Outriders — Breaking Game Journalism
I have been watching coverage of the new video game from People Can Fly, Outriders, since its release on April 1st. After yet another disastrous launch due to “always connected” server requirements, once people were able to sink dozens of hours into the game, it seemed like players could not articulate when it came to their response besides a feeling. “Outriders is a hard to define game,” reads the title of one such Gamespot video. While some may dismiss it, the game has all-time highs in player count that rival some fellow games in the genre like Borderlands 3. While games journalism seems keen on classifying and cornering the game into some palatable review, there is clearly a response to the game that defies language. This is not to suggest that the game is transcending, but more that we have not seen a game fill a role like this in quite some time. To understand what is going on with Outriders, we will need to spend some time here explaining as best we can what the game tries to do on its own terms, as well as talk about its strengths and weaknesses in its attempt The game is a bundle of contradictions. Because of that, Outriders boggled the writer’s mind.
The Bifurcated Story
We will start with story. For those invested in video games, this may seem like a bad idea: all video game stories are terrible, and some video games stories are worse than others. But the response for the game’s story helps to highlight some problems in recent criticism. People assume that there is a 1:1 relationship between a visual style of a game and its tone. Outriders has a decent color palette throughout the later part of the story, but in the beginning it is a grim wash of browns and grays, a nasty side effect of the Unreal 4 engine. The player is a mercenary who travels with the last vestiges of humankind as it escapes a decaying Earth, and they decide to land on Enoch. The planet, at first, seems rich in arable land and clean water, so the explorers waste no time in setting up camp. But disaster strikes quickly. An airborne pathogen attacks many of the humans, while simultaneously an “Anomaly” strikes with uproarious lightning, thunder, and even some time warping destruction. A combination of bad luck and bad decision-making leads to the player nearly destroyed, but chances have it that the Anomaly, rather than rend you apart, instead gives you powers. Using those powers, however, will have to wait. You’re locked in a hibernation chamber for over three decades as humanity struggles to stay alive on this hostile new world.
When the player awakens, the genre quickly shifts from earnest science fiction exploration to ironic and curse-filled Mad Max insanity. The tone shift was jarring and turned many people off from the experience
When a game like Immortals: Fenyx Rising has a light-hearted, jocular, smarmy tone, it is easy to connect the game to its colorful visual style. But Outriders quickly turns black comedy, with some B-tier writing and plot devices that hurt the brain. Many game journalists had an exceptionally difficult time reconciling the disjunction; why would People Can Fly spend such an inordinate amount of time on a story that should not be taken seriously? We forget that there exist whole genres of movies and television with dark aesthetics and hilarious outcomes. Monty Python movies excel at this. It should be perfectly fine for a tone to ride both sides of the line while featuring a visual style that stays in one lane.
The fact of the matter is that, like other games in the looter shooter genre, the disconnect between the story and the gameplay is so wide that it becomes clear that the story was never the point. Consider the story less a narrative and instead another game mechanic, as pacing for the combat. Did you know Diablo has a story? Do you know what that story is? If you do, good on you, but I would wager that a very small percentage of those who play that game are comfortable giving the plot points of the story. The larger question for Outriders may have been: why spend so much time on a story at all? The more horrifying idea that is tied to this question is an assumption that they care very much for the story they have written, outside of the gameplay that Outriders is built on, but that is a realization for another time.
How to Fight
Like some of the best public figures in history, Outriders is a bundle of contradictions that does not just stop with the story. For many who played the demo, a tutorial taught players how to take cover. Cover has been a longstanding mechanic in several shooting games, and especially games developed by People Can Fly, who worked on Gears of War, so it should not have been a surprising legacy idea brought over. But what many were shocked by, as they played more and more, was the realization that cover was not only unnecessary to play the game, but that it could actually impede performance. Like Diablo, footage of Outriders is hectic and bizarre, with characters weaving between friends and enemies, jumping headfirst into torrents of gunfire. Before a motion blur toggle was available to turn it off, this fast-paced movement and the constantly shifting background was causing motion sickness. It was maddening for journalists to have to come to terms with a tutorial for static, cover-based combat, yet look on the twitter page for Outriders to see the post “cover is for cowards”, and then to have the game’s post-processing interfere with upper level play.
Another difficult part of Outriders that feels worth talking about is the variety of enemies. Though the game claims to have over 80 enemy types, coming from several factions and species, players report only mild variations. Watching footage, I can agree. There are humanoids who hit with melee weapons, shoot guns, or lob grenades and mortars. There are creatures who hit with melee claws, and those larger ones who shoot stuff, as well as flying monsters who lob stuff. There do seem to be special enemies that have abilities, but it seems unclear how much these change as the game grows more difficult, and as time wears on. More than the enemy that applies pressure on the player, what changes more is the player him/herself. Our avatar gains new skill points, receives new weapons, can tinker and upgrade weapons with a crafting system, fix a set of mods on weapons and armor that improve new abilities, and acquire up to 8 abilities per class that changes how the player kills these repetitious set of enemies. Because other than a few smaller mechanics, like holding a point, or sprinting towards an elevator, killing is what you’ll spend most of your time doing. The question for a journalist should be: with all this customization (which is great), how should enemies and situations be designed in response? Should more complex plot moments have occurred, like, say, an escort mission, or an on-rails shooting session aboard a train, or perhaps a relay of a particularly heavy item between players that needs to get to a destination, or perhaps a desire to capture a monster rather than kill it through some nonlethal maneuvers. At the end of the planning phase of development, People Can Fly may have looked too closely at Diablo, to the point where conflict resolution has one outcome. For those journalists looking for some Playstation exclusive adventure game with puzzles and a wide variety of encounters, Outriders is not it.
