#you can pay me in WoW classic gametime

[first-impressions-gaming]

The Outer Worlds

Developed by Obsidian Entertainment

Published by Private Division

Release Date 2019 (based on platform)

Tested on Xbox Series X

MSRP 30,00 USD

Oh boy, oh boy, where to even begin to talk about my experience in The Outer Worlds? Let me put it this way, I don’t easily 100% a game, and when I decide “Okay, I played enough share of this game to talk about my experience for it, let’s go through with to the end still” I know that I want to complete it and see the ending unfold before my eyes. When I got to the last mission in this game, I felt “wait a second, this mission sounds like it is going end the story because this is going to be a big revelation”, that was that moment I realized I completed the game without intention to do so. The game’s main quests and couple of side quests here and there last around 15 hours, I completed it within 3 days and I didn’t even realize I was playing 5 hours a day. Long story short: The Outer Worlds has been an epic journey for me, it is worth appraisal because the game puts a lot of story and background history in a 15-hours gametime. When the end credits roll, that’s where you go “Wow, that is…that is… a personal adventure”. The Outer Worlds? This is peak fiction, pure excellence, complete enjoyment, total pleasure.

What is this game about that I enjoyed hell of it? Firstly, I never played a Bethesda RPG before, and the team behind this game, Obsidian, is known for Fallout New Vegas and players praise The Outer Worlds for old-school Bethesda RPG gameplay and mechanics, therefore I cannot go into whether this game is a great Bethesda-like RPG or not, I am just going to criticise it on its own and what it offers.

The game opens with the character customization, you’ve the classic RPG elements in here, you got Attributes, Skills, Aptitude, Appearance, Naming your character. In this section you have certain points to improve your characteristics there. You can improve and upgrade all the skills throughout the game, only your Attributes are fixed and cannot be modified by you, these are Body, Mind and Personality categories. My character looked like this starting the game:

Once you create your character, the opening scene stars rolling with a seamless transition: It is 2355, two ships were sent from the earth to colonise Terra 1 and Terra 2 planets, the ship named hope malfunctioned and didn’t arrive Terra 2 ever. A scientist finds Hope and he is able to wake one crew member up, all of whom are in deep cryosleep, and that’s us, the Stranger. Welles, the scientist, sends us to Halcyon and gives us the mission to return with sufficient resources to wake the rest of the crew members on Hope. As you complete the game, you’ll have more info on this actually, and I wish to leave this part to the end so as not to spoil the fun for you.

We land on Halcyon, on Emerald Vale specifically, as a person who woke up from deep sleep we try to adjust to new natural conditions in this unknown environment, and we approach to the gates of Edgewater. A gravedigger introduces himself, and kind of welcomes us. He offers a side quest to us right off the bat. Side quests even before the first mission? Damn right, let’s go. Silos, the gravedigger, instructs us four citizens in the town haven’t paid the fee for gravedigging, and he desperately needs payment no matter what. When we show up at Abernathy’s apartment, one of the four citizens, he states he needs a certain medicine and he can pay us for our trouble, I accept it, what can go wrong sneaking into a guarded room and stealing a medicine that’s highly-sought after? As soon as we leave the apartment, we see a woman overhearing our exchange with Abernathy about the aforementioned medicine. The woman says it is no good for him, he already has plague and way older than anybody in the town, she can pay much better than him for the medicine, she leaves us to think about her offer. I was really caught off-guard here, “am I stepping into a world full of intrigue right at the beginning?”, the task Abernathy has given us is not simple fetch quest, there is depth to it, he’s asking us to obtain the medicine in an illegal way because the state does not provide him it, and when we accept to get it, a woman turns out all of a sudden, even in a side quest you are there, making choices: who should we give the medicine to? To Abernathy, who is sick and whose illness swiftly worsening? Or this woman we just met who promises a much better money for it? Well, it’s up to you, I won’t reveal the decision I made. As I said, there’re 4 citizens in debt to Silos, the other two are interconnected in a way, one of them is a worker at the factory and the other is a person who’s handling funeral procedures. The factory worker found his neighbour dead, he clearly committed suicide, and she found him in his apartment, therefore, for stupid reasons, she has to pay his graveyard and funeral fees. We collect the payment from her, and head over to funeral place, there we encounter the man, who committed suicide, lying in front of us. The man talks about the recently deceased and mentions  the complications and intricancies, saying that he didn’t actually commit suicide, he must have died of other reasons, even though it is clear that he shot himself with his pistol. It may seem a fleeting moment to you, still it touches you when you experience the back-story in the present moment, the game presents you what took place and you are in the moment at the same time, what’s even more attention-grabbing is that we never know and never meet the dead man in person. He is…there. Just dead. We hear from grapevine that he shot himself on purpose, and the other says he died after shooting himself, implying it is not a suicide in technicality. The humane-ness of the situation is shocking. And you are remembered as the-neighbour-whose-graveyard-fee-I-had-to-pay. Well, we move on. 

