I have been playing a lot of The Outer Worlds over the weekend. I played through several areas, visited several planets and other locations, and reached level 15. So I would like to give you my impressions of the game, without necessarily wanting to call it a "review". The Outer Worlds is one of many modern, big games, that took millions of dollars and several years to make, and as a result are multi-layered and not easily judged on a single aspect. Thus I would rather say which aspects of the game I liked and didn't like.

For me the strongest point of The Outer Worlds is the story, and the way it is told via dialogues with many interesting characters. These dialogues frequently offer you choices, and often different choices are viable. However whatever choice you make, you end up back on the main story line, so there isn't a huge decision tree that changes a lot of the game in response to your choices. And sometimes the game overdoes the idea that different choices should be viable, and ends up forcing you to choose between two flawed solutions, neither of which is really satisfactory. But if you like listening to dialogue in a game, and finding out about strange societal structures by talking to NPCs, The Outer Worlds is definitively the game for you.

Besides that, The Outer World is also a first-person shooter game, in which you explore planets, fight various enemies, and find a lot of loot both on the corpses of the enemies and in various boxes or just lying around, especially in buildings. You will spend a lot of time gathering loot. The disadvantage is that while the quantity of the loot is huge, the quality isn't. Finding a weapon better than the one you are already wielding is rare. Finding an item important for the story is rare. What is common is finding a tiny amount of cash, a few bullets, or low value items like a bag of chips, or low-value weapons and armor. I already hated that aspect in Fallout, and I still hate it in The Outer Worlds. You spend your time gathering garbage, and then from time to time either selling the garbage, or breaking down bad weapons and armor into weapon and armor parts, which you can use to repair the weapons and armor you are actually using. If you have a tendency to look everywhere, you end up with 2,000 spare ammo of each of the three types at level 15, as I did. If you don't look everywhere, you need to live with the fear of missing the few important items out there. For looting I much prefer the Borderlands series of games, where all the important finds come in huge glowing boxes that are impossible to miss.

As a shooter The Outer Worlds is unexceptional. There are multiple difficulty levels. I play on normal, but there is one "story mode" difficulty with even less combat, and two more difficult settings. "Normal" is pretty easy, even for me, and I am not the world's greatest shooter fan. But I don't crank up the difficulty, because already at normal I find multiple enemies moving around me in first-person view confusing. There is a compass system, but I would have much preferred a mini-map. The compass and the waypoint system both fail miserably in buildings with more than one floor, and orientation isn't always easy. Add to that your up to two companions, who will act on their own in combat unless you forbid them to do so, and a fight of your group of three against six enemies can quickly become and very confusing affair. Again, I had more fun in Borderlands.

Overall, I do think I will play The Outer Worlds until the end, just to follow the story. I might skip the searching of all buildings and doing all side-quests for he later part. I certainly won't play it a second time, as I don't think the game has much replayability. If I had paid $60 for the game, I would be slightly miffed now, because for me it isn't really a great game. But it is fun enough, and I got it as part of the Xbox Game Pass for PC (beta), where I am still on my first month for €1. So I don't feel I overpaid. :) Given that you can get over a year of Game Pass for the release price of this one game, I would definitely advise against buying the Xbox or PC version, and recommend taking that Game Pass instead for more games for less money.

After a bit of a hiatus we decided to start playing D&D again with my old group. As everybody had pretty much forgotten everything about Princes of the Apocalypse campaign we were in the middle in, I thought it best to start a new campaign. And as I had quite liked the Out of the Abyss campaign that I had played with the other group, and nearly everything was already prepared for that one, we started that campaign.

The Out of the Abyss campaign starts with the group being held prisoners by the drow. That is a bit forced, but necessary to set the scene for the whole campaign. And it has a lot of potential: There are 10 interesting NPCs held prisoner as well with whom the group can interact to find out more about where they are, and where they could go. And there are tensions between the drow that can be exploited to make the escape easier.

