The Outer Worlds: Spacer's Choice Edition - Obsidian's first-person sci-fi RPG set in a corporate space colony

[kangaxx]

I just read the wiki - so the PC has a multi-step quests to get one of their followers under a bull dyke? Awesome.

No, no, the follower is asexual. They bait you with some firefly-like space mechanic girl (what are her motivations moving on? what happened to her parents? etc) but fuck you after you leave the first planet they hand her questline over to a 15 years old tumblr fanfic writer or something.
Thankfully the game gives you some joocy choices and consequences right after their date!

If you shoot the date whilst they're sitting at the table in your spaceship you get some hilariously stunted speech about "we need to talk about what you did to (whatever her name is)". It's so badly done that it's almost good.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

I just read the wiki - so the PC has a multi-step quests to get one of their followers under a bull dyke? Awesome.

No, no, the follower is asexual. They bait you with some firefly-like space mechanic girl (what are her motivations moving on? what happened to her parents? etc) but fuck you after you leave the first planet they hand her questline over to a 15 years old tumblr fanfic writer or something.
Thankfully the game gives you some joocy choices and consequences right after their date!

If you shoot the date whilst they're sitting at the table in your spaceship you get some hilariously stunted speech about "we need to talk about what you did to (whatever her name is)". It's so badly done that it's almost good.

yes but at least you can't say mean words to her

There’s another interesting wrinkle to the conversation with Parvati, when she opens up. In most RPGs like The Outer Worlds, players are granted a wide range of responses to every situation. You can be nice, you can be an asshole, you can be indifferent. In this moment, when Parvati chooses to be vulnerable, the game explicitly limits your range of responses.
“I want that conversation to feel like a safe space for the players who are playing it and identify with it,” she said. “I don't want to pull the rug out from under them and say, ‘Haha, actually you're a joke,’ or ‘other people think you are a joke.’ [...] I don't want to write a homophobia simulator. [laughs] That's not what I got in the game writing for.”

— Kate Dollarhyde, Obsidian Entertainment, 2019

Players should be able to play an RPG the way they want, and they don’t need my moral judgments getting in the way of how they have fun. I also am not a fan of pre-determined attitudes and alignments for players-my hope is that at the end of the game, they’ve answered the question, “What kind of character am I really, and how did that depart from what I thought I would be?” I always considered Torment a sort of role-player’s experiment, where each incarnation of the Nameless One had the potential to be a different personality and a different type of gamer, depending on the choices he made in the game world. It’s echoed a bit in Alpha Protocol at the end of game with Leland, where he asks if you became the person you set out to be when you joined the agency, and it’s something I like to keep asking players when possible because moments of self-reflection never hurt.

— Chris Avellone, Obsidian Entertainment, 2010

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Infinitron will rate me 'fake news' for directly quoting what people said because he's so upset that people are acknowledging the truth

 

[Infinitron]

Infinitron will rate me 'fake news' for directly quoting what people said because he's so upset that people are acknowledging the truth

Kate Dollaryhyde was referring to one specific dialogue node. In the game, you can murder Parvati's lover in front of her and get a reaction.

But in general, with The Outer Worlds we see that many Codexers are unable to distinguish between their aversion to millennial aesthetics ("soy", if you will) and actual political woke messaging (which the game is way too play-it-safe to have much of).

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Kate Dollaryhyde was referring to one specific dialogue node. You can murder Parvati's lover in front of her and get a reaction.

That's the entire point you fucktard.
They took away player's choice because the writer herself would be offended if someone chose something she didn't like, in a game where you go around killing thousands of people of varying degrees of innocence.

 

[kangaxx]

In general, with The Outer Worlds we see that many Codexers are unable to distinguish between their aversion to millennial aesthetics ("soy", if you will) and actual politicized wokeness (which the game has very little of).

I think this is a specious distinction in this case. The whole game is one long hate letter to capitalism, and has numerous other "millennial aesthetics", as you put it, dotted around the landscape.

 

[Infinitron]

Kate Dollaryhyde was referring to one specific dialogue node. You can murder Parvati's lover in front of her and get a reaction.

That's the entire point you fucktard.
They took away player's choice because the writer herself would be offended if someone chose something she didn't like, in a game where you go around killing thousands of people of varying degrees of innocence.

So an RPG designer wrote a scripted scenario that they didn't want you to be able to break before giving you back full control, wow that's never happened before. The only new thing here is that she bragged about it to make herself look like a woke activist to the journo crowd. It's something nobody would have noticed if she hadn't mentioned it. Mountains out of molehills.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Kate Dollaryhyde was referring to one specific dialogue node. You can murder Parvati's lover in front of her and get a reaction.

That's the entire point you fucktard.
They took away player's choice because the writer herself would be offended if someone chose something she didn't like, in a game where you go around killing thousands of people of varying degrees of innocence.

So an RPG designer wrote a scripted scenario that they didn't want you to be able to utterly break before giving you back full control, wow that's never happened before. The only new thing here is that she bragged about it to make herself look like a woke activist to the journo crowd. It's something nobody would have noticed if she hadn't mentioned it.

She wrote it in a way specifically to take choice away from the player. It wasn't about breaking it, it was about restricting your choice.