During the game you meet major characters, these people can be recruited as companions. Companions hold a major share in the game because they, well, accompany you in all your missions and interacting and talking to them add a lof of depth to your knowledge concerning Terra 1 and 2, Edgewater, the planets you visit and people you interact with, and basically the history of the state. They fill you in all sorts of details and enrich the experience you have. You can equip weapons and gear for your companions and they level up as you and you can upgrade their skills. It’s always great to see that your companions or NPCs are aware of what’s going on around them, or the situation at hand. For example, in the first main mission, you are to make a crucial decision, one that is going to have substantial impact for two communities, one of them is Edgewater town and the town deserters from Edgewater built. You decide which communities electricity and power to cut in order to generate power for your spaceship. After your decision the next time you interact with Parvati, your first companion who is a beginner engineer, gives her input as to your decision and show sentiments on the decision, after she is born and raised in Edgewater, this is all her life. This feature and attention to detail make your experience more immersive because you know your companions aren’t random NPCs following you around, they have distinct personality and character and, most importantly, respond and reach to ongoings.

A game shouldn’t fall into excessive repetition let it be mechanics, story, jokes etc. The Outer Worlds has this great balance concerning the overarching comprehensive world-building. Regardless of where you are or with whom you interact, you sense this oppression on your shoulders, the Board’s. The Board is this ruling committee, it is extremely significant in everybody’s daily life in all these planets you get to visit, the Board is so greedy behind all these doors that they realise there is not enough food to sustain each and every citizen, so what’s the solution they come up with? To freeze and unfreeze citizens rotatingly, in this way there will be sufficient resources for a small share of people. It is even mandatory to recite the Board’s certified slogans and advertisements for civil servants: the most familiar slogan you’ll come across in each location is ‘It’s not the best choice, it is Spacer’s Choice!’. Another mechanic I put high regard is indirect storytelling, in this game you will find ‘terminals’ almost in all locations, buildings, spaceship landing pads. In these terminals, you can find logs and entries, recorded by the workers or the people, you get to visit an abandoned small lab in outskirts of Edgewater to obtain an item, you explore the lab downstairs and there is a terminal, you read and learn what these people experienced, they tried to erect fences, then stronger fences with electricity, yet they lost the war against the enemies of their own. In these records, you are told a backstory and it enhances and complements the on-going ‘bigger picture’ story you are experiencing, these small touches and detail are great additions which are told indirectly in simple words, yet powerfully nevertheless.

Now it is time to talk about issues or complaints I had in the game, it is not sunshine and rainbows after all.

As you set a mission active for tracking, multiple icons will appear if the mission has more than one task to be completed, you cannot see which task is for which location on the map, because it does only state the mission name, not the task names, for example if the mission name’s “Go Home”, this is what it says in the task icons on map, instead of specific task names, and you cannot track a task within a mission, all the task appear on your screen all the time, this gets disorienting when two tasks, which are to be completed in different planets, show up at the same time, as the player I’d like have the option to track down the task I wish to complete first, I don’t need to see an icon for a task from another planet on the screen. 

