This week has seen me playing a staggering amount of Bravely Default 2. Releasing in the same week as Persona 5 Strikers is always a ballsy proposition, yet my Bravely playtime is something like triple that of Strikers right now. And I don’t even think it’s as good as Persona! It just… has its hooks in me. I’m fully intending to do bigger write ups on both these games and my opinions on them, but I’m probably going to save it until I’ve progressed further in both.
So instead, let’s talk about the three hour break I took to play the Outriders demo.
Outriders is an upcoming third person looter/shooter by People Can Fly. It can be played with up to four people in co-op, has four different classes, and- hey, hold on a second, don’t leave. Yes, it sounds like the now officially dead Anthem, not to mention every other looter shooter on the planet. This one is showing signs of being different though. By different, I mean actually completed, functional, and competent. It’s got a story, it’s got good systems and progression, it’s got interesting loot, and it promises to be a reasonably sized game that happens to have endgame and co-op support.
There’s a demo on Steam right now, and it comes out in April. You can blow through most of the content they have there in a couple hours, but it’s the full start of the game and progress does carry over to the final release. It’s a good chance to try out the different classes and abilities to see what gels. Currently there’s mixed opinions, but early consensus on Outriders seems to be leaning towards more positive than anything. I’m definitely more positive about it.
I will not be buying Outriders — despite liking it — until a specific change is made.
I’ll talk about the actual good in a second, but one persistent thing about Outriders drove me utterly insane: motion blur and camera shake. It’s awful, and it’s in every goddamn scene in the game regardless of how much action is going on. Every mission briefing, conversation, or casual moment still looks like someone with a hand-cam is trying to steady themselves in an earthquake. Combine this with ridiculous motion blur in action sequences, and it was almost impossible to actually focus on the damn game.
Typically, I’ll disable motion blur in the options at the first sign of it. Anything more than a minor blur just detracts from the experience for me, but historically this is something you can switch off. Not so in Outriders! It’s got a pretty decent slew of configuration settings on the PC demo, yet motion blur is completely absent. It’s not like it’s trying to obscure bad graphics or awful textures as is typical, either. And none of that excuses the screen shaking.
It was honestly bad enough to give me a headache and eye strain after the three hours of play I had. Focusing my eyes is already hindered as a side effect of my sleeping problems, so I don’t need this compounding it. I’d be surprised if there wasn’t at least one case of motion sickness caused by someone playing this thanks to those aspects alone. According to buddies of mine who played earlier preview builds, it certainly wasn’t that bad in their experiences if present at all.
Seriously, get rid of it. It’s enough that I have no interest in continuing to play or picking up the game on launch until I can ascertain for sure that that’s been removed or significantly reduced. Genuinely serious here. People Can Fly, Square Enix, take notes. Otherwise, take the people who are responsible for this ridiculous decision and lock them in an industrial paint shaker until they realise the error of their ways and fix this. It needs to go. Right now, it’s like the cutscene equivalent of this image.
I’ve never understood the appeal of motion blur as a graphical setting. I know it’s typically used to obscure awkward animations or lower quality textures, fine. But since it’s usually something you can disable anyway, people are still going to see it. If you’re using it to hide something, then spend the resources on fixing up whatever you’re hiding instead. Or just own it anyway, and make the game and its design speak for itself! And that’s just motion blur; don’t even get me started on the screen shaking, because outside of light accentuation in action scenes? Get that out of here. You don’t need it, and even the action scenes are better if you can actually see what’s going on. But, again, if it’s to hide poor choreography or design? Fix that instead, or just roll with it.
In case my words aren’t enough to convey it, here’s a timestamped link to Skill Up’s coverage of the game with a visual demonstration. Be sure to check Skill Up’s stuff out anyway, since he does great work (and is far more successful than I).
Yes, this one point that I’m ranting about was the entire crux of why I bothered to write this about Outriders. It could’ve been any game, but this was the one that broke the camel’s back for me. Get this shit out of my games or make it a toggleable option, please and thank you.
So. Outriders, beyond that, is honestly looking to be a pretty good title. I would actually buy this game if not for this one issue souring my enjoyment so intensely. It’s actually looked at the contemporaries in the looter/shooter genre and learned their lessons in order to make a solid game. No live service garbage or microtransactions to be seen here. Just pick it up, play it through, enjoy yourself and maybe play some more with friends afterwards. It’s like a Borderlands game in that regard.
