Saturday Morning Gaming: The Spoilerish Review of The Outer Worlds

Jaybird

Jaybird is Birdmojo on Xbox Live and Jaybirdmojo on Playstation's network. He's been playing consoles since the Atari 2600 and it was Zork that taught him how to touch-type. If you've got a song for Wednesday, a commercial for Saturday, a recommendation for Tuesday, an essay for Monday, or, heck, just a handful a questions, fire off an email to AskJaybird-at-gmail.com

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11 Responses

  1. Nevermoor says:

    So apparently this game is on the Microsoft monthly plan for PC, which is currently $1/mo.

    That’s a pretty powerful incentive to try this game out.Report

  2. Jaybird says:

    I saw this tweet today:

    It made me worry because the game is supposed to be coming out in April. If they hire the guy/gal tomorrow, they won’t be inprocessed before the end of the week and then you’ve got… what? 3 months to do scenes? How many can you freakin’ do?

    I admit to being nervous.Report

    • DensityDuck in reply to Jaybird says:

      Hopeful interpretation: This is for DLC / Expansion content and not the basic game.

      Moderate interpretation: This is to add street color and NPC flair.

      Negative interpretation: uh-oh.Report

      • Jaybird in reply to DensityDuck says:

        Oooh, for DLC. Yeah, I can see that. Blood and Wine is considered a masterpiece of DLC. It’d be fine if it were for that. It’d be *GOOD* if it were for that!

        Hey! I see that I’m telling myself stories to make myself feel better!Report

    • Michael Cain in reply to Jaybird says:

      Off-topic, but what jumped out at me was the “in-house contractor” phrase. What’s that mean? You get to pay both sides of the payroll taxes, no limits on unpaid overtime, and there won’t be any benefits?Report

      • Jaybird in reply to Michael Cain says:

        They’re in Poland. So I think “In-House” means “no, you don’t get to telecommute from the US, so don’t ask”.

        Edit: So “yes” to those last two. I dunno how payroll taxes work there.Report

      • Brandon Berg in reply to Michael Cain says:

        I was an in-house contractor for six months. Technically I worked for the contract agency, so they mediated pay negotiation and handled payroll and benefits, but I worked exclusively for the one client and just went into their office every day, with very little contact with the contracting agency.

        I think you have the overtime thing backwards, at least in my experience. Salaried tech workers are generally paid enough to be exempt from overtime regulations, so there are usually no legal limits on overtime. As a contractor, I was paid hourly and was not allowed to work overtime without prior manager approval, because my contract didn’t allow for unpaid overtime.

        Economically speaking, the worker always pays both sides of the payroll taxes, regardless of who’s sending the money to the government, but in my case the contracting agency was the one sending the money to the government.

        I would guess that the reason they’re hiring on a contract basis is that they already have all the full-time animators they need and just need a few more on a temporary basis. In my case they were hiring extra developers for a specific project.

        Overall it was a pretty good deal. I didn’t get PTO, but there’s no such thing as PTO anyway, and the hourly wage was high enough that I could have taken some unpaid time off and still come out ahead relative to the last job I had had. Plus the overtime situation was win-win: either I got to go home after 8 hours, or I got paid extra money.Report

  3. Oscar Gordon says:

    Got an Xbox One last weekend, and did the 3 months for a $1, so I am playing Outer World’s. Game play wise it does feel a lot like Fallout.

    As a matter of fact it all feels a lot like Fallout, but set on another planet, with an anti-corporatist vibe, rather than the anti-nuclear weapons vibe.

    And why are all these games put together with Art Deco styling? I get why Bio-Shock and Fallout used that (Borderlands, used it as well, but to a much lesser degree, or perhaps they just gave it a better futuristic spin), but it makes zero sense in this game. Is Art Deco just easy to model and render? It may seem a strange complaint, but it kinda pulls me out of the game a bit.Report