Yesterday the floodgates opened on a new game vying for our attention in the emerging Looter Shooter genre. This morning I am going to talk about my impressions of the almost four hours I ended up playing last night. This will be in no way an adequate representation of the game because I just haven’t spent enough time with it to be certain about how anything works yet. Since this demo is freely available to pretty much everyone at this point… I highly suggest you just skip this post and go make your own impressions. So as such I will lead off with download links so you can do just that. There will be spoilers for the story ahead, or at least some broad summarizations of plot points. Be warned.
I am going to be honest one of the biggest challenges with Outriders is that it is going to need to carve its own identity because out of the gate it feels like a remix of a bunch of concepts we have already seen before in various forms. I was jokingly referring to it as Gears of Destiny yesterday because it feels HEAVILY inspired by the Gears of War franchise. On top of that there is a heavy mix of Guerilla Faction, Defiance, Rage, Killzone and the Mass Effect multiplayer engine. Ultimately the question is does this blend work? Yeah I think it mostly does and the gameplay feels extremely fluid and enjoyable, enough that I went ahead and purchased the game after experiencing the demo.
Why did I go ahead and plunk my money down for this ride? The truth is that the game is telling me a story that is cohesive and understandable. I love the incomprehensible nonsense that is Destiny that has forced me to dig hard to get the little information that I have, but in a new franchise that I am not already sold on and that also seems like an assemblage of parts that I have seen before… they need to hook me on a narrative. So far it seems like legitimately this is a game you can play entirely for the single player story and it will be an enjoyable ride. The thumbnail for the story is that at some point in the future we have destroyed the Planet Earth. The story doesn’t really go into a lot of detail about this but I figure it will probably be something teased out over time.
In order to survive there are two colony ships loaded full of folks and sent towards what appears to be an inhabitable planet. While in transit something happens to one of the ships and it explodes leaving you as one of the last remaining members of what appears to be a law enforcement/expeditionary force type group called the Outriders. This seems significant but we aren’t given a lot of detail about what it means. You are part of the first group to make landfall and at first things seem to be just as idyllic as the postcards made it out to be. However the longer you are planet side the more things go south because apparently the planet is effected by giant storms of some sort of energy that straight up disintegrates some things that it touches… others it leaves changed but it will be awhile before the game elaborates on that fact.
Some events transpire that end up with you being stuck back in a Cryopod… and shocking to no one you wake up much later than originally intended. During the almost forty years that pass things have gone from bad to worse as the planet is essentially divided into two groups: The original expeditionary force that is dwindling in numbers and a group of separatists that appear to have gone full on Fallout raider and I strongly suspect are cannibals by what could only be described as “meat cages”. You wake up on the wrong side of the lines and in your attempt to escape you realize that you have become “altered” and with that comes special powers.
Queue the class selection screen. It was around this point that I alt tabbed out to YouTube and watched a few videos summarizing the classes. More specifically I watched the video that Ginger Prime put out some time back. Based on my limited understanding of the classes the break down goes a little something like this.
Technomancer – Ice based Long ranged support/gadgets lone wolf that almost has a pet class rhythm to it because I believe it can eventually drop turrets. Heals based on long ranged encounters.
Pyromancer – Fire based medium range engagements and lots of elemental damage synergy and crowd control abilities. Heals based on kills of things with its elemental debuffs on it.
Trickster – Time ability based short range assassin type character that gets in does a lot of damage and gets back out. Gets healed and shielded when killing something at close range.
Devastator – Earth based tanky short to medium range engagements that heals based on killing encounters that are in short range.
After looking at the various options I ended up going Devastator since I like being Tanky, but I also like a run and gun up close and personal style. I spent most of the night running around with an Assault Rifle and a Shotgun and shifting in and out of close and medium range using the abilities of the class that I will get into shortly.
Each class has a talent tree system that allows for further customization. From what I understand regardless of the class there is a tree that is a bit more tanky, so that everyone can tank in a pinch. The trees that are open to me with Devastator are Vanquisher, Warden and Seismic Shifter. From what I understand Warden is my very tanky, very focused on having more health and taking less damage tree. Vanquisher seems to be focused on piercing armor and interrupts so might be more team/support focused pending you are not taking the role as tank. Seismic Shifter appears to be about doing big AOE earthquake damage and taking out lots of stuff at the same time. Being who I am… I am probably going mostly down the Warden path.
In addition to talents that give more passive tweaks to your other abilities, there are some active class skills that unlock as you go through the game. You can have three of these equipped at one time and can mix and match them as you go. Right now I have unlocked exactly three, the first being Earthquake which sends out a field of rock in front of me and any mob that it touches causes spikes to shoot up from the ground dealing significant damage. The next is Golem which gives me a rock based overshield causing me to take 65% reduced damage for 8 seconds. Gravity leap is really interesting in that it causes me to jump up into the air… turn into floating rocks and then go slamming down on whatever I target with the left mouse button dealing a large amount of AOE damage when I come slamming down. I use that one a lot as a gap closer on whatever mob is giving me the most grief.
What I am finding most interesting about my class is that in reality… I am not a boss tank. Like bosses are the one thing that I seem to struggle with the most because most bosses punish you severely for close range encounters. What I want to do instead is draw the hate of all of the little guys because each time I kill one of those I heal myself back up significantly allowing me to sustain that action pretty much indefinitely being a roaming bullet sponge. I am hoping to get some time to test this theory over the weekend with some group play, but I am thinking that really is going to be the synergy. You have your dps focus on burning the boss from cover and your tank causes mayhem running around like mad picking up the ire of little packs that I then smash to pieces for health and profit.
Based one what I am seeing gear wise, it seems that when you pick up something blue or better you start getting ability modifiers. This leads me to believe that the end game of Outriders is going to involve some Diablo 3 style builds that abuse specific attributes on your gear to buff abilities and make them significantly more powerful. If I had to guess probably when you get purple gear they are going to start giving you more than one modifier at a time. What I don’t know however is if these modifiers are completely random or if it is fixed like Diablo so you can seek out specific items to fill specific slots. I am honestly hoping it is the later because fully randomized gear may present the same problem that Anthem did of giving you a bunch of items that are potentially useless.
So I have talked about a lot of positives, so we are going to throw out a negative. Sometimes character creation systems end up being unintentionally racist. I feel awkward saying this given that my skin tone can only accurately be represented by the pink crayon in the Crayola box… but like representation is really important in video games. While creating my character I noticed that the skin tone offerings were entirely dependent upon the face that you chose. This morning I pulled together an example of this where I selected the darkest available tone with every single face and then edited them all together. There is exactly one face type that is allowed to be dark brown, with a second being allowed to be more medium… and then everyone else looks like they have just been using bronzer. The folks at People Can Fly can do better and I hope they do as the game goes on. Thankfully it appears that cosmetic changes are free so if they do add in more options folks can re-customize.
Like I said above I enjoyed the game enough to go ahead and purchase it. I only did this because I wanted the cool skin for my vehicle, which I assume gets unlocked for usage later in the game. I think it is going to be enjoyable to at least play through the story and solo around a bit. I am hoping it will be enjoyable for group play because what I have seen so far makes me think that there is going to be a lot of party synergy going on. I hope to get some time in this weekend trying something group based, but it also appears that you can pretty much complete all of the game in co-op mode for those who are inclined to do so. So since this is an impression piece… other than the melanin slider woes… my impressions of the game is pretty solid.
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