So, since the definitive edition releases next week, my friends and I tried playing Outward.
Initially running through the village and doing the quests and doing the things was fun, prepping to go outside into the world and survive, yay, interesting!
Run into a couple bandits right away, get killed instantly.
I figure I just need to learn the game a bit so I get my ass back out there, insta-killed again and again and again.
I get up and there's purple sparklies around me and I figure I need to rest. I go to the lighthouse to sleep, but they won't let me in, too much time has passed.
Uninstall.
I think it really says something about a game when I feel like Morrowind has a better combat system.
Outward's combat and the game itself is an odd mix of things. It's a streamlined survival game mixed into an RPG. It does the stamina and dodgy-stabby thing so many action RPGs do, but different weapons have wildly different movesets that can involve repositioning or strongly favoring hitting one side. It also has a lot of active skills and consumable items to use. I vaguely recall getting past some harder early fights by having extra lanterns around and using the skill that throws one like a grenade.
It's janky and not a game for everyone. It's not as punishing as a lot of pure survival games, but it is more punishing than most RPGs. You never can get a game over on normal gameplay mode, but often have some work to do to recover items after "dying." I enjoyed my time with it, but I've never recommended it for most people. I also never really got super deep into the combat; Once I discovered that having two or more flintlock pistols slotted let you fire and cycle to another without needing to reload the first, I dealt with most harder encounters by using a brace of pistols. On really hard fights, I didn't bother with normal weapons at all and just chain fired 8 or so pistols. Certainly not the only or intended method given how many skills, spells, buffs, and traps you have available, but survival games are all about leveraging your items.
Outward is what happens when devs take "HaRdEr iS BetTeR" to the limit, and do it by making every aspect of the gameplay punishing with no concerns about fun or respect for the player's time.
"Haha you died! A bandit robbed your body and slavers hauled you away. Now you're somewhere else. But there's no map. And we took all your food. And gear. Good luck!"
A lot of people love that stuff! It's definitely tough and slightly janky, but that hits some nice nostalgia points of Gothic 1 and 2 when I was younger.
There are people that enjoy sticking Sharpies up their urethras, too.
Outward is more than "slightly" janky, though. It's kind of a mess.
I mean, I played quite a bit of it. I really wanted to like it because it has ideas that tick a lot of boxes for me. But every time I started to get into a groove and think maybe it was starting to click, it punched me in the kidneys and laughed.
I've gone back to it a couple times to try again, but never made any significant progress.
So, since the definitive edition releases next week, my friends and I tried playing Outward.
Initially running through the village and doing the quests and doing the things was fun, prepping to go outside into the world and survive, yay, interesting!
Run into a couple bandits right away, get killed instantly.
I figure I just need to learn the game a bit so I get my ass back out there, insta-killed again and again and again.
I get up and there's purple sparklies around me and I figure I need to rest. I go to the lighthouse to sleep, but they won't let me in, too much time has passed.
Uninstall.
I think it really says something about a game when I feel like Morrowind has a better combat system.
Outward really enjoys kicking you in the balls right from the get go, but I found it starts to be enjoyable in a souls-esque way once you've gathered enough gear and skills that a single wolf is no longer a life-or death struggle.
If you ever decide to try it again, the easiest way to finish that first quest is to
go to the town storehouse at the docks, into the cliff your lighthouse is on. Inside, there is another door to a cave you can drop down into an come out at the beach south of the village. If you do so before the deadline, there will be another survivor of the shipwreck you can save who will give you that get-out-of-debt free token that was mentioned as an alternative. You still have to somehow survive the hike back to town though.
Once that's done, other than one other time-sensitive quest (that I think is triggered, rather than a countdown from the start) you're free to take your time doing whatever you want until you pick which faction you want to join, and there is a LOT of content available before then.
Outward is what happens when devs take "HaRdEr iS BetTeR" to the limit, and do it by making every aspect of the gameplay punishing with no concerns about fun or respect for the player's time.
"Haha you died! A bandit robbed your body and slavers hauled you away. Now you're somewhere else. But there's no map. And we took all your food. And gear. Good luck!"
A lot of people love that stuff! It's definitely tough and slightly janky, but that hits some nice nostalgia points of Gothic 1 and 2 when I was younger.
There are people that enjoy sticking Sharpies up their urethras, too.
Outward is more than "slightly" janky, though. It's kind of a mess.
I mean, I played quite a bit of it. I really wanted to like it because it has ideas that tick a lot of boxes for me. But every time I started to get into a groove and think maybe it was starting to click, it punched me in the kidneys and laughed.
I've gone back to it a couple times to try again, but never made any significant progress.
