My petty criticisms of this amazing game

[slopesandsam]

Having just finished The Outer Worlds today (I have two small children - managing to finish an RPG in two weeks is a minor miracle), my immediate reaction is: this is the game I so desperately wanted, and I loved it.  I want more.  I hope there's DLC and sequels and glory raining down on everyone who worked on it.

I do, of course, have some minor criticisms.  Criticisms that seem a bit silly and idiosyncratic in the face of how much I loved this game.  But I have the internet, so I'm going to share those criticisms.  Hopefully in a constructive manner.  And, I realise, they're mostly criticisms about how this game didn't quite fit the mold of Fallout - the original two Fallouts, more than the more modern iterations - which is more about me than the game itself. 

First, the mechanical criticisms: I was a little disappointed that I never really felt like my character build mattered an awful lot.  In Fallout 1, it's really clear that the stats and skills you choose have a significant impact on what paths through the game are available to you.  In TOW, I often felt like pretty much all paths were always available to me, and it was really just a matter of choosing which one I preferred (I always felt like my choices were significant, but I never felt like any were really closed off to me).  The dialogue skills, in particular, felt totally interchangeable.  Persuading, Lying and Intimidating all appeared to have the exact same affect on gameplay.  And it was extremely rare to find a skill-check that was so high that it was unavailable (and even when one was, I could usually use one of the other dialogue skills to achieve the same effect).

The ability to initially put points into skill "branches" and have all the related skills increase was, I think, I great idea.  But I think that having that go all the way up to 50 made it so all characters felt a bit generalised far too far into the game (and some felt like they were weirdly grouped - like, I always enjoyed being a sciency-type in the Fallout games, which for me included hacking, because my character knew their way around a computer, but I never enjoyed being a stealthy, lockpicking pickpocket, so having hacking grouped with lockpicking felt wrong to me).

Connected to that, I really loved the Perks in Fallout that only became available if your character was over a certain stat or skill threshold.  It really helped to increase specialisation.  I would have liked to see some of those in TOW.  I really wanted to feel more like a specialist by the time I reached the final third of the game.

Second, the cosmetic.  These criticisms are superficial ones really.  But, I felt like TOW lacked a certain amount of...iconic imagery?  I mean, that's likely an unfair criticism to level at the first iteration of a new franchise, but Fallout 1 had a bunch of stuff that was instantly recognisable as Fallout.  Supermutants.  Ghouls.  Nuka-Cola (TOW has its share of crazy weird brands, but I can't think of one that really stood out in the same way that Nuka-Cola did).  And the "War.  War never changes..." intro.  I mean, aping all that stuff too closely would have been on-the-nose for a game that already shared a hell of a lot of DNA with the Fallout franchise, but I'm a sucker for those iconic symbols.  I feel like some sort of stylised intro explaining how Halcyon was founded and how the Hope was lost would have been cool (obviously not a black-and-white Ron Perlman narrated intro, but something that fit TOW's own style) - something that could have been iterated on in future sequels.

Yes, I know, these are petty complaints.  I feel a bit crummy having writing multiple paragraphs of complaints about a game I consider to be the best game I've played in many years.  I could write many more paragraphs listing all the things I loved about the game.  It was so good.  I can't wait to see where this franchise goes.

[Ommamar]

I am not sure Obsidian was wise to push the Fallout connection to TOW, I am sure it helped sales but very different games developed in very different ways.  For a long time Fallout was a passion product developed on programmers of times, I think this gave it a lot of time to peculate in several peoples minds.  There was one person really responsible for Fallout staying alive but he got a ton of input from many different people.

I like TOW and am enjoying it so hopefully this isn't taken the wrong way (but it is an internet forum so...) but looking at the game play that has some basic things missing that shouldn't be, and reading about the development.  It just seems Obsidian got to a point where they where obligated to produce this game to meet a contract so they could move on to a big acquisition.  I don't think they did a bad job or half-assed it but I feel decisions where made under the pressure of how can we make this a short decent RPG using the least amount of assets in the shortest time period.  Hopefully now that the game appears to be a financial success, that the acquisition has occurred we will see content continue to be developed or at least a  TOW 2.