Outward is an open-world RPG where you have to survive by any means available to you. There is a loose story along with some NPC dialogue peppered throughout, but this adventure will mostly be shaped by whatever you end up spending your time doing. Nothing is really explained to you, but through playing, you can learn more about the culture of Outward and what kind of a situation you find yourself in when you boot up the game. There’s plenty of examples of effective environmental storytelling and it really goes a long way to make the world of Outward more interesting than it appears at first.

"All in all, combat will most likely be familiar to people who have played an action-RPG in the past decade and the real challenge will come from the variety of enemies you’ll encounter."

To get one thing out of the way up front, Outward is a downright brutal game. You’ll die and struggle against smaller enemies for your first handful of hours. Immediately upon starting your game, you’re given a deadline of 5 in-game days to collect a relatively high amount of money or else you lose your house. I, of course, ended up dying a few times to chickens outside the village and failed to raise enough money, losing my home in the process. This just sets the tone for the rest of the game. Enemies hit hard, tangible progress is slow to come, and to top it all off, there’s no fast travel in this game. Outward strips away many of the niceties that open-world RPGs have come standard with for the past decade and gives you a distinctly “hardcore” experience, for better and for worse.

Controls are easy to get the hang of but they don’t push any boundaries. You have a health and stamina meter and combat should be familiar to anyone who’s tried a Dark Souls title. You have a variety of weapons at your disposal, from broadswords to spears. Managing meter and choosing your opportunities to attack is the name of the game and aside from a few tricks thrown in like deployable traps and spells, it never really deviates. A nice touch the game includes is the ability to instantly drop your backpack at the press of a key. Getting into combat, you’ll need every bit of mobility you can get, so dropping your pack once you find an enemy will become second nature. Combat is serviceable without ever being too exciting. The main issue comes from the lack of fluid motion.

Most of your attacks have heavy ending lag, leaving you unable to block a counterattack from an enemy that stopped being stunned by your hit ages ago. And although the stamina meter is important in balancing out offense and defence, once depleted, it takes far too long to fill back up, killing the pace of battles. All in all, combat will most likely be familiar to people who have played an action-RPG in the past decade and the real challenge will come from the variety of enemies you’ll encounter.

"Environments and character models all have a good amount of detail and creativity present in their designs."

You also have survival aspects to contend with, having to deal with hunger, thirst, sleep, and disease. You have to balance all of these needs if you want to survive in the world of Outward. When you sleep, you’ll have to devote some time to security in order to prevent bandit attacks. But if you spend too long sleeping and repairing weapons at your campsite, you’ll be hungrier and more thirsty when you wake up. If you’re not careful, you can leave yourself in a bad position. And even if you are careful, you can still fumble up and acquire acute indigestion from a raw egg with no real knowledge of how to cure it. Like I said before, Outward is brutal. The information that you need to survive in Outward is in the game but you have to sometimes travel far and wide to find it. Even with its lengthy tutorial that explains the basics, Outward is a beast that needs to be tamed over dozens of hours and countless deaths.

Appropriately, the defining feature of Outward comes from your many deaths. You can’t save your progress in Outward. Instead, every time you die, a scenario will play out and you’ll have to figure out how to progress from there. Sometimes you luck out and get dragged back to the starting village where you can safely resupply.

Other times you won’t be so lucky. One of my favorite moments with this game came from when I died against some bandits, whereupon I was dragged to their mines and forced to slave away. I had plenty of people to talk to, alliances I could have formed, and a few different methods of escape I could have pursued. Eventually, I worked up enough coin to bride a guard into sneaking me out in a bag. These moments really serve to give death some personality in this game. No longer can you just retry and scenario over and over until you win. Now, you’ll have to deal with whatever consequences your defeat brings.

"This game is a big mountain to climb and a lot of the footholds that line the path are loose."

The presentation in Outward is a mixed bag. Environments and character models all have a good amount of detail and creativity present in their designs. The soundtrack also helps set the tone, embracing the ambiance of the world. However, with all these positive aspects, Outward certainly isn’t perfect. Once you’re out in the field, you’ll run into framerate dips and graphical glitches that occasionally serve to take you out of the experience. If you’re unlucky, you might even have your Pearlbird quarry clip up the side of a mountain while you’re in the middle of a hunt.

Voice acting is all on-par for this type of game and does its job. Outward does have this strange habit of only voicing some of the written dialogue or in some cases completely different dialogue. Whether it’s because of budget restraints or time deadlines, it’s a distracting aspect of the game and instead of creating a half-hearted attempt, Outward may have been better off opting out of voice acting entirely.

