Outward - open world RPG where you are an ordinary adventurer and survival is harsh

[Casual Hero]

hi

 

[Whisper]

First explore full world, than do factions.

Do not do any quests, even joining faction one. You start hidden timers. There are plenty of timers. And most of them matter. Like destroying starting town (with your chests with loot) in first area.

Seriously? I haven't played this beyond the first couple hours but that's retarded for this kind of game. I'm against handholding most of the time but if you're gonna do something like that, you should really disclose to the player what will happen and tell them to move their shit or there should be a system that automates moving loot between storage locations so you don't lose all your stuff.

Also, when this town is destroyed, you lose access to hub, only hub on map. Since all maps have 1 hub. This means you cant trade on this map, cant restock, sleep etc.
Also you lose access to trainers. This means you cant learn skills that this trainers teach.

There are also other choices during quests which may lead to trainer dying and if you didnt learn all his skills in advance - this means you lose access to learning&using this skills for the rest of the game (there is no 2nd trainer for this skills).

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

Technically, you can still trade on Chersonese map by going to either Conflux mountain, or to the Wind trainer in north east. Other than that though, yeah terribad game.

 

[Ontopoly]

Galaxy downloaded like a 10GB update for the game today, and now when I go to load, it gives me a list of saves to pick from? I can't find any patch notes anywhere though.

The latest update automatically turned on developer mode which gives you access to that stuff. They fixed it though

 

[Whisper]

Technically, you can still trade on Chersonese map by going to either Conflux mountain, or to the Wind trainer in north east. Other than that though, yeah terribad game.

You lose Kazite Spellblade trainer and trainer near village entrance though.

And all of your items that you keep in chests. I think this is first game that destroy all of your kept items in bank/stash due to ingame choice.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

I have played a lot of games in my life that people consider difficult for various reasons, some good, some bad, but Outward is the first game where after a while I got the distinct impression that the developers might be legitimate sadists.

A lot of design decisions don't make any sense otherwise. Why not have intelligent fast travel? All the games they claim inspired this one do (Gothics with Teleport stones you have to find, Morrowind with giant bug travel network, Dark Souls with connecting passages you have to discover and activate). Yet here, players have to run back and forth like retards for hours of real time across mostly empty maps, over and over and over again.

Why does dying place you all over the map randomly? Again, this is not pure difficulty, or to make dying punishing, they could've just taken your gold or items or some other way, this random shit is to just fuck with you.

 

[Zanzoken]

My guess is the devs were really enamored with the game's survival mechanics and felt that quality-of-life features like fast travel would detract from the "lone traveler out in the wilderness" experience. Unfortunately I think this approach really shot the game in the foot.

The #1 problem with the game, that most of its problems stem from, is the map design. So much of the running and tedium could've been avoided if they had just done two things.

- Place the player's home in a centrally-located area with easy access to each of the game's 4 regions (6 if you include DLC).

- When the player travels to a new region, spawn them in or next to that region's town, not on the other side of the f---ing world.

I drew a simple map to illustrate how this could easily be done.

Spoiler

All you need is fast travel points connecting the Player Hub and each of the major cities. This makes it quick and easy for players to do housekeeping stuff between towns, and when you go adventuring outside the wire, the survival mechanics can then come into play.

Also, for all the pointless and unnecessary player homes / strongholds you see in RPGs, this is one game that could've really benefitted from robust basebuilding mechanics. I would make the Player Hub a highly customizable base, that starts small but can be expanded over the course of a game to include modules for storage, crafting, even farming so you can produce items that are valuable to you when you're out in the wild.

There really is a lot to love about this game, so I hope they learn from their mistakes and make the next one not be such a chore to play.

 

[General Disarray]

I have beaten the game some year ago and the DLC but right now I'm replaying it local coop with a friend on a one session per week basis. He has explored all areas trying to decide built, but is now going with mercenary class and the holy mission faction, I'm going ranger with bow and halberd. Got a good combo with shatter bullet knockdown setup into sniper arrow. The previous session we were trashed constantly in the marshes, demoralized. Neither of us had a breakthrough skill yet. But it's fun and we haven't mind the constant walking. Often because of the environment, in the marsh we sort of managed to get lost after trying to go through the shortcut to berg but failed and then went westward route to the low marshes from the high which you rarely do normal wise. Both the starting area and the desert spice things up with environmental hazards, we sort of did the mana mountain in part because of escaping from the cold and I'm trying to introduce more game mechanics sense magic is not really a pure build in this game. But now we are using alchemy and boons for the first time with preparation and consistency. Then we head to home and stashed and refitted to go to the desert.

