#oneaday Day 338: Outer Limits

I've been watching ProJared play through The Outer Worlds and while I've confirmed it's not a game I have any interest in playing myself — it all looks far too "Bethesda" for me in exactly the ways I'm not very fond of — I've been rather enjoying his playthrough.

Jared is entertaining — and I'm glad he's managed to pick himself back up after the debacle earlier in the year — but it's also quite interesting to watch someone else play a game, see how they handle things and be able to analyse what is going on as a "spectator" rather than an active participant. It is, of course, also a way to vicariously experience a game that you're curious about, but perhaps which you're not sure if you'd actually want to play yourself.

The Outer Worlds makes good use of its setting — and I'm glad it's not just traipsing around planets that are basically Skyrim (or perhaps more accurately, Fallout) in space — but I do feel like I'm getting a little tired of the cynical, dystopian future stuff that tends to go hand in hand with this type of game. The Outer Worlds' anti-corporate message feels a bit heavy-handed at times; its repeated use of characters who blindly parrot "the company line" is a joke that gets old quite quickly, and from what I've seen so far the writing on the whole just doesn't seem to have the same kind of thoughtfulness from Obsidian's early work.

It's one of those dystopias where pretty much everyone you meet is an awful person, too, and not in an entertaining way; they're just dislikeable. This makes it kind of hard to care about what is going on. The only vaguely nice character I've seen so far is the companion Parvati, who a lot of people seem to fixate on for this reason. She just hasn't shown herself to be super-interesting as yet, beyond being quite pleasant company; she suffers a little from predictable responses to situations.

I respect what the game is going for, and it certainly seems to be one of the better applications of Bethesda-style open-world adventuring I've seen for a while. It just doesn't seem to fix the overall sense of drabness that always seems to suffuse this kind of game, and which I find extremely offputting when I compare it to the vibrant colours and energetic nature of the Japanese games I particularly enjoy.

Still, like I say, I am having fun with the playthrough that Jared is putting himself through, and I'm glad that the game seems to have turned out well for those who were looking forward to it. Me, though? Yeah, I don't think I can look back at this point! Bring on the cute, colourful girls!