I’m still not sure why The Outer Worlds is thought of as the same team as New Vegas. It had different leads and writers. The marketing for the game heavily pushed the connection because of Obsidian, but the individuals (at least the ones most important in steering the game development) involved are different.
The combat was a low point. I spent most of the game up through the finale with a MK2 light machinegun. It was tinkered with and upgraded. My character had no points at all put into gun skills and I still chewed through enemies with ease. Whenever ammo ran low I switched to a MK2 heavy assault rifle.
Even the finale sub-boss robot was pathetically easy to kill.
Fallout 1 is great, one of my favorite games, but you do have to be ready to accept the 1990s presentation and tech. It can also be very difficult (but never impossible) if you don’t know what you’re doing.
Vanilla playthrough character: Speech, lockpick, small guns. Minimum charisma, high intelligence and agility. Gifted trait.
If you ever meet the used car salesman, don’t leave until you find the Red Ryder BB gun. Not the normal BB gun. Red Ryder.
Wasteland 3 is a very approachable CRPG styled game. It’s not as granular in character build as Underrail because rather than playing as one character, you always have a party. You are encouraged to hyperspecialize each character, as dialog and skill checks will roll from whoever has the highest skill in the party.
I recommend WL3 over WL2 because the presentation is much more polished, a lot of unnecessarily complicated skills from WL2 have been collapsed in WL3, and the story feels more focused and doesn’t drag in the middle as WL2 does.
Still playing The Outer Worlds. I feel like I’m closing in on the finale in the next gaming session.
I want to come back and write a full review because the game has been a strange experience for me. It has so many gameplay and quest design choices that are baffling, usually in a negative to mixed way. There is no single issue that is a killer negative, just a death of a thousand papercuts of small issues.
Yet despite what will be laundry list of issues, the setting is so strong that I recommend the game. This is a game I’m happy is getting a sequel because it is exactly something that needs another attempt.
I think there is a wide difference between soulslikes and GTA. The most obvious being that soulslikes are understood to be difficult, while GTA difficulty spikes are almost random and tend to be a result of poor design.
In something like GTA there shouldn’t be a need to skip story critical missions, because those mission should be ironed out. The really frustrating missions either need to be reworked or pushed into optional side missions.
In certain circumstances, I agree. I am currently playing The Outer Worlds RPG. In the game there is a companion quest which culminates in fighting a “Mantinqueen”- a giant monster space bug. There is a ton of build up to it. The monster had previously killed the companion’s entire mercenary group. The lair was spooky and atmospheric.
Problem was, mantiqueens were creatures I’d already fought in the open world. I could demolish one is about a minute with my upgraded weapons. This made the boss fight underwhelming.
I wouldn’t want the solution to be just tacking on more healthpoints, but there are other options to make the boss creature more interesting to fight and the game took none of them.
I learned about it from Civvie11’s video. I have unfortunately not played it yet, although I fully intend to. It’s stuck on a long backlog list. I really admire such an ambitious game that fully commits to a design and aesthetic which the devs surely knew would be obtuse and offputting to a wider audience. Making a game focused on a vision, without compromise is really a great thing.
That is a question where the answer is very complex. You’d have to break down different game design philosophies, think them through, and then apply them to specific games.
In general, I have two gut reactions:
If players are desiring to change the difficulty of the bosses compared to the rest of the game, the devs have to ask if there is a failure of design on their part. An example of this would be Dues Ex Human Revolution, which was an immersive sim that supported many different character builds, except the boss fights which were entirely based on combat. This created a frustrating and unfair situation to players not making a combat built character. The solution was that the boss fights were completely redesigned in the Director’s Cut release to support alternate builds. This is one example, but naturally there are many more. If a game has a “that boss”, the devs should look at it and examine if there is a problem with the design. Is a battle too comparatively difficult? Too tedious? Only suitable for certain builds (in games with builds)? Is the battle too much of a departure from standard gameplay in the rest of the game?
A popular game is going to get mods. If there is a strong desire in the player base, the mod is going to happen regardless of dev stubbornness, so devs may as well just give the people what they want. If a game is praised but has outcry for boss difficulty sliders, either put it in officially or incorporate it into the sequel.
The engine could truly have rooms over rooms, it just couldn’t render them in Dark Forces. Eventually (after Dark Forces) it was updated to make that possible.