People Can Fly, the studio behind upcoming looter shooter Outriders, has been very, very tight-lipped about their precious project on the run-up to release. Sure, there were some teaser images and an epic E3 cinematic trailer, but all this amounted to was a lot of blue-sky theorizing about what to really expect in the finished game. Now that press has finally been able to get their hands on the game, we can dive into the newest title which co-op shooter fans should be looking out for.
Gamers probably know the People Can Fly crew best from their cult-classic “trick shooter” Bulletstorm, a completely wacked-out sci-fi FPS back in 2011 which prioritized stylish kills, bringing a cheeky and approachable score-attack sensibility to an era overburdened by grimdark sepia-toned shooters. Aside from the considerable variety of murderous methods on display—think of it like a mix between the Tony Hawk series and Doom—Bulletstorm possessed a surprisingly tight, joke-laden yet mature script that rounded out the experience, penned by comic book writer Rick Remender (Deadly Class, Fear Agent). While Bulletstorm persists as one of the studio’s most trenchant classics, they’ve also co-developed titles in the Gears of War series, including Gears of War: Judgment, and worked on Epic’s ubiquitous Fortnite as well (specifically, the Save the World PvE variant).
Outriders marks something of a triumphant return for People Can Fly, being their first shooter action-RPG, their first new IP in nearly a decade, and their first collaboration with Square Enix. The preliminary hours of the game introduce players to the uniquely dark sci-fi narrative, showcasing sharp world-building in a brilliant introduction to the sabotaged savior planet Enoch. Players step into the shoes of an “outrider,” a kind of futuristic trailblazer/pioneer from Earth in the year 2159, part of a mission to explore a planet primed to act as the new home of the human race. An exposure to anomalies diverts those plans and everything quickly goes dramatically awry, and stays there.
What is Outriders?
Outriders is a third-person 1-to-3-player looter shooter action RPG, taking place in an original science fiction post-apocalyptic world suffused with supernatural elements. Players engage a wide range of overpowered cooldown abilities with over 100 weapons to find, modify, and equip, all of which will be needed to take down scores of enemies and bosses, solo or with friends.
There’s a sharp, story-rich prologue that sets the stage for Outrider’s wider narrative. Earth has sent out colonization spacecraft known as Ark Ships through the far reaches of space, searching for a viable new home for humanity. Touching down on the unexplored planet Enoch, your team sets up a base camp to reconnoiter the surrounding area, a verdant landscape teeming with life, including a few menacing—though vegetarian—large furry quadrupeds. As you converse with your fellow crew and captain, all seems rosy, routine, and peaceful.
In truth, this journey is more desperate than it appears. Humanity’s back is to the wall and options are limited. The top brass insists that Enoch function as the new cradle for the human race come hell or high water, the outriders encounter anomalous masses of gray goop and dangerous storms, and the mission is essentially thrown into chaos. Your character faces a close encounter with this mercurial alien threat, and is thrust into cryostasis for medical safety reasons, but left trapped in this stasis for entire decades.
The intense experience of re-emerging from cryostasis feels like a tonal mix of Fallout, Mad Max, and Children of Men. The new Enoch you awaken into is an anarchical dystopia of roving gangs, bombed out industrial architecture, and civil war. It appears that Earth’s remnant civilization certainly did touch down to colonize the landscape after all… then screwed everything up in the process.
The Altereds Give Outriders Their Power
Your main character’s cryostasis after a brush with the anomalies—an encounter which visibly kills and disintegrates others—has left them imbued with strange powers. You’re not exactly “special” in this regard, however, with various other “Altereds” finding themselves on multiple sides of the apparent conflict on Enoch, just like you. Each Altered possesses various powers that bend reality to their whim, granting the ability to call down lightning strikes, teleport across battlefields, cover skin with stone, or cast fire, among many other effects.
Outriders Gameplay Explained
Outriders’ nuanced but impactful twists on cover-based shooting are felt clearly, even in its earliest hours. With People Can Fly’s Gears of War pedigree, snapping to cover and flanking between hubs of concrete is as responsive as you’d expect, but also isn’t anything particularly new. It’s more how the class skills and enemy attacks subvert the boring trend of just sitting there and poking out for headshots.
Aside from the fact that many enemies seem to constantly bumrush entrenched players, defeated mobs also drop AOE explosives which prevent players from just marrying their favorite piece of cover for an entire battle. That means always having to jockey around the environment and keep things moving, pausing for breathers and a slight health regen.
Speaking of regenerating health: don’t expect that leaning behind cover and avoiding damage will top you off automatically. Player’s health reserves regenerate up to a third of their max, but boosting the rest involves an interesting link to your class’s combat skills. For instance, the Trickster class features vicious close-combat attacks which refill their health upon inflicting damage.
This creates an immensely satisfying combat loop which prioritizes movement, spacing, and special powers. Duck behind cover, tag a few enemies with an SMG, then rush in for a close kill to heal before quickly combat-rolling out of the way of a fallen explosive or elemental attack. Altered abilities have dazzling effects that look interesting among the busted up girders and concrete, with defeated enemies leaving behind glowing residue and superpowered neon blue explosions standing out starkly among half-destroyed factories.
Character Classes in Outriders
Four character classes are set for when Outriders launches, and we got to play with three of them: Pyromancer, Trickster, and Devastator. The Pyromancer serves as a kind of distance-DPS or spellcaster class, with early builds prioritizing flaming projectiles that might position them ideally in the back line. The Trickster class is something like a rogue or assassin, with a kit that helps them quickly move around the battlefield and affect space and time. Devastators are a kind of tank class, with high-powered armor and melee abilities that position them in close quarters with the enemy.
