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Shinigami Apple MerchantWilliam Hughes
10/25/19 3:33am
Salutations~!
This past week I was relaxing when all of a sudden, my Planescape Signal© went off in the midnight sky. “!!! Someone’s talking about a spiritual successor to Planescape!?!?! To the Modron Mobile©!” That game in question was/is Disco Elysium, and as someone who holds Planescape up as one of the best things ever in life, I endeavored to devour and binge through DE’s many virtues whole this past weekend. How did that go?
Shinigami’s Mini-Review for Disco Elysium:
“What can change the nature of a man? Torm—”
Inland Empire(Creativity): HOLD IT! This is WAY too boring!
No, it’s fine. This game’s being compared heavily to Planescape: Torment. This fits.
Creativity: Nuh uh. Boooooooriiiinnngggg. People are just gonna think you’re quoting On Deadly Ground anyhow.
Do another Goose reference! Spice it up!
NO. I’m done with the frickin’ Goose references. Go away.
Creativity: Dice roll! Dice roll!
You roll to stave off impulsive creativity. 3% CRITICAL FAILURE.
...motherfu—
Shinigami writes a shitload of longwinded paragraphs on Disco Elysium because Planescape: Torment is one of his favorite GOAT & he won’t shut up about it:
“Ask not for who the Goose honks. It honks for THEE! Justice is not blind... for my HONK... is its EYES!”
Creativity: We did it! We saved this review from utter tedium!
The above internal dispute with my daily insanity illustrates one of the main draws of this new cRPG gem, Disco Elysium.
Namely, you don’t JUST have attributes in this RPG. Strength/Intelligence/Wisdom/Agility/Dexterity. Nope nope. You have Logic and Empathy and Perception and Conceptualization and Hand/Eye Coordination and Encyclopedic and Shivers.
And “THEY” exist in your mind at all times. And if their stats are high enough, “THEY” will chime in at any and every given opportunity, Herman’s Head/ Inside Out style, to inform you of how “THEY” wish you to proceed in a given instance. That concept, in and of itself, is very Planescape-y.
HOWEVER... (draws huge superfluous line in the sand), I hasten to add, having completed this game, that Disco Elysium is NOT Planescape: Torment to the core. Nope nope. It looks like Planescape and shares many of its mechanics and conventions, but if you want the optimal playing experience for this game, go in expecting Fallout 2. This game is MUCH MUCH MUCH more akin to Fallout 2. In particular, New Reno (which, coincidentally, was also penned/designed primarily by Planescape: Torment head Chris Avellone).
So imagine it’s Fallout 2's New Reno and you wake up in a daze and you’re an amnesiac detective, only instead of doing odd jobs for mafia leaders to figure out what’s what in town and playing both sides, you’re actually trying to solve a murder that’s right smack dab in the middle of a huge labor strike. That’s Disco Elysium in a nutshell. Fallout 2: Dystopian Noir Amnesiac Detective Mystery Experience. Comparatively, Torment: Tides of Numenera, despite having meh/bleh combat (wherein Disco Elysium has ZERO combat), is much more like a Planescape game in its soul than Disco Elysium.
All that having been said, how does Disco Elysium PLAY as a Fallout 2 game? Very very well. Every encounter you have with the denizens of this world—it’s a marvel of a roleplaying experience. What everyone remembers from your dialogue choices and your actions. It’s not Divinity: Origin Sin levels here, but it’s still very impressive for a game of this relative scale, size, and style. And again, much as with Fallout 2, this game’s tone is consistently irreverent yet dark, bleak yet humanistic. Monkey Island meets Fallout 2 meets Divinity: Original Sin.
And you can have some really interesting “boss fights” with noir trope characters, as a result of this approach.
You can encounter 3-4 layers upon layers of deception when deciphering the machinations of the Femme Fatale before you, for instance. Or get an exposition overload from the resident rich person expert on the lore of the area. Or have to “get hip with the young’ins” to traverse punk rocker slang and get said kids to help you out. Again, very creative, very witty and irreverent. Very Fallout 2 meets noir elements.
I have 3 minor “objective” gripes about Disco Elysium overall. If I might explicate:
Minor Gripe #1- the RNG Dice Mechanics: OK, in Planescape, if you want to try to do anything complicated, you either have the stats for an action or you don’t. 25 Intelligence needed versus a 22 Intelligence Check action. And so on and so forth. So you either get your Intellect that high, or you wait for a replay and mark in your head, “oh cool, something to do next time.” Not the case in Disco Elysium. Here, it’s all dice rolls, all the time.