You can see the problem I am explaining here:

You can also mod your weapons on workbenches:

When you complete a quest, the game automatically tracks the main mission, this will lead misguided direction for you time to time because the game doesn’t let you know there’s a nearby side quest you can do, instead of this, the game marks the main mission active which is in another planet. The other instance is when a companion requested kindly to visit a grave of a friend who recently died and said the location is on our way to another mission, I said yes, but the game didn’t mark this graveyard location as active quest. The issues I put forward in the last two paragraphs are not impossible mechanics to figure out, for example these issues are handled smoothly in recent Assassin’s Creed games, the game allows you to pinpoint certain tasks, notifies you whether if there’s a nearby quest you can complete and adds additional quests into your available ongoing quest. I highly suggest you to pay attention main and side quest locations and check your map regularly.

Without full-blown spoilers, I wish to mention one sentence from the ending, where the narrator talks about what happens after the final mission and how it all played out. The narrator says Reed Tobson, an influential person in Edgewater who’s fervently supporting the Board and status-quo in a cunning way, is found drinking Zero Gee, some sort of low-quality liquor, and uttering “It’s not the best choice, it is Spacer’s Choice”. This specific line and the scene it describes sounded like it resembles 1984's end in a reverse way. In 1984, Winston is seen drinking Victory Gin after being ‘re-educated’ to love Big Brother and is bereft of motivation or drive in life in any capacity, and he’s fully accepting (well, unwillingly) and not able to go against any longer for sake of what he believes in, thus drowning himself and his sorrows in cheap oily gin. Reed does the same, though for entirely contrasting reasons. He’s longing for the defeated Board and his lost authority and he can only utter what his life stood for in the past, this is a new world he lives in now, one where the yoke of the oppressive and authoritarian Board is no more. 

Here is the complete menus and sub-menus:

The game also puts forth an ethical question through Doctor Welles. In his logs found in the terminal in his lab, we read he tried to wake up at least twelve Hope colonists, and he writes some of the subjects ‘lived’ up to ninety seconds before painfully screaming and dying. He doesn’t mention how many colonists he attempted to wake up to successfully reviving the Stranger. During the game we learn the Board and his military is after Welles because he committed treason against the Board and went against the law in his experiments, especially with Hope colonists. The question has to be asked: can Welles’s actions be justified? In his defence, trying and failing is at least worth a shot and favourable, instead of not doing anything in the face the Board, and all it takes is waking up one colonist properly and all the lost souls be worth it. And we circle back to the beginning, we customize the character and voila, we wake up, we are that person Welles is able to revive from deep sleep.

The Outer Worlds presents a unique and exquisite world (well, worlds) before you, and it’s a must-play even for players who simply enjoy great storytelling with not too-much-of RPG mechanics. 

[tanadrin]

Notes on the Taurahe Language

by Loremaster Surazh Sher'an, of the Royal Society of Silvermoon

Published in the Journal of the Royal Society, in the 6853th Year of the Sun and 5th year of the Regency (619 K.C., 27 A.O.D.P.)

Since the Third War and the reestablishment of diplomatic and trade contacts with the peoples of the western continent of Kalimdor, several new frontiers in natural philosophy have been opened up to the scholars of our Society, in areas botanical, historical, thaumaturgic, and, not least of all, linguistic. Though the tongues of the Eastern Kingdoms have been well-covered in the scholarly literature, and even those of Draenor have had several monographs published on them since the Second War[1], the languages of Kalimdor remain woefully understudied. The most tentative work relating Thalassian to the Darnassian languages has been undertaken[2], but of the other Kalimdorean tongues, nothing substantial has been written.

In the interest of attempting to make my own modest contribution to the study of the Kalimdorean tongues, I would like to offer the following preliminary analysis of a language entirely unstudied by our loremasters at present and, I believe, spoken nowhere in Quel'Thalas, and in precious few places in the Eastern Kingdoms. I refer, of course, to Taurahe, the tongue of the Shu'halo, or, as they are known to outsiders, the Tauren. The Taurahe language is most interesting, being related neither to the tongues of Draenor nor of the Easter Kingdoms, and seeming to have no antecedent in any of the ancient mother-tongues of Azeroth, like Proto-Troll, Proto-Vrykul, or Ancient Kalimdorean. Furthermore, it is a language currently in flux, insofar as the way of life of the Shu'halo has changed enormously since the arrival of the Orcs in Kalimdor and the incorporation of the Tauren into the Horde. Although I cannot capture either the complexity or dynamism of this language in a brief article, I hope to pave the way to more extensive future analysis.

