I ended up doing quite a lot of farming before daring to venture again into a different region. This time my sights were set on Enmerkar Forest

It's kind of crazy to think how much in-game time has passed. Granted a large chunk of it has been from me failing to properly pause the game. I’m just used to in single-player games just needing to open up the menu. This one requires that then clicking on pause.

Between having many days pass in the game while I'm AFK to the insane amount of farming I did in the first area. I was already nearing sixty in-game days with me getting to over one hundred before calling it quits.

I ended up having many reasons for wanting to go to Enmerkar Forest. One of them was for the main questline. The other I wanted to see what kind of skills were for sale from the trainers. As that was an area of this game, I felt I was lacking. I was also starting to have a nice little pile of silver.

This region ended up having some easy-to-spot landmarks making it not too bad to learn the region and get around. There were also quite a few different paths that would all end up leading to the town.

So, when I took a wrong turn the first time around. It would just turn out to be me taking a much longer and more deadly path to get to the town. Oddly enough the town itself was perhaps not as easy to see of a landmark as the rest of the region was.

There were at least three different ways to enter the town. I was kind of shocked by my lack of getting killed. I also at this point had quite a few healing potions and bandages to help when things got ugly.

What I did not know at the time was the path I would end up walking down would lead me to want to give up on this play. As I would end up finding out the hard way the main quest line has quite a few times limited quests in it. There are also certain strangest where other quests can get triggered that have time limits as well.

Since I was playing this game without much care for how many days would pass. As I was never in a hurry to get anywhere. That would end up being quite bad for me. Failing certain quests has some massive negative outcomes you have to deal with for the rest of the game.

There was this massive battle breaking out between the different factions. Long story short the leader of my faction ended up getting kidnapped and I had no idea I needed to be in a bit of a hurry to rescue her.

Instead, I went off to play in a cave called Royal Manticore’s Lair. The number of times I got killed in there making many weeks of game time just fly by was unreal. I was also just having quite a blast inside that cave.

The entryway of the cave itself has a single manticore that I'd fail to kill perhaps a dozen times. Getting killed in here then would send you to the back of the cave. Leaving me in quite a dire situation in trying to crawl back out of this place. It was at least a fun one.

After that adventure, I did not feel confident in dealing with any of the other dungeons in Enmerkar Forest. So, I decided to leave the region and head back home.

Heading home ended up being a massive mistake. Once I got there, I found out it was winter time again. I also had a quest pop up that was timed and failing it had a massive price to pay.

At the time I did not realize this was a timed quest. I found out I needed to take out three targets in a place called Fortress of Vendavel. This also happens to be the very place that has the prison that I spent more than a week at. So, I was not that thrilled needing to go back there.

I also did not know at the time that the entryway into this place would get me aggressive with one of the three people I was supposed to kill either. This more or less made it impossible for me to even clear the entryway.

I’d just end up getting killed over again and again. Anytime I managed to take out two of the three people in the entryway. The zone would reset by the time I had recovered from all the damage I had taken.

I decided enough was enough. I ended up going back to farming out the couple of dungeons I could. The loot was not amazing I however wanted to get enough silver to go around buying a lot of 50 and 100 silver skills and passives. I was hoping that would make me powerful enough to take down the three leaders I needed let alone clear the entryway.

I ended up going to a faraway region called Abrassar which was a giant desert. I died from the heat just trying to get to the main city. Thankfully that put me inside the town called Levant.

There I picked up some rather critical skills and some passives I was hoping would help me out in the long run. I even spent one of my three breakout points picking up some spells that I could not even use since I had not even unlocked mana yet.

I even had to wait for nighttime before I made the trip back through the desert to get back to the forest. This was not the only region I ended up heading out to for skills.

Once I had picked up quite a few new skills I headed for home. This ate up a lot of time. Even worse I still got murdered when trying to clear out the fortress. So, it was all in vain.

One day I'm loaded down with loot looking to sell in my hometown to find out the front gate is boarded up. It turns out I failed to finish the quest to take out the three leaders in time. As a consequence, the only place I had a house in was now gone for the rest of the game.

I also discovered the cave that connected the town to the beach now had a ramp in the cave so you could go in that way. At the time I did not know the town was now overtaken by bandits.

I even spent days fully clearing the town out of anything hostile. In hopes, there was some way to reclaim the town. Turns out there was no fixing this. The town was now forever overrun by bandits.

Final Thoughts

While I did keep on playing for a bit longer. At this point, it felt like I had fallen far too behind in the failed quests. My morale was also rather shattered. The negative consequences of failure were also starting to stack up. Making the game is just not much fun.

I decided then to take a much-needed break. For that, I'm thankful that I did. I'd then go on to attempt the game on a fresh start over. That in this journey is when the game seemed to become easy and was the kind of fun I was hoping to get out of things in the first place. More on that another time.

Information

Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar about Outward Definitive Edition.