And you have White Checks and Red Checks implemented to categorize your actions in this world. White Check Rolls can be failed but still stick around, while Red Check Rolls are One Time Only chances.
In actuality, you could fail every single roll in this game I’m guessing and still get to the end of the story. You’d probably just have your partner covering most of the actual detective work and you wouldn’t 100% unlock the deepest depths of the noir mystery here. And as I said before, with the majority of these rolls being White Checks, if you fumble, you can just “unlock” those failed dice rolls and reroll once the stat involved in that check gets raised a point (e.g. Perception boosted from 5 to 6 on level up automatically unlocks a Perception White Check roll elsewhere in that world; so you can continually get redoes).
But... here’s the “problem.” If you’re a min/max OCD fueled player like me... that’s not gonna cut it. You’re gonna want to succeed on ALLLLL the “major” dice rolls. To learn every hidden motivation and secret in this game. And that means Save Scumming©. Like there’s no tomorrow. This game’s around 25+ hours and I probably spent an additional HOUR just from Save Scumming. All those load times. But I did it. I solved every mystery I desired. But the experience was also a constant impediment to my enjoyment and pacing in this game. All self inflicted, to be sure. But I personally would have preferred the developers just utilized Planescape’s attribute check system.
And don’t get me wrong. I totally understand why these awesome devs went the way they did. It gives the whole game a Steve Jackson Games vibe, it meshes with the pen and paper made manifest and palpable atmosphere these devs cultivated in real life as they crafted this world and its lore painstakingly over decades playing together, and in particular, the fickle nature of fate and random chance plays a big thematic role in how the story unfolds. But knowing that doesn’t make the impulse to reroll for optimal mystery tidbit unlocking any less frustrating. It doesn’t make that experience inherently fun vs. frustrating for me. So so so many 92% chances to win where I continually rocked out absolute Critical Failures. Ugh.
Minor Gripe #2- the Thoughts Cabinet system: Thoughts are the stand-in for Planescape: Torment’s Tattoos.
Instead of learning a Tattoo and paying/spending time to stitch it onto your body or taking it off, you are organically inspired by the people of this world as you progress and as you raise your base stats. If you become Empathetic enough, Empathy might ask you, “hey, want to opt into super duper Empathy thoughts for a passive buff?”
Or if you hear someone talking about Barney the Dinosaur, you might be so inspired to go, “OMG, I never realized how much a detective in a dystopian noir setting needs the teachings of Barney the Dinosaur to overcome this chaotic labor dispute! Caring Means Sharing©, everybody!” At that point, you can assign that Thought to a limited number of slots and wait for 3-4 in game hours to progress while you do other things, until that Thought fully unlocks.
THEN you get a HUGE, very unique passive buff to your character’s relevant abilities (fake e.g. +20 to charisma rolls versus dinosaur enthusiasts).
So how does that become a bad thing? Well, you have a limited number of Thought slots in your brain, even if you fully unlock all the slots possible (~10 versus IIRC ~30+ Thoughts you can find in the game). Now, you can use Skill Points (normally used when you level up to boost Attributes by 1) to remove a 100% completed Thought passive and make room for developing other Thoughts, but THEN you lose that Thought permanently. PLUS, you won’t know WHAT that super duper passive boost is UNTIL you 100% complete it and lock it into that slot. Could be very useful, could be absolutely superfluous to your RP approach. Who knows?
So again, if you’re min/max OCD obsessed like me, that just means you’re getting EVERY Thought you acquire up to 99%, saving the game, passing 1-2 minute conversations with people to “Complete” your army of Thoughts all one by one, seeing which are good passive buffs and which are meh, and then buffet table choosing as you will. “Yes yes nope nope yes yes, OK, time to Save Scum... again... sigh.” Not the way the game was designed to be played, I concur and apologize. But once again, it’s me wanting to experience everything before me and clashing with this game’s specific priorities.
They want me to bond with the RPG flavor text and RP as the person given (perfectly valid desire), but it always feels more like a tug-of-war and battle of attrition with me and my play style because I want to RP as me in this dystopian AND be Empathetic yet sharp as a tack AND solve all the mysteries possible. They want me to replay and try again as other facets, but it just causes dissonance instead.
And that leads us to the last Minor Gripe #3: the tone and politics heavy nature of discourse in this game.
