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I love Matt Rorie's Alpha Protocol!

@magnetphonics: Seems like you missed out on the history of the game. Watch this: https://www.giantbomb.com/shows/quick-look-ex-twelve-minutes/2970-13118

Twelve Minutes is Luis Antonio's one-man passion project. Little home side gig while he was working on The Witness as his day job. As you can see and hear for yourself, all the story and gameplay was already wrapped and finished back then. Ms Anna Purna only provided exactly that, celebrity voice actors, and the resources to polish it up to make it look a bit more serious. And I am glad they made it look prettier, and the voice cast grew on me, too, after a bad first impression.

I super enjoyed my Sunday afternoon with it, and wouldn't hesitate recommending it to anyone enjoying this kind of game on your handy Game Pass. $25, however, that strikes me as crazy by a magnitude. About $9.99 I'd say might be fair price for this much content / level of polish. And use your mouse, not the controller.

I found it to be a rather unique little game & concept, one that I was looking forward to ever since Jeff's QL Ex here, and I generally do not care for any indie one-person effort. Like, "hey, sorry bud, I know there's only so much you can do as being only 1 human, you get my sympathies, and I'll also go and spend my limited time with something else." But this looked like fun. I wanted to be the one doing the clicking.

And I do love adventure games, prodding & goofing around. If there's an objective, a waypoint, a task a game tells me to do, or heavily implies, or looks like the logical solution … I'll *always* do my hardest to go the opposite way first. I find much pleasure in, if despite all that, I find stuff that was still accounted for, acknowledged, rewarded in some way. Or when I find alternate solutions that also work.

Did Twelve Minutes fail at that, at times? Sure did. Was I annoyed when it prescribed a very rigid order and placement of items, for no particular reason? Mildly so. The loop being this short, the play (and possibility) space this limited, they pretty much nailed the sweet spot for as far as this concept could go. Add a larger game area, or double the length of a loop, and this would have fallen apart. I'm rather surprised reading here even this much apparently already went beyond so many's patience. Bummer!

Oh well, I do love goofing around with possible options. For example, an earlier comment here was upset over how barely visible the knife is, although they still found it eventually, which, on the face of it, sounds like very valid criticism. Wouldn't you know it though, you literally don't need it! Ever. Anything you might use it for is all optional flavor, or there's always an alternate item. This is exactly the stuff I so appreciate.

Watch the Quick Looks or Nextlander's vid, and you'll know right away if you feel that itch to be the person holding the mouse. If you are only intrigued by the story, it's not for you. Having this as a movie, or as a short written story, that'd be inane. It works as a video game, and only as a video game. A rather fun one at that, which will take no more than a single afternoon of your time.

What helped me cope with previous staff departures is that they continue being a part of video game content all over the web, mostly Twitch, and archived on YouTube.

If you haven't yet watched Abby & Vinny playing chess last weekend, let me point you in the right direction: CHESS WITH ST. VINNY! | Chess.com with Vinny Caravella

Abby and Dan in particular are pumping out more content than they ever did while still at Giant Bomb. And you'll find gems like the stream of Abby & Dan & Alex Boniello playing Mario Party online, also just from last week. It all just fits in perfectly with what would have been a Giant Bomb East production of past.

Personally I find myself in the same mental space watching these as if the videos were published on giantbomb.com itself, like nothing has changed.

Drew I still listen to every week on the Shift+F1 podcast (with Danny O'Dwyer!), and his Cloth Map videos were all masterpieces, while Covid didn't put a stop to them.

Austin I miss most from video content in recent years. Maybe I'm not looking in the right places since I want video games, dammit, not tabletop and such. I remember gladly watching some Waypoint videos years ago which still had him in "GB mode." There was a gem of a series where he and Rob (you'll know Rob from the Shift+F1 podcast with Drew & co) played Xcom 2 every week for a good long while, a real must watch, until it was cut short for whatever life reason. :( It seems they only pop up once a year for Extra Life now.

Ben did disappear as a public face, but that is exactly why he wanted to leave. I'll miss the guy but that's what he chose, and hard to argue with him not wanting that spotlight. I sure wouldn't, either.

The Vinny & Brad & Alex departures are all so recent that clearly we can't know yet when they will have taken enough of a break, and to know if we can continue enjoying them playing video games somewhere over the internet. That's why seeing Vinny pop up on Abby's stream already was such an unexpected delight.

Today, for the first time, I was emailed the Giant Bomb Crew newsletter, featuring Jan. Only issue is I never asked for it, or intentionally signed up. I sure didn't touch a thing regarding my Giant Bomb account in many, many months.

It even came with a GBoptin@ sender address. I most certainly did not opt in.