That's a pretty harsh analogy for comparing a video game that lots of people enjoy! I would go more "spicy foods" or something like that, but hey video game subjectivity and all.
I have tracking info for mine as well, but I don't get it until Saturday. I am currently working on building a list of games I think would be good to play on it. I preemptively bought a well rated 1 tb sd card and have verified it's capacity so I should have plenty of room.
I have tracking info for mine as well, but I don't get it until Saturday. I am currently working on building a list of games I think would be good to play on it. I preemptively bought a well rated 1 tb sd card and have verified it's capacity so I should have plenty of room.
Pro Tip: I created a Collection in Steam and just threw every game I want to play on Deck in that colleciton. Makes it real easy to go go on the deck and go to that collection to start installing games from there.
The Deck's home screen will also segregate every game in your library that is Deck verified, which is also helpful.
I have tracking info for mine as well, but I don't get it until Saturday. I am currently working on building a list of games I think would be good to play on it. I preemptively bought a well rated 1 tb sd card and have verified it's capacity so I should have plenty of room.
Pro Tip: I created a Collection in Steam and just threw every game I want to play on Deck in that colleciton. Makes it real easy to go go on the deck and go to that collection to start installing games from there.
The Deck's home screen will also segregate every game in your library that is Deck verified, which is also helpful.
Ah, I was wondering if such a thing existed, glad I don't have to ask now!
Turns out you get ONE profile to cover ALL your non-steam games. So no, they don't really have something functional or useful there. I think that's a shame when we do have controller configuration for non-steam games, this is something nearly as essential.
I'm not sure if it's really possible, but they should impliment user sharable in-game settings for the deck, kinda similar to the "optimized profiles" nvidia experience and whatever the AMD equivalent have
I kind of want to push back here. Performance profiles go hand-in-hand with graphics settings, and those are not easily shared. So it's not something that can be as mindlessly and universally applied like a controller profile with default bindings, except maybe for verified games which are required to default to deck-appropriate settings. Even then profiles could shoot for very different things (max battery life, max FPS with aggressive FSR upscaling, low/smooth FPS at native resoulution) which are all tied in with graphical settings, so you kind of have to already know what you are doing when picking from such options. If you do know what you are doing, there aren't that many sliders to play with. I'm just skeptical on how useful something like that is, without somehow allowing profiles to take control of in-game settings which is a tall order.
A second issue is that I expect a Deck 2 to iterate on performance, rendering all the previous profiles moot. I don't expect that same iteration on the controls.
Yeah, that's what I meant. Something that went beyond the steam deck settings, and was actually able to set the in-game stuff. Ideally, crowdsourced, so you could chose between multiple different ones like the controller layouts.
Like I said before, nvidia experience does have the ability to go look for the config files and set them, but I'm not sure that steam would be able to universalize it.
I have tracking info for mine as well, but I don't get it until Saturday. I am currently working on building a list of games I think would be good to play on it. I preemptively bought a well rated 1 tb sd card and have verified it's capacity so I should have plenty of room.
Yeah, I Black Friday'd a 512GB card last year in preparation for it. I always have way too much stuff installed.
I moved over my custom artwork folder (SteamGridDB type stuff: grids, heroes, logos) from my PC to the Deck too. Just a straight copy/paste using a USB stick (and USB-C adapter)*. I felt proud that I figured out where it was supposed to go in the Deck's file structure! Although it did involve un-hiding files. Probably a lot safer having those set as hidden by default, to be fair. Valve are trying to strike a balance between "the Deck is a Linux PC that can do anything" and "the Deck is primarily a game system so let's try and make it relatively un-fuck-up-able to a noob".
* - handy hint: the Deck only needs that very specific ext4 formatting - which it can do itself** - for the microSD card as it's a game install location. For a USB stick or drive, for just transferring files, FAT32 and (as far as I know) NTFS should work fine.
** - received wisdom seems to be, DON'T format the card twice with the Deck, that seems to be bricking cards. Do it once and you're good.
I can't get excited about Starfield because I don't even know the goal is supposed to be. Are you fighting Space Aliens? Space Pirates? Space Berserk Robots?
Tunic is pretty good, but man, I stopped a couple days ago and that was a bad idea because I stopped in the inevitable Blightown Equivalent in every souls-inspired game and it's very hard to muster the will to start back up.
Seriously, whoever thought up
an area filled with rocks that have a constant miasma effect that instead of doing damage reduces your maximum HP constantly and also causes a radiation that fucks with your UI until you can't hear anything and only see things through a blur, AND then filled said area with snipers and grenade throwers that attack at range and run away at the exact same speed your character runs at when you try to get close, AND then put like two bonfires in the entire area,
Pfft, we all knew that wasn't coming out until 2026.