It should be said that Outward is also playable split-screen with a friend. It’s staggering how performance doesn’t suffer much from this and the developers should be commended for putting this into the final product. Both players start together and can synergize abilities and weapons to progress through this harsh world side by side. A couple of adventurers may have to share the loot, but they can also revive each other when one gets knocked out which is more than worth the price of admission as far as I’m concerned. Playing with a pal is a great addition and should really help players ease into this type of game if they’re not used to it.

Outward is a game that is not for everyone. If the idea of dying over and over without much meaningful progression for hours at a time doesn’t appeal to you, this game may not be for you. But if you stick through the grind, you might be able to sift through the jank of this game and find something worthwhile. This game is a big mountain to climb and a lot of the footholds that line the path are loose. But at the end of your trek, you might find an experience that you can’t have anywhere else. Because after the hours of tears and frustration, Outward can end up giving you satisfaction in something as simple as finding a backpack.

This game was reviewed on the PC.

Survival games are a dime a dozen, even in this day and age, but Nine Dots Studio’s Outward is special. Playing more like a harsh immersive strategy RPG akin to Kenshi, the title sees players adventuring through a world where they are pretty much a nobody. Of course, players can work together to ensure further success while opening up new avenues of gameplay.

In a new trailer, the developer showcases some of the strengths of co-op. You can guard your partner in the night so that they recover fully, designate one person as the inventory mule while the other fights, and so on. It’s even possible to use an ally’s magic seals to create spells. Split-screen support is also enabled, which is a bonus.

The difficulty will scale up in response as well. So while it’s possible for both players to go exploring on their own, the best chance for survival lays in sticking together. For those uninterested in co-op, Outward is still playable as a full solo experience. It’s out today for Xbox One, PS4, and PC.

"Outward is an RPG first. Survival mechanics are meant to supplement the experience to make you feel human. Our goal isn’t to make a game about a constant fight against starvation."

How emphasized are the survival mechanics in the game?

Outward is an RPG first. Survival mechanics are meant to supplement the experience to make you feel human. Our goal isn’t to make a game about a constant fight against starvation. A game day lasts about an hour, during which the player needs essentially two meals per day, and it is easy to plan multiple meals ahead. We feel that we struck a good balance to make sure it is neither irrelevant nor tedious.

Can you elaborate on how the online elements of Outward work?

The host player can invite a friend to jump into his world to assist him. The joining player can either create a new player or load a character from his/her own saved games. All character progress is saved for both players, but only the host player’s story progression is saved.

What exactly do the dynamic defeat scenarios in Outward entail?

When the player is defeated, there is a variety of different scenarios that can happen depending on the area where the player was defeated and which type of enemy was the closest when they were defeated. Scenarios can be very simple, such as a slide explaining you were found by a passing hunter and brought back to the nearest town, or can be elaborate, such as being captured as a slave by bandits. Where the player respawns and in which condition varies greatly, and it sometimes can even be beneficial. Whenever the players are KOed, we want them to nervously ask themselves “Oh, what will happen to me this time?”

Spellcasting in Outward seems to be centred on step-by-step approach- can you talk to us about what exactly this entails, and how it’ll function?

Every important spell require some pre-requisite to be met, usually implying a step by step setup before the final delivery. For instance, to cast a rune spell, the player must equip the appropriate magical tome called a Lexicon, and cast the correct runes in the right order. Another example would be a fire sigil, which requires you to expand a firestone to place a magic circle on the floor, and then casting a spark while standing in that magic circle to be able to cast a fireball. Everything feels more involved that way, and it leads to exploration in how to cast those spells and how to efficiently pull them off in a fight.

In fact, even melee special skills follow that formula, requiring from the player some specific conditions such as being under an enraged status or a focus status to do skills such as the Predator Leap or the Precise Strike. The key to win in Outward is preparation, and our skills reflect that.

"We made a game that is intentionally out of our scope because it’s all part of our vision."

You have a pretty small team at Nine Dots Studio, especially for a game as large and ambitious as Outward seems to be- can you talk to us about how you and the rest of the team are handling development of the project? Is a project of this scope a heavy undertaking for a smaller team, or do you feel you’re perfectly equipped to take it on?

We made a game that is intentionally out of our scope because it’s all part of our vision. Nine Dots was founded on the principle that healthier management of game developers such as giving more autonomy, avoiding crunch time, spending more time in pre-production and avoiding wasting time on unused assets, would result in not only happier developers, but more productive as well.

