Great game, too short

[gloomseeker]

16 hours ago, Hurlshot said:

I've got to assume some people just skip through the dialogue and terminals to read, because nothing about this game seems short to me. There is a ton to do and explore. 

QFT. 

Some people are more interested in "beating" the game instead of actually experiencing it. 

In other words they miss the whole point, i.e. it's the journey that matters, not the destination. 

[imitenotbecrazy]

2 hours ago, gloomseeker said:

QFT. 

Some people are more interested in "beating" the game instead of actually experiencing it. 

In other words they miss the whole point, i.e. it's the journey that matters, not the destination. 

It was over before I even knew it. I wasn't looking to beat the game, just going with the natural progression of the story. I do that on first playthroughs as it's nonsensical to run off and do a bunch of random side quests that have nothing to do with the main quest when there's a sense of urgency. Wasn't that a main complaint people made of Fallout 4? Why am I doing all this side **** when looking for my son? Well, why am I doing all this side **** while trying to save the colony? 

 

Some of you guys will make literally any excuse to cover the fact that it's a short story. 

[Hurlshort]

What is the sense of urgency? Everyone has been frozen for 70 years, a couple more weeks while I explore are not going to make a big difference. That is why the Bethesda storylines always bothered me. They do seem urgent. But a floating colony that has already been missing for 70 years is pretty relaxed.

[Wormerine]

On 11/5/2019 at 6:00 AM, Beardedgeek72 said:

Well two decades ago the standard was about 60-80. I still feel slightly robbed if an RPG is < 50 hours long. I grew up with the Baldur's Gate games, the original Fallout games, Planescape: Torment...

You mean Fallout2. Completionist Fallout1 run is actually quite short. Oddly enough I replayed BGs not so long ago, and they are far shorter then I remember. I could swear they were 100 hour long games and BG1 was longer then BG2. BG1 took 43 hours, BG2 took 56:30h. Not topdown Bioware RPGs tended to be around 20-30h as well. 

What consistantly confuses me are people who complain the game is too short, but didn't play all of it. It's not like what's left is collecting 100 feathers. If you liked it, play more of it.

Obsidian was very transparent with what the game was and how long it is. It could be longer sure. It would also need to redesign systems to support a longer game time. Hopefully that will be the sequel. Though I would take a deepr 40h long OW, rather then same depth 80h Outer Worlds. 

[Theonlygarby]

22 hours ago, imitenotbecrazy said:

It's getting castrated on metacritic for length and it's other flaws. It's now dropped to 7.7 user rating for PC. Even with people trying to pad the score lol

 

Right and all the 0/10s are completely legit.  Metacritic is hot garbage.  It's people who dont like the game giving 0s and people who like it giving it 10s.  I mean... The Xbox and PS4 are still around 84... So does that mean that console versions of the game are good and PC version is bad?

 

A 0/10 should be a completely broken game.  Not just "it's too short 0/10".  

Edited November 6, 2019 by Theonlygarby

[Sedgendary]

3 minutes ago, Theonlygarby said:

 The Xbox and PS4 are still around 84... So does that mean that console versions of the game are good and PC version is bad?

tbf I can actually play the game on Xbox but it crashes out before I even get to gameplay on my PC which should be able to play it with no issues. (seems to be a Game Pass Licence issue as I have seen online that people only have this issue with the Game Pass and not if they have purchased it)

[thelee]

I used to be a type who wanted all of his RPGs to be sprawling epics.

Then I had kids and got a busy day job.

I don't think the industry should shift wholesale away from sprawling epics, but I appreciate a game here and there that doesn't require me to play for month+ to complete once with daily evenings carved out away from the family. I appreciated it with Tyranny, and I appreciate it TOW.

My only major gripe is that Tyranny justified the shorter length with tons more reactivity to encourage replays, whereas TOW seems like it has fairly boiler-plate F:NV/FO3-style or level of reactivity, that is - some alternate quest endings, a choice here or there, but nothing like "this area is closed off for you during this run."

[algroth]

Two elements I see repeatedly in Metacritic reviews is users who downvote because "the game is SJW", and users who downvote in *every single platform* the game is in, since their "review" isn't really a review but a statement they're trying to make. And of course it's also offset by bots and people who will upvote to "spite Bethesda" as well, so... Yeah, the user score is pretty useless.