Didn't they just confirm 2026 a few weeks ago? I could swear I read that somewhere.
Elder Scrolls VI? No, they haven't given it a confirmed release date at all. The 2026 (or 2027) date came from..."an insider on Twitter" who doesn't actually work at Bethesda apparently, who also expects Fallout New Vegas 2 around the same time, so it's not what you'd call "confirmed."
Yeah, that's what I meant. Something that went beyond the steam deck settings, and was actually able to set the in-game stuff. Ideally, crowdsourced, so you could chose between multiple different ones like the controller layouts.
Like I said before, nvidia experience does have the ability to go look for the config files and set them, but I'm not sure that steam would be able to universalize it.
As I understand the Nvidia Experience is editing settings files *before* you start a game. Meanwhile the performance tab is all about tweaking the Deck hardware while *in* game. So their uses are different enough that it makes them tricky to join together.
Each game also has its own way of storing settings and the Nvidia Experience is tailored to each individual one, outside of something common like Unreal Engine. Even just figuring out which files to point to and what format they are in and automating their editing, could be tricky to crowdsource. And a dumb "replace the whole file" solution could have collateral damage like messing with your install or save location, or potentially even copyright issues. So some initiative like that would require substantial investment from valve, and IIRC the NVExperience's compatibility isn't even mega-wide, certainly not covering the whole steam library, so it is a fairly tall order.
Something more limited might be, allowing steam games to supply an official default performance profile, which would compliment the default graphical settings. Not sure how many devs would make use of it, but that at least makes the hardware settings compliment relatively simple. Going further would be some API that allows games to take control over the performance tab through their own settings, so the user can easily adjust the two together.
rahkeesh2000 on
+1
Dr. ChaosPost nuclear nuisanceRegistered Userregular
People are expecting them to make another ES game?
I gave up on such hopes a long time ago.
There are apparently people expecting another New Vegas game. Which sounds like a much harder stretch then "Entry six in our long running franchise that we have announced," I'd say.
I do indeed, and just to reduce the amount of fuckery possible, I have it being delivered to my office.
As your boss takes it from you like the Teacher and doesn't give it back to you till your work day is done. Meanwhile the box has been opened and another Steam account loaded on it.
All aside, this is the weirdest goddamn "wrong memory" I can ever recall having.
I vividly recall reading an article 3 or 4 weeks ago where a Beth exec (I forget if it was Hines or Howard) said TES6: Hammerfell was well underway and was aiming for a "2025 or 2026 release date"...
Frigging brains are weird. I must have dreamed it but damn... it seems clear as day in my mind.
Hammerfell is more likely for lore reasons anyways isn't it? If we're going to continue with the knocking out Towers, then Adamantine is one of the few remaining.
Posts
Outward's combat and the game itself is an odd mix of things. It's a streamlined survival game mixed into an RPG. It does the stamina and dodgy-stabby thing so many action RPGs do, but different weapons have wildly different movesets that can involve repositioning or strongly favoring hitting one side. It also has a lot of active skills and consumable items to use. I vaguely recall getting past some harder early fights by having extra lanterns around and using the skill that throws one like a grenade.
It's janky and not a game for everyone. It's not as punishing as a lot of pure survival games, but it is more punishing than most RPGs. You never can get a game over on normal gameplay mode, but often have some work to do to recover items after "dying." I enjoyed my time with it, but I've never recommended it for most people. I also never really got super deep into the combat; Once I discovered that having two or more flintlock pistols slotted let you fire and cycle to another without needing to reload the first, I dealt with most harder encounters by using a brace of pistols. On really hard fights, I didn't bother with normal weapons at all and just chain fired 8 or so pistols. Certainly not the only or intended method given how many skills, spells, buffs, and traps you have available, but survival games are all about leveraging your items.
Steam Profile
3DS: 3454-0268-5595 Battle.net: SteelAngel#1772
There are people that enjoy sticking Sharpies up their urethras, too.
Outward is more than "slightly" janky, though. It's kind of a mess.
I mean, I played quite a bit of it. I really wanted to like it because it has ideas that tick a lot of boxes for me. But every time I started to get into a groove and think maybe it was starting to click, it punched me in the kidneys and laughed.
I've gone back to it a couple times to try again, but never made any significant progress.
Outward really enjoys kicking you in the balls right from the get go, but I found it starts to be enjoyable in a souls-esque way once you've gathered enough gear and skills that a single wolf is no longer a life-or death struggle.
If you ever decide to try it again, the easiest way to finish that first quest is to
My Deck is supposed to arrive tomorrow, so maybe I'll play it on that!
You got your tracking info?
Steam | XBL
I do indeed, and just to reduce the amount of fuckery possible, I have it being delivered to my office.
