The reveal that most folks are still talking about is World of Warcraft Dragonflight, but yesterday brought us another reveal trailer that I personally had been waiting for. Outriders is a game that I still very much have a burning candle for, and while I am not actively playing it I still very much enjoy popping in to make some earthquakes. When People Can Fly announced the New Horizon changes last November, they also announced that we would be getting a new expansion in 2022. Yesterday we got some more information about what exactly that is going to entail. Unfortunately there is still not a ton of detail but we do have a release date of 6/30/2022 or… the end of Q2 pushing it as far out as you possibly can while still counting it in the first half of 2022. I have no clue what fiscal year Square uses, but it is entirely possible that 7/1 is the beginning of a brand new fiscal year as well.
Essentially all we really have to go on right now is two trailers:
In both cases there is pretty scant details about specifics but we know that we are going to be getting the following features that were discussed.
New Story Campaign
New Zones – Ice Themed
Talent Tree Expansion System
New Apocalypse Challenge Tier System which unifies story and expeditions
With this a new Apocalypse Tier of gear that features an extra perk slot
Alternate Advancement System – allowing you to gain stat points after you finish leveling
New Legendary Gear – Class Sets, Shared Sets, and Weapons
“Endgame” – They name drop something called the Trial of Tarya Gratar that sounds like maybe a raid but uncertain
Pre-Order head start – 10% discount and 48 hour early access
All of this sounds great, but honestly the core problem that I had with Outriders is that I never really fell into a regular group that was playing it. The game is fun solo, but I struggled with trying to push myself forward much further by myself. At launch I really hated the Expeditions mechanic because it was timed, and I HATE being timed in a game. There are some seriously mental issues that I have over that that I am likely never going to get over… very deep scars. When New Horizon released they removed the timers and as a result Expeditions got immediately better. I spent some time hanging out with Warenwolf, and Thalen started leveling… but we never really connected as a proper trio to do serious content. Maybe with the release of Worldslayer I can convince them both to give it a shot as well.
I think the thing that I like the most about Outriders is that it really takes so many of the things I loved about building characters in Diablo 3, and carries them forward to the looter shooter genre. When this game released so much press was focused on how this was not a live service game, and I have to say… maybe it should have been. Square does a phenomenally poor job at creating live service games in general, but Outriders is one that I think could have been improved by having a regular feed of new content. I would likely bought some cash shop cosmetics to fund additional development work. Instead what we have is a game that is going to seemingly go long periods of time with no updates and be extremely easy to sit back down on the shelf in those lull periods. That is not a bad thing either, but since gaming seems to be dominated by MAU counts it harms a game like this in the long run.
I am absolutely going to be poking my head into this when it releases late in June. I am going to pretend that the date is a late birthday present even rather than probably bumping up against some fiscal deadline. I am curious, are any of you also looking forward to this? The thing I still really want to see is cross save support because I would probably even pick up a copy for Xbox Series X to play with friends over there, but I have no interest in leveling another set of characters or collecting a new set of gear.
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