Epic Games seems to understand that, given Steam’s massive user-base, the only way it can be a viable competitor is to have games that aren’t available on Valve’s service. Exclusivity deals with third-party companies cost money, and it looks like Epic Games is losing a huge amount of money to make those exclusives happen.
As spotted by PC Gamer, despite paying approximately $444 million for “minimum guarantees” on third-party games for the Epic Games Store in 2020, sales of all third-party games for the year amounted to about $265 million. Apple said that Epic Games lost about $181 million on the Epic Games Store in 2019, putting the total losses thus far at more than $300 million, should these figures be correct. Big games like Metro Exodus and Control were released first on EGS before coming to Steam later.
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Metro Exodus – Official Launch Trailer
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Apple used these figures in a statement as part of its lawsuit against Epic Games, pointing out that the service is unprofitable and is missing security features that Apple’s App Store includes. It pointed out that most of Epic Games’ Fortnite revenue is generated on platforms other than iOS, as well, which would seemingly mitigate the effect of the game not being available there anymore.
These loss numbers are still fairly small compared to Epic Games as a whole. The company was valued at more than $17 billion last August after securing additional funding. And despite being unavailable on iOS for months, Fortnite continues to thrive on other platforms.
The Epic Games v. Apple trial kicks off on May 3. The outcome could determine not only if Fortnite can return to Apple devices, but also if Apple can keep a monopoly over digital purchases on its platform.
Mass Effect Legendary Edition is set to release in just over a month, and the remastered trilogy’s project director Mac Walters has announced that it has gone gold. That means there is very little chance it’s going to get bumped from its May 14 release date.
Walters celebrated the occasion with a clip of several Mass Effect characters dancing, including meme legend Garrus Vakarian.
When a game “goes gold,” it essentially means that its code is finalized to the point where it can be put onto discs and shipped. However, because we live in an era of content updates and patches, it doesn’t really mean as much as it used to. BioWare could choose to replace huge amounts of the game’s code in the future if it wanted to change something, but it does still serve as a big milestone for developers who have been working on the project for months or years.
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Mass Effect Legendary Edition Teaser Trailer
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Mass Effect Legendary Edition bundles together the first three games with improvements to make them feel like one cohesive experience. The first game was criticized, in its original state, for lackluster combat, and this should no longer be an issue in the retooled version. It’s coming to PS4, Xbox One, and PC, with optimizations for the newer systems rather than dedication next-gen versions. A fifth Mass Effect game is in development, as well, though it appears to be pretty early right now.
Another game that also went gold this week is Nier Replicant, which is also a retooled version of a past game. As with Mass Effect, the original Nier’s combat was surpassed by its sequel, and Nier Replicant will implement those ideas into the original game while retaining its story.
Fortnite has introduced thousands of characters, Back Blings, Emotes, and other cosmetics over the years, so it’s understandable that some items haven’t resurfaced in some time, especially when Epic is so often partnering with licensed properties like Marvel, Star Wars, and The Walking Dead. A new Shop section is now available and features previously vaulted items exclusively.
Each long-absent item in this new Fortnite Shop section has been unavailable for at least a year, and some of the deepest cuts go back to the earliest seasons of Chapter 1. Currently, the Vaulted A Year Or More section, as it’s called, includes the Mega Man-like Astro Assassin, masked heroes Taro and Nara, medics Triage Trooper and Field Surgeon, and more, alongside a range of corresponding accessories for several of them.
Even though this is something fans have long clamored for, Epic hasn’t said anything about the releases. Instead, these ultra-rare items all just arrived with the daily Shop update last night with little fanfare outside of the game’s community forums. Each item features the same timer revealing the cosmetics are scheduled to disappear with tonight’s shop update at 4 PM PT / 7 PM ET. Whether they’ll be replaced with more rare cosmetics is not yet known.
If any of these Shop items have been on your wishlist, now’s your chance to get them. There’s no telling when they’ll come back around. Hopefully this means more of Fortnite’s missing-in-action cosmetics will make their long-awaited returns sometime soon.
Sometimes you just gotta get that money. And sometimes, there are zombies in between you and that money. That’s what Zack Snyder’s upcoming film, Army of the Dead, is all about. The director released a new poster today, ahead of a new trailer set to drop on Tuesday, April 13.
