Personally I think this game gets kinda repetitive after awhile especially when the map pool still isn't that large. I always find myself taking 3-6 months breaks from the game and mainly just playing when they add a new map or enemy type to the game so that I get to have that experience of getting lost in a new map again. I feel like they could really use more variety in gameplay. Most challenges involve collecting a thing and bringing it to a place, or starting generators ect. This stuff starts to feel very same-y after awhile, and the enemies lose any intimidation factor once you figure out how their ai works since they're so easy to outsmart, and then they just become trivial and not a real threat, even on the higher difficulties. Overall the game gets really easy once you play it enough, so has a rather low skill ceiling.

It'd be nice if they added more variety in gameplay, since how it is right now the gameplay loop is really repetitive.

new to the community..but it seems like events are recycled and new content is sparse. i guess they do their best with such a small dev team

outlast used to be popular back in the day when everybody watched markrplier and pewdiepie play it,nowdays however these kind of games arent that appealing anymore. amnesia the bunker had the same issue- good game but it seems like everybody preferred to just look up some youtube playthroughs/streams instead of playing it themselves and the exact same goes for this game

Postat inițial de croteam:

outlast used to be popular back in the day when everybody watched markrplier and pewdiepie play it,nowdays however these kind of games arent that appealing anymore. amnesia the bunker had the same issue- good game but it seems like everybody preferred to just look up some youtube playthroughs/streams instead of playing it themselves and the exact same goes for this game

Come on, it's not all bad for the genre. Trails is a success in the Outlast series and according to the developers it has 1.5 million sales in early access on PC alone, not counting sales on release and other platforms. In terms of players playing it, it also has the best online simultaneous player count of all time in the series. There really aren't that many people playing it now, but it's a stable playerbase.
Amnesia Bunker is also successful considering it was intended to be a DLC in the first place, as the creative director said. It was made in two years, got positive reviews and sold well. The problem with Amnesia is more that not everyone liked Rebirth, which eventually influenced the separation of the Bunker DLC into a separate game.

Postat inițial de croteam:

outlast used to be popular back in the day when everybody watched markrplier and pewdiepie play it,nowdays however these kind of games arent that appealing anymore. amnesia the bunker had the same issue- good game but it seems like everybody preferred to just look up some youtube playthroughs/streams instead of playing it themselves and the exact same goes for this game

True, a lot of these games people wouldn't buy unless their friends did too. Or you could just watch someone play it a bit online and get the same experience. It's pretty tough to get into as well but I get it, I wouldn't have been into this game at all if I hadn't played the first two.

I also wonder if early access killed people's interest. Since the game wasn't released complete people left before it fully released

The quality is simply to high. Sounds a littlebit strange, but high quality usually means long development times, so there's next to no reason for variety streamers to regularly come back.

It's also not the best game to watch for weeks, since the low amount of RNG can make it become stale quite fast and big streamers in particular rather need to follow the trends than sticking to low viewer count games.

Though just because there aren't 50k+ players doesn't mean, that it's "not taking off". For a studio like this, which had only 1 big hit and is sitting pretty much in a niche, getting 3k players in peak times (and more like 15-20k a day), it's one of the more successful games out there and probably will be for quite a while.

Postat inițial de offbrandmark:

It's pretty tough to get into as well but I get it, I wouldn't have been into this game at all if I hadn't played the first two.

And i wouldn't have played Trials if i had played one of the other two^^ Especially for someone who dislikes scripted jumpscares and story horror, Outlast Trials is a good middleground between the tension of horror games and the capability to lower the horror factor through exposure/knowledge. Sure you can do that in story games as well, but good horror games usually just end before you reach that point.

Postat inițial de offbrandmark:

I also wonder if early access killed people's interest. Since the game wasn't released complete people left before it fully released

There's a big difference between small indie devs and big studios using that tag. When looking at a small game, people rather expect it to still be in prototype phase, thus still missing content or being subject to constant changes, however for bigger games, people more often than not expect it to already be finished and the EA tag only being some sort of beta testing or polishing phase for some smaller bugs.

And the later is pretty much what we saw with Outlast Trials, as it was more or less feature complete when it got released into EA with mostly some bug fixes and balance changes being applied every now and then. There were also trials added throughout that time, but that's not really different from what we have now. So overall, people who left in early access would've most likely left anyway, even with that tag missing.

Personally if you ask about "before" compare to "now".
1. Take off Murkoff Dollar, given all the decoration and outfits freely are a mistake, trials use to give extra dollar if you get A+, spend money to unlock the drops, give player more things to grind.

2. Repetitive game should be rewarding to push player keep doing the same trial over and over again. This game had been exist over a year now. Most of the player already Max on level. They didn't update much new things for the old player to grind. I had send feedback suggest we should have a "season outfit" which ask for every player to donate their money to unlock it, or just letting player "upgrade" their icon frame, just so player can see how overpowered you actually are. I understand ppl telling me to only play for the game play, but I'm sorry, only getting rebirth token but the trophy already stopped at 100 are meaningless.

3. Speaking of Rebirth system, [before 1.0] rebirth are exam. Those who proof that can rebirth more than 10 are really good, the trials were hard before. But right now, introductory difficulty can grind the same amount of rebirth token? and the rebirth trophy used to be pretty expensive to unlock it for your sleep room it's all gone now.