1. Taurahe in Context

The Shu'halo are a tauroid race of bipeds, native to eastern Kalimdor. First encountered in the dry coastal regions around Bladefist Bay, in what is now Durotar, an alliance was formed between Warchief Thrall and Chieftain Cairne Bloodhoof of the Bloodhoof Tauren in 6833 YS, during the Third War. At that time, all Tauren clans[3] were nomadic; after the tumultuous events of the war and the defeat of Archimonde at Mount Hyjal, the Bloodhoof Tauren and a portion of the other clans settled at Thunder Bluff in Mulgore, with several satellite towns like Bloodhoof Village being founded nearby. Many seasonal Tauren campsites have been converted into permanent settlements, like the Crossroads and Camp Taurajo, facilitating trade with Durotar and supporting a larger population of Tauren.

Despite the adoption by some of a settled lifestyle, many Tauren remain nomadic or semi-nomadic, some for political reasons[4], others simply out of tradition[5]. Because of the hunting lifestyle of the Tauren, and the number of rites and rituals which center around hunting, the creation of permanent settlements and urban centers has not been widely welcomed in Tauren society. Much of the shift in Tauren culture is down to the charismatic leadership of Cairne Bloodhoof; though his authority nominally extends only over the Bloodhoof Tauren, he is highly regarded by the other Tauren clans, and holds considerable influence in Tauren society at large. It remains to be seen whether these new developments in Tauren society, and the importance of Thunder Bluff as a political and economic center, will outlast their chief architect.

As is to be expected, Taurahe vocabulary centers primarily around the historical Taurahe way of life: terminology of the natural world, of geography, travel, hunting, and hunting- and pathfinding-related technologies is quite extensive. The Tauren have traditionally been a shamanistic people, like the Orcs, and so have an extensive vocabulary of shamanistic and natural thaumaturgy. Lacking an understanding of the arcane, or of other planes, their vocabulary for arcane thaumaturgy is limited, and most of their vocabulary around these kinds of sorcery has been borrowed from Orcish and, more recently, Thalassian. Of some influence also has been the Night Elven tongue[6], since the Tauren have a long history of intermittent contact with that people. Almost all vocabulary related to metalworking, alchemy, wheeled conveyance, shipbuilding, and large-scale warfare is directly borrowed from Orcish, with a small subset of loanwords from the language of the Darkspear Trolls.

Taurahe is not a unified language; each sub-clan has its own dialect, resembling most other dialects within their clan, as clans have historically tended to migrate together and to maintain close ties in marriage and trade. Any clear geographical distribution of the dialects has been substantially confused by many centuries of migration, and the spreading of various features and loanwords between migratory clans and sub-clans. Even so, not all forms of Taurahe are mutually intelligible; furthermore, the prestige form of the language has often varied according to the internal politics of the Tauren clans, with the emergence of a preeminent leader or tribe altering the lingusitic center of gravity of the Tauren people. Since the establishment of Thunder Bluff, the Bloodhoof dialect spoken there has been treated as the de facto standard, both among Tauren and within the rest of the Horde; therefore, it is the Thunder Bluff dialect that shall be treated here.

2. Writing System

Taurahe has not traditionally been a written language. Tauren society has historically been based extensively on oral traditions, which supply everything from legal and ritual formulae to history and mythology, which, based on the study of different versions among different clans, have remained remarkably constant over centuries or even millennia[7]. Although the Tauren have had contact with literary societies such as the Night Elves for many centuries, they have generally eschewed writing for most culturally significant applications, ascribing far greater prestige to orally transmitted traditions. Most Tauren elders have committed the equivalent of dozens of volumes of history and poetry to memory; some, such as Hamuul Runetotem, are said to be able to recite what would fill a hundred books in any Orcish library.