The tweet and poster both come on the heels of a special preview event Snyder and publisher Netflix put together to promote the film. The movie tells the story of a group of mercenaries raiding a casino in a zombie-infested Las Vegas. The event has since ended, but you can still catch the VOD over on the Netflix Twitch channel. Viewers were asked to crack a code to register for the Tuesday event. The video goes on for about an hour and features security cameras overlooking different parts of a casino–presumably the one that mercenaries are breaking into in the film. The video itself isn’t terribly eventful. Zombies wander around, and occasionally a dumb human in a hazmat suit or with a camera wanders in and gets eaten.
Before Zack Snyder was known for his “cut” of Justice League and making Batman say a swear, one of his big breakout films was his remake of Dawn of the Dead. He wanted to make a second zombie movie, and Army of the Dead was announced in 2007. It never happened due to financing issues, and then Snyder got busy bringing DC Comics’ biggest characters to life in movies like Watchmen and Justice League. Army of the Dead officially began filming in 2019 when Netflix picked up the movie rights from Warner Bros. Now, Army of the Dead is set to finally see the light of day when it hits Netflix on May 21, 2021.
Army of the Dead stars Dave Bautista (Guardians of the Galaxy) and Ella Purnell (Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children), as well as Ana de la Reguera(Eastbound & Down), Garret Dillahunt (Fear the Walking Dead), Theo Rossi (Luke Cage), and Tig Notaro (Star Trek: Discovery). Snyder directed the film and co-wrote the screenplay with Shay Hatten and Joby Harold.
With this movie releasing on May 21 and Zack Snyder’s Justice League just a few weeks ago, that makes two Snyder projects hitting streaming services in two months. Zack Snyder must be a busy guy.
Please don’t be mad at me, I haven’t played Diablo 2 since middle school. And at that time, my friends (who were also high-level StarCraft and Warcraft players) basically carried me through most of the experience and the Lord of Destruction expansion. However, Diablo 2 showed me the satisfaction you can get out of a good hack-and-slash RPG, tearing through mobs (often with friends), using different classes and builds, and being smart about how to handle the tougher encounters.
After spending some time with the technical alpha, I now see how Diablo 2 Resurrected delivers that exact experience all over again. It really is Diablo 2 with a fresh coat of HD paint, running without a hitch on modern systems. It plays identically to the original game and preserves that experience one-to-one, but with a few quality-of-life improvements and some major visual enhancements that don’t affect the core gameplay systems. This is essentially what Blizzard did with StarCraft Remastered back in 2017–the same iconic game looking real fresh.
And just like StarCraft Remastered, Diablo 2 Resurrected lets you swap between the visual styles instantly with a keystroke. Both graphical modes run simultaneously, and switching between them is seamless. While it’s not much more than a novelty to scratch that nostalgic itch, seeing the original sprites and choppy animations in a 4:3 aspect ratio helps you appreciate the work that’s been done with this remaster. Revamped assets, high-definition textures, and modernized visual effects like lighting, shadows, and particle effects still maintain the true look and feel of Diablo 2 and use the proper 16:9 widescreen format.
One of the more important, but minor improvements comes with the cleaner user interface. Navigating your inventory, character screen, and skill tree is just a bit easier to parse with this redesign and the HD brush-up is certainly easier on the eyes.
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You can see the UI revamp between the original Diablo 2 and the Resurrected remaster.
Overall, this game is all about its dark, brooding atmosphere that intimidates you along the loot grind and demon-slaying journey, and that’s not lost in Resurrected.
As I’m playing through it again in a single-player local campaign (multiplayer is not available in the technical alpha), the ins-and-outs of playing Sorceress are starting to come back. Again, I’m looking up the different builds that are made possible by Diablo 2’s simple yet diverse skill trees. As I crawl through crypts of Rogue Monastery and the Maggot Lair beneath Aranoch, I’m working towards that Fireball-Frozen Orb build that worked so well some 20 years ago and getting back up to speed on how to control mobs and manage my mana pool. Admittedly, Diablo 2 is a repetitive game, and in 2021, that much is readily apparent. But when the gameplay systems are as tight and satisfying as they are in Diablo 2, running through its series of dungeons is still a ton of fun.
