Still working my way through The Outer Worlds when I have time to game. I don't think it is any one thing, but it's a lot of little things that seem to just be off with this game. The motion sickness thing I have mostly gotten over at this point, but the pacing is just weird, and the maps are claustrophobia-inducing small. But it's the pacing that throws me the most, and breaks the immersiveness.
For example, not very spoilery, but maybe spoilery...
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There is one companion quest in the game where you help a companion work through the ups and downs of a budding relationship. The quest has various stages, all centered around conversation trees where the companion updates you on developments since last you talked. The quest has four stages.. first they meet, second they exchange messages, third you take your stressed companion out for drinks to calm down and go over how things are going and then finally the resolution. The problem is that there is nothing stopping your from just completing all 4 stages in a matter of about 5 minutes all while each stage makes it sound like it has been days since you talked. This weird time scale is compounded by the smallness of the environment you are in, and the lack of any meaningful time-based mechanism. The walk between where your companion hangs out, and the object of their affection is about 30 seconds apart on a space ship, with the bar about half way between the two. It's just weird.
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If you think back to games like Skyrim, you could get a quest from someone who might tell you to come back in a few days, and if you actually stood around you could actually wait two sunrises before the next part of the quest triggered, but that isn't the case in The Outer Worlds. There is no passage of time, and there is no map that is bigger than the average town in Skyrim or a Fallout title... I can't stress how small the environment really is. You could probably fit the whole game in to one of the larger Skyrim cities. And those tiny maps are far less aesthetically pleasing, to boot.
And not only are the maps small, but they are sparse. By the time you finish the handful of quests on a given map there is a good chance that everything is dead that needs killing. Only one case that I can think of where there are some beats son the map that I just had to leave alone because I had no hope of defeating them... in theory I could go back and kill all 5 of them for an extra 10 minutes of play time? But in general, you run a couple of quests on a small map, complete them and then leave that map forever with no reason to go back.
Granted, maybe part of why that strikes me as so odd is probably due to my binge on ARPGs lately... not used to the permanence of death anymore! But really, there are maybe 30 to 40 enemies on any given map, probably less than that, so expect to pacify each area rather quickly.
On the positive side, the acting is top notch and the writing is good, albeit mostly derivative. While all of that is good, I can't think of one memorable moment in the game, one head tilting, chin tapping moment of insight that I can take away from the game. That is to say... Planescape: Torment it aint.
.. I mean, it's fun enough that I will finish it, but it's not $60 worth of game. Imagine if you took Skyrim, whittled the story down to spanning maybe 10 towns, and you could only fast travel between the towns.. that is the scope of The Outer Worlds.
