So uh it looks like Obsidian is going to go “LMAO Bethesda we are going to murder starfield, thanks so much”
“From the Original Creators Of Fallout” is ICE COLD
anyway this looks dope and from the description they have a perk system based on giving you character customization depending on what your character is BAD AT which could be a super cool system - kinda like Alpha Protocol but backwards.
edit: it kinda looks like OG, pre-reboot Borderlands did, but Obsidian style.
I have heard some very mixed things about this game, particularly the comments around the original creators of New Vegas (many of whom have apparently moved on from the company?).
It’s otherwise still super early to say anything, but the aesthetic of this initial trailer seems enticing (although the joke-every-thirty-seconds is a bit much). The focus on NPCs is pretty welcome given that we’re coming off the heels of Fallout 76.
It’s hard for me to really be comfortable with the humor when it has ableist pejoratives baked into it. They are just doing the banal thing in fallout 4 with a dedicated sarcasm response to inject humor, but instead of it being the “left” option (or whatever it was) it’s now labelled as [Dumb].
I’m not sure what comments of the creators you are referring to.
I’m honestly just excited that Obsidian is making another big budget game, but I have no idea how it will actually turn out. And haven’t a lot of the New Vegas team left? I doubt people like John Gonzales and Avellone, ESPECIALLY Avellone, will be involved, so we’ll see
This looks an awful lot like Backspace, an old project Obsidian pitched to Bethesda. It’d be interesting to find out how much DNA they share.
God, I wouldn’t have thought I’d be unenthused for an obsidian game presenting as a new vegas sequel but uh, it looks like the borderlands sequel I never wanted. I’ll have to wait and see what people think when it’s released because there’s no way i’m taking a chance on this
I think it looks rad as heck. Tim Cain is all about the world reacting to your choices, even if they’re extremely small, so if the game does that in the way his games have done, then I’m into it. I’m really digging the style too.
I’m genuinely curious what Obsidian has done in the last 8 years to make anyone think this will be anything more than a couple good ideas wrapped in a mediocre game.
Chris Avellone, who, I think most people would agree, is among the handful of best video game writers of all time, not only left Obsidian, but when rumors of Microsoft’s purchase started floating, wrote directly to Phil Spencer on Twitter that they should fire the entire executive staff.
Avellone actually did some contract stuff for Obsidian after leaving but, yeah, like @trty0 said, highly unlikely he’d be involved with this.
eta: I forgot Avellone got a response on Twitter about burning bridges, to which he pointed out that Obsidian had never worked with the same publisher twice. Absolutely brutal.
I can tell you from first hand experience that Pillars of Eternity absolutely met all the hype built up around it, and I wasn’t hype for it at all when I finally tried it.
My problem with Pillars, and I fully admit this is on me, is that the whole time I was playing there was a voice in the back of my head saying “you could just be playing Divinity again.”
A question: will this game allow me to be an alien (I know they mentioned there is a character creation) and will they allow me to be a furry alien cause if not I am not interested. It’s almost 2019 and the options for games with genuine furry charater creation are so few.
I’m actually kinda cold on this. I don’t like the aesthetic, the humor, the themes it’s hinting at. Really what I’m interested in knowing more about RN is the systems. We’ll see how the whole thing pans out.
Far as people involved with Obsidian currently or not, I know for a fact people constantly attribute things in Obsidian game to one person or another that had little or nothing to do with that particular thing, that people do this in spite of the more well-known devs being the first people to point out who did what, and that for a whole host of reasons there are different groups of people who prop up their favored old CRPG designer as some kind of totem who’s presence or absence makes a game good or not. I started a Twitter account in the first place almost a decade ago to follow Obsidian devs, the big names are not as important as you think they are, I promise. I’ve deadass seen big influential reviewers attribute their dislike of POE’s writing compared to Deadfire’s to Chris Avellone’s absence despite him being on the way out during the development of POE and only really having involvement with two companions. People think Josh Sawyer molded New Vegas out of clay by himself, most people have no idea who Eric Fenstemaker or Carrie Patel or George Ziets are.
I have a lot of respect for all these developers and have admired their work for a long time but the idolization gets really tiresome.
I think I’m more positive on this than other folks here. Granted, I rarely ever put much weight on reveal trailers, so the front-and-center humor, while not great imo, doesn’t bother me so much at the moment. Whether or not that level of humor remains as prominent in the final product remains to be seen, but the things that do stand out as positives at this juncture (e.g. skill checks and dialogue trees, an interesting setting, the sense that the devs are actually going for whatever they’re going for) leave me tentatively excited for the time being.
I take the emphasis on jokes in the reveal trailer as basically a signal that “we mean for this game to be funny, at least sometimes” rather than an honest assessment of how funny it will be.
I remember people just assumed John Gonzales, the guy who wrote Horizon Zero Dawn, was responsible for Honest Hearts, which is similarly weird about native people.
Turns out, the only writing credit I could find attributed to him, in relation to that expansion, was the survivalists diary, which ruled; he may have done more, but I couldn’t find any evidence. According to Avellone, he was also responsible for a lot of the main game’s critical path, which also rules.
So yeah, you’re right on the money.
I’d say those Survivalist diaries have a healthy dose of white paternalism in them but yeah. People get this stuff mixed up all the time.
Also I’ve seen people upset that the game won’t have a voiceacted PC now and the awful cRPG gremlin in me who wants to see more games like this with an eye toward freeform mostly-blank slate roleplaying come out now feels obliged to defend and uplift it.
voiceacted PCs are a plague
Fallout 4’s PC was one of the worst things about that game. Which is saying something.
Another thing: I wonder if this particular iteration of Uncomfortable Space Colonialism Aesthetic is something Tim Cain’s into. He was a creative director on Wild Star after all.
I think it’s safe to say that Obsidian like telling stories in frontier/border spaces where you can get conflicts between “civilization” and “wilderness” etc etc. But they’re hardly unique in that - it tends to give you a lot of storytelling options!
I’m generally way more comfortable with Space Colonization stories as a concept than I am with other ones, because in SPAAAAAAAACE it’s possible to tell a frontier story without making it also a “genocide against native people” story.
