parvatiholcomb - Tumblr blog

[parvatiholcomb]

[parvatiholcomb]

I'm willing to trade / give @vicarmax away to anyone who wants it and is actually going to use it because I don't want it to stay hoarded now the Steam version has released.

First come first serve to inbox me, no anons.

[parvatiholcomb]

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: The Outer Worlds (Video Game) Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: The Captain & Phineas Welles Characters: Phineas Welles, The Captain (The Outer Worlds) Summary:

In the solitude of an empty lab, late enough into the night that purists would classify it as morning, Phineas Welles pipettes samples of a dead man’s blood onto a microplate. The plate has twenty-four sample wells, allowing him to test for twenty-four chemicals that might have triggered Dr. Johan Rinne’s cardiac arrest.

Four months after Tartarus, a Hope colonist dies of supposedly natural causes. Phineas investigates.

[parvatiholcomb]

the fact that someone could write these words about this game proves how much it just doesn’t work as a spiritual successor to fallout

my biggest problem with tartarus: it isn’t horrifying enough. this is the game’s final chance to sell us on how monstrous the board is, and it’s almost completely wasted. tartarus itself should be an abomination the way persephone (rapture’s prison) was in bioshock 2. every time i play bio 2, even though i’ve seen persephone before, i’m still shocked and horrified by what happened there. i’ve gone through tartarus multiple times, and it never makes me feel anything.

this is a corporation-run, (presumably) for-profit prison. it should be rife with abuses for the player character to uncover. for example: we know from chartrand’s sidequest that prisoners from tartarus are used as test subjects by the board’s scientists. but, as far as i can tell, nothing in tartarus itself acknowledges that. all we get in terms of horror is a note about solitary confinement and the nice touch of the cells being arranged like a panopticon.

tartarus should raise the stakes for anti-board captains and their companions: if they fail, this is where they’ll end up, and just as importantly, this is what they’ll allow to continue. instead of that, the player just gets a straightforward tensionless big-damn-heroes moment that lasts maybe 15 minutes between leaving the unreliable and talking to sofia. it’s such a wasted opportunity, and it just makes me sad.

[parvatiholcomb]

[parvatiholcomb]

[parvatiholcomb]

[ Images: The first is a full-color ink drawing of a canid from The Outer Worlds, with text that reads “If my teacup canid doesn’t like you, I probably won’t either.” The second is a plain ink drawing of it, suitable for coloring ]

As inspired by @damejudyhench and @kourumi (again), here’s a picture of Darwin (Max’s teacup canid in the branch of the Multiverse where DJH’s Pearl Jenkins lives), whom Kourumi’s Odie would probably pupnap and take home for snuggles & snax.

The original art is by the incomparable B. R. Guthrie, whose work for The Outer Worlds lives on Artstation and if you have not seen it yet you should go over there right now right now and take a look.  If you’ve seen the concepts for all of the different crest styles and colorations, you’ll recognize that I have wholeheartedly stolen from that sheet, and boy was it fun!  So I’m posting an ink-only version so that you can color it in yourself, if you like.  Enjoy!

[parvatiholcomb]

incessant advertisements to join the offworld colonies that the teeming masses ignore; why? is it a trap? are they even worse than Earth? do they even exist?

[parvatiholcomb]

thought i was done writing tow fic but you know what, if obsidian doesn’t make a dlc with parvati’s mom i’ll write that damn story myself

[parvatiholcomb]

#YUP#as much as i love the game#they WASTED tartarus#i was imagining being seperated from your companions#taken away in chains#and waking up in the dark#without armor and weapons#and making your way THROUGH this dark and twisted maze#finding bodies and notes and other prisoners and traps#and one by one#reassembling the crew#finding sam tossed in a corner of the maze#and searching for his parts#and occasionally you can hear the slam of picks#sometimes a scream or a sob or a wail#as these poor folk are ROBBED of their chance of seeing the sun#seeing the light#and eventually you get your crew together#and are able to access the center of the labrinyth#and it is a pit#a hole w guards lining the walls#and you take the weapons and armor youve crafted or found in the caves#and use it to defeat the guards#and each crewmember goes to investigate a few 'rings' of cells each#and you turn around#and realize that these rich capitalist fucks#human experimentation#for the fucking cryonisis chambers#maximum security prisoners left comatose#for those fucking corporations and that blasted chairman to do with as he pleases

extremely good tags

my biggest problem with tartarus: it isn’t horrifying enough. this is the game’s final chance to sell us on how monstrous the board is, and it’s almost completely wasted. tartarus itself should be an abomination the way persephone (rapture’s prison) was in bioshock 2. every time i play bio 2, even though i’ve seen persephone before, i’m still shocked and horrified by what happened there. i’ve gone through tartarus multiple times, and it never makes me feel anything.

