Outer Worlds continues the tradition of mute mode at 20 years old

The computer at the center of Hope is almost accessible, I see as I approach the collection of large iron doors, the simplest of which I have been most attacked by where I met in the colony of Hope. Attackers who worked before the Board, the bureaucratic, the money laundering, and the ill-fated team of CEOs of companies that lead the Halcyon colony. And here's why I'm here: Because of mistreatment and greed, thousands of lives are at stake, it is possible that all that mankind has left is if you believe the rumors.

This world's leading and brightest asset – frozen in the wake of the better part of a decade now – is our only hope for a solution. I confirm the security guards within their positions, go inside, and contact the Hope Control Center. The plan is to jump the entire ship through hyperspace and place it in a lab for someone you can hope to bring back these people to the colonies. You've found the process so far, at least: me.

AI assistants are starting to get involved in calculating and planning our trip, but I tell them not to bother; after all, “I know the best price,” so I will be the only program to skip the drive. Either way, they are unsure of my intelligence. They wonder about "how will everyone die" and "these figures don't look right & # 39; and" why is this number wrong? "

But what do they know? To prevent enemies, I definitely tap on the links, causing a cutscene: The engines of Hope go up, drag ourselves to the main center, and then back out uninhibited … accompanied by a direct collision course with the galaxy.

Yes, that's a shame. It seems that my flawed understanding has undoubtedly placed mankind's last hope in certain death. A pole appears as we head toward the flaming tomb: “The end.” Oh, and look at that, until I find success: “Win ​​the title! The sun. ”

It's funny and not overplaying the ending that a few players will stumble into when they play The Outer Worlds. However it is the one that holds in the spirit of tradition – one that spans more than 20 years and three studios – where various developers incorporate some kind of secret into their games with little enthusiasm from the start. Fall

Here's how the Easter egg works normally: Usually, when a player sets up their stats as strength, endurance, and what in the beginning of an RPG, any related strengths or weaknesses only influence the gameplay, not the flow of the central plan (except for the possibility of locking players in other ways if they cannot pass certain skill checks). But if you give yourself the inner wisdom Fall, for example, you are acting stupid. And I mean indeed stupid. On a 10-point scale for the game, setting your character's intelligence to 3 or less (even though that limit differs from games that have continued this tradition) makes you so quiet that some NPCs see and comment on it throughout your journey. Some of it makes sense.

Activating the "mute" mode, as it is called, adds a lot of NPC discussion options and answers, and dramatically alters private claims and locks you up completely in others – often because you are too much anonymous to find out what's going on (and citizens discussing nuclear backlash are less willing to spend time of their spelling).

That is a really purposeful and stupid joke, requires a ridiculous amount of dedication from developers and players. As your intellectual ability influences how many skills you give to each level you've acquired – thus impacting how quickly you can improve on ratings – choosing the "dumb" mode increases the difficulty level in a way that requires mindless grinding. Scheduling all the rippling effects to your malfunctioning games is no small task, though, and that hasn't stopped developers from including honors in twelve games over the years.

But despite the ridiculous amount of effort required to achieve that, I'm embarrassed to admit that I have never had as much to do with RPG as I do in these times. It's like some kind of indigenous language self-awareness: While I understand that "dumb" mode only exists to be ridiculed, and I can't ignore how much of a sigh of relief it made, each eye-popping and questionable cause inside me. Because I have a confession to make, dear reader: I too, would be totally dumb.

Photo: Obsidian Entertainment / Private Division

& # 39; Started as a lot of Fallout stuff now with canon … & # 39;

This has been for decades, to clarify the in-joke it all started with the Dungeons & Dragons game. Tim Kaine, one of the creators of the Flout series, remembers telling his team about the game for the first time FallDevelopment is well into the 90s. With Cain's advance as a Dungeon Master, the other player deliberately gave a very low intelligence, and Cain thought it would be a fun challenge, as to show this, requiring him to speak only with the words of the voice while playing the role. The work eventually became more difficult than anticipated. Since most of the keyword dictionaries, such terms as “treasure” and “dragon,” were abruptly blocked, communication became a game in itself.

"So there were all these things that mimicked the way he talked, and it was a lot of fun to play and to be limited," Cait said.

This is happening and is undeniable. After Cain talked about it Fall Team, team set to work incorporating the same stupid mechanic in the game.