[algroth]

21 hours ago, imitenotbecrazy said:

Okay that's actually pretty hilarious though lol quite obviously not done to purposely change the score like the one I posted. I agree that it all needs to be taken with a grain of salt but many people do take that as a gauge. Hell, obsidian themselves were offered a bonus based on how NV would do. But I'm sure you knew that 

Some people can be pretty self-conscious about it too. Again, these are in the minority, but so are those who're saying "I'd give this an 8/10 but I'll give it a 10/10 instead for reasons".

[Ommamar]

3 hours ago, thelee said:

I used to be a type who wanted all of his RPGs to be sprawling epics.

Then I had kids and got a busy day job.

I don't think the industry should shift wholesale away from sprawling epics, but I appreciate a game here and there that doesn't require me to play for month+ to complete once with daily evenings carved out away from the family. I appreciated it with Tyranny, and I appreciate it TOW.

My only major gripe is that Tyranny justified the shorter length with tons more reactivity to encourage replays, whereas TOW seems like it has fairly boiler-plate F:NV/FO3-style or level of reactivity, that is - some alternate quest endings, a choice here or there, but nothing like "this area is closed off for you during this run."

To  point I agree with what you are saying but TOW made it very clear to me on the first decision of the major quest line that it would be wisest to finish all side quest before making a decision.  As soon as I had chosen to help one faction the opposing faction quests where botched thus closing me off from that content.

[ComradeYellow]

6 hours ago, Wormerine said:

You mean Fallout2. Completionist Fallout1 run is actually quite short. Oddly enough I replayed BGs not so long ago, and they are far shorter then I remember. I could swear they were 100 hour long games and BG1 was longer then BG2. BG1 took 43 hours, BG2 took 56:30h. Not topdown Bioware RPGs tended to be around 20-30h as well. 

I think the thing with BGs is that quest density at the beginning of the game(s) make them seem longer than they actually are, but once you break from that initial swamp they become more linear and straightforward.  Sort of like the Gothic games but party based and isometric.

[GhostofAnakin]

11 hours ago, imitenotbecrazy said:

It was over before I even knew it. I wasn't looking to beat the game, just going with the natural progression of the story. I do that on first playthroughs as it's nonsensical to run off and do a bunch of random side quests that have nothing to do with the main quest when there's a sense of urgency. Wasn't that a main complaint people made of Fallout 4? Why am I doing all this side **** when looking for my son? Well, why am I doing all this side **** while trying to save the colony? 

 

Some of you guys will make literally any excuse to cover the fact that it's a short story. 

There was a sense of urgency?  The people in the cryopods were in there for 70 odd years.  They're not going to notice if the PC takes an extra couple of hours to pick flowers for a crazy lady to earn a bit of money on the side.

[thearmourofGod]

On 11/5/2019 at 11:11 AM, imitenotbecrazy said:

It's getting castrated on metacritic for length and it's other flaws. It's now dropped to 7.7 user rating for PC. Even with people trying to pad the score lol

 

Thus, proving those pc gamers dont know a great rpg when its in front of their faces, as well as, not knowing how to properly play an rpg.

ie. fast-travel, dialogue skipping, main quest primarily, running around paying attention to nothing in the gameworld and speed playing, etcetcetc

This game isnt even close to “short” unless you are a twitch gamer who is purposefully attempting to get to the end as fast as possible through all various means allowed.

As well, their hypocrisy/lies/dimwittedness are proven since those same “gamers” will rate the super short rpgs of previous eras (fallout1 for example) as GOAT.

 

Edited November 7, 2019 by thearmourofGod

[Beardedgeek72]

15 hours ago, thelee said:

I used to be a type who wanted all of his RPGs to be sprawling epics.

Then I had kids and got a busy day job.

I don't think the industry should shift wholesale away from sprawling epics, but I appreciate a game here and there that doesn't require me to play for month+ to complete once with daily evenings carved out away from the family. I appreciated it with Tyranny, and I appreciate it TOW.

My only major gripe is that Tyranny justified the shorter length with tons more reactivity to encourage replays, whereas TOW seems like it has fairly boiler-plate F:NV/FO3-style or level of reactivity, that is - some alternate quest endings, a choice here or there, but nothing like "this area is closed off for you during this run."

I don't get this. Just play an hour when you can. It's like saying you can't read thick books anymore.