Another thing that’s potentially great for newcomers and veterans alike is the ability to respec your character as many times as you want, free of charge. One aspect of the original Diablo 2 experience was understanding how to build your character from the outset and having to live with some of the mistakes you may have made, unless you use one of the few ways to respecialize your skills. A patch late in Diablo 2’s lifespan granted a respec in the early hours, but there was also a more convoluted way to earn a respec.
It’ll take a while to get back up to speed with Diablo 2 if you haven’t played in a while.
Some may argue that unlimited respecs isn’t in the true spirit of the game. However, this being a remaster where the overall point is to deliver the core experience rather than punish you for what’s an antiquated system, I’m not going to complain about it. It’s not going to affect the in-the-moment thrills and challenges we remember most about Diablo 2.
Diablo 2 was incredibly influential, setting a new bar for action-RPGs on PC and became one of Blizzard’s key pillars–it’s quite clear as to why when many of the game’s timeless qualities shine through. But whether or not you prefer the streamlining that was done for Diablo 3’s gameplay systems, you have to admit that the series has evolved in significant ways when you take off the rose-tinted glasses Things like the tedious inventory management, the somewhat basic level design, and the tiresome trek of getting your gear back if you die have shown their age, of course. And as integral as the stamina system is for how you approach combat situations, it is rather an annoyance from an exploration standpoint. Diablo 2 Resurrected has been a great time, but having it is also important for seeing the genre’s growth.
I’m still very early in this nostalgia rush of a playthrough, but aside from early server issues during the first hour of the alpha being live, Diablo 2 Resurrected is shaping up to be a damn fine game, because, well, it’s Diablo 2 reimagined. It very much gives me that “this is what it looked like to me back in the day” vibe, and it’s a cool feeling when I can switch the visuals to see just how wrong I was.
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Side-by-side, you can see just how much Diablo 2 Resurrected improves the visual quality.
I don’t know if I’m down to struggle through Act IV or Baal runs on Hell difficulty in the year 2021–I got a lot of games in my backlog as is. But if that’s something you want to relive, or even play through for the first time, Diablo 2 Resurrected is showing all the signs that it’s going to preserve that unique RPG that many of us remember fondly. So far, it’s exactly as advertised, and I’m excited to see how the multiplayer experience will hold up in this remaster.
Diablo 2 Resurrected is scheduled to launch sometime this year on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and Switch. Blizzard has a beta phase planned before launch as well, so more people will be able to get a chance to try this remaster.
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Disco Elysium is a groundbreaking open world role playing game. You’re a detective with a unique skill system at your disposal and a whole city block to carve your path across. Interrogate unforgettable characters, crack murders or take bribes. Become a hero or an absolute disaster of a human being.
When watching Star Wars for the first time, it’s easy to imagine yourself in so many roles–Jedi, smuggler, bounty hunter, fighter pilot, princess–but tough to pick just one. Hasbro is making it easier than ever to pick with their newest Black Series helmet, the Star Wars: The Black Series Wedge Antilles Battle Simulation Helmet.
Wedge Antilles is one of the few characters from the original trilogy that lived through the whole series, participating in some of the biggest battles and piloting iconic ships. He went on to star in a long-running series of Star Wars books published under what is now the Star Wars Legends banner, and continues to pop up in the new canon Star Wars novels as well, like the Aftermath trilogy.
The Wedge Antilles Battle Simulation Helmet is modeled after the legendary pilot’s from the films. The wearable helmet offers interior padding, electronic lights, and sound effects. There are three speakers inside the helmet to create, according to the official press release, an “immersive surround battle simulation experience while synchronized LED lights inside the visor simulate blaster fire from enemy vehicles.”
Also inside the helmet is a switch that lets you choose between a simulation of piloting Wedge’s X-Wing at the Battle of Yavin, or the Snowspeeder he piloted at the Battle of Hoth. Of course, Hasbro’s use of the word ‘simulation’ here is rather tenuous. There’s no on-screen display or anything, so you’d better be looking at least at a paused image from a Star Wars battle when you flip the simulation switch.
The helmet will go for $99.99 when it hits shelves sometime in June 2021. You can order it right now through the official Hasbro Pulse site. If you’re more of a Jedi type than a pilot, though, make sure you keep an eye on the “real” Lightsaber that Disney is making.