Probably a very good move. Fingers all crossed for you!
Steam | XBL
That's a pretty harsh analogy for comparing a video game that lots of people enjoy! I would go more "spicy foods" or something like that, but hey video game subjectivity and all.
Hey please don't do Fedex's job for them.
I envy your strength.
If it makes you feel better, it's because I freak out if I see a long list of titles installed that I'm not playing.
Pro Tip: I created a Collection in Steam and just threw every game I want to play on Deck in that colleciton. Makes it real easy to go go on the deck and go to that collection to start installing games from there.
The Deck's home screen will also segregate every game in your library that is Deck verified, which is also helpful.
Ah, I was wondering if such a thing existed, glad I don't have to ask now!
*Darth Vader Noooooo . jpg*
Yeah, that's what I meant. Something that went beyond the steam deck settings, and was actually able to set the in-game stuff. Ideally, crowdsourced, so you could chose between multiple different ones like the controller layouts.
Like I said before, nvidia experience does have the ability to go look for the config files and set them, but I'm not sure that steam would be able to universalize it.
Yeah, I Black Friday'd a 512GB card last year in preparation for it. I always have way too much stuff installed.
I moved over my custom artwork folder (SteamGridDB type stuff: grids, heroes, logos) from my PC to the Deck too. Just a straight copy/paste using a USB stick (and USB-C adapter)*. I felt proud that I figured out where it was supposed to go in the Deck's file structure!
* - handy hint: the Deck only needs that very specific ext4 formatting - which it can do itself** - for the microSD card as it's a game install location. For a USB stick or drive, for just transferring files, FAT32 and (as far as I know) NTFS should work fine.
** - received wisdom seems to be, DON'T format the card twice with the Deck, that seems to be bricking cards. Do it once and you're good.
Steam | XBL
I can't get excited about Starfield because I don't even know the goal is supposed to be. Are you fighting Space Aliens? Space Pirates? Space Berserk Robots?
Pfft, we all knew that wasn't coming out until 2026.
Can't delay what doesn't exist
Didn't they just confirm 2026 a few weeks ago? I could swear I read that somewhere.
Seriously, whoever thought up
Damn why even announce it exists yet?
That's at least 3 more Skyrim re-releases away.
Elder Scrolls VI? No, they haven't given it a confirmed release date at all. The 2026 (or 2027) date came from..."an insider on Twitter" who doesn't actually work at Bethesda apparently, who also expects Fallout New Vegas 2 around the same time, so it's not what you'd call "confirmed."
It could happen though. But I'm skeptical...
I gave up on such hopes a long time ago.
Technically the did announce that they were working on TESVI back at E3 2018 when they also announced Starfield.
As I understand the Nvidia Experience is editing settings files *before* you start a game. Meanwhile the performance tab is all about tweaking the Deck hardware while *in* game. So their uses are different enough that it makes them tricky to join together.
Each game also has its own way of storing settings and the Nvidia Experience is tailored to each individual one, outside of something common like Unreal Engine. Even just figuring out which files to point to and what format they are in and automating their editing, could be tricky to crowdsource. And a dumb "replace the whole file" solution could have collateral damage like messing with your install or save location, or potentially even copyright issues. So some initiative like that would require substantial investment from valve, and IIRC the NVExperience's compatibility isn't even mega-wide, certainly not covering the whole steam library, so it is a fairly tall order.
Something more limited might be, allowing steam games to supply an official default performance profile, which would compliment the default graphical settings. Not sure how many devs would make use of it, but that at least makes the hardware settings compliment relatively simple. Going further would be some API that allows games to take control over the performance tab through their own settings, so the user can easily adjust the two together.
"this is the last time, I swear."
There are apparently people expecting another New Vegas game. Which sounds like a much harder stretch then "Entry six in our long running franchise that we have announced," I'd say.
You do not stop milking the cash cow until it moos its last moo. And that cow has a lot of moo to go.
There is zero chance they're not working on TES6 (Hammerfell).
As your boss takes it from you like the Teacher and doesn't give it back to you till your work day is done. Meanwhile the box has been opened and another Steam account loaded on it.
Steam: betsuni7
I vividly recall reading an article 3 or 4 weeks ago where a Beth exec (I forget if it was Hines or Howard) said TES6: Hammerfell was well underway and was aiming for a "2025 or 2026 release date"...
Frigging brains are weird. I must have dreamed it but damn... it seems clear as day in my mind.
Skyrim Final Penultimate Edition on track for Christmas though.
I'm expecting Elsweyr.
But otherwise I agree.
3DS: 0473-8507-2652
Switch: SW-5185-4991-5118
PSN: AbEntropy