It just takes longer to finish.

[Hurlshort]

5 hours ago, Beardedgeek72 said:

I don't get this. Just play an hour when you can. It's like saying you can't read thick books anymore.

It just takes longer to finish.

I do get this. It is easy to lose connection to a game when it takes more than a month to get through. You start to lose track of the quests you were on, the gameplay of a levelled up character, etc. 

It can even be difficult to read thick books when you have kids and a day job. But it is a lot easier to sit down for 15 minutes and read a chapter or two than sit down and game for 15 minutes. 

[Wormerine]

14 hours ago, thearmourofGod said:

ie. fast-travel, dialogue skipping, main quest primarily, running around paying attention to nothing in the gameworld and speed playing, etcetcetc

And once Netflix releases the feature allowing to speed up videos, people will complain that movies are only hour long!

[thelee]

9 hours ago, Beardedgeek72 said:

I don't get this. Just play an hour when you can. It's like saying you can't read thick books anymore.

It just takes longer to finish.

Hey, a fun thought experiment I learned to do some time back. Every time you want to say "I don't get this" or "I don't understand" about someone else and you barrel on to suggest something else, what you're really saying is "I have an empathy deficit." Try ever so slightly harder to put yourself in another person's shoes.

See, in part, what Hurlshot says below:

4 hours ago, Hurlshot said:

It can even be difficult to read thick books when you have kids and a day job. But it is a lot easier to sit down for 15 minutes and read a chapter or two than sit down and game for 15 minutes. 

I can still read books by squeezing in a few pages (I've been working my way through a big economics text five minutes at a time in the mornings in between my breakfast and the kids waking up), or by reading them during the commute, or via audiobook. But yes, kids and a day job means I don't read as much anymore, either. I also don't go to the gym as much anymore either (though I still try). Side note: in the US (where most people have to drive around), how many skinny/fit parents of multiple young children do you see wandering around? Kids are tiring without even being good exercise! It's even an effort just to find the time to find and listen to new music: now I know why parents become increasingly "uncool" over time; staying up to date on stuff is time-consuming and sometimes it's just not worth it (my wife has basically given up on finding new music to listen to).

For gaming in particular (versus reading a book), there's overhead in gaming, and I want to feel like I "accomplished something" for the hour or two that I can squirrel away in an evening (and 15 minutes is a non-starter because of such overhead). This has meant, in practice, that I play more shooters and action games these days, because I can spin it up real quickly, kill a hundred nazis or zombies or whatnot in like half an hour, and feel like I did something with my rare free time. However much I love Deadfire and games like it, it can be a slog because over like an hour of gameplay, a significant chunk of that will be in load/save menus[1], staring at inventory screens and character screens, wandering through vast empty wilderness areas, and basically not any what I would consider the actual "game" part of the game (questing, dialogue, story, combat). An RPG that is very compact and dense like TOW means there's not a lot of wasted wandering and I spend more time doing the actual game and accomplishing quests, and the mechanics are simple enough that I don't have to spend time during my free time trying to look up stuff or staring at dense info screens trying to determine my next steps - it's optimized to be rich over 15-20 hours which also means I see a lot of progress in story lines and character development in any given chunk of time. (During my game times, I literally set up intermittent timers so I don't lose track of time and forget to go to sleep or something, and I can definitively say that with a 30 minute timer I might be able to clear multiple areas in TOW, but meanwhile literally not even finish a single fight in Deadfire.)

[1] this is despite Deadfire having pretty speedy load times in general; meanwhile I literally don't want to play PoE1 anymore because of its buggy load times (they get longer and longer hte further you are in the game) means it would just be a huge waste of my free time to play

I'm not saying that companies must make short and simple RPGs - I still enjoy getting through Generic Bethesda Open World(tm) game, and games like Deadfire, but merely that I appreciate it when there exist short games. Like I said before, my own critique of TOW is that the Tyranny approach made reactivity such a deep-cut that it was a short game with a long shelf-life because you would literally have areas shut off from you from one run to the next, so even if one run took 15-20 hours the game's actual life with a person might be multiples of that, whereas I could easily see in games like Deadfire or TOW (with a more modest amount of reactivity) that you could be one and done and it could be more problematic as a value proposition for some people.