The priority for storytelling here is ALL about how you represent yourself to others. And instead of Planescape’s Factions, you have the core Classism structures from the advent of the Industrial Revolution at your disposal. You can be the most ruthless Communist ever, out to execute any and all 1%ers. You can be a supremely racist, fascist police officer. You can be a backstabbing Ultra Liberal Capitalist. Or you can be a strict Moralist. Technically there’s plenty of room for ambiguity in how you converse with others, but that’s not the game design’s priority. The game wants to check you off in its spreadsheets so it can remember “where you stand.” So people will preemptively react to your REP as a Communist versus a Fascist versus a Moralist, and so on.
And there’s nothing wrong with an RPG going this route at all. But it’s VERY distinct from the virtues and merits of Planescape: Torment’s approach. You see, in PS:T, it’s all very abstract.
You’ve got Godsmen, who are perfectionists, but they miss the forest for the trees as to the core tenants of human nature. They love craftsmanship and steeling themselves, but that can make them snobs to any and all minor flaws in others. They are not JUST moralists. Dustmen are so obsessed with death that they are a society of fatalism incarnate. Everything about them is the act of preparing for the next life. Everything’s a waiting station. So the meat of your interactions with them is convincing people how to navigate in that unique venue. To reach one destination or another. Or to even turn back.
The dialogue in Disco Elysium is superlatively witty and creative. But in the end, talking about Communist principles with a Union Labor boss is akin to modern SNL where the best they can do at times is to simply quote the President’s weekly vitriol verbatim. These class struggle bullet points have been discussed and analyzed for CENTURIES at this point. And you’re not really here to change anyone’s minds or push them to one side of a spectrum or another or learn abstractly how one becomes one of these factions. You’re just RPing as a side for fun to click with that group, or maybe even lying about being that way to play both sides. That’s it. There’s miles of flavor text brilliance here, but very little of it punctuates beneath that outer crust.
Heck, you even have a frickin’ necktie that tries to tell you frequently to betray people and/or rob/kill them, but this ain’t Planescape, because in Planescape you could potentially talk that necktie out of that behavior OR double down on it. Here, it’s just another top layer of commentary (albeit very well written). I took my necktie off pretty darn fast (was very reminiscent of the talking sword from Baldur’s Gate II, but much better than that at least). Nothing beneath that surface.
And don’t get me wrong, there’s TONS of beautiful RP distinctions that can come up in this approach for delving into Disco Elysium’s world. If you’re super duper Logic focused, you’ll come off to yourself and others like Sherlock Holmes of Gregory House, M.D.. If you’re like me and you went heavy on Empathy, you’ll be more akin to Tom Baker’s 4th Doctor ala Doctor Who, give or take David Tennant if you classify as a Sorry Cop by apologizing too much (no joke, that’s really an RP mechanic in this game, and yep yep, I sure did apologize at every juncture ^^).
But at the end of the day, this game was just a tad too bleak and dire for me at times. I really wanted to help people feel better, the way you can throughout PS:T, no matter how terrible things can get in the Multiverse there. In Disco Elysium, it’s more like Flowey from Undertale is constantly backseat driving your interactions, telling you you’re a liar, a cheater, a MFer at every twist and turn even if you’re trying to be a boy scout like I was. It gets rather grating.
And I know I know, it’s a huge, arbitrary line in the sand for this gem of a game. “OMG, Shinigami, a dystopian noir detective story gets DARK? What a shocker!”
It’s just... you have to sift through a TON of RP mechanics chaff to reach those precious glimmers of deep, emotionally engaging Planescape style greatness here. They ARE there, but they’re not the main attraction. Being able to do karaoke or cheat against your partner in a board game or saying something really random and wacky to a corrupt company boss man as you get into a staring contest on sit/stand conversational etiquette is the main draw.
Example: I’ve been reading other reviews and discussions online about this game to get an idea of what RPers enjoy so much from it, and I think this stellar quote below encapsulates its appeal immensely and succinctly:
After being unable to pay my hotel bill, I lamented to an employee that I didn’t know what money really was and so had the concept carefully explained because my character is a huge shitlord. This discussion caused my psyche’s “savoir faire” trait to do a skill roll, in which it dropped a reference to an obscure person, which then triggered my psyche’s “encyclopedia” trait to do its own roll to explain the reference. And my necktie kept urging me to straight up betray everyone in the room. In the end, I am now internalizing a thought about becoming a hobo-cop, a thought that will finish conceptualizing in 3 in game hours.
