Oh god not Outward. After trying it recently I’m honestly kinda shocked that it’s being played at all. Me and my mate got the impression of playing through a 20 year old hobby game dev project at best.

It felt so very unpolished. Combat, UI, inventory management, dialogues, character creation, narrative, quest logs, crafting; it all feels ancient. Co-op especially - only the host progresses the story, gets quest rewards, and so on. A second player can kinda come along, but that’s it.

Don’t want to discredit old fans of the game ofc, but I honestly believe without a hefty dose of nostalgia you wont enjoy it. It would be like picking up Half-Life for the first time in 2024 and expecting a decent game.

That’s honestly good to know, thanks!

Although it is kind of telling that in order to use their launcher without getting a stroke your best bet is an alternative launcher. Still, I’m going to have a look at Heroic. Would be a shame to never touch all those free games just because Epic sucks so much.

You can change the directory manually for every single install. But a default install path for your games - nope.

Well the launcher can hardly get any worse.

Today I found out there’s no way to change the default install location. And I learned this just today because I so rarely use it. Why is this launcher such a mess. It’s seriously like they’re not even trying.

If an unreliable login, a bad storefront, tedious store pages, and a less than user-friendly library aren’t enough to call a launcher worse than the competition, what even would qualify them as a bad product?

I mean sure, my PC doesn’t crash nor goes up in flames when I open Epic, but that’s about it.

Oh but there are many steps missing.

You start the launcher -> it forgot your device and password, so wait for the confirmation code via mail, enter your info again, then solve three capchas

Browse the store -> except there’s no functioning tag search and the shop sucks, so you need to know exactly what to buy and how it’s called to even find it

Chose a game -> but there’s no tabs or secondary windows, so every time you inspect a shop page and try to get back your search gets reset; please enter all your search criteria again and scroll back to the point you’ve been before

Start the game -> but your own library is a hot mess; click through 13 pages of huge icons representing an alphabetical order until you find the picture representing what you want to play

And then you play.

As long as you don’t notice Epic all is smooth sailing. Every step of actually using the launcher is a pain though. Sometimes I forget how annoying it all is and try again. Aaaaaand it forgot my device and password again. Then I curse at my PC and open steam.