HolyDuckTurtle

It's a good, but flawed game. I got really into it for a month and developed a love/hate relationship with it, but overall enjoyed that time.

That's as somebody who loves sci-fi and got really into building my ship. I was pretty much the target audience so I may have been more willing to immerse myself in it than others would care for.

Also, it was super refreshing to me playing a game where my companions are all in their 30s with a lot of history. It feels quite mature in that sense. Which I guess is why the main story really disappointed me when you get an antagonist who feels like a 12-year old who just discovered the Wikipedia page for Nihilism, but hey ho.

For me it's not so much the travel; the main story tries to sell this idea of exploring the unknown, but literally everything you find is a known quantity in some form or another.

The moment I saw HDRP mentioned I thought "Yup, that'd do it"

I wouldn't say "more worthwhile". But comparing them (in my personal opinion): Outer Worlds trades variety and scale for a more narratively dense world.

Biggest thing is you get significantly more choice in questlines. Bethesda's approach in Starfield is very railroad-y, almost all the big questlines end up picking between two distinct options while leaving you thinking "you know we could just do a third one, or both depending on the circumstances". They also, outside of maybe one or two circumstances, have zero opportunity for creative player intervention. If it's not explicitly mentioned as a quest objective, it's not an option. e.g. No, you can't use the EM gun on this guy to bring him in and face justice, the objective is to kill him, so you will kill him and his guards too. No, you can't go and talk to your superiors for backup before confronting somebody over a major crime. Stuff like that.

Outer Worlds is like Fallout New Vegas in that the world responds to your actions as well as dialogue choices. Every NPC is killable, and they've written a number of scenarios (some of them absolutely gut wrenching) for killing certain people at certain points. Big quests tend to present two options which both have dire consequences, but by doing other quests, talking to other characters, you can uinlock additional options or improve how things will turn out. e.g. You can uncover an internal power struggle in a faction and help choose its leader, which changes how a peace talk can turn out with another faction.

Outer Worlds also gives you more tangible consequences for your actions, like changing the feel of an early town if you deprive it of power. The epilogue is significantly more detailed than the one Starfield gives you, covering a lot of minor quests and each major character you've interacted with.

None of that is to say though, that Starfield does not have a rich and interesting world with cool characters. I've loved my time with both games and I think SF has more fun combat gameplay, obviously both are similar gun-based RPG games where you mag dump bullet sponge enemies, but hey ho. SF also let me build and fly a ship, go where I want with it and take pretty pictures, which has been a lot of fun. Starfield may have less quest choice, but it offers more variety in what those stories cover, compared to OW's more narrow focus.

I will also say that SF made a pretty bold narrative decision in its main story that I was not expecting from a Bethesda game. Even though I have a love/hate relationship with how it developed after that, and think the moment itself could have been handled better, I still respect it. OW also really hams up the evil corpo humour in ways some people might find annoying and difficult to take seriously.

A measure of worth between the two games really comes down to what you're looking for in a space-themed RPG. Personally, I think they complement each other very well as distinct experiences.

The 24 minute video demo talks a little about this. A big benefit of having the Star Citizen alpha be playable is they've refined the gameplay a lot due to feedback. I think the changes they made these last few years to UX, flight model, combat design etc in S42 are really nice compared to what's currently playable.

For better or worse, they appear to have restarted development on Squadron 42 more than once over the decade. It has absolutely suffered from scope creep, whether that gets us a better game than it would have been in 2016/17 remains to be seen. Though that doesn't necessarily mean the gameplay design is "modern" - the game trades feel and usability for "immersion". It plays clunkily like ARMA, you can see in the video how throwing a grenade requires equipping it first (the "throw grenade" button is more like a macro to equip then throw), for example. They've done a lot of improvements to animation transitions to make the game feel better, but they can't seem to shake the core rigidness of gameplay.

Visually they've obviously done a fantastic job upgrading to modern technical standards combined with stunning art direction, Though again; scope creep, the old visuals would have been great for the time. Gameplay I reckon is still going to be fairly niche, they're marrying a Space Combat game with ARMA style on-foot gameplay, I imagine the broader gaming audience may like one but not the other.

With the feedback they've gotten over the years, it should be a far less clunky experience than it would have been 6 or so years ago. But of course, the standards have changed and the game has only become more of a meme over time, so it's got a lot to prove.

I do not believe it to be an outright scam. However, it is horribly managed and I do consider the funding model to be predatory.

The whole "pledge" store should not be a thing at this stage IMO. It's just a cash shop they can justify huge prices with. It's actively contributed to the scope creep by introducing new vehicle roles, which they sometimes admit to not having designed gameplay for yet. Nor does it currently tell you if you can actually rent or buy the ship in-game (subject to progress wipes). Heck, the closest thing to a scam they've had recently was a "new starter bundle" of in-game gear that you lose upon your first death / unrecoverable body. This is a game where 80% of your deaths are to bugs or unintuitive behaviour.

They also keep trying to change their standards to match modern games. Ships have gone through multiple reworks which take months for a single ship. A sensible dev would lock that in and commit to releasing under those standards. It's been pointed out that with the current rate of progress, they'll still be releasing currently announced ships into the 2030s.