If that sounds like the best thing ever to you, buy this game now. If all this sounds glorious to you, you’ll absolutely adore Disco Elysium.
Do not listen to me about all my stupid gripes above. You will love everything about this game and I hope you have an amazing time with it ^^.
So so so many RP fixtures to experience from this story, no question.
You can even go an exceedingly long time through the game pretending to NOT be an amnesiac before people pick up on it. That’s REALLY impressive.
...but you won’t change anyone’s world view from it. You won’t change YOUR OWN view on life from experiencing it, I’d wager. That’s the Planescape Effect to me. What Disco Elysium possesses are a plethora of really solid RP mechanics taken to fullest mechanical fruition. Though the base story beats stay the same. This game has absolutely amazing roleplaying VARIETY first and foremost.
Me? I just needed a bit more heart and soul front and center.
Final Grade: [B+]
Biggest Piece of Advice to Newcomers: Go Jack of All Trades with your character’s stats. The biggest asset for being able to do any and all things in this game is to have a high MAX CAP on your stats. In other words, how high you can raise your stats to get bigger roll %s for progression triggers (e.g. 3 Perception to start with a max of 5 versus 8 total over the course of the game).
Favorite Part of the Game: Anything and everything involving Lena and the Cryptozoologists. What a glorious series of quests. And such a wonderful woman. Her story is like Pixar’s UP meets cryptozoology. It was an absolute pleasure knowing her and helping her out. So too with everything involving the church and its many patrons.
I hope this info helps you make an informed decision on whether Disco Elysium is a great RP experience for you.
Thanks for your time reading all this, and have a fantastic weekend, all.
Take care! ^^
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  WelcomeThrillhoShinigami Apple Merchant
  10/25/19 9:45am
  As someone that would be a Sorry Cop in real life, I look forward to this getting a Mac port someday so I can apologize my way through the entire thing.
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  Shinigami Apple MerchantWelcomeThrillho
  10/25/19 10:07am
  I can wholeheartedly guarantee you will not be disappointed in this regard. I got to say “I’m sorry” everywhere. The game keeps a tally of your stance in the 4 given quadrants of character types (Superstar Cop/Apocalypse Cop/Boring Cop/Sorry Cop & Communist/Fascist/Ultra Liberal/Moralist), and my Sorry Cop meter was OFF the charts. ^^
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PB-n-JusticeWilliam Hughes
10/25/19 8:09am
Hello all!
This week I got my spoop on and tackled the Fort of the Damned event in Sea of Thieves. To sum it up quickly, if you die unique deaths in Sea of Thieves you can change the color of your lantern’s flame while waiting to respawn. So if you die to a shark it’s a blue flame, if you die to a volcano a red flame, and so on. For this event you need to collect all 6 of the different flames and a ritual skull from a questline. Then you can go to a fort shrouded in mist, light the ominous lanterns, and attach the ritual skull to a headless skeleton. If you survive the following waves of skeletons and a single Pirate Lord, you can take home a ton of gold. Now that that explanation is out of the way, I can say that overall it was fun, but Sea of Thieves has a boss problem. Often Pirate Lords are just skeletons with 3 moves and way too much health, and just feel like damage sponges. It would be against their visual dictums to include a healthbar considering their philosophy is to use as little UI elements as possible, but if they could do something like phases in a boss fight would be a big help in making players feel like they’re accomplishing something. Otherwise you end up just throwing yourselves at the damage sponge, dying, respawning, and running back just to get a few more sword swipes in, with no idea how much longer you have to go. Honestly if there’s one thing that needs a retooling in Sea of Thieves, it’s the combat. They’ve added plenty of enjoyable content both PvE and PvP alike, and lots more RNG events that always make your evening interesting. But swinging a sword just doesn’t feel right. Often you’re just spamming the swing button, the sword won’t swing until the 3^rd time you hit the trigger, and then you’re just aiming randomly. I’m not certain how you could improve this, but certainly responsiveness would be a big help. (My only idea: speed up the sword animation and decrease the damage by the same percentage. I just feel responsiveness is so critical to the sense of control that makes video games satisfying.) That all being said, there aren’t many games I can recall that do have satisfying swordplay from a 1^st person perspective. (Anyone able to help me out here?) Despite all this I do still enjoy Sea of Thieves and did enjoy Fort of the Damned. Of all gaming events, Halloween events are my favorite, and really get me in the mood for the holiday. So with that in mind, here’s some atmospheric music from FotD: .

