The Outer Worlds is a RPG by Obsidian and Private Division, an game which has the feel of older RPG games like Oblivion or Fallout New Vegas, a game that Obsidian worked on. In the Outer Worlds, the player character is a colonist frozen in a pod on a ship called the Hope. The player is rescued by Phineas Wells who tasks you to help him revive the other colonists, the player is ejected into the planet below and the game begins. While playing the Outer Worlds I felt levels of enjoyment to anger, I personally loved the dialog of characters and the fun interactions you can have, but then find myself in a spot where I kept dying and dying, but that never made me personally quit the game. As an RPG, one thing it does well is its replayability, with different playstyles, endings, and secrets not yet explored, there is lots of replayability with makes it worth the 60 dollars. I would definitively recommend this game to my friends, it's a RPG straight out of the 2010's with a nice coat of pain with a little more streamlined customization. The gameplay was very open as RPGs should be, the game is spilt up in different planets with lots to explore and aren't just glorified levels. The player goes to these planets by the story, Phineas will give you directions and main quests to show the player other players and characters. The games difficulty is not so consistent, I played on normal and some parts were easy while other would be incredibility hard which only made me quit once with is a feat. Seeing as the Outer Worlds is an RPG, there are different playstyles you can use, although I found it hard to do an melee only run, making feel like the game was made for guns, but people have done it before me. The gameplay was fun, there is a machinic that functions like the VATS system from Fallout, instead of selecting a bodytype and pausing time, TTD or Tactical Time Dilation slows down time and lets you give harmful effects to enemies, for example if you target the head it will blind enemies decreasing their accuracy. The gameplay is logical, it feels like a normal FPS but with some imaginative SciFi weapons like a shrink ray that shrinks enemies. The graphics both look dated and new at the same time, the technology shows age but nothing too big to bring you out of the immersion. While you'll get your occasional texture pop where texture load in while you play, it's mostly cloths or landscapes everything was on model with no noticeable errors in that regard. The backgrounds and worlds were beautiful with bright colors for one and deep and depressing colors for another, it's imaginative to say the least. The animations for NPCs were minimum, only having a couple poses when in dialog, some head nods, and of course lip syncing, the monsters are also minimum but that's understandable considering the size of the game. The music was not too memorable as it's blended into the background, I couldn't tell you one track except the main menu music, which isn't the best. The voice acting is on point and very felt stilted to me, everything sounded natural like the creature sounds, the environmental sound effects, all sound effects and voices sounded great. The controls were your standard FPS RPG control layout which doesn't have customization, but isn't a problem for me at least. The menu is very streamed line so anyone can use them without trouble, although this makes the more hardcore players a little disappointed as some crazy character customization are not present. The menus like the inventory was organized and streamed lined, the menu options involve changing the difficulty, volume, and even an option to have your dialog options pop up before an NPC is done speaking. The map was only used to see where exactly you're supposed to go and to fast travel, so the map isn't anything to write home about. There is a hint system that appears during loading screens at the bottom of a in universe ad, which are random and aren't related to your quest since the game wants you to deal with it your own way. The text had no spelling errors although it didn't always say what the NPC was saying but something similar, like them saying "We have to go kill those guys" with the text saying "we got to kill those guys". There were no technical problems like crashes or bugs I found, only thing that bugged me was the loading screens that took a minute or two, which if I'm honest I and other people who've played a lot of RPG games have grown accustom to. For my final score, I would give The Outer Worlds 4 stars, not the best but definitely a sort of love letter to people who grew up or enjoy playing the RPG games of the 2010's, I honestly enjoyed this game so much it has become my favorite game and I know lots of people agree with me fully.
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When I thought about making games and the production part of it, I always saw myself doing most of the work, but when making your first paper prototype, you need a plan with your group on who does what. When going in we didn't really have a true plan, we didn't assign people to do different things we all worked on one thing together then moved on to the next. We treated this as if it was a group project, some did a lot less then others. We all did a little bit of the big part of the entire prototype, that being the cards. This prototype was a paper version of a dialogue tree for an RPG like Outer Worlds or Skyrim, and it was hard work to make unique dialogue trees for 5 separate npcs and even then we weren't even finished. We lacked the tools at home and some didn't do work they promised to do and stayed in confusing while another stayed stressed, frustrated and wanting to do have creative input. Everyone had different visions on how NPCs acted and talked, which made the narrative a little messy, I believe what we should have done is split the work up among ourselves. We should have had one doing the art, one doing the rules, one doing the survey, and one person writing one or two characters. Now we did have that in mind with the writing but because we weren't a full group so we had to split the work which explains the tone changes. I believe this was a learning experience, so now I know that games take a team effort to make, that no one is a jack of all trades and that I should stay to my strengths.
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The views and opinions expressed in this blog are solely those of the author and Do Not represent those of Durham School of the Arts or Durham Public Schools.
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