Outward 2 Preview – Doubling down on the Outward concept

The original Outward was well received by players with its offering of an RPG with survival elements, where the world was dangerous and you had to use your wits to survive and make progress. Outward 2 looks to continue on and build on those foundations, making for a more densely packed and more dangerous experience as a result, and still without the compromises of fast travel or quest markers. We sat down with Guillaume Boucher-Vidal, the CEO and creative director of Nine Dots Studio, and producer Natasha Collin to play the alpha build of Outward 2, and find out what is in store for players.

“One of the four pillars of what we wanted to improve in Outward 2 was character creation, increase the the role play opportunities and like being who you wanted. And part of it is that we have three starting areas and they all come with a very different Quest that explains how a regular person ends up living a life of an adventurer.”, said Guillaume as we checked out the creation screen.

Players of Outward will be happy to know there are a lot more options available when designing your character to allow you to make them more personal, from body shape, skin colour, hair colour, styles, and various body markings. Once you have crafted how your character looks you then pick their base skill set and attributes. For those of you who really want a challenge, Deadbeat will provide you with the weakest and most vulnerable character build. While it is Guillaume’s favourite, he steered me away from that, so I settled on a book loving brute instead. Your choices will impact the dialogue options open to you and how some quests may play out, as well as your general survival skills in the world. When it comes to factions, you can only join one out and that is your faction for life. You can also not become an expert in every ability, so the decisions you make on which skills to learn need to be carefully thought through so you focus on a particular playstyle.

For this playthrough of Outward 2, we started in the new location of Haboob, a city which was cut off from the world for centuries surrounded by large flora and a persistent sandstorm. Only those who are exiled seem to leave the walls of the city, and for good reason. There is danger pretty much everywhere outside the walls for anyone unprepared. What you notice about Haboob is its distinct style of interesting architecture pierced with a purple lighting interspersed around, and a perpetual sandstorm above the vast cave system in which the city is located. This is one of three starting areas and depending on your choices you may not see Haboob until much later in the game.

You have your own apartment in Haboob, a market nearby where you can purchase items and weapons, and an opportunity to make a name for yourself, except that all comes crashing down after your first night because of Sebastian. In this story, you wake up to find a guard in your chambers looking for something only for Sebastian to kill him and place the smoking gun in your hands before disappearing. This is where the clock starts ticking as you only have 18 in-game days to track Sebastian down and prove your innocence or lose everything. Each day lasts an hour, so 18 hours seems like plenty of time to save your home, except Outward 2 is not forgiving when it comes to time. If you sleep, which you will need to, you will lose those hours. If you lose a fight and get knocked unconscious, you will lose time and have to deal with whatever situation you have woken up in.

There is no death in Outward 2, unless you play the Hardcore mode, where losing consciousness comes with a 20% chance of your save being permanently deleted. But for a regular playthrough, just because there’s no death doesn’t mean there’s no challenge. Depending on where you fall and your luck you may wake up in a friendly situation or in a dangerous one. In one situation I was found by the Menders, a group of helpers and healers that travel Auriel. They are also one of the factions you can join. They mended me up and even gave me information about Sebastian that I could use.

This was actually the first time Guillaume and Rebecca had seen this scenario play out, which was exciting for them too. I asked about how many different defeat scenarios would be in Outward 2. Guillaume responds, saying, “Hey, it’s a tough question. Like a lot, really? A lot. We need them because we die often and so if you keep seeing the same things it eventually gets frustrating. And we need different defeat scenarios for every dungeon as well. So like, that’s why it’s not a cutscene or something. It’s just a little bit of text.”

Two of the criticisms that were levied at Outward included combat being stiff and the world itself be relatively sparse leading to prolonged sections of nothing happening. Guillaume and the team took those comments to heart, and the world in Outward will be more exciting to explore while retaining a similar size to the original’s map. On map Guillaume says, “The emptiness is one of those four pillars. The first one was character creation. The second one is making a world which is more alive. And so to do that, it has to be a bit more filled. You need to have a bit more random events, to have encounters that are not hostile, to populate visually the world a bit more. It will never be as packed as, say, one of those Ubisoft type worlds where you’ve got, like, every 30 seconds you got something coming at you. We’re not trying to do that. But even as you walk around in the city, I feel like it’s luscious. It has lot of places to visit, and when you’re outside, it is more dense than the first. We’ve got it similar in scope, but because it is more packed, it feels significantly bigger.

“[There are] four regions, four cities, lots of dungeons spread across regions. Normally, we calculated we have a budget of about six to eight dungeons, like major dungeons per area, and then we have many, what we call micro dungeons, so interesting destinations that might not take you an hour to just go through.”

Combat in Outward 2 has been improved with weapons have a wider variety of moves depending on direction inputs, and you can carry different combinations of weapons to inflict damage on enemies. For my playthrough I had a small axe in one hand and an ice pick in another, allowing for quicker attacks. Later, I equipped a trident that allowed slower but more powerful attacks, while also providing ways to evade incoming attacks. Locking on to enemies and moving around them gives a fluid feel to fights, but for some fights you do need to prep.

At one point, we came across a ghost in a cave, which could not be defeated with conventional methods. Guillaume took old clothing, tore it into linen, attached it to a stick, doused it in oil, and set it on fire, as the ghost was susceptible to fire magic. Outward 2 is a game where you have to think logically to come up with solutions or suffer the consequences. I drank straight from a stream which gave my character indigestion, but had I boiled the water, I would have been fine. Magic is another viable combat route in Outward 2 with various spells to equip and learn, but is not something that I saw in the alpha build.

Outward 2 has had its development challenges with Guillaume saying that one of the biggest was switching engines from Unity to Unreal 5 partway through development – a decision made when Unity pitched the idea of the Runtime Fee which would have seen a charge applied to developers for game installs after a certain revenue point. “We were a specialist studio with 10 years of experience in Unity. Starting with Unreal was even worse, having to migrate the work that we had already done. So there is something that is lost in the process because the structure, the architecture of the game has to be thought of in terms of what are the strengths of the engine. So now we are kind of trying to massage it back into a shape that fits these strengths and weaknesses of Unreal Engine.”

Outward 2 is a project that clearly means a lot to Guillaume and the team at Nine Dots Studio, so I asked what kind of legacy do they want Outward 2 to have? Guillaume takes a moment to think before saying, “I want Outward 2 to prove that Outward was not a fluke and I want this game to be a complete expression of architecture. We’re not trying to be more accessible, but we want to attain a level of execution where the people who were not receptive to the first one. Now, we’ll know is it because we didn’t execute it well? Or was it because the vision is not for them?

“For Outward 1 I understand that some people like it was too rough for me – that’s valid. I want Outward 2 to be very tight. It’s the first game in a very long time that we are self-publishing. So it is a game that is about the emancipation of Nine Dots, and taking having more control over how we sell the game, how we communicate with players, how do we collaborate with other developers because we are acting as publishers as well.

“We were very successful with Outward, so we used some of that money to fund another studio called Ever Curious Entertainment and their game called Witherbloom. And we can just keep doing more of that if Outward 2 is successful, even a fraction of the success of Outward. Because we are self-publishing, we would keep so much of that success for ourselves and we would share that success.”

Outward 2 is a game that will appeal to those that want an RPG with survival elements, where no quest log tells you what to do, no markers to pinpoint exactly where you are, and where you deal with cold, heat, hunger, and thirst as well as the dangers around you. It is a tough experience but Outward 2 comes across as a game that will reward those who persevere. If it is successful it could also see more studios benefit as Nine Dots expands into publishing, allowing for a more varied game industry at a time when it is needed.