Nonetheless, Tauren have some knowledge and respect for runic sorcery, and have applied it to the totems they wield in battle and use for ritual purposes. These "runes" seem ultimately to be of Night Elven origin, despite no extant tradition of their use in Night Elven society. Potentially, they date from before the Sundering, given their similarity to arcane runes used in Quel'thalas and the contemporary aversion to arcane magic among the Kaldorei.

Almost all written forms of Taurahe found now in Kalimdor are, however, recorded using the Orcish writing system. Orcish uses a combination of phonetic and logographic symbols, having descended from an earlier logographic stage[8] some two centuries before the opening of the Dark Portal. Foreign languages, when recorded in Orcish, typically use only the most common logographs, relying instead on extensive use of the phonetic symbols normally reserved for inflection and particles. The syllabic nature of phonetic Orcish, however, renders it a poor fit for Taurahe, which has a completely different phonetic inventory. Therefore, in this article I have preferred to rely on the superior Thalassian alphabet to transcribe the sounds of Taurahe, which are in fact quite simple for the Elven tongue to pronounce.

3. Phonology

Taurahe forms generally CV syllables, making it at least phonetically one of the less vulgar languages of the Horde. It rarely admits consonant clusters, only occasionally permitting certain syllable-final glides and certain syllable-initial affricates. The fifteen consonants as transcribed into Thalassian are as follows:

p b t k m n s sh h ch (a velar or glottal fricative) l r w y (a palatal semivowel) ts (affricate)

Taurahe has five vowels, which may be either short or long; in most dialects, although not Bloodhoof, the long consonants are in fact diphthongs, and even when speaking Bloodhoof, Tauren tend to preserve those diphthongs if present in their native dialect. The five primary vowels are /a e i o u/; the long vowels are most usually realized as /a: ei i: o: au/. Less common are /au/ and /ai/ or /ie/ for /a:/ and /i:/. Grimtotem Tauren has a completely different system of long vowels, /ae ei ie oa ue/.

4. Noun Classification

The declension of the Taurahe noun is only for four cases--the nominative, the objective, the locative, and the relative--but is greatly dependent on the classification of the noun, based on what appears to be both an animacy and social-role hierarchy. The former is not unlike the animacy classification of some Zandali languages, while the latter bears a (passing) resemblance to the "gender" categories in human languages, but both should probably be treated on their own terms, as the Tauren system is both distinct and more regular than either. Roughly speaking, Taurahe noun classification is between inanimate or abstract, sessile or natural, dynamic-animate, fully sapient, and elemental or divine nouns on the one hand; and provider/loremaster, hunter/leader or shaman/spiritwalker on the other. The social role classification is somewhat more difficult to understand as a regular process among the less animate nouns, and is also not fixed: one noun may migrate between all three categories according to circumstance and usage, without the reclassified noun necessarily being considered a new lexeme. Inflecting a noun according to another animacy category is, however, a standard part of new noun formation.

There are at least six or seven distinct declensions of Taurahe nouns; my Tauren interlocutors have not been able to agree on the precise number, and it may be that comparison to the Thalassian system of declensions is in fact entirely inapplicable here.

5. Verb Nuclei

The Taurahe verb is formed from affixes attached to a single root, a "nucleus" which may be built up with both prefixes and suffixes and even, in some cases, infixes. Roots generally encompass a single semantic concept, which affixes may extend and alter in ways which would, in most other languages, necessitate the derivation of a new word. For example, "kuto," "fight" with the telic, transitive affixes forms the verb "karutoha," "to win [against sb.]", while with the impersonal affix forms "ukuto," "to fall into disarray." The impersonal form can be further modified by the personal, passive affix, "uma'ukuto," "to be routed in battle," which despite the presence of the impersonal affix alters the valency of the verb. All told, Taurahe has perhaps one-tenth the verbal roots of a language like Orcish or Common Human (to say nothing of the refined Thalassian tongue), but dozens, and possibly hundreds, of verbal affixes. Few of these affixes are truly exclusive of one another, and a deeper syntatic analysis is required to determine how, exactly, the valency, tense, and aspect of the final verb are determined.