“It started like a lot Fall things that are now canon, ”adds co-producer Leonard Boyarsky. “It was funny. We just thought it was funny, so we did it. ”(Both he and Cain later took the lead The Outer Worlds.)

But it is a court that has been around for decades. Other developers at Interplay Entertainment and the infamous Black Isle Studios are attracted to the idea as well, so much so that they continue to incorporate the option of low-key playthrough into the game's sequel. After Bethesda Softworks acquired the franchise rights, it continued the tradition in the mainline series Fallout 3 and in following Fallout: New Vegas, a spinoff created by Black Isle veterans under the banner of Obsidian Entertainment. (Bethesda lowered her fame Fallout 4. Asked why, a company spokeswoman declined to comment.) In addition to the Callout series, however, Cain and Boyarsky also went strong on Troika Games, a studio they co-founded with developer Jason Anderson after the performance. Fall, with two taxes paying off in their RPG Arcanum: For Steamworks and Magick Obscura.

Photo: Obsidian Entertainment / Bethesda Softworks

Now what happens when you're the biggest idiot in the room?

In Fall and Fallout 2, a low stat intelligence creates a hacking effect that elevates the difficulty of the game far beyond combat. In addition to developing skills, your sound reading and writing skills are working. Instructing them to read the sign, for example, promotes a message explaining how they struggle to find "those little bug-like points," and the game suggests that you find something to "tax" to do. While it's funny, it also makes finding your way to many places a real guessing game. This debt extends to discussions with NPCs, too; several characters simply "speak too smart" to understand, converting captions into mysterious glyphs.

One partner in Fallout 2 it is completely unavailable for these reasons. A chemist named Melvin that players can find in New Reno often gives you the ingredients to gather to help him produce the best drug in the series, Jet. Afterwards, you join your team as a thank you. By playing “dumb,” he is just plain teasing, insulting, and insensitive, in that way. Many other NPCs are very unforgiving; they'll make fun of you for a while before dismissing you as "blonde" and want you to stop wasting their time. Even with the big changes, people who are proud of all the explosions and no brain after being developed by Forced Evolutionary Virus (FEV), they are happy to make fun of you for being dumb.

The low intelligence play also limits how much you can deal with sensitive goals. For example, FallThe final boss, Master – the inventor of high-tech variables – often gives players the option to join his cause before killing them directly when they clash for the last time. Joining his levels, which later require you to pick up where your vault is in order to convert the vault occupants that were meant to save you to super mutants, leads the "bad" player to an end. If your skills are high enough, you get the chance to talk to him about his program completely, in the traditional Interplay / Obsidian way.

Image: Black Isle Studios / Interplay Productions

However, if you are an idiot, approaching the Master brings out the only option for one conversation: to call her ugly. Yes, "ugh-lee," at least.

“I doubt that even the FEV will help you,” replied Master, thus deciding on both the wrong ways to move forward. And since your low intelligence may mean that you don't have the skill points needed to unlock the other end of the spectrum (by hacking through the central controls of the Master's sanctum to start a self-destructive sequence), most players are left with one choice: Go down every last living thing.

In time the house paintings incorporated these very low-cut hair, with a strong focus on refining the glittering Easter eggs that are only available to incoming artists.

Back to Fall For days, the dumb interview line really got things going, ”Cain said. “While … The Outer Worlds, we have made it into an amazing character that you do not understand. ”

Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas, again The Outer Worlds distinguish some of these situations with the label of "mute" next to certain speech options, or in many cases, simply implement them in context. Like when a friendly robot Prototron roams the halls of the long Roosevelt Academy watching your character see your character as "special needs kids" and volunteers will accompany you around the building. Or if you find the NPC's downward spiral about a tightly-linked post-apocalyptic Mojave desert group, but all the questions you can ask hold their names, such as "Flowers of Pock-Lips" for the following of the Apocalypse and "NCR Bear" for the Republic .

Like Nitai Poddar, one of the designers behind the scenes The Outer Worlds and teachers of writing made in the previous "way" mode, summarizing the secret: "It should be a punishment, but in many cases the humor sounds like a bonus."