Had to sprint though the winter in desert armour hoping we be fast enough to not freeze to death was quite fun, then forgetting we actually end up in Berg first and not Abrasaar because we were so focused on the desert and surviving the winter xD. Decided to continue with the second holy mission faction quest, got some popup overheard information in the inn was cool. Went to the hive, survived a tough fight and talked with the paladin. Went to Abrasaar, my char almost burned to death running to the city sense I give my friend the best stuff. We are playing with his char as the main and I split screen join in. But now with cold magic boon it went better. Once we got to the town he unlocked the breakthrough point and the sprint skill, not enough money for blood bullet. Then we ended the session, around 3-4 hours. Next time maybe we try getting more money to get blood bullet. In the oasis when we entered the area we meet a NPC for the blood under the sand quest, so we might do that one. I think this was around our fifth sixth time playing.

It's a good coop game if you can handle slower paced games. I like to play Project Reality and Squad, so I'm comfortable with slower pace in games where you play more cooperatively. My friend has played some GTA rpg servers with a friend so he doesn't mind. Having some beers and snacks and catch up.

I can recommend this mod for playing coop on a TV. It adds vertical split screen instead of the standard horizontal.
https://www.nexusmods.com/outward/mods/122

 

[LESS T_T]

Definitive Edition in May.

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/794260/view/3126066699593100380

Dev Diary #8 - A Look Inside Outward: Definitive Edition

We are nearing the third anniversary of Outward's launch. To be honest, it would be expected that the game we made would no longer be relevant after so long, in an industry that churns out new games at a dizzying pace. At some point, we’ve all heard our fellow gamers talk of their backlog and how it keeps growing. It's why I always saw it as an immense privilege that our players came back to Outward over and over again.

The game we have today is surprisingly different from the game we launched nearly three years ago. Those who discovered Outward more recently might not even know that some hallmark features of the game, such as items being morphed through the legacy chest or the hardcore mode were added in a free content patch and were not in the base game.

We've improved the game's graphics and performance. We've added quality-of-life changes. We even added poutine! We spent years working on two gigantic paid expansions which brought the game further than anything we could have possibly imagined when we first launched Outward. We did all of this because we knew our players were hungry for more.

Of course, with time the audience dwindles. However, we want to do one last big push before focusing all our efforts on our next games. With the Definitive Edition, we are sending a clear message: now is the best time to play Outward. Especially if you want to play it on your new console.

We've faced a few delays. We've done the new console ports on Xbox Series and PlayStation 5 internally rather than relying on external studios, and this meant learning and making some mistakes. Finding the right release date is quite challenging too, so we had to be patient. However, now we're getting close to the finish line, and we're ready to give you a first glimpse of what's coming. So here's the dev diary detailing the new content we're adding along with quality-of-life changes, optimizations and fixes:



We can't wait to see new players experience the world we’ve built for the first time with this more polished and expansive version of Outward, and also our veteran players adapting and rediscovering the game once more.

 

[JDR13]

We even added poutine!

I'm hoping that's a typo and that he actually means poontang.

 

[notpl]

Does the game still have a giant empty MMO world and a main quest that consists of nothing more than walking back and forth from one end of it to the other to talk to sole NPC in each town with dialogue so that they can tell you to walk back to the other end of the world and talk to a different one?

 

[Yosharian]

Yeah the world feels really cool the first time you traverse it and then you find out that half the game is fetch/delivery quests

Not cool

They should have just not bothered with formal quests at all and focused on the other aspects like dungeon-crawling

Still a fun game for a while though

 

[General Disarray]

It's fucking great, you guys are just teleportation addicts. Love that they are fixing it up! Especially adding new mechanics items to the core game areas is really great.

 

[Rafidur]

Just travel on 20x speedhack bro, running in a straight line gets past any combat anyway.

 

[LESS T_T]

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/794260/view/3210513624480276196

DevBlog - Game Balance Changes in the Definitive Edition
Hello everyone!

Today I would like to clarify what we mean when we say “we made balancing changes”, as I’m pretty confident it will affect the experience in a meaningful way.

Of course, there is a plethora of small tweaks to increase the viability of as many options as possible, but these could be the kind of balance changes in any patch. For the definitive edition, I’m happy we had the chance to make wider and far reaching changes.

Difficulty curve

Let’s start with the scariest change: we made the hard enemies harder. While this might appear on the surface to be a surprising move, the reasons why we did this was that some players could clear out dungeons very early on and jump into end game gear. This broke the intended progression curve and also made it tricky for players who then went into areas they were ‘under-leveled’ for. This increase in difficulty will mostly affect defensive stats, such as increased HP, protection and resistances.

