Autumn of Greed
Spiders, 2019
Windows, PS4, Xbox One
原作者：PFM，译者：LightningChris
I've always felt that with every new game released, Spiders Studios was able to increase their production value and game mechanics, but at the same time, they lost a little bit of themselves. While their games have always had a BioWare studio twist, what really makes their previous games stand out is an emphasis on storytelling, which they use to depict more nuanced or ambiguous settings. As a result, their stories can be about more personal conflicts, or they can look for themes that other big companies would touch on in one go.
Then Spiders released GreedFall, a game dedicated to filling the void BioWare had recently left behind—something that many people were happy with, but I still felt was missing. Whether it's BioWare's narrative scale and characterization, or Spiders' vaunted charm, the game seems to be missing some of its dark flair.
Combat is very soul-like, but only melee weapons are like this, and firearm weapons ignore a lot of combat mechanics.
While Greedy Autumn offers a lot of story options, the biggest deciding factor is how many of those repetitive side quests you complete to please factions and companions.
Greedy Autumn features three factions inspired by real-life history who work together to colonize a faction called Tyr Brown. The island of Teer Fradee. The island is a mix of American, Irish and Australian elements, as well as other countries, recreating the style of these countries during the Age of Discovery.
In the game's setting, the conquerors of this island have magic. Because of a mysterious and seemingly supernatural plague, everyone is searching for an antidote, stumbling on each other in the process. The game's questions of colonialism, political struggles, and identity are deliberately avoided in favor of an environmentalist story that ends up being both thematically scattered and absurd.
The same can be used to evaluate the gameplay. At the heart of the game is the combat system, where you're constantly fighting with two companions while pausing the game to assess the situation. The character growth system is still the familiar warrior/mage/thief combination, but the class settings are very unbalanced, resulting in players ultimately choosing according to the difficulty of the game, losing the space for personal expression. Moreover, these choices have no effect at all on other factors in the game other than combat. The game comes with another system of talents, such as Charisma and Courage, which can be used in the dialogue system, but ultimately their use is very inconsequential and can only determine how many enemies you fight or how much loot you get.
The game's narrative isn't much better, as the consequences of the player's choices aren't very significant, as most of the time you're the tool man on the island of Tirfreddy. To make matters worse, the biggest decisions in Greedy Autumn are based on how many side quests you complete, rather than choosing different sides between different factions.
As a result, the game is like a Frankenstein, stitching different elements from different genres – a common problem for Spiders Studios. In Greedy Autumn, they polished the game to a higher quality, so the market feedback was good, but in the process, they still lost the indescribable essence that was what gave their game potential.
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1 Translator's note: The original text here is je ne sais quoi, a French sentence that literally translates to "I don't know what it is", which in English refers to something that is indescribably good.
The Outer Worlds
Obsidian Entertainment, 2019
Windows, PS4 Xbox One 和 Switch
原作者：FE，译者：Or. man
It's been years since Fallout: New Vegas (2010) was released, but it's still a modern classic and one of the best RPGs of all time. With New Vegas on the line, Bethesda's Fallout 4 (2015) and Fallout 76 (2019) performances, it's no wonder Obsidian Entertainment is eager to recreate its glory.
"The Outer Worlds" was born, carrying everyone's hopes. It's a first-person RPG with a retro-futuristic aesthetic set in a dystopian[1] space colony that ironically evil corporations have taken control. This is Fallout Space Edition: the classic combat, stealth, mouth cannon, and other gameplay have been retained, as well as elements such as the ability to take out any NPC, and there is even a smiling mascot that resembles the Vault Boy[2].
The game was produced by Leonardo M. Leonard Boyarsky and Timothy Boyarsky Led by Tim Cain, the duo also worked on the original Fallout (1997) and later founded Troika Studios. Their games include Arcanum (2001) and VtM: Bloodlines, both of which are ambitious but sadly riddled with design flaws as RPGs. For better or worse, The Outer Worlds is the opposite of what it used to be—a smaller, more restrained, and well-polished game that just wants to keep up with Fallout: New Vegas.
Technological advancements since New Vegas have allowed the game to have more polished graphics and a more comfortable shooting experience, but The Outer Worlds has always felt like an old antique. The overall quality of The Outer Worlds is certainly a passing grade, but it is definitely not up to the heights of New Vegas, and it is not as good as Obsidian's other flawed, but more spiritual.
The issue of the size of the game has been debated - 10-20 hours is too short for an epic open-world RPG, but at the same time it lacks the refinement of a small-scale game. For example, while the combat rounds are well proportioned, the level-scaled loot mechanic and the scarcity of enemy types make combat quickly boring and boring. Characters have multiple dialogue skills, such as persuasion, intimidation, and deception, but all branches of dialogue tend to lead to the same outcome. Most of the missions are to run errands for NPCs or kill something on these pocket planets, and the end of the adventure is usually empty.
The Outer Worlds can recruit a total of 6 teammates, but only 2 of them can be selected to fight alongside the player. The teammates are portrayed as more serious, often clash with the sense of absurdity that haunts the game.
In-game weapons have a variety of effects and different values, but the levelscaling system makes the weapon's DPS [6] more important than any of the character's attributes or skills.
Obsidian Studios has teamed up with the NoClip channel to produce a documentary about the development of The Outer Worlds, which you can watch here.
The game premise is also not fully explored. On the one hand, the game presents a capitalist dystopia full of moral choices that NPCs plead with the player to take seriously, but on the other hand, it hypocritically wants to strip away the political element and add a blunt neutral attitude that rejects any ideology or radical behavior. There's no fun in this fragmented social structure, and the narrative is petty, confined to a few characters back and forth, either helping them or letting them die. It wanted to be a hybrid of Firefly[3], Rick and Morty[4], and Futurama[5], but it ended up being unpopular.
Despite its obvious shortcomings, The Outer Worlds is also enough for gourmets eager to play a triple-A RPG. If you're just looking for a smooth and comfortable RPG, The Outer Worlds is also a great choice. Whether this will be enough to carry the ambition of Obsidian and become a classic under its umbrella will have to be left to the time to tell.
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1 Translator's note: Also known as dystopia or despair, it comes from the Greek word for "bad place" and has the opposite meaning of utopia. If utopia represents man's imagination of the best form of society, dystopia represents man's fear of the worst form of society.
2 Translator's Note: The Vault Kid is the corporate mascot of the fictional Vault-Tec Corporation in the Fallout franchise, and is often used as the mascot of the Fallout games themselves.
3 Translator's note: An American science fiction television series that tells the story of nine crew members who embark on an adventure in space in the year 2517 aboard the Firefly-class spaceship Serenity.
4 Translator's Note: American science fiction animation takes place in a multiverse that includes countless real-world settings. Characters will use the Crossing Gate or Rick's UFO to travel to other planets and dimensions for adventures.
5 Translator's note: An American comedy cartoon about a little clerk who is refrigerated in the last seconds of 1999 and only reawakens 1000 years later and begins his life and adventures in the futuristic world.
6 Damage per second (DPS) refers to the average amount of damage dealt per second of an attack in the game.
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