Okay -- now I think I have a better sense of how the whole thing is structured. So it's more of a series of narrative areas, but you can do them in more or less whatever order. Less of a web of interconnected events...and more like a series of individual "blocks", with choices affecting only the stuff within that block of gameplay. (How's that?)
If so, well, that lessens my interest a bit. I thought the game would weave the different areas together a bit more. (I specifically tried not to spoil the overall arc for myself.) Still, the actual gameplay itself looks fairly engaging.
Hmm, sort of. The choices you make at any given turn do not alter the outcome in most cases. This is what I meant when I said the game is primarily linear and you're along for the ride. It's kind of like the TV show Bandersnatch (no idea if you're familiar with it). You might have a branching path with three or four forks in the road and various decisions to make at those forks. The reality is none of those choices mattered much. You might make various choices in any given order but the path is set. You just don't recognize it until after the fact. It's the illusion of choice (in fairness, this describes most games with choices.).
Now, there are areas where I suspect this is not true. Specifically, when dealing with factions and various characters and decisions in the main narrative. I'm not 100% sure because I only finished a single play through. Still, the way they were constructed leads me to believe this is true. At the end of the game it kind of summarizes the aftermath. The way it did so lead me to believe multiple critical decisions made during the game influenced that aftermath.
Like I said, it's more akin to an old school isometric RPG. Where the narrative is largely set in stone. It's less like, say, TW3. Where a choice made earlier might have a domino effect in various other areas later. Although, as noted there are cases where this TW3 theme probably does apply. It's just not as expansive and involved in this regard.
It should also be noted the main narrative wasn't particularly interesting, in my opinion. It didn't feel like it had any real direction until halfway through the game. It didn't even come into complete form until near the end. The focus was more on a micro level. The localized issues present at the various places you visited. There were some tie ins between those local issues and the greater, macro level narrative but it still didn't feel as inter-connected as it could have been.
Well, they're at least rounder than the average Bethesda NPCs / companions. The engineer character surprised me a couple of times with how natural her confidence in herself seemed to develop. (I think @Rawls mentioned it above, so I looked up some gameplay of the character and was, kind of surprised, really. At least as good as most network TV series characters.)
I wasn't so much focusing on how they would interact in combat as how the characters themselves were presented in a performance sense. The writing was pretty good. I liked how, rather than trying to "act like the character is insecure", she seemed relatively balanced and ocassionaly struggled to hide the insecurities. That was nice. (I could compare it directly to that radio DJ character from Diamond City in FO4 -- the same type of character. However, the character in TOW is far more nuanced and natural.)
Yeah, Parvati is a well built character. For a number of reasons. She also felt like one of the stronger companions. Her skill set was useful nearly everywhere and her special ability offered a lot of utility. Max and Nyoka were also well designed. The other three came off as rather generic. I really wanted to like the robot but, for whatever reason, couldn't...
The only reason I mentioned the combat specifically is because the theme where changing companions alters the experience applies across the board. Swapping to a different combination changes the banter they periodically engage in when you're roaming the landscapes. It changes the dynamics of combat. It alters the dialogue during certain quests. It alters the approaches you can take during the quests given the way the character progression works and companion abilities factor into it.
If the game does anything well I think these alterations to the experience based on companion selections stands out. Even if the execution wasn't perfect there it says a lot about what the developers were trying to accomplish. And they were on the right track with those goals.
The only part I didn't like about the companions was the game didn't appear to factor in their persona much when it came to decisions made by the player. For instance, a companion might have a moral compass slanted in one direction while the player could make decisions in another. Differences in the way these views and actions lined up didn't seem to have any notable impact.
Granted, the character build I went with was heavy on leadership and dialogue related abilities, with a secondary focus toward science and a tertiary focus on stealth. I didn't invest much into combat (this is not to say I didn't engage in it to smack baddies around
). Problems were solved via diplomacy or by taking the least bloody path, for the most part. Incidentally, I probably didn't make many, if any, decisions in direct conflict with the companions in possession of a stronger moral or ethical compass.
