Finding it for less than 20 bucks on the Nintendo Switch store, I downloaded The Outer Worlds. The game is a FPS/RPG hybrid somewhat in the style of Fallout 3. Set in a distant future (or seemingly an alternate-future,) you're a space colonist whose colony ship was lost 70 years ago while corporations went to colonize other planets, and a mysterious scientist thaws you out intent on sending you on a mission to get the resources needed to thaw out the rest of your ship (which has thousands of others frozen in cryostasis) in defiance of the corporate dystopia that seeks to stop him and you.
You arrive on a planet and encounter the really crazy corporate culture that has developed while also dealing with a big alien planet with a lot of its own life.
The game has two major things going for it right off the bat: first off, what little I've seen of this planet is pretty and colorful. So often I find that these sorts of games go too far on the "used future" aesthetic as if everything has to be grey and brown. The second is that it has a Bioshock-like retrofuturistic feel to all the corporate advertising and such. It's not full-blown Fallout in style, as the ships, robots, and gear does actually look futuristic, but it's like everyone's discovered late 19th/early 20th century art aesthetics and gotten really into them.
The first settlement you come across is a company town dedicated to Spacer's Choice, which cans food (their speciality is something called "Saltuna," which is either salted tuna or something very weird and alien they're just marketing in a way to make you think it's that.) It's a dystopian world where everyone's afraid of speaking ill of their bosses lest they lose their one lifeline on an alien world.
In addition to wildlife and dangerous robots, you'll also come across Marauders, which are basically your classic bandits and thugs.
There are some fun wrinkles here - thanks to your 70 years in cryosleep (which was supposed to last only 10) you've developed a weird relationship with time, allowing you to periodically slow down time in the middle of combat, which lets you more precisely aim to cause various status effects.
I've only scratched the surface of the game, but it has made me realize something:
I'm not sure that I'm still into this kind of open-world game as I used to be.
Ten years ago (well, in a little less than two months) was the release of Skyrim, which has got to be the most popular open-world RPG of all time. And I drank deep of that game, spending hours upon hours finding dungeons and leveling up my skills to become a total badass.
But after sinking so much into that game, I think I've come to appreciate a more streamlined and curated game experience. There's something to be said for simplicity. When I saw that there were several types of food that provide various temporary buffs, and a whole system for repairing and modding weapons and armor, I think 25-year-old me would have been really eager to master these systems, but 35-year-old me feels his eyes glaze over.
When I got an NPC companion to follow me around and fight alongside me (thankfully they seem to always bounce back if they go down in a fight,) I realized that all that crafting and equipping gameplay was now multiplied by two, and if I wanted to get it totally right, I'd have to do a lot of flipping back and forth through menus and such.
One of the reasons I think I've been so excited for Metroid Dread of late is that it looks like it's going to be fairly classic Metroid gameplay, with a simple pattern of explore-acquire upgrade-explore new places the upgrade opened up. Samus never has to repair her gear, and upgrades have a visceral effect, not a change to stats. (Yes, the suits tend to reduce the damage you take and things like the Plasma beam do more damage, but no one has ever spent time in a Metroid game trying to balance a bunch of different scaling stats and crafting systems.)
I think as I've gotten older, I've become less patient with the fiddliness in gearing that most modern RPGs require.
Remembering classic SNES JRPGs, one would typically just have three equipment slots - a weapon, an armor, and an accessory - for each character. Most of the real strategic/tactical decisions are made in combat.
And I think that might be the real standard - even in a turn-based RPG system, you can have a cool strategy game to play (D&D is a non-digital example).
One of the things that I like about Skyrim is that the first-person combat actually felt pretty good (by 2011 standards). I remember making an Argonian character who was a sword-and-board tank type, and hitting someone with a shield bash felt really cool. Now, yes, I would fast-travel to all the best mines to power-level blacksmithing so I could make daedric weapons and armor as quickly as possible, but one thing that was very useful was that those upgrades were pretty linear - you knew you were getting a better piece of gear because it had a single stat to upgrade.
FFVII Remake managed to make the combat fluid while at the same time including the menu-hopping strategy of the classic FF games, which is frankly a mind-bending achievement.
With the Outer Worlds, I guess I just find myself shooting marauders in the head with 50 bullets and finding it weird they don't die until I realize that it's just because my gun has bad stats. I'm not saying it's an invalid way to build a game, but it's one that I'm finding less viscerally exciting.
I don't mean this to sound like a bad review. This is about my feelings for the game rather than the game itself. While I've only played for a couple hours, I think that if you really want an open-world style FPS with a pretty cool aesthetic, this is definitely one to check out.
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