Outward 2 Preview: The Survival RPG That Hits Hard

26.03.2024 - 23:39 / ign.com

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.

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.

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