u/Thopterthallid

It drops me in a camp with some non-hostile scourge with no context and there's nowhere to go. There's a gap to jump across but it feels impossible to make it without jump ability.

Edit: Okay it turns out they just disable blink in this spot for some god-forsaken reason.

Sorry for dumb question, new player and trying to wrap my head around it. My Renegades contract says complete a sabotage mission, but there's none available today? Does that happen? Am I just missing something?

Tell me if you've heard this story:

You love Outward and convince your friend to try it. You both exit Cierzo and come across a pair of bandits. Your friend goes down quickly because you couldn't deal with your bandit fast enough to give them an assist. You bring them back but now they have mostly burnt health and stamina. You get into a couple more fights but they aren't having fun and they just never play again.

I've had 4 separate friends bounce off of Outward because they just cannot find a way to break through enemy defenses and feel completely helpless, yet all of them adored the concepts and mechanics.

Just as a quick aside, I'm the guy who recently made the post about getting every achievement. I wrote the stickied guide at the top of the subreddit. I have 600 hours in Outward. I've finished New Sirocco four times. I'm not saying this to brag, but I want to point out that I have at least some level of expertise.

I recently got to play with someone who has a lot of experience with Outward as well and we decided to do a co-op playthrough together. It was miserable. Enemies just don't really get staggered. Even using powerful counter attacks like Pommel Counter don't deal enough impact to stagger lowly bandits and hyenas and you'll often take a (bloated attack value) hit anyway when you try.

We decided to experiment a bit. We downloaded the Raid Mode mod which allows you to customize how scaling works. All we adjusted was to turn off enemy impact resistance scaling. We kept the higher health, damage, and impact. Suddenly the game was a blast again. Was it much easier? Yes. Was it very cheesable? Yes. Encounters against one enemy felt maybe too easy, but encounters against two or more actually felt perfect.

So what are the main issues with co-op scaling?

• 1: It's not even especially obvious that enemies get stronger in co-op. I didn't even know for a very long time and if I did I very likely could have salvaged the experiences of the friends who bounced off.

• 2: Changing how much stability enemies has fundamentally changes how you fight them from a "give-and-take" method to just kinda playing footsies until they're dead.

• 3: The way enemies are scaled sort of implies the intended method to overcome their stability is for both players to attack them simultaneously. This makes sense in 2v1 scenarios but in 2v2 scenarios it's entirely antithetical to people's natural instinct to say "I'll get the one on the right, you get the one on the left."

• 4: I think it's safe to say that for a great many players, their first time playing will be with a friend who is introducing them to the game. If they try and fight a bandit alone (like in a common 2v2 scenario), they're going to be fighting a bandit that is so much stronger than they're ready for.

So what is a good solution? Don't change the enemy stats. Change the encounter. How do we do this? Well there's lots of ways!

Increase the number of enemies in a given patrol.

Maybe instead of one pearlbird, there's two. Maybe instead of two hyenas, there's three. This has three main benefits. The first is that it visually conveys to the players that this is a more powerful encounter than what they'd see in single player and it needs to be approached differently. The second is that there's just a little more loot to spread around. Thirdly, it kinda just makes for a more exciting and dynamic skirmish.

Replace encounters with different enemy types.

A Bandit Archer is replaced with an Ice Witch. A Bandit Lieutenant is replaced with a Bandit Defender. You could argue that this also sort of counts as just boosting the stats of an enemy, but it comes with the massive upside of visually conveying to the players that this enemy is tougher. A guy in thick plate armor with a tower shield and a kanabo is very easily identifiable as being a tougher challenge than a cloth-wearing guy with a machete.

Give enemies new actions that they only use in co-op.

Maybe the bandits can toss the odd fragmentation grenade. Maybe hyenas can howl to call for help and spawn an extra hyena to join the fight when outnumbered. I think that just giving enemies actions specifically designed to deal with multiple players is a great idea.

Give enemies a longer detection range in co-op.

Traveling in groups is inherently less stealthy. This wouldn't make combat encounters harder at all, just force players into more of them.

Maybe even create unique enemies that specifically only appear in co-op.

A necromancer who can summon ghosts, or tiny tuanosaurs that flee and attack with ranged poison spit when players stick close together but get more aggressive with claws when players split up.

I feel like these ideas solve the issues of the overwhelming nature of stat boosted enemies without making the game cheesable for co-op players. Any thoughts?

Do I need to download an app? Is it tied to my scene card?

But like, don't break any reddit/subreddit rules.

My recommended pages are filled to the brim with either Xenoverse 3 clickbait or drama about the green guy that I could not care less about. I hate Youtubers sometimes.

It always bugged me that Super Attacks that utilize a sword don't actually use the sword equipped in your accessories slot. You can put a sword there, and during the animation often times your character will retrieve the sword from the position where the accessory rests, but the sword on your back stays put. I think accessories should be reworked into an equipment system.

As an example: Imagine you want to use the super attack Rakshasa's Claw. That's Janemba's move where he uses a sword and fires projectiles from it. You should be required to have a sword accessory equipped. That way, they could have it so that the actual sword you choose to equip (or perhaps power pole, bansho fan, Whis Staff, etc.) would be present in your hand during the animation. You could do the same for attacks that would require a tail, a gun, evil containment jar, majin energy stealer etc.

What else can we do with it? Well maybe that same slot has other utility use-cases. Like King Kai's training weights or Roshi's shell. Wearing them would decrease your speed or stats but increase your EXP gain, but they'd physically appear on your character to really sell the fantasy of playing in a Dragon Ball world (as opposed to just equipping a Super Soul).

Beyond that, maybe equipping a scouter alerts you to random encounters that may appear during Parallel Quests (or whatever new repeatable content we'll be doing in XV3), offering us a chance to hunt down temporal interlopers for unique equipment. Maybe equipping a dragon radar alerts us that a Dragon Ball is hidden somewhere in the mission. That alone is a more fun way to hunt dragon balls than spamming PQ15 over and over.

Thoughts? I'm tired of accessories always feeling like halloween costume flair. I want a scouter that actually does scoutery stuff.