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Outriders can be a tough game once you start to get into it. Despite access to a host of different ludicrous superpowers, you’re still human at the end of the day, and if you get nailed with enough bullets or slashed by enough monster claws, you’re going to die. You can mitigate some of that incoming damage with Outriders’ cover shooter mechanics, but because of the way most character classes recover health, you need to be constantly slaying foes. If you’re not using equipment mods to help with that, you’re kind of playing the game wrong.
There’s a pretty deep and robust modding system in Outriders, but it’s easy to overlook. First, when you’re introduced to the system, you don’t really need it yet. Second, you go through so much gear in Outriders that you might be thinking, “I’ll wait till I get the really good stuff before I start making changes.” Unfortunately, that’s a mistake–by not modding your gear, you’re likely making the game much harder than it needs to be.
Gear mods can give you significant perks for your armor and guns, making your abilities and status effects a lot more powerful. Even relatively early in the game, you should be tuning your gear to fit the powers you like and the enemies you expect to face to give yourself the biggest advantage you can. But to do that, you need to understand how mods work and how to create character builds, even with less-than-optimal gear. Here’s everything you need to know about modding in Outriders, including why you should be doing it.
How Modding Works
The mods on different pieces of armor and weapons can give you massive bonuses and increase your strength.
In order to start modding your gear, you’ll need to progress the story of Outriders far enough to rescue Dr. Zahedi. That happens pretty early in the course of things, and once he joins your team, he’ll allow you to make changes to your equipment back at your camp and truck. You require two kinds of currency to mod items: Leather for armor and Iron for weapons. You can get Iron from those blue metal hunks sticking out of rock walls scattered throughout the game; Leather comes from creatures you kill. Both kinds of currency will also drop from weapons you dismantle.
Once you’re regularly earning items with blue icons, representing the second of four equipment tiers, you’ll start to see that they come with special mods. These mods each have their own tier, indicated by a Roman numeral 1, 2, or 3. The better the gear, the higher the perk tier it can take. But even at the first level, these mods are significantly helpful, especially on armor. Your armor mods convey a bunch of upgrades to your class abilities, often giving you shields, extra health, or extra damage on a specific ability.
While you’ll constantly be swapping whatever gear you’re using for new stuff with higher numbers in Outriders, you’ll want to pay attention to the upgrades your mods give you. You can customize your gear by swapping mods between pieces to get exactly the loadout you want, synergized with the abilities you have equipped, by visiting Zahedi. To unlock a perk in the modding menu, you need to dismantle a piece of gear that already has it. Once you’ve done that, you can add the perk to one of your gear’s mod slots, so long as you pay a small fee in Leather (or Iron, if you’re talking about guns).
The Benefits Of Modding Armor
Switch mods around based on which abilities you plan to use in a mission–it’ll save your life, and it costs next to nothing.
Especially as you start to climb up toward World Tiers 7 and 8 and beyond, the difficulty of Outriders can increase significantly. You’ll find an ebb and flow as you earn better gear, but you can mitigate big difficulty spikes with your equipment mods. At almost all times, you want to have mods on your armor that benefit the abilities you use most, or at least, are using at the time. If you’re wearing armor with mods meant for abilities you don’t have equipped, you’re completely wasting it.
Armor mods can make a decent ability phenomenal very quickly. For instance, the Devastator’s Earthquake ability is pretty solid–it deals damage in the area in front of you, goes through cover, and can interrupt enemies when they’re attempting to attack you. But mods make it significantly more powerful: one gives Earthquake a huge damage upgrade; another gives you a second Earthquake charge so you can use it more often; another gives you armor based on how many enemies you catch with the ability; and another inflicts Bleed on enemies hit by Earthquake, which synergizes with other Devastator skill tree upgrades. If you throw a few of these on your armor, suddenly you can use Earthquake way more often and have it protect you and heal you much more easily. If you like Earthquake, or any other ability, you should be using the perks that bolster it.
The thing about these mods is that they make it much easier to stay alive in a fight. Character classes in Outriders all heal themselves through combat, and with the Trickster and Devastator, you need to be constantly pushing the attack to heal yourself and stay alive. (It’s a little different with the Pyromancer and Technomancer, but in both cases, dealing damage and killing enemies is key to survival.)
