Spam Spam Spam Humbug 130 – Let’s All Play The Outer Worlds
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Podcast Topic(s)
This episode begins with some light riffing on Chris Spears’ development-tracking Twitter bot, followed by some elaboration from WtF Dragon on spending the week in Regina, Saskatchewan. He bemoans having forgotten his gaming laptop back in Edmonton, but has nevertheless been keeping himself entertained with a few games he has on hand, notably Moonlighter and Starlink: Battle for Atlas. There’s some discussion of the latter, in fact; WtF is finding it engaging and entertaining; it offers a fairly free and open gameplay experience, and in some ways plays like No Man’s Sky (but with an actual plot).
However, the main topic of this episode is — far and away — The Outer Worlds, the new single-player RPG from Obsidian. Notably, The Outer Worlds is the first game that has come along since the founding of the Ultima Dragons Discord that just about everyone in that community has been excited about…and playing! Too, the overwhelming agreement among the podcast crew is that it’s nice that it’s a complete, fully-realized game; there’s no online service component, the story is complete, the game is stable and plays well even on middling hardware, and overall it’s well-written…and, importantly, fun.
The setting of The Outer Worlds also garners significant praise, as does its Fallout-eqsue atmosphere. The game even uses the same plot contrivance that the Fallout games do; the developers chose a key point in history and took it in a different direction, then extrapolated from there to create the foundations of the game’s world. And the world — worlds — of The Outer Worlds are exceptionally well-realized within the game’s foundational premises.
Overall, it’s been great to see the reception The Outer Worlds has gotten; there have been a number of streamers running playthroughs of it, it has gotten lots of coverage in the gaming press, an it has been the focus of lots of online discussion…even amongst the Ultima Dragons. It’s the game we’ve been hoping Obsidian would produce for a while now, and very polished at that…and it’s refreshing to have a developer who is willing to undertake a single player project and run with it.
We do cover a few other topics over the course of the episode, including Halloween, sexy costumes, the Hawkeye Initiative, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, and those special games that somehow always eat up way more time than we necessarily intend to spend with them.
Exit Question: is the text-based medium central to the definition of what a MUD is?
Community & Patronage
And, as always, this episode of Spam Spam Spam Humbug is brought to you by our Patreon backers; thank you to everyone who supports Spam Spam Spam Humbug and the Ultima Codex by that means. And, as always, a hearty thank you to our co-producers: Seth, Goldenflame, Chris, Brickbat, Dominik, Violation, Cranberry, Christopher, Bruce, Dark Wraith Dragon, Helgraf, Gronkh, Pascal, and Thorwan.
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Music
Ultima VI Gates of Creation by OC ReMix
Ultima V – Stones 2001 Remix by DJ Lizard
Obsidian’s latest game has been occupying pretty much everyone’s interest lately, and that’s a very good thing.