Or you could just have one group member deciding to attack a drow at the first opportunity, without a plan, without discussing it with the group, and with no idea what to do after the initial attack. *Sigh*

Of course that escape "worked" in as far as it got the group and the NPCs out of their cell and into the Underdark, with the drow in pursuit. The only alternative would have been a total party kill, which maybe isn't what you want at the start of a campaign. However the lack of planning leaves the group in the worst possible starting position for the rest of the campaign. A better plan could have led them to pick up some equipment during their escape. Now they have only the weapons of the one drow they killed, and they didn't even take his armor. They also have not the slightest clue as to where they are going, they just followed one of the NPCs who suggested one of the three tunnels leading out of the cave.

What's done is done, and we can't rewind and do the escape over. However most of the NPCs are still with them, so hopefully we can get that roleplaying interaction going in the next session, to give them an idea of the geography of the Underdark, and where to head to. With the easiest option to get equipment missed, they are going to have to acquire weapons and armor more slowly, over time, as loot from whatever enemies they fight. I do feel that the players are missing out on something by not even trying to roleplay more, or to plan more. But I can't exactly force them to do so.

I don't know if it is the same everywhere, but the big-box electronic stores I visited this year had on offer every electronic device known to man, except for 3D printers. The idea that a 3D printer is a plug-and-play device for regular consumers seems to be pretty much dead. The technology is too fiddly, and the usefulness too limited. I love my 3D printer, but I recognize it is a niche hobby, for my niche application of printing miniatures and terrain for tabletop role-playing games.

Now for people who don't have a 3D printer, there are 3D printing services like Shapeways, or for those of you wanting tabletop miniatures, Hero Forge. For people who do own a 3D printer, there are both free sites like Thingiverse and various "premium" marketplaces for .STL files. I also got a lot of files for my hobby via various Kickstarter campaigns. So I wasn't really surprised when I saw an offer on the World of Tanks launcher for a 3D printing service offering 3D printed model tanks. That might be interesting! At least I should check it out ...

The result *was* interesting in as far as I came across the most useless 3D printing service ever, called Wippit. They don't sell you a file you can print. They don't sell you a finished print. They let you pay for a model, and then send data to your 3D printer to create a print via an app. Once, with some option to try a second time if the first print failed. Now first of all that only works for a limited number of 3D printers supported, so even if I wanted to use this offer, I couldn't, because my printer isn't supported. But I certainly wouldn't want to pay for this service, because it takes all the disadvantages of the other services, with none of the advantages. You still need your own printer, your own filament, with your own risk of print failures, so you don't get the advantages of a service like Shapeways. But you also only get a single copy of your print, with no options to modify it, so you don't get the advantages of a downloaded .STL file. If your print doesn't work in two tries, you basically spent your money for nothing, and wasted your material to boot. Who thought that this was a good idea?

Oh, and by the way, there are tons of free .STL files for tanks on Thingiverse.

Thanks to Bigeye for mentioning the game pass option to play The Outer World. Having looked into it, I decided to try out the Xbox Game Pass for PC (beta). That turned out to be not much of a risk, as I got an offer to subscribe for my first month for €1, with each following month costing €3.99. The installation was a bit weird, with some strange error messages, but after trying a couple of times, I finally had the Xbox (beta) application installed on my PC.

So now I have access to currently 147 PC games. The games aren't streamed, I still need to download them to play. And I assume I can only play them as long as I am subscribed. The games catalogue is neither huge, nor does it contain only triple A games. But then, I downloaded and played "The Flame in the Flood", which turned out to be a fun enough indie survival game. And it costs €14.99 on Steam. Well, I'm not going to play that for 4 months, so even if I used the Game Pass for nothing else, I already paid less than the Steam option. And of course in 2 days The Outer World gets released, and I can play that on release for no additional money, while other people will pay $60 for that. That sounds like a really good deal to me!

I don't know if the Game Pass is going to stay this cheap, but I assume that depends on the size of the game library. I probably wouldn't want to pay more than €9.99 per month, and that only if the game library was a lot bigger than today. But I think of it as Netflix for games, and my Netflix subscription is sure cheaper than buying movies and TV series on DVD, which is what I did previously. Basically the only way to lose money on this is to keep paying the subscription and forgetting to actually use the service.

I assume some people might be bothered by not owning the games anymore. Well, legally speaking you don't even own the games you bought on DVD, you just have a license to use them, and the means to use them for as long as the DVD works and you have a PC that runs it. But practically speaking, games are often consumables which we play for a while and then never again. At zero additional cost, and just the time and effort needed to download the game, you can try out games you aren't sure about. As few games have demo versions these days (unless you abuse the Steam refund system), the ability to try out lots of different games for free is quite nice.

