True to my previous statements, I decided to start playing Outward to see if what I feel is inefficiency and impracticality on the part of a Let’s Play I’m watching is truly those things or if the game really is just that punishing. I’ve even got a friend playing it with me, so we can really replicate the recorded experience. Albeit with the benefit of having watched the stream and having a wiki open on my second monitor. So it’s not exactly the same, but it’s similar enough that I’m pretty sure that some amount of what I’m seeing in the LP is the players’ reach exceeding their grasp. I’m sure some amount of this is the constant awareness that what they’re doing is being recorded and will be put online for entertainment purposes, so they don’t want to spend forty hours doing incremental small journeys out into the wilds to safely collect resources, earn money, and buy skills before they really strike out into the world. I mean, I haven’t done that yet, either, but I am in the process of doing that, to the tune of buying all the basic skills available to me in the starting city that meshed with my chosen sword-and-shield approach. I will probably buy more, yet, just to keep beefing up my repetoire of abilities so I can bust out the appropriate weapon as needed, but I think we’ve hit the point of being as ready as we can be to really make a go of things in the wider world beyond our small town’s gates.

Which is a thorny prospect at the best of times in this mixed survival and adventure game. You need to go outside the safety of your hometown’s walls with enough supplies to survive but not so much stuff that you can’t carry all the loot and treasure you went out to get. You need either the supplies to make food or the food itself. You need a tent or bedroll, supply preparation tools (alchemy kits or cooking pots). You need your backup gear as applicable, your tools of violence, your restoratives that aren’t food, and so much more. Every trip out of town is a game of “what can I afford to leave behind?” that can have incredibly lethal results if you pick wrong and every return to town is a constant trial of “what can I afford to sell?” since you never really know when something might wind up being useful and when it mostly just exists to be sold for money. The game itself doesn’t really help you that much, unless you’re buying recipes, but then even those aren’t always helpful because you might read the description of a dish containing fish and eggs that you got as a quest reward but only the recipe for that food will tell you that it needs to be a specific kind of eggs that don’t come out of birds (fish eggs, would be my guess, to sidestep the rather gross name the game gives to its other, non-bird eggs). Every single excursion is a game of logistics and thats probably why I’m enjoying myself as much as I am. Plus, the fact that all of this stuff goes in your pouch (personal inventory) or backpack (an inventory container) means that you have the ability to drop it if you get into a tight spot since there’s a dedicated drop/pick up your backpack button in this game.

Honestly, the ability to remove and reequip your backpack with a simple button press makes a huge difference. In most other games like this, where inventory is managed incredibly specifically and you’re penalized for carrying too much stuff, you’re stuck with that penalty all the time. Dragon’s Dogma pretty specifically has it set up where you are either weighed down by it or it’s basically gone forever, so having a game where this kind of mechanic is included but that also has additional mechanics built in to take it from a purely punishing element of the game to a neutral, you-can-learn-to-adapt-or-build-around-it mechanic is a very interesting design choice. There’s literally a backpack (with a lower capacity, of course) that specifically doesn’t hinder your movements OR your dodge roll. There’s other backpacks that might slow your movement speed and reduce the viability of your dodge roll to varying degrees, but they also tend to have a much expanded capacity for random crap! There’s even a backpack that keeps your perishable items from rotting as quickly! The whole game has really taken this idea, of needing to manage your inventory, and built a system around it that turns it from something purely onerous to one that feels interesting to play around in. It stops feeling like a punishment for collecting things the way the game demands you do and starts feeling like a puzzle for you to work through.

I’ve yet to see a lot of this in-game, though. I’ve spent some time idly reading the wiki as I’ve gotten curious about things that have come up in my contemplations of the game or that I’ve seen in the LP I’ve been watching, but I’m mostly stuck to mechanics and stuff that the game doesn’t seem to explain despite being a core part of the game, like rules for skills and what all those damage resistance types are and what most abilities and boosts ACTUALLY do. Or what the various damage types are on your weapons, how status effects are applied, and what, exactly, “impact” is beyond clearly being a stat describing the weight of a hit. What’s it mean for that number to be high other than “staggers enemies more quickly” since enemies also deal impact and, as the shield-bearer in my little group, I really need to figure out what it’ll mean to get hit while blocking things. How does my shield’s impact stat counter my enemies’ impact stats? Do I really need to keep my stamina as high as possible, or can I spend some to unlock some magic for myself? Is magic even worth it? So many questions that the game doesn’t really seem to answer, based on watching this LP, and that I’ve yet to find a useful answer for in-game. Which is honestly the most frustrating part of the game. I understand the appeal of getting dropped in the world without knowing stuff, but at least let me find people in the world who understand it so I can figure out how it works without needing to track the exact numbers of what happens to my stamina and hit points every time I get hit, hit someone, block a hit, or do a dodge roll so I can Scientific Method my way through it. Which is a small complaint, considering I seem to play about two hours a week of this game, but it’s on my mind as I contemplate diving ever deeper in this horrible Fandom wiki… These sites really are miserable.