So every time you return to your camp, talk to Zahedi and switch the mods on your armor to bolster your abilities. Be sure to also dismantle the gear you’re not using and don’t need to sell to increase your store of mods. Getting into this habit relatively early will cut the difficulty of some of Outriders’ toughest fights because you’ll have huge advantages, with your abilities healing you more and doing more damage.
Don’t Forget Your Weapons
Adjusting weapons so that you get good synergies can make you way more deadly on the battlefield.
It’s less important than modding your armor, but modding your weapons is also a good idea, especially if you’re doing a lot of harvesting and have materials to spare. Like armor, you can swap the mods on your guns by dismantling weapons you’re not using and then changing the mods equipped to the ones you are.
This is a very good idea if you start to notice that there are certain weapon mods that synergize with your character class (like Burning and Ash with the Pyromancer) or that give you an advantage (like freezing allowing you to take enemies out of the fight as the Devastator). Think about which mods work best for your character and how you play, and also how you can use your primary, secondary, and sidearm weapons together based on their mods. For instance, nailing an enemy with a few Toxic rounds from one gun, then freezing them with the other, can let you rack up damage without that combatant threatening you. That gives you time to handle the rest of his squad, or gives you options for dealing with tough Altered enemies that like to chase you out of cover or hit you with Anomaly powers.
The point is, you get huge benefits from having modding your armor and weapons with mods that work together. Outriders will continue to get tougher and tougher as you climb its World Tiers; spend the time to mod your gear so that you can stay powerful even against amped-up enemies. You’ll have a much better time working through Outriders’ story with the right alterations to your equipment.
Outriders is a game that isn’t defined by big new ideas, but rather a variety of familiar elements mixed together in experimental ways. It’s a role-playing game with loot-shooter elements; it’s a serious, dark sci-fi outing that often comes with a pretty big dose of humor; it’s a third-person cover shooter that demands you rush out and smash enemies with your ludicrously lethal magic powers. Whether this mixture works for you will determine how much you’ll enjoy exploring the war-torn planet of Enoch and the last desperate vestige of humanity clinging to life there.
Outriders blends well-known video game elements into something new and challenging, and while it takes itself seriously, it isn’t self-serious. The game is about the human race destroying its home, violently colonizing new spaces, and tearing itself apart, but its heavy themes are often lightened up by a general blockbuster goofiness and characters defined by their gallows humor. You find a place within it as an accidental superbeing with space magic powers on the newly colonized planet Enoch, and you’re mostly just annoyed that irritating people are wasting your time with their gopher chores. It’s a fun, self-aware fit.
Though Outriders looks like a live game of the loot-shooter persuasion, it’s actually much more Mass Effect 3 than Destiny 2–like Mass Effect, RPG progression, an expansive story, and cover-shooting are more the engine of the game than chasing the next new gun. Although it does have a hearty dose of gear progression, Outriders is a cover-shooter RPG, leaning heavily into an epic story told with tons of dialogue, cutscenes, character interactions, and collectible lore.
Developer People Can Fly has clearly drawn a lot from its past work on the Gears of War series in creating Outriders. Rifle-sporting enemies take fortified positions to unload on you at a distance, backed up by shotgunners who try to close the gap, armored troops carrying chainguns who plod toward you through the open, and cleaver-wielding sprinters who charge straight at your face to drive you out of cover.
The gameplay core of Outriders is shooting, and you’ll have a mess of guns at your disposal. Though you can only have two main weapons and a sidearm equipped at any given time, you’ll have lots of options thanks to the loot-shooter half of the Outriders formula. That means you can pair a sniper rifle with a shotgun or assault rifles and SMGs, and since you’re constantly searching for weapons with better stats, you’ll cycle through a lot of different loadouts in a short amount of time.
What makes these weapons especially fun is the myriad different properties and status effects they can have, like dispensing poison, blowing enemies up, freezing people solid, and more. Recalling Gears of War again, Outriders’ shooting is reliably solid, fun, and feels good–but finding synergies between your weapons’ weird properties is a lot of what makes the shooting part of the game rewarding. The deeper into Outriders you get, the more fun the shooting becomes as you start to rack up the Legendary guns that do awesome, ridiculous things. The core shooting is spiced up with wrinkles like hitting enemies with lightning strikes, healing you for landing headshots, and dropping comets on people.