So right now, I am quite happy with my Game Pass subscription. I'll see how it works out over the coming months. 

After watching a video review of a pre-release version, I added The Outer Worlds to my Steam wishlist. "But Tobold, you are doing it wrong, The Outer Worlds is exclusive to the Epic store!", somebody is likely to say now. Well, it depends how you define exclusivity. The days, "exclusivity" is a short-term concept. The Outer Worlds is exclusive to the Epic store, for a time. In this case, a year. In other cases, as short as 6 months. In other words, it is exclusive to the Epic store for people who want to play the game while it is new.

My Steam Calculator tells me that I own 379 games on Steam, of which I have only played 29%, or 111 games. The last thing I want is starting a similar library of unplayed games over at Epic. On the other hand for any new game I would like to play, I can probably find a similar game in my library instead. I don't need to buy new games as they are released. I don't even buy new Steam games as they are released. I usually wait a year anyway, until the game is at half price in a Steam sale. So waiting for the "exclusivity" to end isn't a hardship for me.

Don't get me wrong. I'm okay with there being an Epic store, as to avoid a complete monopoly of Steam, to keep them honest. I just don't want to bother right now with multiple platforms for PC games on my computer. Some of the "exclusive" games I could actually buy on a DVD in a box from Amazon, although that option doesn't seem to exist for The Outer Worlds, unless I want to play the game on a PS4 or XBox. But overall the exclusivity stuff doesn't stress me, because I have time. I have too many games, and not enough time to play them, so I can easily wait.

How many arrow does it take to kill a level 1 wizard in D&D? The answer is that it depends very much on which edition of D&D you play. In some editions a single arrow kills a level 1 wizard, in 4th edition you'd need like 4 or 5. That makes a huge difference to tactical gameplay. And that is not just true for D&D, but for all games which have attacks and hit points. Like World of Tanks. If you change how many shots it takes to kill a tank, you massively change the game.

On the latest Sandbox test server run, Wargaming is doing exactly that. By changing the number of hit points that tanks have, and the damage of various ammunition types, the overall effect is that it will in future take more shots to kill a tank. At lower tiers, much more. Lightly armored tanks being one-shotted by a single shell from a derp gun doesn't happen anymore. And regular tanks with regular ammo trading shots takes a bit longer, or much longer at lower tiers. If this is implemented on the live servers, that would massively change World of Tanks into a very different game. And I think, for the better.

In many cases today, World of Tanks battles go too fast, because a lemming rush from one team rolls over the weaker flank of the other team. More shots needed to kill tanks slows down the lemming rush, and gives the defenders the time to move tanks to the attacked flank. In other cases today, World of Tanks slows down to a crawl, because tanks are in very strong defensive positions, and the attackers feel that if they advance, they will get obliterated before getting a shot off. Again, more shots needed to kill a tank resolves this problem. If you know you can withstand a few more shots, you can be a bit more heroic in advancing.

Besides making the game itself better, the changes might actually also be beneficial with regards to some behavioral problems. Most World of Tanks players use a mod called XVM that displays the stats of players. And that results in some players "stat padding", that is playing in a way that maximizes their WN8 stats, for example by targeting new players in low tiers. The way WN8 and XVM works is by using a database of lifetime statistics of damage dealt, and comparing the damage a players deals to the average of all players playing the same tank. If you change the hit points and damage dealt of all tanks, all the statistics accumulated before the change will be incompatible with the statistics generated after the change. And because the changes are complicated, you can't use a simple adjustment factor to make the stats before and after compatible. So probably XVM will have no choice but to exclude all the old stats from the calculation. Which will simply evaporate all the effort some people put into stat padding. So hopefully the practice will become a bit less common.

Personally I wouldn't mind a stat reset. When I first played World of Tanks, I wasn't playing it very seriously. Since I restarted, I am making more of an effort to play better, and in consequence I do play a lot better than before. But because my stats are an average of old and new, my WN8 is rising very slowly, being dragged down by the thousands of battles of the past. A lot of people with that problem just "reroll" and start a new account, but I don't want to lose all the tanks I already have. Stats are not *that* important to me.