The crucial thing that stands out to me in Outriders is the loot. Or, more to the point, the fact that I’m even getting it. A lot of the genre staples really make you wade through a bunch of extraneous junk throughout your game time and lock off anything meaningful until endgame. That was always the case for me in Destiny 2, where I just bounced around from weapon to weapon based entirely on item level. Once I hit the power cap and actually started to engage with the system. Well, Outriders was throwing powerful and interesting abilities on guns of blue quality or higher (standard rarity colours of orange > purple > blue > green > white) that were actually worth using. Should that actually continue outside the demo and apply to more gear options as I go, that’ll be great. Already a good sign.
With that in mind, it’s probably good that the guns are dropping with interesting modifiers, because the actual gunplay is… fine. It feels like a decent enough third person shooter, but it lacks the real punch and solid feeling gunplay of Destiny or Remnant: From the Ashes. It’s still better than the likes of Anthem, where you’re only shooting as filler in between your ability cooldowns. Thankfully, Outriders has those too.
Tying into the plot of a crazy alien anomaly changing people, you get blasted and gain access to powers. This manifests in playing one of four classes; I played the Trickster. As I levelled up, I’d gain a handful of unique abilities, three of which I can slot in out of combat. Every class has a unique healing mechanic to supplement the baseline systems, and the Trickster gains a shield so they can get into the fray at close range.
I could summon a blade of energy that blasted people into skeletons, drop a bubble that slowed time and let me sidestep bullets, and even “nothing personnel kid” teleport behind someone with a bonus shield. I was quick to grab a shotgun and go to town, only to get a shotgun that had explosive firework rounds that cleared packs of enemies every couple of seconds.
This was probably the best way for me to shake the “cover shooter ennui” that Outriders instilled. There’s lots of low walls and cover that you can snap behind, but the Trickster had me just disregard all that and wade in like a lunatic. Other classes benefit more from the cover, but it’s a lot more active and frenetic than it looks on the surface. Using the powers feel a lot better than the gunplay so it’s a great supplement.
Beyond the class choices and loot, there is further customisation with a skill tree. You’ll get more points as you level and progress, and each tree branches into three “subclasses” of sorts. Still, there’s interesting abilities and modifiers scattered throughout the trees, and following one to the end isn’t so powerful that you aren’t encouraged to experiment and shuffle. You can also do that freely, which is nice. I’d imagine that once loot starts interplaying with specific abilities, that’ll become quite mandatory to get an interesting build.
That about covers the gameplay. It’s worth mentioning that I did this whole thing solo. Apparently the random matchmaking is not working correctly (or at all), so that’s probably for the best. I could definitely see how things like my ZA WARUDO slow time bubble could be very beneficial in teamplay though.
How’s the rest of it, then? Well, Outriders is clearly putting the story front and centre. It’s not bad, but it’s not great either. Humanity is mostly extinct, Earth is gone, we’re trying to settle on a new world and shit immediately goes wrong so now it’s a blasted warzone with not enough to go around for everyone. It’s all very grim and bleak, but there’s still potential for it depending on how things go. Lots of different alien biomes to explore and creatures to encounter in addition to all the human enemies would be nice.
Presentation wise — aside from being impossible to properly gauge behind the screen shake and motion blur — it all looks nice enough. I’ve heard a lot of complaints about it being too brown, but that honestly only applied to maybe the first area? It’ll eventually go into trench warfare and battle zones that are still brown but have plenty of blue, green, and splashes of colour and design to it. I don’t get all the hate, but then, I survived the PS3 era of visual design. Maybe I just know how bad it could truly be as far as bleak colours and bloom effects go.
Looking at each individual area specifically like I have been here, none of Outriders feels particularly great. But I honestly did enjoy myself more than I was expecting, so it’s more fun in practice as a whole than what I’m describing now. It’s genuinely been enough to pique my interest and I would absolutely buy into it and play for real, if not for the deal breaker of a screen shake.
Until I hear that those horrific presentation decisions are dead and buried, I won’t be getting Outriders. If and when it does, though? Sure, sign me the hell up.
And with that, we have the first real major not an update post of Delfeir vs. The Backlog in a while. It was as fun to write as ever, and the fact that I’m allowed to be a little looser and less constrained with my writing than for another platform is refreshing. I’ll be back sometime soon to write about Bravely Default 2, most likely. Hit me up with comments and feedback if you’ve got any, or otherwise just reach out and talk games with me. I’m curious to anyone else who played Outriders if they experienced similarly to me. Until next time.
Delfeir vs. the Backlog 