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Things get weirder in its merging of space superpowers with the cover shooter core. You can choose from one of four ability classes early in the game: Devastator, Trickster, Pyromancer, or Technomancer. These each have the general roles of tank, rogue, damage-focused mage, and debuff-focused mage–the Devastator uses gravity attacks for close-range kills, the Trickster teleports around to get the drop on enemies, the Pyromancer is a mid-range fire-flinger, and the Technomancer can summon turrets and rockets that also poison or slow targets.
Each class has a different way of replenishing health through combat, generally by focusing on their specific strengths. The Devastator, for instance, heals you for every close-range kill, encouraging you to get in close to enemies to hit them with powers like a short-range earthquake. Combat becomes a constant calculus between when to cut the distance and take down an enemy and when to take cover, bide your time, and protect yourself.
That combination can be a bit confusing and, as a result, combat is a place where Outriders can both sprint and stumble. You’re playing a shooter where you use cover to keep yourself alive, but you’re often encouraged to leave cover to keep yourself alive. That push and pull of avoiding incoming damage and taking the fight to the enemy requires you to constantly manage the battlefield, as well as your ability cooldown timers. If you jump out of cover and go wild with all your powers on an approaching enemy, you’ll leave yourself exposed for all their friends and quickly find yourself cut down by incoming fire.
That means having an earthquake ready to stun incoming fighters is essential to saving your life, since it allows you to grab kills while keeping your head down. Similarly, abilities like the Trickster’s teleport, which instantly puts you behind enemies in cover, are just as useful for dramatically repositioning yourself across the battlefield as they are for eliminating foes. But you can rarely just go all-out with your guns and abilities–you really have to think about where you are, where your enemies are, and how you can best eliminate them without exposing yourself.
It can feel unintuitive at first, but when you do find the balance between using your powers, healing yourself, and staying out of fire, Outriders creates some pitched, frantic battles that use cover just enough to give you a second to breathe, without pinning your shoulder to a single chest-high wall and leaving you there for minutes on end. As you hit tougher battles in the late game, the combination of overwhelming enemies and incredible powers and guns mixes together to create some explosive, nail-biting battles. These fights also highlight how well Outriders’ modding system works, even if it is a bit awkwardly implemented. Earning new mods requires you to scrap armor and weapons that already include them, and you can only change one of two mod slots on any given item, so figuring out how it all works can be a bit confusing. When you spec out your gear to make your powers and guns stronger, adding defensive buffs, higher damage, and better healing, though, you really start to feel unstoppable, and the game ratchets up the challenge to match.
But there are also times when you find yourself surrounded or cut off, trapped between enemies, unable to kill anything fast enough to heal or escape the onslaught to save yourself. Sometimes a situation just seems unwinnable, forcing you to die and try again. Luckily, Outriders generally only sets you back a bit for these losses, so you can re-enter a fight quickly and try a new approach. Facing tougher Altered enemies, who have powers similar to yours, can result in battles of attrition where you have to cheese the situation by scurrying out of the arena so enemies don’t all chase you down at once. And sometimes, even careful management of powers, cover, and your spacing on the battlefield aren’t enough to save you, and it’s these moments when Outriders can get frustrating because it doesn’t feel like you’re losing for lack of skill.
There are ways to deal with that issue, however. Outriders is largely pretty open and has liberal fast-travel, so you can bail on a mission to go do a side-quest without much difficulty, allowing you to grab rewards that can boost your gear and character. As mentioned, once you get comfortable with the modding system, you can make changes to your loadout that make specific powers more viable, allowing you to really lean into powerful builds that give you an advantage and reward planning and strategy. The difficulty of enemies is also determined by the overall World Tier level, which rises as you earn experience points alongside your character. World Tier also determines loot drops, so there’s an incentive to keep it on the highest level you can, but if you’re in a particularly annoying fight, you can always back it down a touch to keep yourself from stalling. The World Tier is a smart solution to the difficulty problem, and since it can be adjusted any time, it gives you a lot of freedom to avoid frustration at key moments.
