Outward is an interesting title that contains simplicity with a layer of complication, which makes the adventure just not another open-world role-playing experience. It’s a tale of survival on multiple scales, both within your village and outside of it, while at the same time a simple adventure that we’ve seen before in other titles, such as Skyrim. Outward is huge in girth and option, but small in focus and mission, which makes the adventure that much sweeter.
Let’s dig right into it.
The game starts by creating your character, as any good open-world RPG should start. You have plenty of choices when customizing your adventurer, so you’re not short on how far you can go with it. For those of you who have ever discounted the ‘random’ button on character creation, I highly recommend pushing it for this one. It’s beautifully random with its visual delivery.
After creating your character, the game dives into the story, where your character has survived a shipwreck, one of the lucky. Of course, just because you survived it doesn’t mean that there isn’t peril lying ahead of you, mostly from angry family members who blame you for the death of their loved ones (and it’s wrongful blame). The village of families, which is none too happy with your survival, gives you two choices to pay back money they feel owed to them by your survival — a blood oath mission completion or paying them back in silver. Either choice is difficult, as you probably can guess, and both choices will have you going out into the wilds for a long grind. Oh yeah, you have five days to both either or suffer the consequences, and the game does time night/day changes. Super duper, eh?
Regardless of your choice, the crux of the game is going into the wilds. The game, as you will see when you start gathering yourself together from the shipwreck, wants you to go around, explore, collect, build, and make your character unique to what you think he/she should be. This is one of those games where you’ll have ‘your’ own adventure in the game, which is going to be incredibly different from other adventurers experience. While everyone might be on the same hypothetical rails as the next gamer when it comes to story, developer Nine Dots has encouraged you to go and find your own path to victory. This is a classic open-world structure and one that should breed a lot of fun videos on Twitch.
Now, to add more uniqueness to the mix, the biggest point of interest in the game is going to be how you arm and cloth your character, which will certainly draw PC folks to the Outward flames. I saw from my short stint with the game that gathering equipment, even down to my backpack, brought a unique style to my adventure. I’m still wanting a backpack that has that lantern hook on it to match my clothing — yes, that is where I’m at with this game right now. More to the point, character customization and the amount of options that Nine Dots has provided the gamer will make the adventure a unique experience from one gamer to the next. That makes this game a whole lot deeper/richer experience and will be a huge selling point for the game. No, I’m not joking. For those non-PC folks out there, this is a certain feature that PC gamers froth at the mouth for when playing an open-world adventure. Is it odd? A little, but I understand why they love it.
A little less unique to the open-world package is the grind you will most certainly go through with Outward. While the exploration will certainly keep your attention in the right place, the grind that you’ll need to do to get through the game is going to be thick. That isn’t a bad thing because all good open-world titles request a bit of grinding, but you just need to emotionally prepare yourself to get through it because this is the only way the game will let you improve your situation. You will kill enemies, which will occasionally kill you. You will get close to achieving goals and fall short from time-to-time, but that will be okay because the game will put you right back into it. There’s a lot of ‘usual’ going on with the structure here, but all of this is expected with an open world grind. I can’t tell you how many times I died in this game. It was a lot. For example, the first time I died was by the hands of two enemies walking in the fields with me. I had thought the ‘alt’ key was my sword button, but apparently, that is left mouse button (forgive me, I’m a console gamer). They killed and rag-dolled my character, then I woke up in my village naked/afraid/unarmed. I gathered my stuff up and went again. And died again. It was a dance of death and exploration pretty much the entire time I was playing, but I was expecting this from Outward. That’s how you die and that is how you get back in the saddle. Now, while I did wake up and gather my things to go out again, I was brought down to minimum health, which I had to go and rectify. I’m not sure why that wasn’t brought back up when I awoke, as it does make sense that you would heal when you come back to life again, but it was an added element of difficulty to the grind. I can dig change.
Adding to the adventure and grind, the game does feature a lot of crafting in both the food/weapon/magic arena. While my adventure was solely focused on swinging a sword, I did see different ways to gather material and put together food and spells. I know that some of you out there just absolutely go ga-ga over crafting, so I would bet that when this finally gets released in a reviewable form that you’re going to be pleased as punch in what it offers in this arena. It looks incredibly complicated and deep, which makes for an engaging time for those gamers who adore that route. You will certainly have a lot of grind motivation to play for in Outward because you will have to gather material to make items. Motivation is never a bad thing with open-world games. Having a healthy amount of motivation to keep up the grind after countless deaths and such is always a good aspect to this type of game. It is what kept Skyrim fascinating and interesting, and I suspect that Outward will fall into the same place with motivation.
All of the above said, Outward is still a work in progress. The good folks at Nine Dots have something solid going on with this open-world game. We’re going to be there for the final release and maybe, just maybe, review this on the PlayStation 4 when it makes it to the market. Until then, keep an eye on this game.
