coldbrightsunlight wrote:Well that sure made me want to play Disco Elysium instead. Lol.
Oh, looks like no controller support? That's a no from ruined-wrists me.
I actually completely missed your earlier question asking what was wrong with TOW.
For me it was the absolute lack of depth to everything. You're awoken 70 years into the future from cryostasis but this doesn't seem to be remotely interesting to your character, it's barely ever mentioned and no one else seems to care either, you just seem to understand how everything works and who everyone is without any reason. In the character creator it made me pick my profession prior to the events of the game, which had no bearing on the rest of the game at all and didn't explain why I was suddenly very comfortable murdering people and things for no apparent reason except that the game marks them as enemies. The planet you start on has this very thin plotline of "lol big super evil corporation that works everyone like slaves and has literally not a single redeeming quality whatsoever vs the good guys" and you're left to resolve it. Obsidians previous writing staff have been incredible at doing this type of thing tactfully before, making seemingly reprehensible factions or characters actually seem viable or not quite as black and white as initially seen, and that's totally absent here. The solution to this big corpo/fellow man drama was by the way, wanton murder, a rampage and annihilation of one of those groups. I kept getting options to ask about "the plague" but no one had mentioned it, there are so few people populating the environments that no one was talking about it at all, and it felt like they added it in to the text but never implemented it in the game. I dismissed all of this as "oh well, it's the first planet, maybe it's a slow burner and when I start hopping planets and assembling a crew it'll get more exciting, varied and interesting". It did not. There are a very small handful of weapons and an even smaller handful of armours, no true unique items of any sort, and the maps are so small and dull that there's just no incentive to explore whatsoever. The best thing to see about each planet is what you see when you step off your ship, there's nothing special or unique to find beyond that, and exploring only emphasises that they really didn't put much effort into the smaller areas, as if they didn't want you to go there. This all combined with being bombarded with the same 4 enemies throughout the whole game. I love Obsidian and absolutely hate Bethesda, firmly in the camp of "Bethesda ruined Fallout and are as bad as EA", have over 700 hours in New Vegas alone and have really liked all Black Isle and Obsidian games I've played *that share a writing team*. Marketing TOW as "New Vegas in space" is grossly misleading as there isn't a single member of the writing team who did New Vegas present in TOW. This is most evident any time you're presented with a choice, and the dialogue/writing in general, which is leagues inferior to any other game they've done, and even the last two Fallout's. It's quite bizarre for Fallout 3 to have created more unique, populated, diverse and interesting environments in Rivet City alone, than TOW could muster across a slew of planets.
It mostly felt like Borderlands-lite with "hey, you guys liked Firefly, right?". Twelve hours later I've been everywhere I can go and it seen everything I can see a hundred times over. Every conflict is resolved with violence, every quest is "go kill stuff and collect this", same enemies on every planet, my crew fails to interest me in any way whatsoever because there's just not much that can be done with them, no memorable characters or memorable... Anything really. I had one quest to do which looked like it might ramp things up into a different gear which might actually be interesting, so I start it. It's the last quest of the game, that's it, it never went anywhere, never did anything. Just recycled the same few things over and over, drilled into you "big corpo = bad" and gave absolutely no incentive to do a second playthrough. Realising I was on the last level I quit the game and uninstalled it without finishing. I wanted to like it, I really did, I apparently stuck with it to its very brief and abrupt end, but it just never did anything at all. It sounds super harsh but I can't justify giving it anything above a 3/10. It runs like shit even though it doesn't look anywhere near good enough to warrant it, and everything about it is so spectacularly forgettable that within a fortnight of release and playing it, I cannot for the life of me remember the name of a single character or planet. I have over 700 hours in New Vegas, it's buggy and fucked up and Bethesda did everything they could for it to not succeed too much, and if you also loved NV or other Black Isle/Obsidian games in that vein, there's only disappointment here, which is maske quite efficiently with the name of the company and by how awfully Bethesda has done this year.
As for Disco Elysium, you can use a Steam controller, and some people have used Xbox controllers and just remapped the buttons. Either way it'll come to consoles next year so will surely get full controller support soon. Oddly, it'll scratch the Obsidian itch much better than the Obsidian game, because it does give you genuine choice and has spectacularly written dialogue, with a similar sense of humour to the great days of yore. It running on integrated graphics and being easy to go in and out of are also nice bonuses.