I found it rather funny just how many times in the first ten minutes of playing I got killed. There are times when a game is just not how you enjoy playing. For a survival open-world game I was expecting certain things things.
The biggest thing this game drove me to feel was my character was not the strong hero type you would expect in a single-player RPG. While it was not something like dark souls crushing. Anything and everything can and will kill you quite a few times in this game.
Decisions and most importantly failures can have long-term consequences in this game. Not something I was expecting and it killed certain parts of the game.
For instance, some quests you end up getting are timed. You only get so many in-game days to complete their objective or you either fail them or get a lesser reward. One such mission early on made me feel I was going too fast through the game. Despite the fact, that I was not. I was only a couple of main quests into things.
As a result of failing a time-limited quest. The town in the starting zone of Chersonese was destroyed. There is no coming back from that. The main place for me to store my items, shop, buy certain skills, and sell items. Now gone.
Once that occurred there was no longer much of a point in me grinding anything in that zone. For let’s say money which becomes quite important in things like unlocking skills. Either I needed to luck out and there be a wandering vendor or I'd have to travel to another zone that costs rations to do so. Then go on a massive walk to the towns that were near the zone.
The skills in this game are quite interesting. There are two limiting factors. How much money do you have. Along with only being able to have three breakout skill points. You can train all the lower-tier skills you like if you have the money to do so at different trainers spread across different zones.
You however only have three total breakout skill points to spend. This enables the higher tier skills from each trainer. You also only get breakthroughs but I found that more than enough as that means you can max out skill trees from three different trainers.
This I felt allowed quite a fun mix and match of different things. There is however no way to reset breakthrough skill points once you spend them. At the very least it was nice not having to pick a starting class I wanted to be in a game. Instead, I just ended up making my class in a way.
Getting defeated or as one might say killed in this game can be quite brutal. When you get killed you might be “saved” by someone and put back into a city, a friendly cave, or some campsite. In those situations, you also still have all your stuff.
Then there are the deaths when you awake and find yourself deep into a hostile dungeon. Still with your gear but cannot kill much of anything. You more or less need to wander around till you find your way out and hope to not get killed again.
Then there are the deaths where your items are taken from you. You might still end up having access to your backpack but your weapons and armor are now gone. You might also say find yourself now a prisoner.
Your items are now off in a chest somewhere that you have to somehow fight towards and get. To make things even harder all zones reset every few days. So, at best you have a week to recover your items before they are gone forever.
Nothing sucks more in an RPG than spending lots of time getting amazing gear. Just to get killed and know you are not going to recover your items in time. Having to go back out and either hope you kept some old gear around or more or less start over and acquire basic gear working your way up again.
Sure, having money and saving lots of items you can recraft items from is quite important. More times than not in this game you are always just broke. To get a house just to store stuff in each city costs 500 gold each.
It’s almost like this game has an endless cycle of poverty. A little bad luck and some bad moves. You find yourself at the bottom of the Foodchain again. Getting killed by the most basic of things in two shots.
It felt like most of my game time was just spent sleeping in a tent outdoors to recover my character. Anytime you take damage there is a chance some of your max health becomes “burnt” and you can no longer heal back up to that amount until you have rested enough. The same goes with stamina and it's being used.
Unless you are in your own house or paying to spend the night in an inn. You will need to deal with the survival aspects of this game just to be able to reset. You need enough water and food, and hopefully, you won’t become too hot or cold.
There is nothing more dreadful in this game than being out of food, and water, and having 75% of your health and stamina burnt. You can’t reset to recover. You more than likely are out of potions that can restore some burnt health. You stand no chance of killing anything to escape that cave.
Thankfully after the game gods have laughed at how bad of a situation you are now in. They will at some point take you out of that cave where you no longer have a chance of escaping. This at least gives you a fighting chance of trying to recover.
Final Thoughts
I wish I could say I got to a point in this game so far where I felt like “I've made it.” That has yet to come on my first character. I’m just a couple of deaths away from losing all but my skills. Spending what little money and resources I have to rebuild myself. For all I know I have an active quest that will not get finished in time resulting in me losing access to another town which would be dreadful.
There just never came a point where I could say in this game, I was having fun. It was just one endless struggle after another. If I was not struggling to kill things my character was now getting killed by heat stroke. If I had lots of water suddenly, I could not find any food to eat and would have to either buy.
I have been tempted by the idea of just starting over on a new character. This game requires a bit of game knowledge. I just don’t know if I'd have any fun knowing what mistakes to not repeat a second time to even want to do that.
Even more crazy there is a system in this game to pass off a couple of items in total to a new alt. Almost like you are supposed to get to a point where there is no hope and you need to start on a different character to make better choices.
This game could have been so freeing by not having a leveling system. Instead, it was just an endless grind for gold and outside of a couple of character buffs skills give you. There is not much advantage outside of gear as you progress through the game. The gear itself also just felt underwhelming.
Information
Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar about Outward Definitive Edition.
I've really been wanting to check this game out for a while now! (Btw I have been mentally reminiscing about revisiting DS series) Such despair! As they died and/or fled they must have said This is Enjar's fault! Somehow this revitalizes my interest and even makes it stronger! I think I vaguely know which quest you mean, something about a debt, I remember from a YouTube review some years ago haha.
So I read up to the part where you say the skill system is great (I remember others liked that too) but I decided to stop there so as to not spoil it for myself! My most favorite part of playing the game is those first hours before anything like landmarks get ingrained in the memory! The pure exploration phase where everything is new! Even so, such failure can still encourage replayability, right? An entirely different timeline in which you are that strong hero!
Once things start to click for you in this game it becomes amazing. I’m over 120 hours played since I’ve written this post. It was quite rough on my first character lol.