Is there any improvement in this Definitive Edition?
No remarkable journey is achieved without great effort. Outward is an open-world RPG where the cold of the night or an infected wound can be as dangerous as a predator lurking in the dark. Explore the vast world of Aurai, embark on memorable adventures alone or with your friends.
Back in 2019, I reviewed the original Outward and while I enjoyed it to a degree, it definitely needed a lot of work to make it compete with other RPGs out there. Since then, open world RPGs have vastly improved and what made Outward stand out with it’s split-screen/online co-op seems a lifetime ago since a good few games have done this since and are more memorable overall.
The Definitive Edition has a bunch of game balances and comes with all previous DLC that was released, but the visuals haven’t quite seen much of an improvement, with the only noticeable thing I saw was load times and framerate, though it did seem inconsistent at times which was surprising.
Ultimately it feels like while the Definitive Edition comes with all past content and balances, it still retains a lot of the flaws of the original both in terms of gameplay and performance. I can’t help feeling like it would have benefitted from a few more months of polishing, though I imagine the developers might add in some other balances/fixes via patches in the coming months, but it just doesn’t feel like the big leap in quality from the original version that you would hope from a Definitive Edition.
It doesn’t help either that the scale and quality of open world games has drastically improved since 2019, which will make it harder Outward to stand out from the crowd. I’m not saying that it can’t do that, but it’s definitely a big mountain to climb.
The Verdict
While it was nice to give Outward another chance with its Definitive Edition, I can’t help feeling that not enough has been done to improve it or make it compete with the other open world RPGs out there. It is a decent RPG at times, but gamers will need to overcome a few hurdles to get the most out of it.