It can 100% be played solo now save for a few cinematics associated with ops that are not in any way necessary for immersion or the story. You can do all the good Bioware stuff and ignore the rest. From the knights stuff on they actually made it kinda a pita to play together for the story parts.
@Sunny I may take a look. I loved the base game and did... I want to say nearly all the class quests, because they were all worth doing. But I got bogged down in a WoW-cloney endgame experience that, well, wasn't as good when I'd already quit playing WoW.
Is the f2p leveling related stuff problematic? I recall there being something about xp gating or whatever when they swapped over. I don't mind paying some money but I also don't really want to do a ton of grinding to get through the storylines.
I am not going to spam the board lol like I started to do. If anyone else wants my dish on the ftp vs subscribing, let me know. Otherwise the tl;dr is that the free stuff is worth doing, since it's Bioware good and it's free. Shadows of Reven was opened for ftp with this xpac and it is GOOD.
@bored said in General Video Game Thread:
@Sunny I may take a look. I loved the base game and did... I want to say nearly all the class quests, because they were all worth doing. But I got bogged down in a WoW-cloney endgame experience that, well, wasn't as good when I'd already quit playing WoW.
Is the f2p leveling related stuff problematic? I recall there being something about xp gating or whatever when they swapped over. I don't mind paying some money but I also don't really want to do a ton of grinding to get through the storylines.
For SWTOR? The main thing was subscribers could sit in Cantinas and build up bonus xp so they could level way faster but I never really had a problem getting to 40/50 as F2p in a reasonable time. I think I hjad to do a bit more sidequesting per world than a Sub did to progress through the main stories solo instead of with a group but it wasn't egregious. The main thing I wish I could have had Sub for was the free premium currency for the cool skins.
Ratropolis on Steam is fun little game that plays like a 2d side-scrolling real-time deck builder.
It's in Early Access but I'm enjoying it thus far.
The Outer Worlds: A 5-Second Review
Didn't hate it, didn't love it. Wished there was more...everything.
--
The Outer Worlds: A 5-Second Follow-Up
Wait, Ashley Burch voiced for it? 10/10! Game of the Year! Wooooo!
@Thenomain But it wasn't Outer World enough, was it?
@Thenomain said in General Video Game Thread:
The Outer Worlds: A 5-Second Review
Didn't hate it, didn't love it. Wished there was more...everything.
--
The Outer Worlds: A 5-Second Follow-Up
Wait, Ashley Burch voiced for it? 10/10! Game of the Year! Wooooo!
So I decided to bite the bullet and wait two days for it to download (Because wow Epic, just fucking wow, also their newly implemented cloud saves take for fucking ever to upload)
I am not sure how long the game is yet, but I feel like if I can squeeze 60 hours out of it on one play through (which I'm at a bit over 30) it's worth 60 bucks, (1$ an hour of entertainment).
I'm only running through on Normal difficulty and its really stupid easy if you keep tinkering and upgrading. I understand there's higher levels of difficulty for later play throughs and I can see the mechanics that are implemented but normal is more like story mode is in most other games. I died one time on the Vale from the first Primals you can run across, and then a second time because I blew myself up with a grenade launcher next to a whole stack of canisters trying to shoot someone and my companion walking in front of the grenade. The game itself though is fun, the comedy is there, I think if they make some expansions (for reasonable prices unknown if they can/will with their new deal they signed onto with Microsoft) it could become ALL the Outer Worlds enough.
@Testament said in General Video Game Thread:
@Thenomain But it wasn't Outer World enough, was it?
No. It was not.
@RDC 
@RDC said in General Video Game Thread:
Longer games = better games is a cancer on the games industry.
The Last of Us has a run-through time of between 12 and 16 hours. At $60, that would put your cost per hour at around $4 to $5.
So, you're right.
“It is better to live doing the things that you like. It is foolish to live within this dream of a world seeing unpleasantness and doing only things that you do not like.” -- Yamamoto Tsunetomo.
@Ganymede said in General Video Game Thread:
@RDC said in General Video Game Thread:
Longer games = better games is a cancer on the games industry.
The Last of Us has a run-through time of between 12 and 16 hours. At $60, that would put your cost per hour at around $4 to $5.
So, you're right.
Weird, isn't it?
