The Outer Worlds

Vorph said:

It's a good game with barely any woke shit in it at all, a vast improvement over the previous one, and easily the best thing Obsidian has done since New Vegas (which admittedly is not really that high a bar, but still...).

No performance issues at all on my system using the Digital Foundry video as a guide, and with framegen forced on in the ini since for some reason they forgot to include it in the in-game settings despite the game shipping with the required DLLs for it.

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I have frame gen in my ui from Xbox game pass pc app.

Utnayan said:

Lol

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You know that's a Satirical propaganda clip from an In-universe show? Its making fun of Woke crap.

I am nearing the middle(end?) of the 2nd planet, which I didn't/don't like because its a Fallout-level of destruction war-torn devastated area(Fallout post-apocalypse people should love it). It's seriously one of the best RPG I have played in years, not that I play that many.

-Quests are good, solvable in several ways, nothing is really overtly ideological, nothing hits my radar as Woke.

-They go out of their way to make fun of the factions evenly: Aunties Choice is Corporatist/Capitalist faction, Protectorate are the Socialist/Totalitarians (there is no stealing in their towns, nothing is personal property) they may be a little nicer to the Protectorate folks but no question Aunties Choice are the "good guys". 2nd Planet is the Order, who believe in the mathematical perfection of the universe who are fighting with Aunties and their own splinter rebels the Glorious Dawn.

It's easier to understand the politics of OW2 if you think about it more like the Old West in Space than anything resembling our world: Corporate towns, untested products, big claims, etc. The Protectorate is ruled by the Sovereign, who sends their citizens for "Mental Refreshment" for the slightest mistakes or demerits. The Order is like the Big Science/Church of the 19th Century. None of them are spared and all of them have sympathetic characters. The whole game plays like the old RPG Paranoia if anyone remembers that far back.

-Combat is pretty good if not great on normal, way better than OW. One review compared it to Destiny; I don't know about that but it's fun. Companions can do lots of damage and some healing, depending on how you spec them and if you spec into Leadership skill. -Add-on/mods to weapons don't do damage mods, that all comes from skills.

-Skills set up is super, super restrictive: Have a plan going in. The game doesn't reward experimentation. No game has ever needed a skill/perk Build Planner more than this one. 62/64 are all you are going to get without Flaws helping you, and believe me you probably don't want that help.

-The whole setup is make to encourage/demand a definite Character type and allow for multiple play throughs where you do different things with different skills.

-This run for me is Ex-con Innovative Lucky Dumb Leadership/Lockpick/Engineering; Maybe next time I do a Lawbringer Brilliant Nimble Sickly Science Medical Hacker or a Something Nimble Lucky Dumb Observation Guns Stealth. Engineering and Lockpick are so powerful together, though. I put a point in Hack and took the Restricted Access Perk so I could get access to to more in the Vending machines; I didn't do much but unlock 4 extra items of varying helpfulness. The more you know.

-Supposedly a point is Observation and taking Treasure Hunter is the way to go and really helps out in getting good loot to sell or break down from crafting but since I locked out Observation are part of the 5 skills I chose (you have to pick 5 skills to never put a point in as part of the drawback for "Dumb") so much for that one.

-The limit forces the player to make hard, interesting, definitive choices about their characters on each playthrough.

There are a few puzzles but nothing too aggravating; most of the ones requiring skills have multiple ways to solve them.

The game does not hold your hand or offer tons of hints, it spins you up and lets you go. One review I watched said he entirely missed two possible companions in his first play through. There are tons of uniques you CAN get but you have to be paying attention or looking closely, checking the merchants, etc. Again, it doesn't have flashing lights or guard rails. It can be rushed through if you just follow the mail quest but I have spent probably the last 12 hours on planet 2 Dorado trying to figure out where things are, how to get places.

It would be a shame to pass on this great game because of an out of context clip from Twitter/X and Obsidian's rep.

EDIT: AMD Adrenalin was showing me at 52.x FPS with TSR Frame gen; I switched that to FSR4 and it jumped to 115.4, very high everything, so rocking right along. The game keeps proving that it doesn't give a shit if you know what's going on; I picked up a task on the way as part of a quest to explore the Z whatever refinery; nowhere was the nature of the task recorded. Initially when I got back to the task giver, she said "you didn't do the thing, sorry!" and only then I realized the marker was for the main explore quest, not the task quest, which was never logged anywhere. Holy crap, Devs, at least acknowledge the task in the journal!

Talenvor said:

Do you have a link to the review that compares OW2 to Destiny? I’d like to watch it. Next game on my list is either this or Borderlands 4, whichever has gunplay that feels most like Destiny 2.

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Borderlands 4 by far.

rhinohelix said:

You know that's a Satirical propaganda clip from an In-universe show? Its making fun of Woke crap.

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I think you need some mental refreshment!

(I have laughed a few times at some stuff. It's basically a whole bunch of make fun of everything from a political satire point so far)

If you have an NVIDIA card you definitely need to install this.