The only negative news about the changes is that they will be slow in coming. The first changes to ammo have been discussed months ago, for AP and APCR ammo. Now HE ammo is reworked. HESH, artillery, and a few exotic ammo types still need to be reworked. And so, probably, will some tanks: On the European servers Wargaming is currently selling a KV-2R with a Warhammer skin, but that tank relies very much on its derp gun. By making those guns much less effective, some of the tanks that rely on them are right now a bit useless, so Wargaming will need to do something to make them useful again. Otherwise the people paying €27 for a KV-2R now and getting it nerfed to uselessness a few months later would justifiably complain.

Imagine the following situation in World of Tanks: Three tanks from one team are around the corner from a single enemy tank. If they move around the corner, they will easily kill him. However the enemy tank sees the three tanks, and is pre-aimed at the corner, so the first one of the three to move will take big damage and potentially die, before the other two then finish off the enemy. So, do the three tanks rush around the corner, or not?

Obviously from a team point of view, rushing around the corner is the best option, the one getting the team closer to the win. The single tank isn't going to make a move, and if the three tanks wait around the corner, the single tank has basically neutralized three enemies. However modern games work with individual scores and rewards. Being first through the breach and getting killed scores you zero points, being one of the two other tanks that then farm the enemy tank while he reloads scores you lots of points. Playing for the team diminishes your personal rewards. Yes, if you do the same amount of damage, a win gives you more xp than a loss. But a team win in which you didn't do much damage because you died early is as bad as a loss, or sometimes worse. The guy camping in the back in a strong defensive position that does nothing for a team win might end up with more xp than the player who is heroically at the front.

For me this is bad game design. In other words, the incentives of the game push the player to act against the best interest of his team. The "more skilled" a player gets, the more he understands that personal sacrifice is against his interest, and the less he will play for his team rather than for himself. Rushing around the corner and getting shot is for noobs. If by the randomness of the matchmaker you don't have any noobs on your team, everybody camps and the game is a boring draw that takes forever.

On sites like GOG.com I can get 30-year old games like Ultima IV, Pirates!, or Defender of the Crown. I don't necessary want to, but at least it feels as if these games are preserved, and I *could* play any old game I want. I don't have that feeling with multiplayer online games. And that sometimes makes me think that "I should play this, while it is still around".

One aspect of that is that multiplayer games do decline, and sometimes die. World of Tanks is at the lowest number of players per week ever, at around 650k on the European server (US server is only 125k). That tends to spike up around Christmas, but every year the spike is lower, and then it falls to an even lower low point. Not only is World of Tanks already 8 years old, it also suffers from a game design which encourages veteran players to prey on new players, which makes a large influx of new players unlikely.

But another aspect is that World of Tanks today, patch 1.6.1, is a very different game than it was years ago. Every patch changes things, and every year makes the player base more veteran. Unlike WoW Classic, a WoT Classic server wouldn't even make sense, because you just can't get back to the collective sense of discovery and trial-and-error gameplay.

The overall result is that World of Tanks is one of the few games I know where I have the impression that I missed out on something because I didn't play it for several years. And where I am a bit afraid that if I stop playing now, the game will be essentially unplayable or gone the next time I come back.

I am good at my day job. How do I know that, when there curiously is no "gear score" or similar rating of my performance displayed over my head? Well, while companies aren't always very good with giving feedback to employees, they tend to have some pretty easy system in place. Your continued employment depends on you not totally sucking at your job. And if you do your job well, you probably get a promotion from time to time, and/or a bonus. If you really need a score, you could argue that the number on your paycheck is just that, a representation of your value to the company that employs you.

A major reason why I am good at my job is that I have been doing it for about quarter a century, for over 40 hours per week, around 2,000 hours per year, or 50,000 hours total. That is well above the usual estimate of 10,000 hours needed to master something. Now because you know me only from my blog, and on my blog I tend to write about games, you might think that games are my major occupation. They aren't. I spend significantly less than 2,000 hours per year on games. Furthermore I play a wide variety of very different games. The skills that would for example make me a good dungeon master in Dungeons & Dragons are completely irrelevant to my performance in World of Tanks. So while I have a good "general gaming" skill and knowledge, there are few games in which I am any good, and none in which I could dream of winning an e-sports or other game tournament (well, I did win some minor Magic the Gathering tournaments long ago, but only local ones).