In other news I have also continued my playthrough of Shenmue, and I would wager I’m about 33-40% done. I have talked to members of the Three Blades, then went on to interrogating some sailors, ambushed Charlie in a Tattoo Parlor, and I’m now waiting to meet someone Charlie is setting me up with. Looking over a broad overview of the game, that means I should be close to finishing Dobuita. The game has grown on me a lot more! The voice acting is full of character, even if it’s still laughable at times. It was definitely an accomplishment to have every NPC on a schedule all the way back then, and that does add some realism to the world. And the QTE’s are OK and help make the video game feel more like a movie then a game. Now that I’m not just asking people about “that incident” it does feel more like I’m doing something in the game. I wish that more of the fights in game used the fighting mechanic instead of the QTE mechanic, but that might soon change as I descend deeper into the underworld.
As for KOTOR II, I made my way inside the Czerka Military Station, stole a shuttle, and went to the North Pole only to find ~~Santa~~ the last of the Jedi. I confronted one of the Jedi who exiled me, and even though I’m dark side I somehow agreed to help find other Jedi to fight the Sith. I’m assuming I can do some dastardly things to these Jedi though. Kreia is tired of my psychotic shenanigans and just wants me to get to the point, while the other party members are questioning why they’re doing the evil things they are. It’s a good Obsidian game.
Speaking of, this morning I also played Outer Worlds, though only for an hour. It was mostly just so I could give my friends an impression of it. (I have game pass and they don’t, so it cost me next to nothing to do this for them), and wow. The music amazed me out of the gate, the combat was enjoyable and responsive, the humor is on point, the graphics and world design are great, and it’s not needlessly complicated as an RPG. In short this game is dangerous for someone who has been making steady progress on their backlog. A short tangent: In the world of Catholic books, there are two signs that the Church approves of a religious book: the 1^st step is a “Nihil Obstat” (or “nothing stops it), meaning essentially there’s nothing that is glaringly wrong with the content of the book, and so can be forwarded to the bishop. The second is the Imprimatur (“Let it be printed”) which is really just a Nihil Obstat but with the Bishop’s authority behind it. As I’ve only played this game for an hour I haven’t seen enough for a legitimate review. But in just one hour it definitely receives my gamer’s “Nihil Obstat”, as nothing currently stops it from being a good game. Looking forward to playing more! Sorry backlog.
Whether my impressions will fall in line with yours Will, only time will tell. Of all the things your review said though, the most damning for me is the lack of Witcher-esque moral quandaries. In a game about corporatized outer space, you think it would be more rife with ethical dilemmas you wrestle with. Ah well, I shall see.
That’s it for me, hope you all have an enjoyable Halloween!
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  Chum JoelyPB-n-Justice
  10/25/19 8:51am
  Thanks for the first impressions on The Outer Worlds! I love the Nihil Obstat / Imprimatur metaphor, that’s a great way to look at it. Anyhow, I’ll try to respond to the rest of your post later but I just saw the UPS delivery truck drive off, literally as I was reading your post, so that means my copy is sitting downstairs and it’s time to start playing! (scampers away eagerly)
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  Shinigami Apple MerchantPB-n-Justice
  10/25/19 9:47am
  Local Kid: HEY, PB-n-Justice, wanna play baseball?!?
  “Not right now.”
  Capsule Kid: HEY, PB-n-Justice, I’ll tell you where to go next if you buy me a new capsule toy! I know lots of sailors and gang members and stuff!
  “That’s okay.”
  Tom: Hi, PB-n-Justice! Wanna buy a hot dog? *does wacky dance*
  “Maybe later.”
  I’m glad you’re starting to warm up to the charms of the denizens of Ryo’s world in Shenmue. Not remotely any game SHOULD mimic exactly what Shenmue does here with its strict adherence to realism in how events unfold, but it’s really nice to have A game in this world like Shenmue around.
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Lurky_McLurkWilliam Hughes
10/25/19 3:42am
Finished off Battlefield: Bad Company 2 earlier this week, which was slicker but not as entertaining as the first one.