6. Taurahe Words and Phrases

The following phrases are taken from interviews with my Tauren interlocutors. I traveled to Thunder Bluff and Bloodhoof Village for a period of eighteen weeks and interviewed approximately a dozen Tauren of four different clans. This is but a small sample of the corpus I used for my analysis, and with the aid of an colleague who has been transcribing Taurahe lore from Orcish to Thalassian script, I hope to soon begin work on a more complete grammar of the Taurahe tongue.

Vocabulary

-she/-sha: Affix denoting natural phenomena, celestial bodies, and the divine, cf. "An'she," the creator-sun. shu: Clan, tribe, political grouping. Cf. "Shu'halo," the Tauren people. halo: 1st person plural pronoun. We, ourselves. apaa: watch, guard ro: path, road apa'ro: the Waywatcher, Malorne -ah: augmentative affix por: lore, wisdom, custom, law por'aa: ancient wisdom, longstanding (and therefore inviolable) custom alo: within, inside ne[e]: to be (cf. "ishnee," "let be," or "ichnee," "to remain, to always be") pawne: spirit, soul owa: to dash, to bolt, to run tanekaa: blue; cf. Taunka "taunka," "winter," and the Taurahe idiom "bluest [i.e., coldest] of winters" manii: to shake laata: to shake; with the causative infix cf. "Laakotamanii," "the Earthshaker." isha: grave, serious, deep awaak: doom, ill fate, misfortune eeche: white ala: to walk mo: dream ala'mo: druid, i.e., one who walks in dreams haurakemani: the Earthmother shu'halo: a Tauren, the Tauren ahee: language; to speak

Phrases:

Pawne chi owako lehe "[May the] spirits guide you"

Ya shu'kushaa "For the Horde"

Namak'ehe shu "Victory or death"

Chi shu'ma'hewa "I've been expecting you."

Lehe shu'po'halo wota'ano kuu "May my ancestors watch over me"

Rek'ala'mo ya kusho'ake ne "Cat druid is for fight"

Notes:

[1] See especially Magister Thoradiel's "On the Orcish Tongues" and its follow-up, "The Draenei Dialects." Loremaster Harran of Dalaran's groundbreaking work, "The Eredar-Draenei Family" dissects the relationship of the demon-languages of the Twisting Nether to the Draenei tongue, but N.B. that possession of this volume is forbidden in Dalaran, Orgrimmar, Thunder Bluff, and Stormwind owing to its extensive analysis of demonic incantations; the nearest available copy is to be found in the Black Library of the Royal Apothecary Society, in the Undercity.

[2] Magister Gal'an's "Some Darnassian-Thalassian Cognates", Notes of the Royal Society, 6851 Y.S., issue no. 3.

[3] Taurahe "shu," variously translated as "clan," after Orcish usage, or "tribe." A "shu" is any extended kinship group, and the term is sometimes applied to large political groupings of any kind, e.g., "Shu'kaldo," the Night Elves, or "Shu'ekate," the people of the east, i.e., the Alliance.

[4] Most notably the Grimtotem who, while having diplomatic relations with Thunder Bluff, are not technically part of the Horde.

[5] E.g., most of the Wildmane Tauren.

[6] Now called Darnassian after its principal dialect, but functionally the same as Proto-Kalimdorean.

[7] The consistency of Tauren oral traditions is bolstered by analysis of their (admittedly scant) attestations in Night Elf histories. Several important entries are found in "The Annals of Kalimdor," vols. XLIV to LXX, currently held in the Sentinel Archives. The author acknowledges that the currently strained diplomatic relationship between Quel'Thalas and Darnassus may make consultation of these codices difficult.

[8] "Old Orcish Pictographs," Proudmoore, Jaina. Journal of the Linguistic Society of Dalaran, vol. 53, no. 2.