The part that isn’t my shiny big forebrain.

I realized this morning that I tend to identify almost entirely with my vaunted intelligence and not with the rest of me.

In fact, if you read this blog (and I know you do), it can almost seem like I am less a person with depression and more like a rather troubled robot.

But I am more than my mind. I am a pretty special dude even without all that mental muscle. And I think I need to remind myself of that as often as is feasible because it is that other part of me that needs to be strengthened and reinforced.

I have an overdeveloped mind and an underdeveloped everything else (soul, spirit, will, etc), and that’s an imbalance that needs to be corrected ASAP.

Not that I know a lot about things like that. That’s part of the problem.

So now I am going to try to get the ball rolling by talking about the good things about me that have nothing to do with that stainless steel intellect of mine.

There’s my kindness. That has absolutely nothing to do with my intellect. I would be the same sweet, sensitive person even if I had an average IQ.

I can’t imagine being any other way. Not with my level of empathy and depth of feeling. I pick up on other people’s emotions readily and it has taught me a lot about not just how people tick but how we are all connected by our humanity.

Then there’s my sense of humour. Granted, I might not be as witty without the big brain, but I would be just as wacky. I love to make people laugh and I am pretty sure that I still would even if I had to resort to fart jokes and pratfalls.

There is my expansive and understanding nature. I want to love, accept, and include everybody. And I want everybody to love, accept,and include one another as well. I am a harmony and happiness seeking creature, and that has nothing to do with having this white elephant of a brain to drag around.

There’s my boundless curiosity. I want to know everything about everything, basically. I has a desperate desire to understand how it all works, and I am pretty sure that would be true even if I had a lot fewer CPU cycles to dedicate to the search.

And there’s my charisma and power of personality. Pretty sure that I would still have that even without the gold plated IQ. It’s possible that without all my unused mindpower to supercharge it, my personal magnetism would not be as strong.

But it would still be there. And maybe be more effective because it would not be distorted by my odd emotional affect.

You get the idea. It’s still a hard thing for me to think about because I am so used to thinking of myself as this big brain.

But I am so much more than that.

And it’s high time I recognized that.

---

So I blasted my way through Outer Worlds.

It’s surprisingly short. When I reached the end, it really felt like I had only done like three quarters of the game at most.

Considering I paid $83 CDN for it, I have to say I feel rather ripped off. I am sure that if I had gone with my first idea, buying Borderlands 3 instead, I would be nowhere near the end of it yet, based on the previous games in the series.

Overall, the game, while excellent, feels a tad threadbare. There’s surprisingly few weapons, armors, mods, and so on. Plus there are two planets in the game’s solar system you don’t even go to, plus plenty of room on the planets you do go to for more quests and adventures.

My feeling is that there was more content planned but what I got was all that actually got completed in time for release day.

If so, then I hope the first DLC expansion for the game is free or very cheap. I am talking less than $10.

Because if not, I am going to complain to the company.

I think the mistake the devs et al made was that they didn’t realize the kind of expectations they were raising when they made a game that was so much like Fallout 4 and the rest of the series, and other games like them.

Those games have absolutely massive amounts of content. It’s one of the things I love about them. There is so much to explore and do! So many missions that I can pig out on objective-heavy content to my heart’s content for a long long time,.

I only got 47 hours of play out of Outer Worlds. By comparison, I played Fallout 4 for 577 hours. That’s more than ten times the content.

Admittedly, that was with ALL the DLC. But still, even without the DLC, it was 400 hours easy. And all for slightly less than what I paid for Outer Worlds.

My fave PC game of all time, Witcher 3 : The Wild Hunt, gave me 376 hours of fun,.

And of course, Skyrim sucked over 2000 hours (that’s 83 whole days, or 125 waking days) out of my life.

That doesn’t really count, though, as the amount of free DLC via mods for Skyrim dwarfs the size of the original game by many magnitudes.

My point is that while 47 hours might seem like a lot, it really isn’t compared to similar games, and it’s those games that set my expectations as to how much I am going to get out of a game.

And I did some Googling, and I am not alone in this. A lot of other PC gamers found the game to be surprisingly and unpleasantly short.

So at least I am not alone in my pain.

What makes it worse is that right before I bought Outer Worlds, I finished two massive games, Pillars of Eternity 2 and Borderlands : The Pre-Sequel, and so I had a rather large gap to fill.

I hope the company takes this discontent to heart, and pushes some content to fill the gap. Either that, or I hope the demand for more creates a lively and active modding community that takes the shortness of the game as a challenge.

Either way, the fact remains that the game left me wanting more in the wrong way.

Use those other two planets dammit!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.