Entirely coincidentally, because I know basically nothing of The Outer Worlds, a couple of nights ago I picked up my long-running game of Fallout 3. Last save was from November 2017, so it’s been a while. Fortunately though, if I may give myself a pat on the back for farsightedness, when I was playing it last I wrote down a list of the things I still wanted to do and places I wanted to go in-game, so picking it up again has been relatively straightforward (even if I had to look up the controls for the lockpicking mini-game). I’m currently on the quest to find the Soil Stradivarius, though really I’m just pottering around bits of DC I’ve never investigated before, like Takoma Park.
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  Chum JoelyLurky_McLurk
  10/25/19 6:27am
  Ah, the Soil Stradivarius... I discovered that kind of by accident, but it’s in a pretty interesting/challenging vault as I recall, so you should have some fun with it. I like Fallout 3 even hen it’s a little janky (or more than a little).
  And cheers for writing stuff down, I started doing that consistently for most of my games earlier this year and it has really helped in situations like that (and also just helped me to better retain what the heck happened in all of the many games I play).
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  TaumpyTearrsLurky_McLurk
  10/25/19 7:25pm
  Oh man, Bad Company 2. I barely even remember the single player mode (I think it took me like two years to finally finish it), but that might be my favorite online multiplayer game ever. I played Battlefield 3, 4 and 1, and enjoyed them to varying degrees, but none of them ever hooked me like BC2. I feel like it worked better as a tactical squad shooter AND it worked better as a gonzo playground than the later games. Some days I was stealthily creeping on objectives while a sniper covered me until I blew through a wall, set the objective bomb, and covered the objective close up with my shotgun while support players blasted all the entrances from midrange. Other times I would be strapping C4 to and ATV and driving it off a cliff trying to drop it on enemy players or objectives. One match where the main path between objectives was a snowy wooded area, a squadmate and I decided to play lumberjacks and blow up every tree with C4, creating a no man’s land without cover for the enemy team to futilely run through while we gunned them down. I would gladly take a remaster of this game that brings the serves back to life on modern consoles over basically anything Battlefield seems to want to offer at this point.
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WelcomeThrillhoWilliam Hughes
10/25/19 10:30am
The middle ground/negotiator ideal path trope in Obsidian RPGs is indeed a well worn path by now, which is why I think that Fallout New Vegas is one of their best modern achievements- every faction is flawed (some more than others of course) and blowing them all off or up is a viable option. I’m holding off on getting Outer Worlds until around Christmas, but I’m still going to give it a spin.
I’ve finished the campaign in Borderlands 3 and I’ve gotten Zane to about level 45. I saved side quests for Mayhem mode to keep it from getting boring or stale, so I’ve been going back through and finishing them off little by little. The gameplay in BL3 is excellent, but the story is pretty dumb and drains a lot of personality from the main cast, especially since they all turn into hapless idiots in the cutscenes. At this point, I’m trying to hit max level before going into True Vault Hunter mode and farming for max level gear. My pace has slowed a bit since the main campaign is finished, so I’m going to likely hit the Halloween event sporadically while it’s going on. I may even just put it down until the November performance patch hits, since the menu problems are pretty annoying.
I’m also doing a Fallout New Vegas playthrough as an NCR Ranger-ish character. It may be doomed since it’s on the PS3 GOTY edition, which apparently still has a game breaking bug toward the end, but I’ve found it fun going back to the Mojave here and there. Man oh man is it rough around the edges, though- much like my rugged gecko eating wilderness hero. Making a concerted effort to push through in Pillars of Eternity as well- I like the game, I just keep restarting it like a doofus because I take a break and forget where I am and what I was doing with each of the character builds. Respecing has helped make the game move a bit faster though- I think I hit a good ability spread for my Shieldbearer character and the party stomped Radric and his guards when we did Lord of a Barren Land.
In tabletop news, we haven’t played in a long time but this weekend we’ll be doing a Halloween season Eclipse Phase one shot of the Continuity module, updated for 2nd edition. It’s a survival horror scenario on a deep space cluster habitat where the PCs contend with both a paranoid AI that’s running their hab and their own previous selves infected with a monstrous virus.
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  Lurky_McLurkWelcomeThrillho
  10/25/19 11:56am
  My experience of Fallout:New Vegas on the PS3 wasn’t so much that it had a bug near the end, as it just kept grinding to a halt because it was carrying so much weight. For a time I ended up playing it in five minute increments before it would inevitably crash.
  When it gets like that there are techniques for making it start working again. (I think the same techniques work in PS3 versions of Skyrim and Fallout 3 - so if google doesn’t get you much you can try looking up solutions for fixing either of those two). From memory, I think that basically the technique is to delete the game data (though not the save games, obviously) from the PS3, then next time when you start the game and load up a save, put it on pause and let it spend a few minutes reloading game data onto the hard drive. Worked pretty well for me in Fallout 3.
