Outward 2 picks up 50 years after the events of the first open-world survival RPG; developer Nine Dots tells me that “The difference in production value is significant.” Again, you’ll play a nobody of an adventurer, just a regular ol’ human against a world rife with danger.
I went hands-on with a PC demo, and it felt like a hyper-polished slice of gameplay – but a rather thin one. It evinced no details of Outward 2’s story or scale, but I sure felt the series’ famously difficult combat. It left me ultimately unsatisfied, desperately wishing to learn and experience more.
I started my playthrough in a quarry, having been dropped unceremoniously into the world with no preamble. The environment is very detailed, colourful, and almost cute in a low-levelled World of Warcraft dungeon kind of way. In other words, not very threatening – but I was very quickly taught otherwise.
Along with my starter gear, I put on my backpack – a bulky thing that you’ll literally need to remove before combat, lest its weight makes you clumsy and slow. I blithely strode through a gate into the next area – a mine pit, with some nearby enemies to flex my combat skills on.
Hard Mode Only
Something new to Outward 2 is the concept of an off-hand; while your left hand could only hold trinkets in the original, you can now equip a shield or a second weapon, allowing some flexibility in choosing a setup that’ll deal the most damage to whichever enemy you’re fighting. You can even get a bit silly by equipping two shields and just going about bashing everything.
The combat moves sound like typical RPG fare on paper – dodge, tap for quick attacks, hold for slower and stronger attacks, et cetera. But once I was actually in combat with a giant, angry bee-like enemy, I realised that I needed to undergo a lot of hard lessons to learn how to employ my skills effectively. Which is another way of saying that I died. A lot.
The enemies in Outward 2 move fast, and each death sent me right back to the beginning of the demo. In real life, I know that I wouldn’t just race blindly into combat with an enormous seven-eyed boar, and Outward 2 challenged my preconception of being able to “just wing it” in a game. I began to feel that I’d need to sink more time than a demo could offer into learning how each enemy worked, how they moved, and how I might get to their weak points.
One thing not present in the preview, but in the works for Outward 2, is the return of “defeat scenarios.” Instead of simply returning to the previous checkpoint, you might receive a sprained ankle that limits your ability to dodge, or a concussion that doubles your mana costs. Theoretically, there will be no going back on your combat failures; you just have to live with them while you recover.
A Magic Touch
After one of my many deaths to the mine’s monsters, my attention was directed to a pile of junk behind a building, where I found a single-use Fire Stone. Magic in the Outward series is ritualistic; even casting a simple spell has multiple steps.
For instance, to cast a fireball, I needed to build on a tiny spark spell. By expending my Fire Stone, I placed a fiery sigil on the ground. Standing on that sigil turned my spark into a fireball, allowing me to deal a lot more damage to the enemy before it even reached me. I found myself mentally preparing, thinking through combat strategies before entering into encounters, which felt a bit at odds with the fast whirlwind encounters themselves.
I found more tools to aid me in combat as I ventured deeper and deeper into the mine, though: Chests in dark corners that contained armour, consumables to add some oomph to my weapons. Outward 2 will have a crafting syste m, hinted at by random items I could pick up, such as mushrooms, or a fallen boar’s tusks. Unfortunately, my time with this demo wasn’t sufficient for any meaningful experience with the crafting mechanic. In fact, I began to feel like the demo wasn’t showing me much outside of combat at all.
Let’s Get Real
Like its predecessor, Outward 2 is open-world with four different regions planned, each being about two square kilometres large (not including dungeons). That’s about the same size as the original Outward map, but this time around it’ll be “higher quality” and “slightly more dense,” according to the developers.
But that’s something I didn’t get a sense of in this preview. The scenario I played is an actual in-game dungeon, and it feels like it: I felt boxed in and kind of lonely, with only rabid enemies for company. Even the buildings around the mine were bereft of NPCs. I desperately wanted to break free of the demo, venture into the wider world, and learn more about this fantasy space.
Similarly, I couldn’t get a great feel for the survival loop outside of combat. The Outward universe is notoriously hostile, and like in the real world, you’ll need to eat, hydrate, and sleep – so I was told. None of that was present in the demo, which sadly made it feel more superficial than the developers probably intend Outward 2 to be.
The original Outward was heavily story-driven, and the increased budget this time around allows for cutscenes and more voice-acting – though again, in my experience, that’s all theoretical. It was perhaps the biggest thing missing from the preview build, some contextualisation of this fantasy world where painful things happen. Without it, my constant deaths felt more irritating than anything; there was no real motivation beyond making some enemies dead.
It’s apparent that this early preview is more of an introduction to the combat than to Outward 2 overall. The combat is hard, sure, but I’m not interested in mere difficulty: I want brutality. I want to get hopelessly lost in the wilderness, break a bone escaping bandits, run out of potions when I need them most… you get the idea.
Let’s be clear, though: Outward 2 hasn’t broken any promises yet. Given the first game’s focus on being a regular little person in a big scary world, I was hoping to see that continue in the preview – but I still have little idea what that might be like. Looks like we’ll be waiting a little longer to see if Outward 2 propels the series upward.