Public vs. Private Perception
If People Can Fly was worried about balancing the classes in such encounters (were they to exist), then the situation is already perilous without it. There are four playable classes in Outriders, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. The Technomancer has long-distance fighting covered with turrets and mines to keep enemies at arm’s length. The Pyromancer is a mid-range magic class that focuses on setting people on fire and weakening them. The two close range classes, the Devastator (a tank) and a Trickster (a rogue) mop up on the front lines. After the demo, most people agreed that the Trickster was the most enjoyable class that they could play thus far in the early game. In less than a week, as I have been watching Twitch streamers, I noticed that not only were three streamers playing as the Trickster, but they were also using the same abilities, weapons, and strategies in the endgame. They had automatic shotguns, they were using the same abilities, and they played the game in the same way. Now, granted, because they all had the same class, it stands to reason that they would play the same way, which happened to be up close and personal. But in my time in the demo, I did not play the Trickster in this way, but rather resorted to hit and run tactics on the periphery of the combat zone. There should be many ways to build a character, but seeing the balancing of the game resorting to this was disheartening. On the other hand, just because Twitch streamers do decide to play one dominant strategy, does not mean that others do not exist. Still, the point is that Outriders exists best in the player’s imagination when they have to play the backend game of tinkering with their character, discovering how to make a great new weapon and armor piece fit into their arsenal. As a result, the game should be contextual based on the enemies, the setting, and the loot that players have at that moment. It was unavoidable that, with the wealth of customization, that the developers would not be able to balance every single aspect of their gameplay. Though the game offers the opportunity for diversity, there is a single-mindedness of this dominant strategy that pigeonholes the game that is all we can see online. It is bad marketing for itself.
But for many people playing and writing about the game, the balancing concept was difficult to parse out. It had become abundantly clear that the Trickster could output more damage than any other class. The Pyromancer was the weakest. And yet, in a cooperative situation, some would say it would be beneficial to the team to have a Pyromancer available to weaken enemies for the Trickster to finish them off. That comes part and parcel with the action roleplaying genre. But what is to stop a team of three from simply all being Tricksters (which is possible) to double-down on strength? Should the game be played in cooperative or solo play? Gamers and journalists alike found things to like with both. Most likely, the answer is “yes”. But with the tumultuous launch of the game to constant disconnecting with servers, and with the exciting feature of crossplay tabled until further notice, many players ended up playing solo. It added yet another wrinkle into the toolkit that journalists often have on-hand when talking about playing video games. In this genre, solo and cooperative play is more along a spectrum. To this day, there are solo Destiny players, but the more I interact with that game, the less I feel like that is how it should be played. Between strikes and raids, many of the ways for players to go far in the game’s systems requires cooperative play. Outriders has similar endgame content called “expeditions” that look to be playable (and winnable) alone. As far as a spectrum, Outriders right now leans more towards solo play-but as disconnects and latency problems are resolved-it may shift more towards cooperative play, putting it right smack in the middle. To some, this is a worse outcome. If the game lends nothing for its classes to synergize off of each other, is there a point participating in this shared, erratic experience? Only once while watching Twitch have I encountered top-level strategy said aloud. Not to say that it isn’t going on, but it is much more intuitive in its play, rather than explicit communication like, say, a Destiny raid. What journalists should have mentioned, was that for those groups who play games like World of Warcraft or Destiny, there are no similar longform mechanics-driven experiences that require cooperation. It is the same experience together, rather than a new experience.
A Messy Set of Reviews
A visual style that leans away from its tone, gameplay mechanics that contradict, stale situations and a hugely variable avatar, and balance problems that raise questions about both solo and cooperative play. What does a journalist do when faced with the prospect of explaining a game like this? On top of that, the game is a veritable buffet of mechanics seen in the last decade, yet decidedly struggling against certain trends as well, most notably the live service. There’s a lot of “insider baseball” going on with Outriders. It widens the chasm between those who follow a niche genre and those who don’t. It actually makes the concept of gaming exciting. In literature, if someone were to ask for a recommendation, I would not start with avante-garde. Gaming perhaps has a claim more than before to have followings, niche markets, and expectations in said markets. For those who paid attention, Outriders is easy to decipher. But for those consumers who wonder what they are going to get their children for holiday gatherings, I just do not know. For those who adore the looter shooter genre, Outriders seems to be expertly executing on some key ideas that makes purchasing a no-brainer. In a globalized, crossplay market, with the option for streaming as well (like GeForce Now or Google Stadia) gaming can reach more players around the world, which means where the purchases come from does not have to be as clear. As a result, the presentation of the game does not have to be so obvious. In a gaming climate where we have a glut of AAA games that all seem to copy one another for a shot at most-talked about graphics, while at the same time falling far short on innovation, Outriders may be a good sign. It means that companies should not feel required to chase. On the other hand, the labor required to put the game on all these devices is the kind of monotonous and tedious tech work that only larger companies can afford. To me, Outriders is a strange watershed moment, where streamers and YouTube content creators seemed to have a better read on a game than the larger publications. It will be up to those larger publications to either fear or latch onto this kind of game. Does it mean that the job is fragmenting beyond the control of IGN or Gamespot? Does it mean that their expertise is being tested? For such a bland-looking game, Outriders has done enough to make the industry ponder.
Originally published at https://theroyleline.blog on April 6, 2021.
