u/LordMugs

This post might come as a bit of a rant because I really tried to like Outward as it has many mechanics and features I would enjoy in a singleplayer game but I felt that it REALLY was disrespecting my time.

For those who don't know Outward, the premise of the game is basically being an immersive RPG experience, which means eating, drinking, sleeping and being an utterly useless idiot in the beginning. Thing is, I love all that premise, so why not give it a try?

The game begins with you having to pay a heavy sum to your town's leader as your family owes the town and you're supposed to pay the debt. You're in deep shit and have to get the money one way or the other, and that's fun! You can head out of town and try killing something... And you're dead. But that's fine! You get back up in the town and you can go right back... Or not. Your health and stamina got "burned", which means they won't regen until you sleep. So you go after someplace to sleep and back to exploring! This time you got a backpack with you, but it slows you down and you can't roll properly. There's a button to put your backpack down and you must do that for EVERY enemy until you get better gear/get better at the combat. Well that's starting to get tiresome...

The problem with all those mechanics is that I've played for quite a few dozen hours, but they never get better! You unlock all sorts of magic but you never get a way to fast travel, only maybe a 15% speed boost from a mask. You go to explore and if you die like 3 times you get teleported to fuck knows where and have to rest then WALK all the way to a town to get food/water to go back to the place you died to try again. It's a fantasy game! Why is there no fast travel, albeit limited? Even a mount would be better than having to WALK THE ENTIRE MAP! And here's the kicker: when you're walking the first time the game is absolutely amazing and you probably wouldn't want to just teleport somewhere, but after you backtrack like 5 times, well, there's better use of my time than doing that.

Now Outward has it's fanbase so I get people liking it but... Come on! Backtracking the same area for the 10th time doesn't add anything to the player nor the game, so why do it? Why make the gameplay loop involve dropping a backpack and then going back to get it? Or having to rest every time you die (in a game with difficult combat that you learn by trial and error). Why not make the game's gameplay loop the best the game has to offer, which are the times you're exploring, learning the lore, getting better at combat and getting loot/upgrades? I really wish this game wasn't fighting so hard to waste my time, as it has a great worldbuilding, magic system and exploration.

First of, sorry but I think the vanilla combat sucks (and yes I do know how it works, and yeah I know there's lots of fans out there of the combat) and I couldn't get into it the first time I tried, but now I'm playing with the total overhaul openmw pack AND n'garde (hence the heresy) and holy shit the game is awesome!

I may sound crazy but somehow the combat seems better than vanilla Skyrim? The introduction of glancing blows instead of misses, parrying and the balance of the modlist made it so every combat feels different and fun. I actually feel the need to use paralysis, fatigue drain and other debuffs instead of just spamming left click as I found myself doing in Skyrim vanilla before finishing even the first dungeon (or stealth archer everything). Parrying is also very satisfying somehow, despite the aged animations.

And having the tamriel rebuilt project is also great, the world feels huge and everywhere I go there's some actual content, it's the best exploration I've experienced in ages. Sadly I can't say which content is TR and which content is vanilla (they're too well integrated) but I'm finding Morrowind the best elder scrolls game by a mile! Writing is also great, the dialogue system works pretty well and I'm sad we'll not see it many times in the future (if at all)