In a way, we have something to prove to the whole industry, and this is why we make games that are “over ambitious”. We want people claiming that crunch is necessary to use us as demonstration that it’s not true. We’re trying to send a message, and we’re also making a dream project while we’re at it. Of course, being a much smaller team means that we must make compromises, and we’re not trying to make a game devoid of flaws. We’re focusing on making something unique, rather than trying to be perfect, as it is the best way to use what resources we have.

Split screen co-op is something that we see less and less of in games these days, so people are quite excited about its inclusion in Outward, especially given its nature as an exploration heavy open world RPG. What was the thought behind the decision to include such a feature in the game?

I have such fond memories of player games in splitscreen with friends or with my brother, and I thoroughly enjoy playing games with my wife as well. That’s how she discovered that she loved shooters, because we went through Gears of War and Army of Two together. I spent so much time playing Skyrim and Oblivion and I simply wished that was an experience I could share with her sometimes, and I knew I wasn’t the only one who wanted a game like that.

Truth be told, the inclusion of split screen in Outward was an extremely difficult challenge, both from a design and technical perspective. We had to make heavy sacrifices to make it work. Making it happen in our game made us understand why it was so rare nowadays, but that’s exactly why we should be doing it. Games need to offer something unique to distinguish themselves from the rest on the market.

How much of an emphasis does Outward put on a set narrative and storytelling?

Outward has three different storylines and we feel that those stories have something to say. It’s not just an excuse to go from point A to point B, and we tried to steer away from clichés. However, we’re not well equipped as a studio to do high budget narrative delivery. There is no lip sync or elaborate cutscenes, which makes it hard to present that story through trailers or other promotional assets. So we had to focus on substance. We touch themes of collectivity versus individualism, religion and faith, inequality of aptitude, among others. We also offer multiple perspectives on the conflicts through the various factions you can join.

Still, the game offers a lot of freedom and ultimately, it’s the player who will decide how much importance the story will have for them.

Do player choices impact the story and the world? If so, how big of an impact are we looking at?

The player can affect the story and the world in two ways: choices and failures. It is one thing to make a choice that can have consequences, but not a lot of games ask of the player to accept their failures and move on. When the player is handed a task, that task is more often than not tied to a time limit. The whole world isn’t waiting for you to get a move on. As for the nature of those consequences, I don’t want to spoil it but I can tell you this much: in a few cases they can be catastrophic in nature.

"Outward is meant to make you think like an adventurer would. We want the players to be scared of enemies and feel the need to prepare accordingly before heading into danger."

Is Outward an experience that is geared specifically for those who enjoy a challenging experience, or does it make concessions to be more accessible to other kinds of players as well?

Outward is meant to make you think like an adventurer would. We want the players to be scared of enemies and feel the need to prepare accordingly before heading into danger. It simply wouldn’t make sense to make the game more accessible, it goes against the vision. However, if the player takes to heart the basic concepts of the game, such as trying to outsmart your enemies instead of rushing in, difficult combat situations can be resolved quickly and efficiently. That bandit is giving you trouble? Poison him and play defensively until he dies. That monster is looking scary? Place some traps before provoking it and consume that special potion you were keeping for a special occasion. Just don’t expect the game to hand things to you on a silver platter.

Do you have any plans for launching on the Switch?

Not at the moment.

Will the game will feature Xbox One X specific enhancements? What can players expect if they are playing the game on Xbox One X? Is 4K/60fps on the cards? And how will the PS4 Pro version turn out in terms of resolution and frame rate?

Both the Xbox One X and PS4 Pro versions will feature improved framerate and higher resolutions. We are also working on other improvements at the moment such as enhanced post processing for both platforms.

How is the game running on the original Xbox One and PS4, frame rate and resolution wise?

Our emphasis in development was focusing on the core experience by providing lean, well optimized builds. Players will not have to worry about having the best hardware available on the market to get the most out of Outward.

Next gen is coming sooner or later. From a development perspective, what is your biggest expectation from PS5 and Xbox Scarlett?

I honestly just want more power, as the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One were already relatively weak when they launched 5 years ago, and the X and Pro are still attached to those weaker consoles since game behavior must stay the same. Higher resolution and higher framerates are a nice bonus, but they do very little to the game experience for most players. If the base console is more powerful, then we can use that power for gameplay instead of only low impact visual adjustments.

This might be irrelevant however if we move toward playing games on the cloud and relying on a fast internet connection instead of powerful hardware. This could be much more disruptive than anything else the gaming industry has faced during the last 5 years.