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  WelcomeThrillhoLurky_McLurk
  10/25/19 12:58pm
  Thanks! I’ll keep that in mind for when the game gets increasingly sludgy.
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NilusWilliam Hughes
10/25/19 5:53am
Hey guys, The Witcher 3 is a really good game!
I know that is a revelation that is 4 years old but I’m finally into it and loving it.
I have Game Pass so I can play Outerworld if I want but I’m worried it will pull me away from Witcher
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  Westernwolf4Nilus
  10/25/19 8:34am
  Happy for you! Witcher 3 is still my favorite game of this console generation. I wish I could play it again for the first time.............
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  PB-n-JusticeNilus
  10/25/19 12:14pm
  Witcher 3 is a great game and if you have any interest at all in finishing it you should definitely make it a priority. Game has content for days. I personally put in about 170ish hours for the main game, the two DLC’s, and a good majority of the side quests.
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Kirino SucksWilliam Hughes
10/25/19 1:27am
I’m currently downloading The Outer Worlds via Microsot Game Pass for only a dollar a month.
Meanwhile, Bethesda wants to charge people $99 a year for Fallout 76's cosmetics and private servers, a game where it costs $60 to play. Go fuck yourself, Todd Howard & Pete Hines.
Also, I’m going to finish the entirety of New Game+ for The Witcher 3 today. This is the only game where I actually played a New Game+ because of how much I liked my first run of the game. Gwent is even more fun in New Game+.
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  PB-n-JusticeKirino Sucks
  10/25/19 12:19pm
  Witcher 3 took me so long that the idea of playing it again has no appeal to me, as much as I absolutely adored it. Though I did accidentally let Triss go and accidentally romance Yen, so if I ever did do it over I would change that. (As for how that accidentally happens - I thought Triss would be safer away from Novigrad and was worried about her dying, so I sent her away. And then I felt bad saying no to Yen when she asked how I felt about her. The lesson being, be honest and don’t be a yes-man.)
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  Call Me Carlos the DwarfPB-n-Justice
  10/26/19 11:56am
  Counterpoint: Triss knowingly deceived and slept with her best friend’s amnesiac life partner, while not even telling Geralt about the existence of his daughter.
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Westernwolf4William Hughes
10/25/19 8:37am
I don’t usually get games at launch-it is rare that I don’t wait for some kind of price drop when I buy games. But I am strongly considering an exception for Outer Worlds. I really want to play this, and sometimes I have to understand that life is too short to worry about saving 20 bucks and I should just play something when I want to.
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  PB-n-JusticeWesternwolf4
  10/25/19 12:25pm
  *shilling intensifies* If you have an Xbox or PC you can buy Game Pass Ultimate for $1 for your first month and play Outer Worlds on there! I believe after that it’s $15 a month, but that would still mean 5 months of game time for the cost of 1 game at retail.
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  Westernwolf4PB-n-Justice
  10/25/19 12:50pm
  Thank you very much for these suggestions! Sadly, my gaming is restricted to PS4 and Switch at the moment. But I hope that others are able to take full advantage of game pass.
  Maybe I will add XBox for Outer Worlds 2...........
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ghoastieWilliam Hughes
10/25/19 1:26am
From the very first lengthy trailer for The Outer Worlds, I suspected exactly this: they’re doing stuff that’s been done to death already. “What if the pre-nukes Fallout world had managed to make it into space?” was the whole thing. Right there. Not even trying to hide it or augment it or anything. No competing thesis. No alternative philosophy. Just... the dystopia managed to climb a few more rungs on the great civilization-level ladder before everything went to shit, and here comes a cipher from the past who was on ice (HELLO FALLOUT 4 QUITE EXACTLY... well, you know, except for the part that Fallout 4 managed to fuck up, which was saddling this cipher with a specific personal backstory and ‘urgent’ motivation... that the player could then casually ignore for as long as she wanted to, with no consequence.)
