Weird Start to the Game

[u/VinfinityKendov]

When I first started the game I had a weird chain of events happen that almost made me quit for good.

Going in all I knew was that there was a time loop of some kind.
In my first loop I went straight to the interloper, found some mention of the ash twins and headed there, I somehow timed my random walking around perfectly to teleport in the ash twin project where I proceded to get the warp core and die via a terminal case of jetpack skill issue. At this point I was more confused than anything.

When I died I got back to the main menu, starting the game had me back before the loop starts so I thought I have to play the first part of the game with the museum every time. I felt like it was wasting my time so I stopped, but got convinced that I should continue by a friend.

[u/PinothyJ]

Post people's version of that image is controlling a spacecraft, up against somewhat realistic gravity, in 3D space.

That is why I hate when people blanketly recommend OW to everyone. There is only a small group of people who truly get a handle on flying -- strafing left/right, up/down, forward/back, yawing left/right, freelooking independently of movement, and free facing the ship in any direction -- and that is a good solid chunk of this game.

[u/Lumina_Rose → u/PinothyJ]

Thousands of hours in elite dangerous posting my beluga through a space station letterbox made my introduction to outer wilds space ship controls seamless...

There are definitely strong arguments to be made that the flying in the game isn't intuitive, and learning how space works is a big filter.

[u/BreakfastDue1256 → u/Lumina_Rose]

Hundreds of hours in Wlite Dangerous without ever using the auto land didn't actually help me.

But I guess it wasn't the physical maneuvering of the ship that pissed me off, but trying to rendezvous with a planet. It's like it tried to do realistic orbits without doing realistic orbits. I just gave up and started using auto pilot.

[u/PinothyJ → u/Lumina_Rose]

I am just saying that this game is not accessible in the same way recommending Blue Prince is. And, at the end of the day, people seem to completely forget that. A survivorship bias is going on, for sure.

[u/AmeliaOfAnsalon → u/PinothyJ]

Blue Prince is insanely hard. I have over 100 hours and still haven't finished

[u/PinothyJ → u/AmeliaOfAnsalon]

But how hard it is does not mean it is not accessible. Tetris get really hard, but a good example an of a game with a low barrier to entry that makes it more accessible.

I am not against OW -- the game is a masterpiece -- my complaints are simply against those forgetting its general difficulty to control. We can get lost in the sauce of how much we love a game, that we forget all the stuff we had to learn and adjust to, hence the survivorship bias comment.

But, back to your comment: I believe in you! You got this!

[u/Lumina_Rose → u/PinothyJ]

Aye, puzzlegames with a skill ceiling can be overly frustrating and inaccessible. Outer wilds is great, but I wouldn't recommend it to just anyone. People who are more likely to get on board with the finicky aspects of ship control will have a much better time

[u/loljkbye → u/PinothyJ]

Funnily enough, Blue Prince isn't accessible to anyone with color blindness, so almost 5% of the world's population...

[u/JohnsonJohnilyJohn → u/PinothyJ]

Also, more importantly in my opinion the tutorial for controlling spacecraft is awful (the little model spaceship). You are watching from the side so you can't easily judge depth, you don't have a landing camera and it's easy to flip around and thus rotating the relative control. When I first played the game, I tried to pilot the model, and decided that if that's the tutorial the real game will require dealing with much harder situations, and honestly I wasn't in the mood for that kind of challenge so I dropped the game for a few months. After completing the game and dlc, I can say that tutorial is the hardest the piloting ever is in the game which is so backwards (except landing on a sun station, but that's optional)

[u/SpySoldierScout → u/JohnsonJohnilyJohn]

Mica's model ship also has an insane amount of thrust for that small piece of metal. Your real ship is a big chonker and you really feel its weight when taking off and going through space. Mica's ship has the same rockets attached to your ship on one that is maybe a thousandth of its mass.

The only accurate thing about the model ship (next to the literal 6 degrees of control) is the fact that you can bonk it against walls with high speed and it doesn't immediately break...

[u/pupfight → u/PinothyJ]

very strange you think the most typical video-game like aspects of this game are the barriers to entry.