That's not even mentioning the single player component, Squadron 42, which got indefinitely delayed a few years back before a major demo showcase which never materialised. Supposedly, it's been scrapped and re-done more than once.

Their last big chance to show they've pulled things together is going to be the upcoming CitizenCon (yes, it has one) where they'll supposedly be making a big Squadron 42 announcement. A former customer service employee, who recently criticised the company's spending practices, claimed they'd taken a much more serious approach to the scope creep and that we'd see some results of that towards the end of this year.

I'm not holding my breath though. They've been known to create bullshit for presentations before (e.g the infamous sand worm) and I absolutely would not be surprised if Chris Roberts feels pressured to one-up Starfield.

As a side note, does anyone else get the impression this article was written by an AI? It repeatedly lists of buzzword features, like the Hangar module which hasn't been relevant for years, and barely discusses what the game is actually like.

I've played a bit and explored the first major city. I love sci-fi games and am definitely starting to get a feel for the world and kinda like it. Not sure at this stage I'd call it "good" though, the gameplay is a bit clunky and the UX could do with a lot of improvements. Gunplay is pretty floaty and the default pistol iron sights are awful. My initial impression is: if you want a Fallout-style space RPG with good writing and characters, and have not yet played Obsidian's Outer Worlds, then that would likely be a better choice.

I also love flight games, but space combat seems very bland. It seems you're mostly big and slow, so there's not much manuevering going on that makes these games fun. Even a simple variation of Star Wars Squadrons boost>drift mechananic would make it much more engaging. You get an opportunity to see what a larger ship feels like and it still only has forward-facing weapons so it feels like you just try to out-DPS whatever is in front of you. If you try to use the environment, like giant asteroids, for cover or to split up enemies, said asteroids get blown up in seconds, a weird design decsion IMO. I've not messed with ship customisation yet. I did really like getting to a traffic zone and just hailing other ships to trade and chat though!

There are things I'm liking about the writing. This is, so far, the only game I've played which lets you choose they/them pronouns as a third option for voiced dialogue, which is really neat and something I've wanted to see for a long time, as opposed to just male/female OR gender neutral everywhere. The first major city has some interesting places and a history walkthrough from the local faction's perspective, which heavily hints at there being a lot of bias to unravel by visiting the others. I quite like the religeous centre books which discuss the idea of faith being core to human experience in a broader sense than just belief in gods and spirituality. I'm generally enjoying getting immersed into the world so far.

The game's opening is crazy fast-paced though, a thing happens and a guy gives you his ship within like, 10 minutes excluding character creation. I can't help but wander if the writers are relying on you having read lore on their website or something, because at creation you get choices for which faction you were raised by, but ZERO context about any of them. Could also just be a thing for repeat RP playthroughs, but I don't play games this large that way.

Another thing I'll add is graphically the game is pretty weird. It has some of the worst luminance balancing I've ever seen in a game. You'll see what I mean if you fire a mining laser in the first cave, the laser is dark. They seem to heavily rely on screen colour filters that add a grey/brown tint to everything and crush the dynamic range, Their first big outdoors reveal with a musical flourish is a brown landscape with a grey-tinted sun from the filters lmao. It's slightly improved on PC by tricking the game into using Windows Auto-HDR (which, amusingly, involves renaming the executable to farcry5.exe), but not by much. For a game that largely sells itself on exploring and finding beautiful vistas (I think at least, I avoided marketing and got the game with my new GPU) this is an alarmingly bizarre art direction choice to me.

Otherwise, the game feels like it's from 2016. It's lacking a lot of basic options like FoV sliders (can be edited in a config file, but still). Space travel is a series of black screens presumably because they couldn't get any kind of seamless loading to work. Besides equipping weapons from the ground, they don't seem to use alt-actions for anything else like eating food in front of you or reading a book without taking it (the former requires going through menus). Shop inventories do not show how much of an item you already have, etc. After installing the lastest AMD drivers, it runs well on my Ryzen 3600x RX 7900XT, 32GB system on High (not Ultra) settings, but in a way that suggests performance is significantly worse on lower-end hardware (and I am aware consoles are locked to 30fps!). I have yet to see the game justify its intense performance requirements given that, again, it does not look next-gen to me nor does there seem to be much complexity behind the scenes that affects gameplay from the player's perspective.

Overall I like it, but I would NOT have gotten it if it wasn't free with the GPU I got from my last one failing. I'm generally happy with playing an immersive space RPG so far, but would not recommend it over The Outer Worlds based on a more objective view of it so far.

Even though it was developed by a different team, they did capture the general charm IMO. The story and characters aren't terrible, some of it I really loved. Like Inquisition and Anthem, it was primarily let down by a lot of management and studio culture issues which have been made very public.

In my view, Dreadwolf is their opportunity to show if they've managed to overcome those callenges or has sucumbed to them forever. I am made hopeful by what appears to have been a well-scoped and managed project in the Mass Effect Legendary Edition.

I hope so. My fear is after seeing what the fossil fuel industries did to stop alternatives from arising, that they will embark on a new campaign to undermine this for as long as possible.

There doesn't appear to be a paywall, do you mean the large "pls donate" banner?

Damn, it's nice to see he's doing something which is having an effect, even if it is small in the grand scheme of things.

An appropriate use of the Welcome to Night Vale cover art