What's next going forward

Hi everyone.

First off, an immense thank you to everyone who joined the Beta and gave us feedback, either positive or negative. It’s been apparent that the Beta has been rocky for many, and even the more convinced players had heavy caveats to their appreciation of the build in your hands.

I admit that I took too long to start responding personally to your messages. At first, I thought the distance would prevent tainting the experience of players, but to be honest, direct communication and transparency were always my preference. I should have been more involved from the start. With that being said, I can assure you that we’ve been monitoring everything very closely, from what’s happening in the discord servers, on Reddit, on Youtube, on streams and the multitude of comment sections everywhere.

While it’s clear that a lot of you are disappointed by the state of the game’s stability, I also see that you all care and only want what’s best for the game. It goes without saying that we feel the same. We need to live up to your expectations for Outward 2. So while you can see from the patch notes that we were reactive, we know that it’s not enough and we’ve taken notes on many areas where we can still improve, aside from the obvious performance issues and bugs.

I also have good news: the majority of comments we received are about things that actually are easy to fix. Sometimes it’s only a matter of changing a value. Aside from bugs, the problems stated are almost never with the systems themselves, but either the balance or the UX. It’s all fixable and often, was already in our to-do list. So I invite you to stay tuned, because it only gets better from here on out.

Here’s an INCOMPLETE list of things we caught on from the feedback that is yet unaddressed, aside from bugs and optimization, that we intend to look into. Note that there is no order of priority established at this point, and we also have our own vision that we don’t want to stray away from.

Settings:

Multimonitor support

Rebinding heavy attack so it’s not a hold

Toggle for bow aim instead of hold as an option

UI:

Inventory filters

Item squares are too small

Recipe already learned should be displayed as such

A button to compare an item with what’s currently equipped

Improve the presentation of the loading screen that is just pitch black

Character Menu selection sticks out like a sore thumb

Controllers tend to not work well in many menus

Opening the map menu should always open up the current location

LD:

More fishing spots

Light sources at the entrances of Simeon’s Bastion to make it easier to find at night

Behaviors:

Enemies tend to be too aggressive

They don’t attack each other often enough

The summoned ghost blocks the player’s path, need to be able to push them

Enemies don’t swap target easily enough

Roaming NPCs don’t engage each others when they should (guards vs robbers, for instance)

Economy:

Sell prices are often too low for the effort (or maybe not enough drops per kill in some cases?)

Combat Balance:

The spark cooldown might be too long?

2h maces lack reach. We will need to adjust the moveset and make it less static

Sword might be too easy to use?

Enemy stability recovers too quickly

Stamina recovery from buffs need to be better

Other Balance:

Start with a tent in inventory

Body temperature changes too quickly

Snacks and meals should be separate buffs

Pouch capacity gains are currently set to % rather than flat values, making them useless

Gamefeel:

Hitting an enemy with a pistol round should have an associated sound / VFX

Movement feels a bit floaty to some

Once again, this list is incomplete, but the point is to show that we’re taking notes of your comments and we will make the most out of the playtest, even if the build was more broken than we all wished. Thank you everyone for your support. We will try to do another patch during the playtest, but we can’t make any promise. It will depend on how transformative such a patch would be and also, making sure we didn’t break something as we tried to implement more fixes. In any case, the work will be reflected when we launch.

Guillaume