An important update regarding Outriders. pic.twitter.com/HHZrq5GIik

— Outriders (@Outriders) January 6, 2021

The PvE shooter space is pretty crowded these days. With live service games more popular and numerous than ever before, it takes a lot for newcomers to become successful. Outriders has just the right pedigree to succeed.

Published by Square Enix and developed by People Can Fly, the sci-fi co-op shooter could become the next big thing. Even if you don’t recognize the studio’s name, you’ll surely remember their games. They worked together with Epic Games on Gear 2, 3, and Judgement.

But their crowning achievement is the ridiculously fun Bulletstorm. Hence, Outriders is promising from the start. These developers sure know how to create extremely satisfying combat.

Outriders originally targeted next February for release but alas. The developers decided it would be better to take the extra time to polish their new IP. After all, first impressions do matter in the contested online shooter market like no other.

And from our early experience with it, Outriders is definitely one title to look out for. You can read more about our thoughts in our preview coverage here. Especially, if you’re looking for a traditional complete game. As the developer states, Outriders is not a live service game and instead a complete product.

Still, that doesn’t mean eager gamers won’t have anything to look forward to next month. Outrider will receive a meaty demo towards the end of February. People Can Fly promises the full experience in the demo which spans the first few hours of the campaign.

It also features access to all characters classes and solo & co-op gameplay. The cherry on top, you’ll be able to transfer your progress from the demo once Outriders fully releases in April.

Outriders will launch for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S on April 1st.

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While my demo from February was placed at the start of the game, this one took place much further into the game. The rich world I was already entranced by became even more intriguing. Giant, weird beasts lurked in the distance, with roars like Godzilla. It was like being stuck on a planet with the monster from Cloverfield. While we never went anywhere near it, its presence left an impact on me and made me curious about what other forms of life lie on this planet.

When it came time to start fighting enemies, it became clear why they placed us further into the game. There was a huge spike in difficulty compared to what I played earlier this year. All of the enemies were high leveled and their AI was incredibly aggressive but also smart. It was clear it wasn’t just hard for the sake of being hard, they’re strategic in how they attack you. They flank, they flush you out of cover, they pin you into cover, they use their own abilities to try and trap you, and more.

Outriders is a cover shooter that constantly forces you to move and adapt because of the pressure it puts on you, it’s absolutely great. It became clear to me that as you play the game, the game isn’t going to grow static. It’ll constantly evolve as you play to ensure you’re not just cleaning house with total ease. Not that it won’t ever be fun but it will be challenging.

That said, as the Technomancer, you can absolutely obliterate the opposition. You’re granted rocket launchers, turrets, fancy grenades, and more. They have the ability to not only deal big damage to the biggest of enemies offensively but also play very defensively. It’s incredibly easy to break up large groups of enemies with the rocket launcher while charging. It’s also incredibly easy to protect yourself while your cover is getting chipped away by laying down a turret right next to you.

It’s a worthy class and while I didn’t get to see how Technomancer works when playing with other players as other classes, the potential is exciting. Juggling all the different powers with each other to take down bosses and other fodder enemies is something I enjoyed a lot in my first demo with Outriders. Combining those scenarios with Technomancers skill-set sounds like a total blast.

The only downside of the game that is becoming apparent to me the more I play is that Outriders feels very linear in a way that the gameplay doesn’t support. Games like these (like The Division) support big spaces to play in and freedom to explore. From everything I’ve seen, it feels like you’re forced to stick to very thin paths that occasionally divert to different little areas.

If you’re on a massive planet, it only feels right to want to explore that. Especially if it’s blooming with weird life, I want to be able to go and see that. Maybe this is just limited to the sections I’ve played and it opens up a bit more but it seems like it’s a lot of hub locations and walking on specific paths between said hub locations.

Even with that one downside, Outriders is still a blast to play and Technomancer only heightens that. Hopefully the game opens itself up as you play and allows for more freedom to really capitalize on all of its potential.

Outriders releases this holiday season for current-gen and next-gen consoles as well as PC.

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Last week, I flew out to Los Angeles where I got to play People Can Fly’s first new game in 7 years: Outriders. As far as I’m aware, this is one of the first PlayStation 5/Xbox Series X titles that anyone outside of developers has played. We didn’t play it on either of those consoles, the game was running on high-end PCs but we were told Outriders will launch on next-gen as well as Xbox One and PS4.

I came into the event with tempered expectations, expecting another version of Destiny, The Division, or Anthem. What I came away with was a strong belief that People Can Fly is about to deliver one of the best games that’ll be available for early adopters of next-gen. On the surface, it is very easy to draw comparisons to those aforementioned games but once you really see what it has to offer and dig just a bit deeper, you realize Outriders is something really special.

It’s worth noting that People Can Fly heavily stressed Outriders is not a “games as service” title, it has all of the general gameplay concepts you’d expect from that genre but it leaves out the monetization schemes.

That means no loot boxes and no microtransactions. They also noted the game is about 40 hours in length with some endgame content thrown in there. There are no concrete plans for post-launch content (or at least any they wanted to share) but we were told if the game is well-received, they’ll develop more content.

You play as an “Outrider”, one of the strong-willed folks tasked with saving mankind by evacuating Earth and colonizing a new planet known as Enoch. It sounds like a story we’ve heard before, one way or another, but it quickly takes a turn. Enoch is not the paradise that they had envisioned despite its lush beauty. A mysterious storm quickly consumes Enoch with catastrophic effects that tear the planet apart and reduce life forms to mere molecules, you narrowly escape but are deeply affected by some of the storm’s strange elements.