"I personally don’t like microtransactions as I feel that they offer little value to the player making those purchases, especially if they are temporary buffs and such. It’s important for any industry to be accountable for their actions and to make a genuine effort to provide something of value to its customers."

Do you think cross platform will be one of the defining features of next-gen consoles?

It could be. While I think it’s nice for players to be able to play together no matter the platform, I predict that this will make big games bigger and leave even less room for the smaller games to find their audience. There can only be so many multiplayer games that are highly active at the same time due to the network effect. If all platforms share the same ecosystem, the number of commercially viable multiplayer games might diminish.

What is your take on the ongoing drama of loot boxes and microtransactions?

I personally don’t like microtransactions as I feel that they offer little value to the player making those purchases, especially if they are temporary buffs and such.

It’s important for any industry to be accountable for their actions and to make a genuine effort to provide something of value to its customers.

I feel that the game industry is pushing its luck recently and if we don’t collectively clean up our act like with did in the past with age rating boards, the government will step in and do it for us. Those decisions will be made by people who are less likely to understand gaming and it worries me.

Cross-play continues to be a major topic of discussion in the industry, especially in recent days with all that’s been going on with the ongoing controversy surrounding Sony and a number of indie developers. The hope remains that by the time the next generation of consoles comes around, such issues will have been put to rest, and cross-play will be a widely accepted and used feature.

As per Nine Dots Studio CEO Guillaume Boucher-Vidal, though, who’s serving as the creative lead on the developer’s upcoming open world RPG Outward, though cross-play obviously has many big advantages, it’s also something that could be disruptive for smaller multiplayer focused games. Essentially, according to Vidal, bigger multiplayer games might grow bigger, which would mean that the smaller ones might find it even harder to compete.

“While I think it’s nice for players to be able to play together no matter the platform, I predict that this will make big games bigger and leave even less room for the smaller games to find their audience,” said Boucher-Vidal in an exclusive interview with GamingBolt. “There can only be so many multiplayer games that are highly active at the same time due to the network effect. If all platforms share the same ecosystem, the number of commercially viable multiplayer games might diminish.”

In the same interview, Boucher-Vidal also spoke to us about what he expects from the hardware of next gen consoles in general, and how he hopes their added capabilities will be put to use in future software. Read more about that through here.

Our full interview with Boucher-Vidal will be going live soon, so stay tuned. Nine Dots Studio’s Outward, meanwhile, is scheduled for a 2019 release on PC.

Many have been predicting that the next generation of consoles from Sony and Microsoft is not too far away, and that 2020 is most likely when we will see their releases. Based on several recent reports, that certainly seems to be the case. Some developers are already working on next gen games, while it seems Sony has shifted its internal focus for software development to the PS5 as well.

With the PS5 and the Xbox Scarlett surely not too far away now, questions about what they will bring to the table have become more pertinent than ever. But what do game developers themselves hope to see from the next generation of consoles? Recently, we conducted an interview with Guillaume Boucher-Vidal, CEO of Nine Dots Studio – who’re working on the upcoming open world action RPG Outward (on which Boucher-Vidal also serves as the creative lead) – and posed the question to him.

Boucher-Vidal’s response was quite simple- more power. But more powerful hardware isn’t something that he wants to enable better visuals and improved resolutions and frame rates – which he calls a nice bonus – but instead to be able to make advancements in gameplay itself.

“I honestly just want more power, as the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One were already relatively weak when they launched 5 years ago, and the X and Pro are still attached to those weaker consoles, since game behaviour must stay the same,” he said. “Higher resolution and higher frame rates are a nice bonus, but they do very little to the game experience for most players. If the base console is more powerful, then we can use that power for gameplay instead of only low impact visual adjustments.”

That said, Boucher-Vidal is wary of the possibility of the industry shifting to cloud gaming and as such having to rely more on fast internet connections instead of powerful hardware. According to him, such a scenario could end up being quite disruptive. “This might be irrelevant, however, if we move toward playing games on the cloud and relying on a fast internet connection instead of powerful hardware,” he said. “This could be much more disruptive than anything else the gaming industry has faced during the last 5 years.”

While there has clearly been a much greater push for improved cloud technology and game streaming in recent times, there are many who believe that that is more about laying down groundwork for the future, and that traditional consoles won’t be replaced by cloud streaming any time soon. Given the intensive large scale infrastructure stability requirements needed for cloud-streaming to be able to do that, it seems unlikely that Boucher-Vidal’s fears will come true any time soon.

Stay tuned to GamingBolt for our full interview with Guillaume Boucher-Vidal.