Outward The Adventurer Life Sim

I didn't see a thread for this game on the forums anywhere and it recently came to my attention, so I thought I would start a discussion on it.

Outward is a survival RPG where you are nothing more than a regular person trying to survive in a fantasy world. You are not the chosen one, the Dragonborn, a reincarnated god, or anything of the sort. You are a normal person who inherits your father's debts and the tribe tells you you have five days to pay off the debts. With no other way to earn the money, you strike off into the wilderness.

The game uses a lock on combat system akin to Dark Souls with light and heavy attacks, blocking, dodging, and stamina. You wear down your enemies' defenses which lets you break their guard, opening them up for a brief time to score some free hits. They also have a magic system, but it is more "ritualistic" as they put it. To learn spells, you have to give up some of your maximum life and stamina to gain spells and maximum MP. One of the first spells you can learn is called "Spark" which creates a small spark of flame, not much more useful than for lightning a campfire. But you can craft an item called a "Fire Stone" which lets you create a circle of power that when you stand in it and cast Spark, it now produces a bigger flame akin to a fireball. This sounds really cool and an interesting take on magic.

Then they have a survival system on top of this. You need to eat, drink, and sleep. But you can't just eat anything. You cannot eat uncooked meat, which means you need to set up a campfire to cook the meat. Your need to sleep also plays an important role in the game. When you set up camp, you have to choose how much of the night you divide between sleeping, staying on watch, and repairing your equipment. You need that sleep, but without keeping watch, you could be ambushed in the middle of the night. Your gear also degrades as you use it, so it needs to be repaired and maintained.

I saw them also mention things such as the environment around you caring about the clothing your wearing. You will need warm clothes such as furs in the cold and snow, and wearing heavy armor in the desert will cause you to tire faster and suffer heat exhaustion.

The game is coming out March 26th for PC, Playstation 4, and XBox 1.

Official Website
PC Gamer preview
IGN hub for Outward

Looks cool! One thing I'm really into is they also support coop, including split-screen coop so my wife and I could play together if the game is good. Forgot it was coming out this month!

Launched today! I'm going to see if Karla is own for it.

I've heard nothing but amazing things. I'm curious!

I’ve been watching a twitch stream of it for the last hour or so and it looks pretty cool but there are just too many other games right now. Definitely keeping my eye on it though.

Of course, in the past whenever I’ve decided to “keep my eye” on a game rather than getting it outright I typically end up impulsively buying it several days later anyway, so we’ll see.

Played for a couple hours tonight, and have yet to even leave the first town you start in. There is plenty to explore, people to talk to, and things to find around town that keep you interested. Probably could have gone a little faster but I was just enjoying walking around and exploring, even though you are thrown a pretty harsh time limit right out the gate.

Definitely looking to try this out in coop as well. Should be quite interesting.

A time limit? I like the look of the game, but I really don't like time limits!

Razgon wrote:

A time limit? I like the look of the game, but I really don't like time limits!

After you leave the tutorial area you're given five in-game days to pay off 150 gold worth of debt to your village. Completing any quest in the area earns you a tribal writ that waives the debt or you can also easily scavenge 150g worth of items in/around town. It's not as harsh as it sounds.

Ah - nice! thanks! That sounds manageble.

The looks quite interesting, but also quite janky? In the best tradition of Deep Silver releases, but that can be fun as well!

I heard that if you don't pay off your debt the only thing that happens is you lose your house, which can be repurchased later, but at a significant cost increase.

I am really itching to buy this. Can’t decide if I should wait for patches and a sale.

I would really wait for patches.

I've been playing this for about 6 hours with my friend and while I would say I'm enjoying my time, I honestly don't have anything about this game that makes me want to recommend it. We've been doing random missions for people and sort of following the critical path, but mostly trying to get used to the way the world works.

I've run into a number of not-severe but annoying bugs, including my character rotating without prompting, excessive fire animations, and crashes to desktop.

Don't worry about the "deadline" the game sells itself on being a survival type game but there's no consequences for anything really... we've died numerous times and you just wake up with all your stuff... the very first mission we did paid off our blood debt instantly, it was shockingly trivial.

The game has a bunch of weird sort of indie jenk that could be polished out, like
...in co-op you can't both talk to the same vendor
...when a friend is talking to an NPC you can hear what the NPC says to them, but not what they say to the NPC
... stuff stays in the world forever, so there are corpses left on the road from weeks ago, and then the NPCs that we killed there repop so we kill them again and a pile of corpses is just forming on that spot
... AI monsters never stop chasing you--ever
... when you die sometimes you get captured by the enemy but can easily escape and recover your gear, but for some reason the co-op person gets to keep their gear in that case, only the main player loses theirs
... the interface is generally bad, but fairly complete, a lot of things need to be confirmed or are only available in one specific place (e.g. you can't drag and drop to your toolbar, but you can drag and drop items from your inventory)

I could go on ... but I think the point is the game could use some gestation. That said, this isn't an early access title so maybe it will never get it?

