Outward 2 was recently delayed from its planned July 2026 Early Access launch to 2027, with the team saying beta feedback made it clear the game needed more time. What were the biggest areas of feedback that convinced you the delay was necessary, and what should players expect to feel has changed the most when they next play it?

Stability is the big outlier. Optimization and debugging takes a lot of time and Outward 2 is a very big game. Expectations for Early Access games are that it’s okay to have some bugs, but the experience should be pleasant. Crashes and disconnections while playing in multiplayer were frequent, and we’ve noticed some specific hardware and OS configurations that slowed the game’s performance to a crawl. So if you mix bad stability along with many small things that need work, such as economic or combat balance feeling off, you end up with frustrations and apprehensions in too many areas at once and instead of a sense of curiosity. We decided to extend the game’s development not to add more things, but to offer a tighter package that announces more clearly where we want to go from there.

You’ve said the goal is for there to be a “stark jump” between the beta and the Early Access launch. Does that primarily mean better stability and polish, or are you also using the extra time to rethink balance, onboarding, combat feel, quest structure, and world readability?

The biggest jump should be in making an experience that feels solid rather than holding together with duct tape. So debugging is important, but also the impact of balance changes can’t be understated. The balance in the playtests were not final, but clearly it’s been a sticking point for many players. Balance is something that is very easy to iterate on during Early Access, and it’s one of those things that is a lot easier to tweak just right when you have a dialog with your players. But we’ll need to be closer to the final intent to keep our players engaged. Something as trivial as how much stamina you recover from drinking water can impact a player’s experience.

As for onboarding or quest structure, while we do intend to improve the tutorial, it will remain a separate mode and we don’t intend to hold the player’s hand once they start their adventure. It’s part of the vision of Outward to feel overwhelmed at first. But we need to make sure we give enough tools to the player to overcome those initial challenges.That’s the fine line we need to hit in the balance.

"The biggest jump should be in making an experience that feels solid rather than holding together with duct tape."

The first Outward built its identity around immersion through friction – preparation, navigation, survival, danger, and consequences. With Outward 2, where did you draw the line between preserving that friction and making the game feel more responsive and approachable?

Essentially, we never thought about it in terms of if there was too much friction or not enough. Instead, we focused on whether or not that friction was going with or against the sense of immersion. How stiff combat was in Outward 1 was due to technical/budget constraints, not intentional friction. However, making the combat feel very deliberate was important. If we can make combat deliberate without making the player frustrated that their avatar is unable to do something they could do themselves, it’s a gain worth pursuing.

As for making the game more approachable, part of it is having a compelling carrot. In Outward, many players felt that the story was an afterthought unless they played through all factions and realized how complex of a tapestry of events and motivations the story actually was. So having more compelling characters, story beats, a better rhythm and, eventually, fully voiced dialogs should give some motivation to keep pushing initially. So if the experience is less clunky, more visually appealing, with a more involved story and a world that feels more fleshed out, I think that we’re giving a better reason to stick through the friction than we did in Outward 1.

Outward 2’s combat is noticeably more fluid, with dodge steps, rolls, cancels, dual-wielding, smoother blocks, and more flexible weapon combinations. Since players now have more control in combat, how have enemies, stamina costs, encounter placement, and punishment been rebalanced to keep the game difficult without feeling unfair?

The speed and flexibility we gave to the player had to be matched with higher aggression from the enemies, and we also gave them more ways to attack from a distance. We also still need to work on what are the proper stamina costs for actions now that they are faster, since it means there are more opportunities to land multiple hits, or more attacks to dodge in a shorter amount of time.

We want to be very careful with the number of enemies we have to face at a time. So our levers of balance are more based on behaviors and statistics.

At the end of the day though, the lesson is that real combat is not fair. You should give yourself an extra edge if you want to survive a 2 versus one encounter, or to fight against a monster that is multiple times your size. I think the worst thing we can do is to pretend that it’s fair while it’s not. If, from the outset, you understand that the world is unfair towards you, then you start approaching combat differently. That’s when it pays to be clever and prepared.

"At the end of the day though, the lesson is that real combat is not fair."

The Exercise system sounds like a major shift away from traditional XP and levels, tying growth to finite micro-achievements across combat, crafting, and survival. How does this system change the way players naturally build their character, and how much room is there for non-combat-focused progression?

I foresee two different approaches. Either the player will choose the upgrades that naturally offer themselves to them as they play with whichever playstyle came organically to them, or they’ll make a plan of where they want to take their characters and influence how they play to speed up their ascension. Both approaches are fine and viable. While some requirements are tied to non-combat gameplay, the rewards are always at least in some fashion relevant to combat aptitudes. The reason for this is that the other things we can do rely more on know-how than on statistical advantages.

I think the biggest impact is that your character will grow more slowly but also more gradually. In Outward 1, once the ball started rolling, finishing your character’s build could go very fast. Now, instead of a final growth spur, your journey will reward you gradually, which in my opinion better simulates the experience of learning and growing.

Early Access is planned to launch with three of four regions and only part of each faction questline, while the full game is targeting four regions and three major questlines. How are you structuring Early Access so that it feels like a meaningful adventure rather than an incomplete slice of the final game?