One memorable example happens internally New Vegas& # 39; Old World Blues extension. Sometimes, without your intelligence, you come face to face with the mind of your character. Even for middle-aged players, the brain quickly begins to spread and cover itself with a veil, punishing it for somehow managing to lose it (and a few other vital organs). While still keeping up with the “mute” playing, players get the option to ask why their mind sounds quicker, and, as far as speaking, some of their stolen organs can talk to? After some frustrating attempts to explain, your brain finally says:

“Okay, let me put this in perspective. Brain: smart. Heart: stupid. Spine: very stupid. You: a unique fool. "

(As for why the jump is so sudden in intelligence, the brain points out that in finding some "real books, remember" during your partition. That, and a large number of Mentats.)

From time to time, your stupidity can result in a wonderful reunion. “The ice cream!” She cries aloud. to the bot inside Fallout: New Vegas you can confuse it so much that it is short or confusing. Sometimes, your weird logicary can handle – against all contradictions – get to the right solution. It is one of Cain's favorite "Kaquin" speeches The Outer Worlds, a player can help the Edgewater resident recover from the devious misery that surrounds them by offering the following advice: “You should be really drunk. Alcohol kills germs. ”

In The Outer Worlds specifically, choosing low intelligence offers one unexpected advantage that Cain and Boyarsky say they have never really considered before. That "dumb" ending I mentioned earlier in the story – when I intentionally killed people by tossing Hope into the sun – consequently made the game shorter, meaning that the folly had spread to the middle The Foreign World to speed up communities as an appropriate time-saving strategy.

Overall, in terms of getting faster time (in The Outer Worlds), the dumb end is the way to go, ”CreeperHntr, a speed rider beat the game in just 12 minutes using this method, he told Polygon in a direct Twitter message. And in time Fallout 4 they may not have the full "mute" mode, players have found respect for the tradition, the "Idiot Savant" perk, surprisingly useful. “You're not stupid. Of course … something different, ”reads the custom description; when activated by it, the player receives a large repetition of experience with random actions, with the potential to cause this depending on how low their intelligence is. The result, as one Reddit user dropped, that pairing an Idiot Savant perk with low intelligence can be an effective strategy to grow a character quickly.

It should be noted, by the way, that none of these games except The Outer Worlds specifies the way in which setting a low intelligence stat can affect your experience. The presence of the Easter egg is very widespread by word of mouth, shared by players who simply stumble upon it in their play. However, Fallout: New Vegas puts a line in front of the counter that the closest match comes to commenting on these results. After taking the bullet back to the brain in the opening cutscene, he is stopped by a character named Doc Hudson, who goes through the process of creating characters. If you choose a character with a smart challenge, you will cry, "Sorry son, I stuck your head in the way I knew. I knew I missed a place."

Photo: Obsidian Entertainment / Private Division

Taking a joke too far, too far

As the tradition goes on The Outer Worlds, Cain and Boyarsky challenged them to open up the flesh completely to make the players feel like they were playing a real person, not just a tissue of a man-given joke. After all, as part of your character's climax, you start the game frozen among other colonies in Hope, the most collectible group of people on Earth. The question to be answered was, as Cain put it, "Why is a dumb person being kicked out of here?"

"We didn't want this character to be completely monosyllabic and we couldn't combine one or two," Boyarsky said. “We wanted to try to get a different idea of ​​what that character is. So we went with a totally hopeless type of person. It wasn't … you know, they couldn't maybe learn, they can maybe write – but they just seem to miss how things will work together or what should happen. ”

As part of this effort to create a three-dimensional idiot, i The Foreign World The team experienced creating different "mute" character choices with the same confidence reserved for more traditional formats, such as those focused on melee or stealth (though the language is dense). Instead of adding a comedy joke, which includes "mute mode" is just another part of the writing process, "so come up with your persuasive checks, your other skills checks, and your dumb checks," Boyarsky said. As part of the QA exam, Cain said he had asked inspectors to consider the possibility of adding additional dialogue or status, and flagged any longer gaps between such cases.

According to the storyteller Poddar, allowing "dumb" players to accidentally crash into the sun was "one of the very few ideas that have been in store for our game since before development." As soon as he arrives on his second day at work, he notes, he remembers Cain and Boyarsky requesting that this option be installed, back before Hope and its important human responsibilities even in the picture (before The Foreign World the draft involves flying an asteroid across the solar system, not the atmosphere).

Similarly at the start of the development cycle, the group reported how the “dumb” talk sessions would work internally The Outer Worlds by writing an interaction with one of the game's six characters, Ellie's back version. Although he has just become one of the fastest and most morally responsible for your team to offer scams instead of real help, he hasn't started that way. Exercise was meant to be proof of concept, but it eventually came up with another purpose, as the writers of the game continued to cast Ellie as a man who had come a long way after they no longer needed her in that role. "So I think that was part of his personality, because we used him to explore this idea," Boyarsky said.