As conclusion: The game losing the meaning, not just because it have alot of bugs that ruin the game and the dev really don't know what they are doing, lots of [promise] that might never be real. I am sorry I have to say that as a gamer common sense.
Remember the first day they announced Escalation Mode? They take off the ability to stack rebirth tokens(saying it's a bug). And also cap the stamps gain. Player can only grind 100 stamps per day, after the 100, they had to wait for 24 hours cool down.
"The deeper you go, the more reward you get." but the truth is you only play to 19/20 to rebirth. the rest of token are burned.

Take off all the MKs forcing newbies to step in Escalation, confused about all the MKs, suffer with different variator such as stay together? Sorry, this is bad move. Not to mentioned, all the new MKs are not like the old origin MK. The old MK will state out what to do on top. But right now is just one thing "reunited the family" as example.

I hope my word didn't anger any RedBarrel defender, I notice how everyone will ask me to play other game when I simply give a feedback of current update. Yes, it is getting worst compare to before, this is fact. I truly don't understand why they did that. Escalation is the only thing to keep player who love this game going, I love this game, is just heart breaking to watch it changing things used to be great.
Why the player base still remain almost the same, hard to queue for a single game, spend 20mins still couldn't find a single team in quick play, after they get million sold?
Old Early Access player quit the game because of the rebirth changed(We really have nothing to grind.), new player will probably run for 2 weeks and quit the game because of how limit the maps are now in the program but unwillingly to dive in escalation until they learn a single MK from 24 Mks rotation. "the more easier trial you grind, the faster you get to rebirth" is what The Outlast Trial teaching now. Easterman speech before we rebirth can be scrap now, because we don't have to do any exam anymore to gain your cheap rebirth.

Postat inițial de Coyle's Therapist:

Personally if you ask about "before" compare to "now".
1. Take off Murkoff Dollar, given all the decoration and outfits freely are a mistake, trials use to give extra dollar if you get A+, spend money to unlock the drops, give player more things to grind.

The ironic part is, that the old system allowed you to grind less, since at some point you had so much money, that it literally didn't matter anymore. though you still needed to play like 60+ matches of any type to unlock everything, since the only way to do so was to get a random drop after each trial. Though compared to today, where you know what you're doing it for, you had to do it completely blind back then and just hope that it's even worth it.

The new event system pretty much does the same, just allowing you to see what you get and not with a completely obsolete currency in the background which you've way too much of anyway

They should make smaller&less convoluted maps if they want me to truly like this game. Do better pink barrels!

I can always find a lobby full of people. So IDK what game your playing. I'm in NA

Postat inițial de offbrandmark:

I remember this game being pretty popular with streamers for a bit when released, and I got it around the same time. I jumped back in after a long time of not playing and really enjoying it. But I can't help but notice the player base is pretty small.

Why did this game not take off? Is it the lack of variation?

Because it isn't designed to be playable for so long as a live service game even tough they clearly wanted to have a live service game.
And let us be honest the trials are often way too long. Especially if you are solo.

Postat inițial de Nihil:

And let us be honest the trials are often way too long. Especially if you are solo.

I don't know what you're doing to call it "long", but each Main Trial is doable in 15-20 minutes and each MK-Challenge in 4-10 minutes. Any shorter and we're gonna spend more time in loading screens than actually playing the challenges.

Now if you take much longer than that, then it's probably due to not being aggressive enough, especially when playing solo. The enemy AI is very basic and easily manipulable, so there's usually no need to hide or sneak outside of some edge cases or event variators.

If anything, the trials are way too short and have a severe problem of getting repetitive quite fast, since you can easily do all programs of an event in like less than 2 hours and are now forced to repeat it constantly if you want to keep playing the event for the next 1,5 weeks until the next map rotation.

Postat inițial de Maya-Neko:

Postat inițial de Coyle's Therapist:

Personally if you ask about "before" compare to "now".
1. Take off Murkoff Dollar, given all the decoration and outfits freely are a mistake, trials use to give extra dollar if you get A+, spend money to unlock the drops, give player more things to grind.

The ironic part is, that the old system allowed you to grind less, since at some point you had so much money, that it literally didn't matter anymore. though you still needed to play like 60+ matches of any type to unlock everything, since the only way to do so was to get a random drop after each trial. Though compared to today, where you know what you're doing it for, you had to do it completely blind back then and just hope that it's even worth it.

The new event system pretty much does the same, just allowing you to see what you get and not with a completely obsolete currency in the background which you've way too much of anyway

Do you know stamps are not reset and we just finish the whole catalog with 3k stamps only after this change. Says allowed us to grind less, we don't get random drop anymore after finish a trial. We only update the game, spend all stamps on the new catalog and call it a day.

Postat inițial de Jimmy:

I can always find a lobby full of people. So IDK what game your playing. I'm in NA

Full of lobby ≠ player wants to play the same game mode with you. Random invite player into escalation will mostly lead to the way they quit the escalation before it reach #5. [pretty much 15 mins gameplay only]
What I mean hard to find player is in the quick play system. Read my word again, finding lots of playing playing chess at lobby is common, but they not getting into escalation, the only game mode that is good for old players.

Every update broke the game for veterans, that's why.