There’s custom content such as level design and story, then there’s systemic content such as character builds and mechanical exploration. At first, we will lean more into the sandbox experience to keep our players busy, but it’s our intent to prioritize the rest of the story and regions within the first big updates to come, so that they quickly get a sense that almost all of it is there. That’s when we can start surprising them with extra layers of depth!

Narrative delivery seems to be one of the big areas you want to validate during Early Access, especially before committing to full voice acting. What did you learn from the first game’s more emergent storytelling, and how much more authored, character-driven, or faction-driven will Outward 2’s story be?

The story in Outward was mostly about witnessing a series of events enacted from enormous factions, as just one among many to serve the organizations and without ever being at the center of the attention. This time around, in order to feel more the stakes of the story and get a deeper connection with the characters, we came up with smaller factions, also implying that your role is more central for that smaller group. The stakes are just as high as in Outward 1, but there is more space to intimately know who is involved. I rarely feel like the characters are really important in open world games, so this approach is our attempt to break the pattern.

Outward 2 is adding a more alive world through seasonal changes, region-specific hazards, patrols, dynamic encounters, and stronger navigation demands. How are you making the world denser and more readable without compromising the series’ refusal to rely on GPS-style guidance and hand-holding?

Honestly my only answer to this is a simple one: aside from maps, add more signs on the roads to help figure out the way

"I think the most frustrating elements are when you feel like there’s nothing you could have done to reach a different outcome."

Preparation seems even more central this time, with traps, poisons, potions, sigils, specialized gear, backpacks, mules, camping equipment, food, weather protection, and wound management all playing into survival. How do you make these systems feel like meaningful strategy rather than busywork?

In most survival games, you fill up your needs to get rid of handicaps. In Outward, that’s the first step but then eventually you do it instead because it strengthens your playstyle. So your choice of tent, backpack, food all might change based on the fact you want to play a mage, for instance. So you go from doing it because you need to, to doing it because you want to.

Of course you probably don’t want a sprained ankle and a concussion, but that’s different. For wounds or illnesses, we went with something that was more mechanically complex than just a lowered stat that can easily be healed whenever. That way, we make the player shift their mindset and acknowledge the consequence of their state, rather than just power through it.

Defeat scenarios, wounds, time skips, stolen gear, quest timers, and Hardcore mode’s permanent-save risk all sound like they could create amazing stories, but also real frustration. After the beta, how are you tuning those consequences so setbacks remain memorable and fair rather than demoralizing?

I think the most frustrating elements are when you feel like there’s nothing you could have done to reach a different outcome. For that, we need to ensure that we distribute enough tools (such as traps, potions and ammo) and enough knowledge about those tools (such as hints through dialogs, crafting recipes, early opportunities).

During the beta, I feel that we could have done a better job with that early distribution, in order to get them started. Our approach is to subtly nudge, but never to push them outright towards the answers. Some people might not catch on and that’s a risk we’re quite willing to take.

Creative director Guillaume Boucher-Vidal, also the CEO of Nine Dot Studios, acknowledged the suddenness of this decision on the studio’s official site. However, “the truth is that if we just stick to the plan stubbornly, we’re delivering a product that might not satisfy your expectations. The last thing we want to do is disappoint fans of Outward, and there have been a lot of comments stating that they wish for the game to spend more time in development before the launch. The point of a Beta is to listen to feedback, and so we will.”

Of course, Boucher-Vidal acknowledged that those who had planned their Summer break around playing the game. “It sucks for you, and I personally apologize to everyone affected this way. However, it would be even worse if you ended up playing something over your vacation that you were not even happy with.”

He also noted that it’s difficult to assuage “the appropriate degree of stability expected for Early Access. The best we can do is take a hard, honest look at the game, and at our team, and ask: in a few weeks, will this be good enough to charge money for?” Considering the team wants a “stark jump” in from the beta to early access that “we earn the trust of our players.” Clearly, that wasn’t possible.

However, Nine Dots Studio is taking it on the chin and compared it to the developer’s “equivalent of a defeat scenario.” “A setback and we come back better prepared.”

Much like its predecessor, Outward 2 is all about exploring a fantasy world and doing your best to survive. Enemies can often be overwhelming, and failure is highly likely, but death isn’t always the end. Sometimes, you may wake up in a different area entirely and try to find your way back.

As punishing as it sounds, the realism, lack of handholding and sense of freedom are ultimately what attracts players. Whether the sequel can surpass the highs of its predecessor remains to be seen, but at least it comes with co-op, both online and split-screen, so you can suffer with a friend. Stay tuned for updates on a new release date in the meantime.

Corny as it may seem, the results certainly speak for themselves, even if it’s running at 1280×720 and 30 FPS. Even the quality preset is called “Potato”, but only requiring an AMD FX 6300 X6, a GeForce GTX 750 Ti and 8 GB of RAM in this day and age is no small feat.

For those who go various other ways, Ultra settings at 4K/60+ FPS will require a Ryzen 7 7700, an RTX 4080 and a whopping 32 GB of RAM. At least Medium at 1440p/60 FPS offers a solid middle ground, requiring a Ryzen 5 5600X, 16 GB RAM, and an RTX 3060. Check out the full hardware requirements here.

