Outward 2 Preview: The Survival RPG That Hits Hard

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