The sale is tempting me. Someone talk me down.

EverythingsTentative wrote:

The sale is tempting me. Someone talk me down.

No.

You need to buy this and let the rest of us know what is going on. For the good of the community. We believe in you.

But you don't have to of course.

I did it. You knew what you were doing!

I didn't expect this. It's Dark Souls level difficulty with Skyrimesque exploration, sprinkled with survival mechanics. I'm having a lot of fun with it. It's got some jank, but nothing game breaking...so far.

Interesting....

I died in the tutorial.

As far as I can tell, the death penalty is "random event occurs". Sometimes it's good, most of the time it's not.

The death penalty for dying in the tutorial is going back to the beginning of the tutorial.

Have a couple of hours in the main game now, was able to get past the first main quest with not much trouble. The game does seem to expect you to self direct. I am taking it slow, venturing out from the starter town to explore the surroundings some during the day and heading back for the night. Taking it very slowly.

I made the mistake of rushing off into the next region and not really exploring the first one all that much, but it worked out because the first mission in the next region is go back to the first.

I just completed the Blue Sand Armor set this morning. I finally look cool, but this armor isn't good for my current build.

I played this on PS4 for a bit but only got a few hours in with a couple of different characters. I'd usually drift away during the first set of missions for one of the major groups you can join. What finally drove me away was that the nights are just so doggone dark in that game and playing in a well lit room with a lot of natural light, well, it's just not easy to play, even with my guy using light spells, torches, or lanterns. I probably could've fiddled with the settings on my TV but there was just too many other games floating around.

One character was a mage and the way they handle the magic in this game is really interesting but it takes a while and a decent amount of money to make it really viable as your go to means of combat. Another character I spent a lot of time with was a straight up fighter with a spear. The melee combat is definitely methodical and you constantly have to be aware of your surroundings, stamina, and timing of your strikes. It's not a crazy complex system but it's definitely not just a button masher.

It's no where near as polished as something like a Dark Souls, but it's got the same deliberate, wait for your opening, fighting system.

I'm not sure if PS4 has it, but on PC you can adjust the brightness. It turned it all the way up and night time is a lot better. I still need a lantern in caves, but I can now travel by moonlight at least.

I turned the brightness up some because my old eyes cannot see as well as they used to. Night time is still pretty dark, which I want in a game like this, but I can see well enough to follow a road/trail. Caves are very dark though, still need a lantern/torches/light spell.

The more I play and think about this game, the more interesting it is. I cannot formulate yet what it is about it I find compelling but I do find it compelling. It strikes a good balance between survival elements and fun. Too much either way and the game would be less fun, I think. Make the survival stuff too punishing and it is all just a pain in the ass. Too forgiving though and why bother.

I was watching some videos of this game and got kinda turned off by these death scenarios and just the overall sort of jankiness of the game. The streamer would die to some bandits and the 'scenarios' were basically just different respawn points. If he was killed by the outlaws he'd pretty much just walk naked out of jail, grab his stuff and be right back where he started. If he was kicked out of the camp he'd not even have a hoop to jump through to get right back to what he was doing.

Was this a microcosm of the whole game or are there more interesting situations out there, and this was just a side effect of being in a pretty out of the way area without a lot of attention paid?

Oh 2nd question. There's split screen coop right? Is that playable?

The death penalty as far as I can tell is "random thing happens" It is kind of location based, so if you die in a bandit camp you get stripped and respawn in the bandit camp. If you die by hyena near a den, you wake up naked in the den surrounded by hyenas. It's a bit more random when you are exploring the world, but you are going to see similar events. Gep is a recurring character that takes you to an alone spot and leaves you a healing item. I've been taken to a mysterious creatures cave. I've even been imprisoned and had to trick the guards to let me out.

It does have split screen. I haven't tried it out, but I've read that part of the reason that the game is a bit graphically lackluster, it is so it runs well in split screen. They make up for that failure with a beautiful artistic style, though.

Just from watching streams this game reminds me of Elex from a few years back.

JeremyK wrote:

Just from watching streams this game reminds me of Elex from a few years back.

*all my eyebrows raise*

*and other parts of my body*

This game is charming as hell.

EverythingsTentative wrote:

The death penalty as far as I can tell is "random thing happens" It is kind of location based....

Well, now I don't know about that anymore. I was inside a dungeon and was killed by a Wendigo and was taken out of the dungeon and halfway across the map. That made me walk away for a bit. I went back to the dungeon and fell in love with the game all over again.

Spoiler:

There was a talking skull with an arrow in it's head. I had to find it's body parts and put him back together. It charmed the hell out of me.

In!

Got killed during the tutorial