The Outer Worlds, The Thread

[pierrot]

Yeah, that's a Supernova thing (though some late game perks do allow you some rez capabilities; the top tier ones in each companion give them a single rez on cooldown and you can perk into having your inhaler rez people on a cooldown. Once I got off of the first area I had enough gear that the companions weren't a liability; they would die now and again if I was stupid but I could reload around it. In terms of how far into her quest, I had done the part where she asked me to talk to Vicar Max, then when we were going to the hydro plant she decided to take another dirt nap and I gave up on her. I had planned to just go solo, but then when I had a companion with me that I had bothered to armor up they were suddenly useful, so I respecced out of the solo perk I had taken.

Oh snap, I didn't realize you could respec the perks. I thought it was just skills. I'll have to keep that in mind.

Did you end up looking up her questline? I thought it was kind of unexpected, even if I was annoyed about getting dragged into it.

[MrPopo]

No, since I'm planning on going back and doing a separate playthrough on a lower difficulty and doing her quest.

[pierrot]

I see. Cool. I won't say any more, then.


I think I'm finally done with Monarch. I'm kind of getting tired of this game now. Part of that is probably an issue with how I'm playing it, though. Basically halfway through Emerald Vale, I started to realize that I'm a loot-whore, mega hoarder, and have been scouring the lands until they're a veritable scorched earth. So, really, Monarch became a bit of a chore pretty quickly, and it's much less appealing scenery to me, as well.

So I think I have a bit over 50 hours clocked, now, and I'm level 28. I started on Byzantium, after finishing up a few of the crew's questlines, as well as Sublight's.

I was able to broker peace on Monarch, at least, but I kind of pissed off Lilya by making the scientist work with Welles. I haven't been back to his lab to see what his thoughts are on that, but considering the way this game seems to not care about the plotlines after it checks all the boxes on the quest, I'd actually be surprised if he even mentioned it.

Stuff went from easy to even easier. I found a bunch of neat weapons on monarch, like an N-ray Plasma Launcher, but that weapon specifically got me thinking about just making an N-ray Assault Rifle, since those are my go-to, along with the Bolter Pistols. So that's what I did, and I tinkered it up to 29. It's like massive super-death in my hands. Right now I'm trying to finish off getting Science skill up to 80 for capped science weapon tinkering, because the last two perk points I used on doubling their potency. I have four of the science weapons, and I know there's at least one more, because I can't figure out how to get to it. It's kind of bothering me, too, but after 40 hours of playing this game, I did finally figure out that I can pickpocket people in the process of searching for a way to get to that weapon.

I'm hoping I'm pretty closed to finished with the game now. I'm feeling pretty done with it, personally. I do kind of wish I hadn't chosen normal difficulty. It ended up being way too easy, but I'm also a little skeptical that it would really change much, at this point in the game, on the higher difficulties.

[MrPopo]

There's one Science Weapon for each type of weapon skill, and the Long Gun one was my favorite, with the Heavy Weapon as my second favorite.

[pierrot]

Yeah, I ended up finally finding that last science weapon when I just happened to re-read a note while looking to talk with Udom Bedford, because I thought there was a possibility he had some quests that I didn't get. I thought the science weapons were funny, but outside of the long range weapon, they felt a bit too much like novelty weapons, with too niche a utility to take up a regular spot in the four weapon slots. Even with their damage cranked up with skills and perks.

I finished the game up last night, after pretty much barrelling through the last two areas. I felt really deincentivized to spend any time rifling around through those areas, since it kind of forced me into the sneaking mode most of the time. So I just ended up taking the shortest path from point a to point b, and waltzed right through to the ending. Although, in the last area, the couple of times I thought I might just shoot everything, I got pretty wrecked. I was level 30 before I was even done with Byzantium, and had put some hefty dosh into the Chimaera, but it didn't really matter. I wasn't taking those shoot-outs very seriously, either, but they were still way harder than anything combat related in the game, previously. Like, it would have been really nice if they had just sorted out a way to make that area a little more reasonable, and spread out some of that difficulty a bit more to the rest of the game.

Anyway, I imagine I got one of the "better" endings, but while it remained a fairly addicting experience, mostly throughout, my enthusiasm for it dipped significantly the more I played it. I ended up with something like 65 hours clocked in it, but I'd be surprised if there were more than 2 or 3 percent of the world that I didn't walk over--. Also, the ending felt pretty insignificant, and canned. It really didn't do much for me. I'm happy for Max, though.

I already uninstalled it, but I'll lose access to it in a couple months, anyway. I don't really see myself picking it up again in the future, and it has so given me my fill that I don't really want to play anything like it for maybe, oh, at least a few years.

One thing that kind of stands out to me about this game, in retrospect, is that while it has a lot of characters who demonstrate non-hetero sexualities, they're all female. I don't think there was a single instance of any sort of queer male character. What gives?