You end up going into cryosleep until you can get proper help but no one comes… you awaken 30 years later. The green plains of Enoch are replaced with bleak, brown, firey trenches and it’s borderline unrecognizable to how you originally found it. The booming society that was promised collapsed, it’s utter chaos. You essentially woke up from a dream world to a reality that reflects a nightmare.

A worthwhile story is at the forefront of Outriders. With games of this nature, we usually see these incredibly realized worlds but they ultimately fall apart in creating a compelling story. Your character is never a character, it’s just a vehicle to listen to other people deliver exposition while you stand there with a blank face and stern posture.

Outriders does away with all of that. You create a character at the start of the game but they’re fully engaged and essential to the narrative. People Can Fly have crafted a story and world that isn’t window dressing for shooting galleries or bullet sponges, it’s fully realized. Something you don’t see as much in these online RPGs is a sense of agency.

You can have branching conversations with characters which helps you learn more about the world, the people, and grounds you in the humanity of the story. In a game like Destiny or Anthem, you can get lost in all the sci-fi and lose the perspective of the fact you’re there to save mankind. That’s not the case in Outriders.

It’s almost a true RPG that you’d see from the likes of Bethesda or Bioware. The only thing missing is a morality or branching narrative. This is still very much a linear story, the ending you get is the ending everyone else will get. It feels like a “real” story and not like a series of quests that just link together a loose narrative to give some sort of reason for the gameplay.

In what is a miraculous feat, People Can Fly has seemingly begun to deliver on all the potential a game like this can have. Where Destiny or Anthem fall flat, Outriders strives. Where Destiny or The Division 2 strive, Outriders excels beyond those standards.

Gameplay is king in games like these. It needs to be fun because they want your time, they want you to replay missions, they want that grind, and since there’s no PVP, the PVE needs to be fun. At the start of the game, you’re able to choose a class that specifies the powers you can use.

You can choose from a pyro, a heavy-type class, and a character who can manipulate space and time called Trickster. There will be at least one other class in the final game but it wasn’t specified what their powers are at this time. I spent my time as Trickster which seemed like the most fun of the bunch.

You can send some sort of energy towards your enemies which causes them to slow down and then literally violently implode with guts, bones, and all. You can create a force-field of sorts that slows down anything that goes through it including bullets and enemies themselves. The third key ability available in our time is perhaps my favorite and it allows you to teleport behind enemies, slow them down, and then you can unload bullets in them.

It was endlessly satisfying to teleport behind someone, pull out a shotgun, and blow their head clean off. It’s a non-stop adrenaline-pumping experience that doesn’t reward you with fancy, colorful loot but a narcotic-esque kind of gunplay. It triggers all those sensors in your brain that make you giddy in your seat as you play.

People Can Fly made one of the most fulfilling shooters with Bulletstorm in 2011. They’ve plucked some of those core feelings you get from playing an involved shooter like that and infused it into the multi-layered gameplay of Outriders. It’s really nothing short of wonderful.

At the time of writing this, I don’t know what games are going to launch on PS5/Xbox Series X in that launch window. However, I can safely say that I feel like whatever is out at that time, Outriders is going to be a worthy competitor and must-have title for the new-gen and also deliver a significant bang to help wind down the current-gen.

Outriders releases this holiday season for Xbox One, Xbox Series X, PS4, PS5, and PC.

The post Preview: Outriders looks to kick off a strong start for next-gen appeared first on GameZone.

After a cinematic trailer last summer, People Can Fly has finally shown off a proper gameplay trailer that gives us a better idea of what the game is. Outriders places you in the shoes of a soldier who is part of a movement to colonize a planet known as Enoch. After a catastrophic event, the once ideal new home for humans is ruined and your character inherits special powers.

Any semblance of society crumbles in on itself, turning to chaos and destruction. Your goal is to survive the turmoil of Enoch and hopefully, make it a safe, inhabitable place for humans to live on. You can view the trailer below.

The Outriders trailer also confirms that the game will be coming to both next-gen consoles: Xbox Series X and PS5. This is one of the few confirmed games for the consoles and part of an even smaller few confirmed for the launch window of the consoles.

We got to play Outriders last week at a preview event in Los Angeles. We’ll have impressions, extended gameplay footage, and interviews on Thursday, February 13th so come back to GameZone for all the deets.

Outriders is scheduled for release on Xbox One, Xbox Series X, PS4, PS5, and PC this holiday season.

The post Outriders gets proper reveal trailer; Coming to Xbox Series X and PS5 appeared first on GameZone.

Atypical to what fans have grown to expect from the Japanese publisher, Square Enix has surprised viewers last night with the announcement of a cooperative-focused sci-fi shooter. Outriders will offer player the option to play with up to 3 friends in drop-in-drop-out multiplayer. Developed by People Can Fly, the fine folks behind action-packed shooters like Bulletstorm and Gears of War: Judgement, Outriders definitely has the talent behind it to pull of an action shooter in a sci-fi world.

Developer People Can Fly also released their first developer diary about Outriders where we learn that players will be able to create their own custom characters, or Outrider as they are called in the game.

As Mankind bleeds out on the planet of Enoch, the Outriders track a mysterious signal in this E32019 Official Announcement Trailer. Outriders is a 1-3 player, drop-in-drop-out, co-op shooter, set in an original dark and desperate sci-fi universe.

As the release date is still far off with only a vague Summer 2020 description, stay tuned for more details coming this Winter.

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