this is a corporation-run, (presumably) for-profit prison. it should be rife with abuses for the player character to uncover. for example: we know from chartrand’s sidequest that prisoners from tartarus are used as test subjects by the board’s scientists. but, as far as i can tell, nothing in tartarus itself acknowledges that. all we get in terms of horror is a note about solitary confinement and the nice touch of the cells being arranged like a panopticon.

tartarus should raise the stakes for anti-board captains and their companions: if they fail, this is where they’ll end up, and just as importantly, this is what they’ll allow to continue. instead of that, the player just gets a straightforward tensionless big-damn-heroes moment that lasts maybe 15 minutes between leaving the unreliable and talking to sofia. it’s such a wasted opportunity, and it just makes me sad.

[parvatiholcomb]

I thought the twist of The Outer World was gonna be that The Board are intentionally poisoning and killing their own people.

They discovered the Halcyon system is too inhospitable to make profitable so they’re committing insurance fraud on the entire colony so they could pack their bags and try again in another system.

But apparently, the twist is just that The Board are really stupid and really incompetent and that’s why everything sucks.

Which is disappointing because it’s really simplistic and unnuanced.

[parvatiholcomb]

My overall take after multiple playthroughs, as someone who spent several years hyperfixated on FNV:

a) It’s a fun enough game while you’re playing. The dialogue is witty (and laugh-out-loud in some places) like in NV, the environments are really well-designed, and the companion banter is really great. There are a few NPCs I still adore, even months after last touching the game. But it was never that immersive to me, because:

b) TOW lacks the thoughtfulness, deep worldbuilding, and complex factions that made NV great. The route choices are what you would get if you changed NV so that the only ending options were the Followers of the Apocalypse or Caesar’s Legion, except that Caesar’s Legion has so much more internal consistency and depth than the Board. New Vegas’s main factions had real thought put into them and were designed to contrast with each other in ways that raised meaningful questions; Outer Worlds is just “lol corporations bad and stupid”. The main plot doesn’t hold up to any real scrutiny, and parts of it feel like the devs were copying bits of NV without really understanding what made them work. It just -- to me, at least -- doesn’t have any of the aspects that made NV stick with me for so long.

How do people who enjoyed Fallout New Vegas feel about Outer Worlds in comparison? I got up to landing on Monarch over the Christmas break on my brother’s Xbox, then went back to uni and forgot about it. What I’ve seen so far didn’t hit the spot for my Fallout hyperfixation, and honestly was a little disappointing based on the amount of hype (disclaimer: in fairness, I was and still am so deep in hyperfixation that I can’t really get sucked into any media that doesn’t have links to Fallout), but I’m getting desperate for some mental stimulation over here and am now considering downloading it for PC. So… how would you rate a) how enjoyable and immersive it is in general, and b) the New Vegas vibes?

[parvatiholcomb]

Captain Jia He everybody

[parvatiholcomb]

any bioshock fans following me who’d be interested in beta-ing a 5k fic about diane mcclintock?

[parvatiholcomb]

finishing up the fic got me thinking again about how completely nonsensical the main phineas storyline is (and how terrible its implications are). and it’s kind of making me want to write an original thing with the same general premise of “someone works to revive some group of ancient people in the belief that they alone can/will save society”, except the text challenges that belief instead of supporting it

[parvatiholcomb]

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: The Outer Worlds (Video Game) Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: The Captain & Phineas Welles Characters: Phineas Welles, The Captain (The Outer Worlds) Summary:

In the solitude of an empty lab, late enough into the night that purists would classify it as morning, Phineas Welles pipettes samples of a dead man’s blood onto a microplate. The plate has twenty-four sample wells, allowing him to test for twenty-four chemicals that might have triggered Dr. Johan Rinne’s cardiac arrest.

Four months after Tartarus, a Hope colonist dies of supposedly natural causes. Phineas investigates.

[parvatiholcomb]

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: The Outer Worlds (Video Game) Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: The Captain & Phineas Welles Characters: Phineas Welles, The Captain (The Outer Worlds) Summary:

In the solitude of an empty lab, late enough into the night that purists would classify it as morning, Phineas Welles pipettes samples of a dead man’s blood onto a microplate. The plate has twenty-four sample wells, allowing him to test for twenty-four chemicals that might have triggered Dr. Johan Rinne’s cardiac arrest.

Four months after Tartarus, a Hope colonist dies of supposedly natural causes. Phineas investigates.