, I decided I was in. I've heard that Tyranny is doing quite well, sales-wise, but not as well as PoE did. I was a PoE backer, but I haven't gotten around to playing it yet. Partly because I'm an old fogey now with all these responsibilities that make finding time for a long RPG pretty hard. But another part of the reason is that I'm somewhat fatigued with the more typical fantasy RPG settings (elves, dwarves, castles and forests). I did find time for Tyranny, and that's largely because of its setting. So, here's my suggestion: run a Kickstarter to fund the creation of three (or more) mini-RPGs that use the PoE engine. Each would be as large as, say, the Vendrien's Well starting area for Tyranny. And each would be set in a non-standard world. Whatever worlds seem most interesting to your creative teams. Maybe it's set in the stone age, and you're a caveman fighting ancient aliens. Or a steampunk game where you're hacking into Difference Engines with punch cards. Anything that isn't traditional epic fantasy. And if one (or more of them) strikes a chord with players, sequelize it with a fully fledged game later. That's a Kickstarter I would love to back. And even if it wasn't a Kickstarter, three-mini-RPGs package like that from Obsidian is absolutely something I'd buy the moment it became available.