This game, while ok so far, is optimized for jack shit. This mod took out my stutters and increased frames a bit so I wasn't tearing my eyes out.

It definitely doesn't hold your hand. Main and Side quests have markers but then you are also given radius's in which to explore every nook and cranny for quest objectives. I got lost early on in a side quest but eventually found my way. Lots of skill options and perks. Other thiings, like trying to find the bounty mission giver is a pain - found the guard but told me where to find it but no joy since on the map I do not get a tool tip of "Barn" or something after I have explored it and with the art style I have no fucking clue if it's a barn or not.

Vorph said:

Actually kind of disagree there. Easily Distracted is a great flaw if you force it to trigger at level 4. You end up with 88 skill points and can either go all-in on five skills at 18/18/18/17/17 or leave them at like 16 across the board and put 8 into a sixth at levels 28-30. The build I settled on to finally complete the game with is Ex-Con, Lucky/Resilient/Dumb, Easily Distracted and a few other flaws that have no real downside, skills I'm raising are Engineering, Lockpick, Medical, Speech, Guns. I left Explosives and Science unlocked in case I want to raise one of them a bit rather than go all the way with the first five. From what I've read 16-17 is about the most you really need in any skill to meet the vast majority of important checks and the ones that do take the full 20 aren't that big a deal, or there's a key or alternate method to get around them.

Locked skills are Leadership, Sneak, Melee (all useless on hard/very hard difficulty), Hack, and Observation (the weakest of the world skills).


Don't think you're missing out on much there. Only person I've seen recommend Treasure Hunter is fextralife, and his beginner guide video is filled with bad/wrong info.

There's no massive bit sink like Tinkering this time around so you get plenty just looting and doing quests. And since you don't need bits for much, you should never sell anything to a vendor and break it all down instead so that covers all the crafting materials you'll ever need (and then some) too.


Eh, it's optimized better than any UE5 game I've played in a long time. Ultrawide even works right out of the box instead of having to use Flawless Widescreen or one of Rose's mods, which alone makes it better than 90+% of UE games. Adrenalin shows me with average fps at 100 which is also what I set my cap to so I'm getting zero drops at all with the optimized settings from Digital Foundry's video:

Spoiler

High optimised:
Hardware Ray Tracing OFF (RT shadows are completely broken)
Screen Effects HIGH
View Distance VERY HIGH
Shadows VERY HIGH
Textures VERY HIGH
Visual Effects HIGH
Foliage VERY HIGH
Global Illumination HIGH
Reflections VERY HIGH
Crowd Density HIGH

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I have seen Treasure Hunter referenced in quite a few places, from Steam forums/Guides to YouTube comments. That may just be people self-reinforcing, or it could be accurate; it's going to be some time until we get numbers to back up any of these claims. There is a ton of conflicting info right now about the game, from folks saying "Dumb is terrible because it limits your choices" to "I want Abrasive because I don't care about faction questions" to "Sickly is the best drawback because you can always make up health" etc.

"Easily Distracted" locks you out of any rank 20 skills and those Perks, though, and also removes any choice you have in the matter, so there's that. I mean it sounds great on the surface just so long as you don't want any other skills than the ones you have when you triggered it as well.

As far as bits go, with Engineering, I haven't sold anything in a long time. There are still a few recipes I haven't found yet; Large Plasma Cells IIRC, and I haven't done much with the inhaler.

There are a number of different possible approaches and strategies that can be taken with the game and that one is completely valid way to get an extra 25 or so Skill points.

Vorph said:

Yeah, my biggest concern with Easily Distracted wasn't the rank 19-20 checks since I've seen a bunch of people say there's nothing at all unique locked behind any of them. It was that being forced to spend equally on five skills would end up with me short on points in some of them for the checks I came across normally and should be able to do. So far that hasn't happened at all, and almost all skill checks I'm seeing are 1-2 ranks below what I have.

It's also made this playthrough far easier than the earlier ones that I scrapped, mainly because I can actually raise Guns while still keeping up with the world skill checks. Without Easily Distracted I was never really able to raise anything besides engineering and lockpick, with the occasional point in medical.

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I wanted the 20 Engineering Perk and the 20 Leadership perk but your method gets you a whole bunch of stuff in science/hack/medicine/speech whatever your other two skills are besides Guns. A mod where you get 5 skill points a level would be AMAZING or let you take Easily Distracted as a drawback and only select 5 skills to evenly put points in: Call it ASD, 4Chanate, FOHcused, Idiot Savant, I don't know there are a lot of ways you could go with that.

Edit: Again, seemingly most of the way through the 2nd world and the intended-to-pass skill checks seem to be in the 8 range, while those you aren't intended to pass are 12. There are any number of low-level ones as well (Hack 3 to solve a puzzle here for one method to bypass a trap easily, otherwise you need to time it pretty well), etc.