I think it depends on the type of game and what those hours of game play involve. If it's 12-16 hours of Story? Sure.
If it's 12-16 hours of running around in an open world OMG why isn't there fast travel... less so.
Personally I wouldn't consider 30 hours to be a short game. 12-16 would be.. shortish, but again content matters.
$60 for 8 hours or less though would be pretty terrible.
I don't think 30 hours is short either, but there are people who feel they need upwards of 100 hours of content to be satisfied. But I've never been in the boat of 100% completion that that camp seems to be.
I don't care that I finished The Outer Worlds in 30 hours.
I care that it didn't feel too fleshed out. I care that it didn't feel memorable.
I care that I wanted to get more involved in the world, in the companions, in the situation.
I care that it felt very late to me before I could see the plot. Maybe if I read all the terminals and data pads I would have put it together before someone said, "This is the plot," but that moment was very, very late.
I care there were teased locations that I never got to. Did I make a decision that took me away from it? This is the main reason I want to do a second playthrough where I will try to be the biggest jerk possible.
I care that the final moral decision was introduced, again, via a terminal and resolved with a "what do you do?"
I care that The Outer Worlds was so much of a tease, not a full-blown immersive orgasm. (Except for our delightful ace companion. That plot was fulfilling. Kudos.)
I didn't hate it, but I didn't love it. I liked it. I liked it enough. But with the small plotlines that rarely interwove (but were awesome when they did!), I felt disappointed.
6/10.
@RDC said in General Video Game Thread:
Longer games = better games is a cancer on the games industry.
Yeah, Untitled Goose Game is about four hours of content and easily worth $1000 in entertainment value. Don't @ me.
@Ganymede said in General Video Game Thread:
@RDC said in General Video Game Thread:
Longer games = better games is a cancer on the games industry.
The Last of Us has a run-through time of between 12 and 16 hours. At $60, that would put your cost per hour at around $4 to $5.
So, you're right.
To me it's what the game is advertising itself to be. Last of Us is not an open world free form RPG game, it is a linear RPG-lite, and it advertised itself that way. Skyrim advertised itself as an open world game with 100+ hours of content if all side quests and random content are explored. You can play unmodded vanilla skyrim for that long, I logged over 1000 hours on xbox with no mods and was perfectly content. I then logged another 1000 hours on Steam with some modded content a couple years later (tho the game was only like 30 bucks then).
The main reason I said 1$ per hour would be good for Outer Worlds is because it is marketed as a open world RPG. It's also why I don't buy games like Last of Us or the Call of Duties, I buy RPG games because I want something that will give me 40-60 if not more hours for that 60 dollar price tag.
If you want something completely different, I have been trying out Age of Decadence. It is old, it looks awful and it is brutal as hell.
But the game is incredibly deep and can be played in what seems to be at least a half dozen completely different ways. There is a 'big plot' that the character is only one part of and you interact with it in utterly different ways depending upon your skills, background and actions.
The setting is a weird post magitech apocalypse quasi-Rome but frankly I am not 100% sure if there is any magic or if it is all technology. You have legionaries with bronze spears but my singular run through so far I also encountered a what I am pretty sure was a nuclear bomb, a drawn out quest line over a suit of (maybe magical?) powered armour and what I am pretty sure was a god entombed in the bottom of a pyramid full of weird machines that my Lore 0 character did not understand at all. Protected by Roman-Robots.
@magee101 said in General Video Game Thread:
The main reason I said 1$ per hour would be good for Outer Worlds is because it is marketed as a open world RPG. It's also why I don't buy games like Last of Us or the Call of Duties, I buy RPG games because I want something that will give me 40-60 if not more hours for that 60 dollar price tag.
To each their own. I suppose your analysis is why I enjoyed any of the Mass Effect games more than Dragon Age: Inquisition.
“It is better to live doing the things that you like. It is foolish to live within this dream of a world seeing unpleasantness and doing only things that you do not like.” -- Yamamoto Tsunetomo.
@Ganymede said in General Video Game Thread:
@RDC said in General Video Game Thread:
Longer games = better games is a cancer on the games industry.
The Last of Us has a run-through time of between 12 and 16 hours. At $60, that would put your cost per hour at around $4 to $5.
So, you're right.
Weird, isn't it?