Now, I'm not upset or anything, and realize there's an Unsubscribe link at the bottom, which, again intentionally, I did not try clicking. Honestly, I mostly was too lazy / perplexed to sign up in the first place. An email newsletter?! Like what the hell, in this century?

In the end I'm mostly curious if it's a bug that I got signed up for the newsletter without my asking, or an intentional change to drive up subscriber numbers?

I always assumed the biggest cost in running GB would be the cost of serving the decades of videos, the live streams, etc. But they’ve been clearly able to drive that down significantly in recent years. With the switch to defaulting all non-premium videos over to YouTube, or doing all the free live streams over Twitch. Would be curious to get a ballpark figure on how much they’ve been able to save.

The salaries, hell, all of us could name every single one of their handful of people. Uh, 9 in total, plus Business Dave? At this moment, I actually worry most about Dave, or Will and the rest of engineering. GB’s already one short since Dan left. The entire GB East is all of 3 people.

The Outer Worlds has been my most enjoyable week of gaming this year, and is the clear Game of the Year for me. I didn't realize how much I craved an experience like it for so long.

And it didn't start out looking that way. I was in a way glad that the footage I saw of the game months before release didn't grab me. Thing is, I love my achievements. They add a joy to my gaming I don't much care to analyze why; I only know I value them dearly. Combine that with my belief that the game would be exclusive to the Epic Games Store, which still won't allow them, and I was relieved I had very little excitement.

Then the release week came, along with that EX video with the developers, then Brad's quick look shortly after, and I'll be damned if it didn't intrigue me. I wanted to be the one controlling that game, being in that world. It even looked respectable graphically for the first time, might I say, even impressive in parts. All that earlier pre-release footage, which now I know were limited to Monarch, looked downright ugly to me. What I was seeing now, however, somehow felt like a completely different game all of a sudden. Plus, to my great relief, even if not Steam, it was part of Xbox Game Pass for PC alongside the dreaded EGS. I could have it for essentially completely free, and with my beloved achievements, to boot? Why, thank you!

In short, the game didn't take too long to grab me, and give me that joyful week where I couldn't wait to jump back to Halcyon. The combat difficulty topic is a little strange to me. “It was too easy!” ”It was hard!” “It was hard but then it became easy!“ I mean, what level was your character at, and what level were the enemies? All throughout the game, that seemed to be the one determining factor in how hard or super easy a fight would be. As you would expect in an RPG, and has always been the case.

I travelled to and completely finished Monarch, for example, before ever setting foot on the Groundbreaker. I couldn't do much else but run for my life, but ran I did, got my fragile ass all the way to Stellar Bay without too much issue. Then as I went about completing the quests, I got powerful enough to more and more comfortably clear out all parts of Monarch.

The part I could most appreciate, I guess, is that almost always the game allowed me to put in the little extra effort to give me the outcome I envisioned in my head. Edgewater thriving, yet Adelaide also pleased? You can have it. Peace on Monarch? You got it. Plus, all throughout, there was nothing at all in The Outer Worlds to actively annoy, to take me out of the game.

You mentioned Fallout 4, a game I enjoyed rather more than GB staff, and has put hundreds of hours into, and still came away mixed. Because of all those rotten infinite random quests. Because all the base building, despite a certain addictiveness to it, couldn't stop reminding me how everything is fake and flimsy, when I would inevitably end up with broken, physics-defying floating monstrosities. But the real downer was the ending. When every faction had the one solution: go blow up, murder, exterminate some others. Go kill the same people that have welcomed you in peace, talked to, done quests for. That's not some beautiful narrative purity forcing you to live with the hard choices in my book. That's forcing you be a fucking psychopath.

The Outer Worlds had none of the nasty stuff, and has always respected my time and my wishes. Took me on a joyous adventure from beginning to end. Couldn't recommend it more. Quick aside, I also didn't have the load time issue. I could barely even read the loading screen hints, and I don't have a beast of a PC. Was it perfect? Of course not. Was it an exhaustively gigantic game many hundreds of people worked on? Nope. I kept wishing for more of this, and that, more worlds, more story, more with the companions… All that, however, only suggests to me how much I have enjoyed it, and how excited I'll be for future DLC or a sequel.

It's not a landmark game by any stretch, a title I would without much hesitation bestow on Obsidian's earlier Matthew Rorie's Alpha Protocol, but not everything needs to be. More of your favorite food with none of the bad is still a pleasure. Especially for free. Thanks, Game Pass.

@edgework: This seems to be it for sure. Leaving it on Auto works even when logged out. Still no pre-roll video ad, though. Weird that the other options worked after logging in. Quality with Auto seems reasonable too. It just never even occured to me not to tap HD.

@edgework: Ah yes, I always instinctually and immediately tap on HD. My Internet connection is at least thankfully plenty fast and content served through Akamai CDN has always been solid.