Up until whatever the planet is called where you the purple haired negro drunkard I was having an ok time and was at around a 6/10. That's when I realized that there are three enemy types in the entire game and the humor really started grating on me.
I still haven't completed it. I met with Pickle Rick to talk about unfreezing the colonists or whatever and I think that all I have left is a few faction quests and then the final battle but I just can't be assed to finish it.
My final score 4/10.
That would be Monarch. BTW that is the only open world zone in the entire game, Roseway/Scylla are very tiny and Byzantium/Groundbreaker are just cities. Eridanos is just a hub with zones to explore, ala Nuka World in Fallout 4 but much smaller and without any side areas to explore. This only leaves Gorgon and arguably Emerald Vale as the only open world areas of the entire game alongside Monarch, which is the WORST area of the game since it has FOUR enemy types(raiders, lizards, jackals/dogs and mantises), absolutely puke worthy visuals, no random encounters(the few you get after you resolve the quests there often break the game, engine clearly not intended for it like Gamebryo is for Fallout/TES) and the area is still tiny by open world standards, not to mention strangely linear. This is the best showing Outer Worlds gets as far as open world gets and it gets a solid C+ at best for it. The only reason it is getting that plus is because you can kinda sort of skip the main quest a bit by going there very early, at the cost of being dropped right at the extremely high leveled zone filled with enemies, kind of mimicking what New Vegas does where you can sneak/fight past Cazadores and Deathclaws to skip a huge chunk of the main quest, so that is kind of neat.
This was not planned, the game originally had every single planet as a major open world, with the important zones you can fly to in the final game being locations you can seamlessly travel between(for example, the above example I provided was not the only one, you could originally make your way straight out of Emerald Vale to Byzantium since they are both on the same planet and probably skip the entire tutorial all together instead of being stuck in Emerald Vale until you get the engine part, altho originally the game would start in Roseway not Emerald Vale). This did not work because the team was too incompetent, engine was not made for it and they had to cut it for time and budget purposes. Tim Cain specified in an interview that there was "one cut too many" for his tastes, and along with his many later rants, he probably meant this part in particular when he refers to "that cut".
So, what I am saying is, you're not missing out on much. The game many people likely imagine in their head doesn't exist even tho it was definitely planned, Emerald Vale tutorial is pretty much the microcosm of the entire game. You either take it or leave it. So many people were disappointed when they were finally given an opportunity to quest and explore freely, only to find out that the only open world area outside the tutorial in the vanilla game is an equivalent of a sewer level. They better fix this for OW2, this is easily one of the biggest complaints people have about the game.
I actually liked Nyoka, and her being WoC stopped her being a mercenary or White Hunter cliche. She was funny, and the story with her old comrades had heart.
She is actually a pretty good companion, but the woke fatigue is so strong that sadly not many people will give her a chance solely because she is a neon haired nigger, and a "strong woman" at that. Shame, but Obsidian is part of the problem here for keeping all these tired tropes going anyway they can. If they accidentally write a good character using them, nobody will care, they are tired of them.
As for the humour, OW1 was directed by the whimsical Tim Cain but this time they have Leonard Boyarsky to be a straight man.
That's actually not true, the game was originally going to have much darker tone, similar to Firefly as it was one of the main inspirations. There are parts of that in the main game where you can see how that would have looked, the redditization came relatively late in the game's development. The QA testers said they "didn't like being sad" so they asked for some humor to lighten things up and that's why every single conversation in the game has to have some stupid joke in it. In quests where moral choices were present, they "didn't like being the bad guy" so every fucking outcome became a punchline to a joke and every morally dubious character turned into a cartoon. Sublight quest is the perfect example, it start out well, but along the way you will see where the redditization took place, and where it was completely butchered because it hurt someone's feelings that playing as a space pirate might have been the morally wrong thing to do. Tim was the guy behind Fallout 1, compare that game's tone to Fallout 2 and which one has more stupid jokes and pop culture references. Big missed opportunity, cut content of the game like the cut intro which shows that everyone was stripped of their national identity and rebranded as a "Halcyonite" the moment they touched ground on the colony would have been very cool to see instead of the cookie cutter "capitalism bad" plot where the main villains aren't even evil as much as they're straight up retarded(altho to be fair, this did age like fine wine when you see just how much things have been falling apart since the game released in 2019).