Why am I talking about my skills in my job and in games? With games having become more and more "main stream", there are now millions of people like me. People who work a full-time job and are good at it, and then spend much less time on games than they spend on their job, and so they aren't particularly excellent at those games. Now the convention in gamer culture is to look down on me and these other millions of people. Filthy casuals, that can't even dedicate 10,000 hours on completely mastering game X. How dare they tread the same (virtual) ground as the masters of the universe, the people who are really good at their chosen video game?

Now the casual players tend to also spend less time to gather on forums and talk about games. But if they would, their point of view somewhat mirrors the point of view of the hardcore gamer. The thing is that there are only so many different things a single person can be good at. There are only 8,760 hours in a year, and if you consider the need for sleep and other necessities that means you need at least 2 years to put in 10,000 hours to mastery into anything, and only if you concentrate on one single thing. You need to choose carefully what you want to become good at. The reason why many people choose to become good at their job is the above mentioned link between job skills and pay check. From the people who are excellent at a video game, only a tiny percentage can make a living out of it, be it from prize money in tournaments or as streamer / YouTuber / influencer.

In absolute terms being good at your job isn't completely incompatible with being good at a video game. You could fit in a 40-hour job with 40 hours per week of gaming, if you don't do much else. But for most people that would be stretching it. So the people who do work 40+ hour weeks are often correct in assuming that the people who play 40+ hours per week don't also excel at their jobs. So when it comes to trading insults, the "no-lifer" description of the hardcore gamer is an obvious one, even if it isn't always true.

That has consequences. For example in the course of my job I sometimes have to review CVs of young people for job interviews. I am pretty certain that most people under 30 play video games regularly, and a good percentage of them plays them enough to qualify at least as "a hobby". However the "hobbies" category of a stack of CVs is full of reputable things like sports and social engagement, and rather void of any mention of games. So even people who would privately consider themselves as "gamers" wouldn't want to attach that label to themselves when applying for a job. I don't frequent dating sites, but I'd assume that it is the same there. "No-lifer" is more than an insult; it is a description that hardcore gamers actually fear when it comes to their life outside of games. Anything you do in life has an opportunity cost, that is to say it costs you time you could do something else with. As gamers, hardcore or casual, we need to be aware of what the opportunity cost of gaming is, and if we are really always doing the right choices.

Whenever you do a battle in World of Tanks, you gain a small percentage of the experience earned in the form of "free experience". Free experience isn't attributed to any specific tank, but can be used to unlock any tank or equipment you want. Thus it is very, very useful. And in consequence you don't get very much of it. Unless you pay.

If you play a premium tank, or a tank that has been fully researched, you have two options: Either you use the experience gained towards crew training, albeit at a rather horrible conversion rate. Or you accumulate that xp on the tank. The only thing you can do with that accumulated xp is to convert it to free xp, but it costs 1 gold per 25 xp. But you can wait for one of the regular XP Fever events, where the conversion rate is discounted to 1 gold per 35 xp.

Most people choose the accelerated crew training option. I don't. Spending money on World of Tanks doesn't bother me, and I can afford it. Wargaming constantly bombards players with offers to buy premium tanks, but I only buy the really overpowered ones. And once you have some good premium tanks, there isn't much reason to buy many more of them. Instead of paying 100 Euros for a "special edition" premium tank, I can buy 30k gold with that. And that converts a cool million xp into free xp. Obviously I don't do that very often, because you also need to earn the million xp in the first place.

In consequence I never use that free experience to research new tanks. Rather I play to earn the experience to get to a new tank, and then use the free experience for researching modules. That has a huge advantage: I never have to play a tank with bad stock modules. I fast forward to having all the good modules on the tank, which then makes playing that tank a lot more pleasant. And so I can play that tank to earn the experience I need for the next tank up the tech tree.

You could claim that this is pay to win, because a fully equipped tank is obviously better than the same tank with stock modules. But I see it more as a comfort function, paying money to avoid a tedious grind with a stock tank to earn your modules. It isn't cheap, but I think it is a better purchase than buying yet another premium tank.