My big question, I guess, is whether there’s anywhere else for these kinds of games to go once you’ve plumbed the “sophistication” and “nuance” of a branching tree where virtually everything is a shade of grey (except maybe the ‘murder everything because you can’ branch, which I imagine remains stubbornly black.) The audience eventually, collectively realizes that a grayscale version of these games is just as rigged as the 4-color version where you can Captain Kirk your way through the seemingly no-win simulation. Grayscale might satisfy when, like The Witcher 3, the developers hew to a better-defined character and let their politics simply exist in the worldspace. But with this cipher-and-dystopia stuff? I dunno. Meanwhile, I don’t think anybody has tried to make the “Alpha Protocol of the Bethesda/TES/Fallout subgenre” yet. I think that might make Alpha Protocol the best deconstruction we have, just by proximity and default.
It’s tough for me to throw stones. I honestly don’t know where a team of writers can go from here. All I know is that this all feels very tired, and very rigged. And the scrounging for ammo and scraps certainly doesn’t help. Innovate *somewhere,* jesus.
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  rogueIndyghoastie
  10/25/19 6:01pm
  To me, the problem seems to be the promise of freedom. Should an RPG like this be anything but a sandbox for the player to shape as they see fit (down to the protagonist themself), players decry it as the death of western RPGs.
  The main hallmark of the genre is saying “yes” to the player, “you can do this”, “you can do that” - is it any wonder we keep getting toothless sandbox games?
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  Merveghoastie
  10/25/19 11:10pm
  Branching off one of your points: I think what makes “everything is morally grey” so tiresome is that that’s not how the real world works. In reality, there are often shades of grey, but sometimes some things are obviously good, and some things are obviously bad. Constantly inundating players with moral tradeoffs just reveals the artifice behind the choices.
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RespectableishCWilliam Hughes
10/25/19 12:52am
Remnant: From The Ashes. That friend and I got really into so we even started planning game sessions in the evening whenever our schedules allowed (is this growing up?). Managed to get in several hours that way, enough that we actually beat the game a first time.
It’s not a very long game and meant to be replayed several times but going through it once at least, I know have a cleared idea of what the game is and wants to be.
The bosses are definitely the highlight but strangely, the end was a bit lackluster in bosses. We had the hardest time in the mid-game with Ixilis XV and XVI, a sentiment shared by many apparently. The bridge setting and keeping an eye on both bosses front and back is challenging. I think it took us 3 hours or so to beat him in two sessions. The first time we called it quits when we seemed to get worse and worse. The following day it took us four tries. Funny how much a well-rested mind can accomplish. Defeating this boss was slow and grueling, and progressing our road to victory went inch by inch. That victory was very satisfying and well-earned.
The Undying King was also pretty difficult but the difference in learning curve was quite interesting. The first few times we got absolutely brutalized by the mobs and the heavy-hitting attacks. But each time, we would figure out a key point in dealing with this or that enemy type. In the end, while at first it seemed like another repeat of Ixilis, refining our strategy was much more crucial to defeating this enemy. Ixilis is more about mechanically executing perfectly (shoot the ghostblobs, dive, mod, strafe,..).
Compare that to the final world where we beat all bosses on the first or second try. And then the final boss. He has a gimmicky feature to inflict damage that game developers seem to love, having a boss operate by different rules than the whole preceding game. It was frustrating and we had to change our gear which seems unfair and cheap if you choose a certain build. (shotguns are next to useless for defeating the nightmare. Ruin and the Magnum+Swarm were my go-to here after using the Coach gun and Defiler the whole game).
Being hooked as we are, we started up a second campaign, this time hopefully encountering all of the other world bosses (and smaller ones). So far, we absolutely destroyed the first mini-boss on our first try which comparing it to the first time we had a boss fight was tremendously satisfying. We’ve come a long way. Luckily, enemies scale along with your level so as we level up everything in our inventory, enemies will keep growing stronger too.
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The Dark One 508William Hughes
10/25/19 7:50am
WOW.
it’s amazing how quickly i became super uninterested in this game after reading the first couple of paragraphs of this article. i hate idiocracy because it’s all too true, and i hate that i almost played a game that was that. listen. when i get a few minutes between rearing my toddler, work, sleep, and tending to the house to play a game, i dont want to be reminded how much life fucking sucks and i certainly dont want satire all the fucking time.

hard pass. i wanted fallout in space. yes. i get that it has some satire. yes. i get that it has corporate crap. but jesus christ.
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  SquidEatinDoughThe Dark One 508
  10/26/19 4:53am
  Lol, this pissy negative review is an outlier.
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  Rueful CountenanceThe Dark One 508
  10/27/19 5:34am
  It’s far closer to Fallout in space that what you’re currently imagining, honest.
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