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