These experiments have also served as a touch tone for developers and writers who were not used to the joke decades ago – a way to show that the "dumb" actor "Cain and Boyarsky thought they were The Outer Worlds. When asked what approach he gave to the team's narrative designers, Cain jokes: "I didn't write one of the dumb interviews, but I did promote it."

The party has also used other media as reference points – in particular, the famous idiots who managed to follow that fine line between the charming lightton and the moron who wanted to gather.

“Having been raised in the diet of The Simpsons, Futurama, again Firefly, "Poddar notes," I feel that the archetypal "dumb" character I'm writing for is a combination of Jayne Firefly and Zapp Brannigan from Futurama, included a young Homer Simpson for good measure. ”

And what is the result of all this mute devotion? In The Outer Worlds, Obsidian takes the 20-year-old goof to new heights unseen before, adding countless talking checks, new NPC dialogue, and many new conclusions for ridiculous players. The other endings are eliminated with their unique cue card during the final narrative of the player's game similar to Obsidian's RPG. Adhering to "dumb" speech programs when meeting with the Board, for example, results in the following:

“After saving her from Tartarus, Sophia Akande promises any reward you can think of. Power. Wealth. Influence. However, you were more interested in simple pleasures in life – such as the smooth and refined taste of Rizzo & # 39; s Purpleberry Munch. Rizzo & # 39; s Purpleberry Munch – the only bar in Halcyon officially approved by the Unfaith Captain. "

The fate of your character is not much different if you choose to help Phineas, either. After the final battle, he asks if he will help him build a better Halcyon and save him from starvation, where "mute" characters can give the impression that they were busy thinking about getting ice cream to heed Phineas' request. Though it may seem stupid just because of the stupidity, in fact this elimination is something of an in-house Easter egg, according to Poddar.

"It's a reflection of the idea Obsidian had at the time NVProgress there, of a low-level intelligence player, is the whole story New Vegas it & # 39; s just about getting ice cream, & # 39; ”He wrote. While writing Phineas' concluding sequence, it struck him as the perfect place to jump into such reverence. “I checked into the offices of Tim and Leonard and got my idea of ​​the ending of the cream. They loved it. I wrote it. And that's the way things are sometimes done here. "

Given the time, Boyarsky says he liked doing it The Outer WorldsThe "mute" mode is drowned out by logging another search directly for lowercase characters. In it, all intents will be labeled by the character, and as a result only reflect their extraordinary understanding of what goes on around them.

"You're playing a dumb character and someone tells you to get a power controller. You don't know what that is," said Boyarsky. "So everything you write says & # 39; I have to get that thing on the ship. You know – thing …? & # 39; ”

As with many other “dumb” quirks, it will make the game more difficult, but for some people, a level of commitment only makes the best of the best. That's why the "mute" mode was able to build an ice ball far beyond what it had never been before Fall, and why developers continue to enjoy keeping up with the process. It's the same reason why Cain and his D&D team found sticking to their entertainment commitment in the first place. Sometimes a stupid joke is enjoyed equally by the people who commit to its dedication.

And while I realized that at the end of the day it was all the simplest of years, over the years I was playing various "dumb" ways and found that, time and time again, I couldn't help but feel while in my character's clothes. An important part of my professional career requires me to ask what many would consider to be foolish questions.

Because here's the thing: Even the best expert in their field can be totally masturbating in explaining what the hell is do. (At least, it's becoming more and more understandable to your average off-the-roader.) Part of my job – first as a professional editor, and now as a journalist – quotes that. Better yet, to break that gibberish while everyone else is in the room without a clear understanding of what is going on. He wonders how many important questions are finally received when a person comes in and asks: "OK, someone please explain this to me by being 5."

So I'm not used to staring blankly at my "deaf" character who earns money every time he opens his mouth. I've been getting the end of those frustrated regimes and taking breaks more than I care to count. So much so that it bothers me that I don't end up filling the manhood too much – my last dumb, as it were – in these games.

However, in all serious honesty, after a long and arduous campaign to save the Capital Wasteland cum Arcanum cum Halcyon Galaxy, and to go around endlessly when the whole NQC bends your ears, you didn't want to say take off and retire somewhere to enjoy some simple food?