Protection

While I believe the heavy armor sets were quite valid in Outward - and were a very good way for players to buy themselves some much needed protection when they made mistakes - there was a general sentiment that it didn’t offer enough to compensate for their drawbacks (loss of speed and higher stamina costs). There was also a sentiment that resistance was always more attractive than protection. So we fixed both problems with a fundamental change: protection now not only applies to physical damage, but to impact as well. Consequently, we had to revise impact resistance and make sure it didn’t suddenly become easy to ignore the risk of stagger altogether, or make some enemies almost impossible to stun.

DLC Content redistribution

This was another major change. I would say one of the most obvious consequences is how enchantment recipes are available in various stores, rather than concentrated in Harmattan. Arcane elementals can now be found in every region, in places that make sense. However the Antique Plateau will still be the best area to farm elemental particles.

We’ve also put workshops in every region so players can build the musical totems, so don’t need to trek all the way back to the Caldera if you lose one of your apparatuses. These workshops will still require materials found in their respective regions.

Corruption is now found in any area where it makes sense, and it also more potent. Without proper gear to mitigate the effect of ambient corruption, you will feel quite pressured to move out of the green fog.

Some of the item properties that were only found in the areas specific to their respective DLCs - such as cooldown reduction or barrier - can now be found on items from the vanilla content of Outward too. This opens up more viable gear and ensures items aren’t as easily outclassed.

Material Sample guaranteed drops

The random nature of drops for rare resources could be too brutal in The Three Brothers. We’ve found a way to alleviate this issue. The player will be able to talk with a town NPC to trade 3 of any samples for the specific type of rare resource you are looking for.

Town Reset

The fact that towns didn’t reset was causing issues both in terms of balance and immersion. A lot of players felt that sleeping in a house or an inn simply didn’t make sense compared to just placing a plant tent that would freely feed you and provide a sufficiently generous sleep buff. You will still be able to set up a hobo camp, but should you stay out of town for 7 consecutive days before the town resets. This means that you’ll be able to loot junk piles and such when coming back in town, giving something to do while your friend is shopping, buying skills or re-organising their inventory.

This list is not exhaustive, but those changes are those that I think will most significantly alter the experience of playing Outward. Hopefully it will keep even seasoned adventurers on their toes. I look forward to seeing your reactions and stories. Be careful, some of your habits may play against you this time around…



Special tip:

Players who already own the base game and the DLC "The Three Brothers" are entitled to a free copy of the Definitive Edition!

For those who haven't set foot into the world of Aurai yet: now would be the perfect time to explore the lands, so lace your boots and grab your backpacks, adventurers!

 

[HoboForEternity]

Looks good. The moment i stopped enjoying the game was the moment enemies became pushover. Making the strong enemies tougher will make the game interesting for longer.

No more becoming a hobo in town, shame, but necessary change.

 

[LESS T_T]

Definitive Edition in May.

May 17.

 

[LESS T_T]

Definitive Edition is out now.

 

[anvi]

They should have called that game Running and more running.

 

[Decado]

Steam says I have the definitive edition in my library, but I clearly do not.

I liked the hell out of this game, have like 300 hours in it. A lot of their fixes look quite good, I'll probably get pulled back in for another playthrough.

 

[HoboForEternity]

legacy chest doesn't work with definitive edition

I just want my bird mask so I can run faster

 

[Cyberarmy]

I really wanted to like this one but still feels like a running simulator mostly. While some larger dungeons I encountered was kinda cool, world felt empty and eventless most of the time.
One of the few games I couldn't able to finish...

 

[mkultra]

i lost interest when I 1) couldnt jump/climb 2) couldn't swim 3) couldn't even fall / drop of a cliff.
in a linear game those things are expected, in a modern open world game, lol, no.. these mechanics all add to atmosphere, immersion, feeling like you're an explorer and not like someone bound to a wheelchair.

 

[General Disarray]

I've been playing the DE version now, really great, the early game is really fun in this game. You really need to use all the gadgets to win flights, rags, traps and bows. This is because the bandits will often trade with you on hits and with no armour you lose against two. Trogs are easier to sidestep sense they don't block. So I love that they have upped the difficulty so you get a slower power progression.

One Bugg I found was that they broke AutoHDR which is a shame, the sun, torches, lanterns and magic with the bloom really glowed on 1500nits. Hope they fix it.

 

[JDR13]

Steam says I have the definitive edition in my library, but I clearly do not.

Do you own both DLC? If so, you should have been upgraded to the DE automatically.

i lost interest when I 1) couldnt jump/climb 2) couldn't swim 3) couldn't even fall / drop of a cliff.

You can most definitely fall off a cliff.