Edited November 7, 2019 by thelee

[Ommamar]

2 hours ago, Wormerine said:

And once Netflix releases the feature allowing to speed up videos, people will complain that movies are only hour long!

I haven't tried on Netflix but I know you can play videos at different speed on Youtube which can lead to funny results but on some of the videos I have seen uploaded seems the only way to make them watchable.

I think the game is a good fit as you can rush through it if you want but if you are the type of player that tries to find every nook and cranny when many different builds you can really stretch it out.

[gloomseeker]

On 11/6/2019 at 6:23 PM, thelee said:

I used to be a type who wanted all of his RPGs to be sprawling epics.

Then I had kids and got a busy day job.

I don't think the industry should shift wholesale away from sprawling epics, but I appreciate a game here and there that doesn't require me to play for month+ to complete once with daily evenings carved out away from the family. I appreciated it with Tyranny, and I appreciate it TOW.

My only major gripe is that Tyranny justified the shorter length with tons more reactivity to encourage replays, whereas TOW seems like it has fairly boiler-plate F:NV/FO3-style or level of reactivity, that is - some alternate quest endings, a choice here or there, but nothing like "this area is closed off for you during this run."

I do agree with gaming becoming much harder to fit in your daily schedule as you get older (unless you're retired presumably), I just feel the exact opposite when it comes to Tyranny. I tried to replay the game but I couldn't stick to it for a second playthrough as with hindsight it felt too binary to me (plus I went for the Anarchy path the first time which was really rewarding). 

I think the problem some people have with TOW is that you can cut corners if you decide to force your way through the game. If you rob and steal and kill important people you can complete some objectives pretty quickly. It gets even easier to do so if you're playing on Normal difficulty since you can get away with pretty much anything at that difficulty level.  I'm not even saying that it's a bad thing. In a real pen and paper RPG if you decide that you don't want to play along with a quest giver and want to organise a heist instead of a trade it's totally up to you. We're just not used to games allowing us to go around a quest to complete it or letting us dispose of a quest giver instead of following the quest line. 

As for the game featuring hubs instead of a huge open world filled with question marks and useless collectibles, I guess that's a good thing. There are so many games these days that showcase really huge game worlds it's actually refreshing not to be overwhelmed with yet another huge world map filled with markers. 

[ZakKa.dev]

I'm happy the game isn't an 100 hour long RPG. I completely agree with this article

https://www.polygon.com/2019/11/7/20952172/outer-worlds-rpg-length-20-hour-game-100-hour-story-campaign

[_brontosaurus]

so in other words you skipped most of the game

[Beardedgeek72]

Thing is tho, is this a 30-40 hour game if you actually roleplay?

Or play on Normal?

Because I never do everything in an RPG. That's min-maxing, not roleplaying. If my character wouldn't care about something, I don't care either, so I might miss a quest that way. Or two. Or five.

I also consider extending the game length by upping combat difficulty fake game length. (Same goes for unnecessary puzzles, btw).

[thearmourofGod]

Beardedgeek72

so far, what ive liked about this game is that in my short advancement of the story i can see that the quests so far have had multiple roleplay solutions and is one of the many reasons why im excited about my second run

for me, normal, low difficulty “story” runs is superficially shortening game length, though, i will agree with the bullet sponge argument up to a point 

[Guest]

17 hours ago, Beardedgeek72 said:

Thing is tho, is this a 30-40 hour game if you actually roleplay?

Or play on Normal?

Because I never do everything in an RPG. That's min-maxing, not roleplaying. If my character wouldn't care about something, I don't care either, so I might miss a quest that way. Or two. Or five.

I also consider extending the game length by upping combat difficulty fake game length. (Same goes for unnecessary puzzles, btw).

So I actually skipped a lot of content in my first playthrough because I was roleplaying. I ended up tacking some of it back on at the end because I knew I was approaching the final few quests, but I was already at the 60 hour mark by that point. YRMV

[Mushashi7]

I have the same feeling. The game is too short. My first play-through in rush mode took about 21 hours. After reaching the end I felt something was missing. Was that it?
I don't know how big the Obsidian developers team is? So, I won't judge them in any way.
Perhaps we as consumers are also being spoiled in the last couple of years? I was thinking about Fallout 4, Witcher 3 and AC Odyssey? Huge and long games.

I really like 'The Outer World'. It's just a game to my liking. And I hope more is coming in the shape of DLC or expansion.