 

[Infinitron]

 

[[UCHIHA]XxDarkSasuke420xX]

 

[rusty_shackleford]

This has nothing to do with you being railroaded into a specific choice by a writer driven by her own ideology.
Why are you so intent on ignoring what she herself explicitly said was the intent of her actions? How much do they pay you for this?

 

[Infinitron]

I'm not ignoring it. I just think it's such a small thing that I suspect Dollarhyde was inflating what she did to score woke points with her crowd. And people here fall for it and assume a game where you can be quite cruel to your companions is some asexual hugbox simulator.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

I'm not ignoring it. I just think it's such a small thing that I suspect Dollarhyde was inflating what she did to score woke points with her crowd. And people here fall for it and assume a game where you can be quite cruel to your companions is some asexual hugbox simulator.

It's not about being cruel, it's about not having the choice to be cruel.

 

[Wulfric Pinewood]

So as long as discussion is worth of your time You admitt that TOW is a good game.

 

[jackofshadows]

It's something nobody would have noticed if she hadn't mentioned it. Mountains out of molehills.

Come on now. I went reading meta-stuff only after the finish line. And of course I did notice that specific dialogue moment because it was some sort of quest culmination point and because I was pissed enough already by that quest. And now suddenly game took away even its usual silly murder-hobo options. I mean yeah, it's no Bethesda's immortal NPCs bs but too close to it. But her reasoning behind it turned out simply disgusting.

 

[Quillon]

It's something nobody would have noticed if she hadn't mentioned it.

I didn't notice it since I was playing the good guy but people have noticed it here before she bragged about it. And stop excusing shit because they don't have a neon bilboard over them saying "I'm shit", seen the same attitude from you for Sawyer's talk where he proudly disclosed a reason why they changed Benweth's and Aeldys' past relations.

These things may seem small but add up to a pile of shit. The time they should spend on creating a compelling narrative goes to inserting their agenda/spotting potentially offensive shit(that virtually no one would care) so they can brag about it in panels or on twatter or whatnot.

 

[Blaine]

Infinitron

Being able to shoot the lover after the conversation node has little direct bearing on the conversation node itself, which was deliberately designed to force the player to be supportive of the relationship and of homosexuality. All it really means is that the character is flagged as killable.

There's more to it, however. There are countless instances in RPGs when you can kill an ally, a leader to whom you've been loyal, a crucial scientist, or any number of other personages when it is irrational and potentially self-destructive to do so, because up until that point you've chosen to be friendly and cooperative with them—but in many of those same cases, you could have previously chosen to be unfriendly instead, and that's key.

In this case, only friendliness is allowed during the dialogue node, and therefore shooting the character will always be irrational with regard to the story. For this reason, even though you can vent your frustration/dislike/distaste/whatever on the lover in pure game mechanics terms, rationally your character is railroading into feeling and acting one way only.

 

[Infinitron]

It's not as extreme as you're describing it ("supportive of the relationship and of homosexuality"). My recollection is that the conversation still allows you to be pretty snarky. You just can't be in-your-face cruel towards Parvati during those moments. It's not something you would normally notice since the truth is that almost no video game would allow you to "gay-bash" somebody during any moment. I think most of us realize that and wouldn't expect otherwise - which again makes me suspect Kate Dollarhyde was bragging about having done very little out of the ordinary.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

It's not as extreme as you're describing it ("supportive of the relationship and of homosexuality"). My recollection is that the conversation still allows you to pretty snarky. You just can't be in-your-face cruel towards Parvati during those moments.

your recollection is wrong

 

[Roguey]

It's something nobody would have noticed if she hadn't mentioned it.

I noticed, but I have an eye for these things. It is amusing that Boyarsky's design tenet of "everyone must be killable" meant that she had no choice but to write dialogue for killing the gf.

 

[fantadomat]

Well that gay romance was the best an most memorable part of the game. Also it got you the best quest reward lol.

 

[Blaine]

I noticed, but I have an eye for these things. It is amusing that Boyarsky's design tenet of "everyone must be killable" meant that she had no choice but to write dialogue for killing the gf.

That's interesting, because had I been inclined to baseless speculation, I would have speculated in my previous post that Dollarhyde, given the choice, would rather her pet character(s) be un-killable.

Now I have something concrete upon which to base that speculation, although I suspected it before: "everyone must be killable." I hadn't known that this was a definite design tenet, although anyone with a brain knows that un-killable NPCs are generally undesirable.

So, in summary, Infinitron is thoroughly wrong. It seems that despite being an Israeli patriot, he'll nevertheless stoop to defending American SJWs to serve his greater goal of preserving the honor of Obsidian Entertainment—quite the bizarre bedfellows.

 

[Infinitron]

Uh, okay. Btw it is an Obsidian design tenet that long predates Boyarsky joining the company.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

It's something nobody would have noticed if she hadn't mentioned it.

I noticed, but I have an eye for these things. It is amusing that Boyarsky's design tenet of "everyone must be killable" meant that she had no choice but to write dialogue for killing the gf.

It's extremely poorly written, watch the videos for a laugh at how terrible it is + terrible facial animations/lack of emotions.

 

[fantadomat]

Uh, okay. Btw it is an Obsidian design tenet that predates Boyarsky joining the company.

Hmmm like which games? Killing people in PoE would break your progress from what i remember.