In a nice twist, no single class faces any weapon restrictions whatsoever, meaning that Devastators can equip and use sniper rifles with the best of them. Developing your individual character is intended to empower the player, not shuttle them down a predefined course of restrictions, and the resultant challenge has been tuned to account for the lone wolves playing through the story content as capably as committed teams of three. This means that no locked-out equipment or team-dependent raid content will be found in Outriders.
As for the fourth Outriders class? That remains a mystery, for now.
Trucks and Hubs in Outriders
Large multi-wheeled convoys, known in-game as “trucks,” once carried the outriders on their exploratory missions into the unknown, and these same (now-repurposed) vehicles will carry players between Enoch’s different war-stricken regions. At no point will you be driving these on your own—which means no Mako-styled navigation in the vein of the Mass Effect series—though you will be able to customize them with items and drops. People Can Fly describe trophies from defeated deadly fauna which can be affixed to the truck hood, as well as the availability of cosmetic changes to the vehicle’s appearance as you see fit.
Essentially, Outriders eschews the wider open world of series like The Division or Borderlands, with bespoke hub areas that offer main quests, side quests, and merchants. The main hub we saw in our demo was quite detailed, a rundown ramshackle slum that actually changed after quests were completed; at first, armored gang members could be found tormenting civilians near a stairwell, but they scattered after doing away with their leader in an early quest. It’s small-touch emergent storytelling like this that makes these Outriders areas potentially more compelling than the visually busy but ultimately stagnant hubs in Destiny 2.
Side quests may appear as exclamation point markers on the limited HUD map, and they lead to additional items, rewards, and storytelling opportunities.
World Tiers in Outriders
In one of Outriders’ most unique twists on the co-op RPG shooter, a World Tier system turns a common quest into a possibly epic engagement. Essentially, as players perform well in the game, they unlock higher World Tier levels, which can be activated to increase the overall difficulty of the team’s game instance. Even a paltry side quest can shift around, increasing enemy strength or changing the configuration or type of enemy, including how they engage each battle. The host in a game controls the World Level for the party, with higher unlockable tiers yielding greater loot rewards.
On the one hand, the World Tier system is a great way to bring lower-level players joining higher-level ones closer together, allowing over-leveled guides to accrue rewards for taking their friends through earlier sidequests they’ve already completed on their own saves. World Tiers can actually be inspected in menus and swapped around as they’re unlocked, but only one can be active at a time in one game instance. It’s a rather elegant solution to a frequent problem found in the MMO grind.
Long story short: if your friend is already at the end of the game, they may still benefit from shepherding you through earlier content. However, if a World Tier seems impassable for the present team, it can be nudged down for now and reattempted later on.
Outrider Skills and Abilities
Outriders’ set of cooldown skills walks the line between reliably familiar and exciting. The Devastator/tank class has a stone skin skill which adds bonus armor protection, but don’t let that lead you to think that they’re anything like a lumbering oaf. Consider another early Devastator skill which lets you leap high above the fray, pick out a specific enemy, then slam directly into them for a noisy finish. The Trickster’s skills include a teleport backstab, which is pretty much old hat for rogue classes, but another creates a magical AOE sphere which inflicts a dramatic slowdown on any enemies caught inside, allowing your teammates to easily pick them off as they struggle to move.
The range of skills span predictability in this manner, and they make firefights feel more dynamic than the usual mob massacres evident in other looter shooters. Time and time again, Outriders’ approach reveals something of the unusual, whether it’s an overpowered boss encounter peppering the arena with lightning bolts or flaming cyclones, or a conventional story moment which ends with a sudden bullet to the head.
Outriders’ Narrative and Story
Some players may certainly enjoy picking apart the esoteric lore of the Destiny series, but Outriders is decidedly more direct in its script and narrative segues. The protagonist here is characterful, sarcastic but frequently sincere, embroiled in the new politics present on Enoch’s scarred scrap of civilization. There are dialogue options which let you dig further into details and backstory, as well as highlight cues which progress the story more quickly, but sacrifice that sense of detail when chosen.
So far as we’ve seen, Outriders’ script is up to the considerably high level set by Bulletstorm before it. The weathered war-flavored snark never feels overwhelmingly cynical and all the voice actors are clearly bringing their A-game. The female and male protagonists feature confident, engaging performances, and co-op play doesn’t break the story’s flow in any way; players get to see their own ad hoc cinematics starring their own avatars, with a nice vote-to-skip option ensuring there’s no need to re-watch sections which all players in a session have already sat through before.
The texture of Outriders’ world-building feels like a heady mix of Mad Max’s fractured desperation, Highlander’s mix of sorcery and urban blight, and Battlestar Galactica’s sci-fi militarism. Of the latter, there’s a certain type of tone which seems especially relevant to Season 3, where the new human colonization of a planet leads to even more conflict and splintering within the community for which peace was intended.
Outriders has been in development since 2016, and it’s clear that People Can Fly are entering the RPG shooter genre in careful but dramatic fashion. Enoch is a dark, deadly, but gorgeous science fiction world, the type of environment players are going to want to explore carefully for lore while shredding enemies with their superpowered abilities. Look for its release during the 2020 holiday season on current-gen and next-gen consoles and PC.