Of course, if you want to get in on the action even sooner, registrations are open for the closed beta, which runs from May 26th to June 8th. January playtest participants receive automatic access, and it’s a good thing, because there’s a new region to explore: La Rescapée.

Don’t let the name, which means “saved and finally safe” in French, fool you. Following an extensive history of violence, it’s home to numerous ghosts. As always, prepare for the worst and hope for the best.

The core game design decision behind this is the fact that players’ characters in Outward 2 will be regular humans, rather than being important parts of some major prophecies about the fate of the world. “That was the big change in our approach,” said Boucher-Vidal. “We made all of our design decisions to be in alignment with this vision. You are just a regular person, and you just want to think like a human would, but in a fantasy world.”

“It’s when you’re aloof, when you’re just like ‘pfft, that’s not so dangerous, I’ve done it before,’ and that’s when life just claps back at you, right? In real life, it’s like that. It should be like that in the design as well.”

Things start out with the in-depth character creation offered in Outward 2, which is a major step up from 2019’s Outward. Boucher-Vidal acknowledged the fact that the first game in the series had “very ugly protagonists,” and that it didn’t offer many options aside from a handful of faces and haircuts. Outward 2, on the other hand, will offer players more options, including things like character backgrounds and traits.

When starting out, players will also have the choice of three different starting locations, each of which will have its own unique quest that sets up the motivation to go on an adventure. One city, for example, frames the player’s decision to set off on an adventure as being the result of desperation from being homeless, while another city will have players having just bought a house, and getting embroiled in strange situations from that. The third city will have the player looking to improve their lot in life after having spent time sweating away in mines.

Tying further into the sense of immersion Nine Dots Studio wants to provide for players, Outward 2 will have a complete year-long calendar system that will also serve as the foundation for a dynamic weather system. Much like in the real world, the seasons in Outward 2 will change depending on the month. Seasons will also affect the world around players rather than simply being visual effects.

Improvements made the combat include allowing players to equip more varying kinds of equipment, including the option to dual wield just about any weapons or shields they might find.

Outward 2 is coming to PC in Summer 2026. The studio has also confirmed that there will be playtests, which can be registered for through Steam.

As a follow-up to the 2019 open-world RPG, Outward 2 continues the tradition of immersive fantasy with extensive consequences for nearly every action. You’re once again starting as an unremarkable individual, but there are three scenarios and 11 backgrounds to influence the beginning. Aurai offers four core regions with unique biomes and a seasonal cycle that spans the entire year.

While it’s a struggle at first (and honestly, every step along the way), you can seek out trainers to improve your skills and leverage the Exercise system to improve passives. Weapons have separate movesets, and combat feels more fluid. You can even bring along a pack mule for extra carrying space.

For those interested in going hands-on ahead of time, Nine Dots Studios will host a playtest. Dates have yet to be revealed, but you can pre-register on Steam.

Among the features of Outward 2, alongside a general improvement to visuals when compared to the original Outward, will be more content than before, including new non-combat encounters, impactful day/night cycles and weather conditions, and even more active NPCs.

The game will also have improved character creation tools, as well as a complete overhaul to progression that brings with it a new exercise tree and gives players tasks to help unlock new improvements and abilities. The combat system is also set to be improved, with more responsive attacks, as well as the addition of dual wielding.

Outward 2 doesn’t yet have a release date, but the game does have a Steam page, which reveals that it will support single-player, as well as online and split-screen co-op.

Nine Dots Studios’ ambitious open world RPG Outward is now available for Xbox One, PS4, and PC. Unlike your typical medieval fantasy titles, Outward is all about pure grit and effort as you conquer any challenges thrown at you. Which usually results in a lot of dying.

Along with survival elements, which see players managing their stamina and staying vigilant while camping, Outward employs a complex magic system. It’s all about crafting the right seals and preparing your magic beforehand as opposed to instantly casting spells. There’s also split-screen co-op, which allows two players to venture into the world together.

So you could battle enemies together, manage different inventories, and even watch over the other person at camp while they recover. Outward doesn’t boast the most impressive visuals, but its gameplay does provide a large amount of choice. Check out the launch trailer below and see if it scratches your own fantasy RPG itch.

Many open world, RPG-style experiences pride themselves on rewarding players and eventually letting them steam-roll through challenges. Nine Dots Studio’s Outward takes a different approach. It’s more survival-oriented, challenging players to stay alert and prepare for the worst. The combat is no exception – check it out in the trailer below, courtesy of IGN.

Even if you’re taking on two simple bandits, Outward is about careful movement and attacking, as opposed to rushing in. Attacking foes on unstable ground will cause them to lose balance, creating openings for further attacks. We also get a look at how features like traps, poison, and magic can tip the scales in your favour.

Outward releases on March 26th for Xbox One, PS4, and PC. Playable solo or co-op, the game sees players embarking to unknown lands and cities, taking on various quests and surviving against all odds. Check out GamingBolt’s interview with the developer to learn more about Outward’s intricacies..