The combinations of over-the-top guns, ridiculous superpowers, and huge groups of enemies creates some awesome combat moments. Outriders might not reinvent any of the ideas at play in its battles, but it mixes them all together in some really inventive ways. Not every single battle in the game works exactly as intended, but it’s not a problem with the mix–it’s when the arena layout of a fight puts your back against the wall, or when you’re not specced out to deal with an unexpected threat.
You can also play Outriders cooperatively, which elevates how frantic and wild combat can become. Having multiple superpowered players working together to stun enemies, teleport behind positions, spread out status effects, and dish out massive damage makes for a bombastic, sensory-overloading combat experience, especially in tougher endgame battles. It’s not a stretch to say that Outriders is best experienced with friends and other players–solo is fun but can get tough, while co-op fighting just continually highlights the game’s best features and encourages you to think creatively about combining powers, guns, battlefield control, and teamwork. After putting about 40 hours into Outriders, I regret not recruiting more pals to work through the main campaign at my side, especially because the game makes it very easy to drop into and play or replay every mission.
Unfortunately, playing together has been difficult since Outriders’ launch. Cross-play between PC and consoles, an element People Can Fly touted throughout the game’s development, is currently disabled (consoles players on separate platforms can currently team up, though). Some players have complained of server connection issues, and while I didn’t encounter any while I played on PC, I did have repeated crashes when connecting with friends and trying to play together. On console the server issues are more prevalent, with lengthy wait times when loading into the game and unexpected disconnects when playing.
These technical issues will likely get cleaned up over time, but right now, Outriders can be tough to play, and it’s frustrating that the game’s always-online nature means even those taking it on in single-player are stuck dealing with some of the problems. People Can Fly has said it’s working to improve the experience, but so far the most frustrating thing about the game has been those times when I was trying to load into an endgame Expedition mission and instead crashed to desktop two or three times before finally getting to play.
When it comes to narrative ambitions, I enjoyed Outriders’ lengthy story, although it winds up being darker and more disjointed than what is implied in the first half or so. People Can Fly has obviously put a lot of time and thought into the game’s lore, and there’s a lot of interesting writing to be found in journal entries and side-quests. What I liked most, however, is the unexpected mixture of desperation and humor. Enoch, the planet where Outriders takes place, was meant to be an idyllic new world for the remnants of humanity to colonize. Instead, it’s a war-torn hellscape where the last vestiges of the human race are literally ripping each other apart. The misery and torment of the situation is exacerbated by the Altered, like your character, who have gained godlike powers.
Coupled with the dark, serious, and gritty sci-fi take are the moments of levity that make Outriders feel human. One mission found a group of cultists sacrificing soldiers to the Anomaly, the weird Enochian storm that destroys electronics, rips apart buildings, disintegrates people, and sometimes bestows superpowers. Rather than plead with the Anomaly worshipers for his life, the soldier attempted to reason with them, explaining that there was nothing supernatural in the strange storms. “It’s just electromagnetic … scientific … sh-t!” the guy yelled before they kicked him over a cliff, and I couldn’t help but laugh. If I were trying to disabuse some fanatical cultists of their misplaced and lethal worship of a colorful electrical phenomenon, I’d likely say something similar.
Unfortunately, the longer it goes on, the less Outriders leans into that mixture of intense topics and blockbuster levity. Things get dark as time goes on, but the road trip-style story abandons examining how to handle being a human-turned-god and instead looks into atrocities related to scientific ethics and colonialism. In the end, it feels like Outriders shifts subjects a few times, leaving a lot of threads hanging and without bringing many to a satisfying conclusion.
But the moments where Outriders is taking daring swings at mixing disparate elements are when it’s at its best. The game is surprisingly deft at combining things that shouldn’t work together: Its story is often funny but similarly severe; its combat requires you to take cover and to charge; its abilities make you phenomenally powerful but prone to overestimating yourself. If you can find the balance in Outriders, People Can Fly’s RPG-shooter finds ways to combine well-worn video game ideas into something new and fun. Especially when you’re accompanied by friends and put the time in to really understand the game’s systems, Outriders rewards you with epic battle moments and a sprawling scope. It left me wanting to continue venturing out into the wilds of Enoch to see what I might find there–and to smash whatever it was with seismic earthquake magic.
