Any Interest in Outriders?

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TheHT

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Looking back fondly on playing Vanguard in Mass Effect 3 multiplayer, it dawned on me that this arcadey-looking shoot n loot -- which I had very little interest in based mostly on how uninteresting it's visual style is -- might just be a fleshed out successor to ME3's combat.

Then I found this video of the Trickster class, and it's basically the Vanguard with Soul Greatsword from Dark Souls and a bunch of fun-looking time abilities (including a return skill like Tracer).

Game aesthetically still looks bleh, but whatever, gameplay looks like a good bit of fun. Comes out next month, I think?

SO!

What do you all think about Outriders? Any interest? Like the look? Don't care? I know it's made its rounds here and there in the past, but it never seemed to make much waves afaik.

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bigsocrates

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#2  Edited By bigsocrates

This is a big "wait for reviews" game for me.

The fact that it's a co-op focused game with a heavy emphasis on story is a big warning sign, because that almost never works. The fact that it's furthermore pitched with a serious tone from a developer who have only done goofy before is another warning sign. Then there are the delays etc...

I liked Bulletstorm so I have some hopes for the gameplay being good, but this thing is coming in with more red flags than a Soviet flag warehouse, so I'm definitely going to wait and see.

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Humanity

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I like People Can Fly as a developer but I dunno if I have the energy in me for another story thin, continuous loot treadmill at this point. Maybe if it was shockingly different and redefining the genre in some ways but this looks kind of like another one of these. Thats not to say it looks bad just nothing special.

Give me Bulletstorm 2 ..(you cowards).

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bigsocrates

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@humanity: They seem to be claiming there will be a substantial story in this game but who knows. At least it doesn't seem to be a live services game.

Bulletstorm was a legitimately great game that just didn't get attention for whatever reason. Not only did it have the fantastic creative kill and scoring system but it actually managed to have a fun story despite its hypermacho main character. R.I.P. Waggleton P. Tallylicker.

I don't understand why there isn't really a big market for great linear first person shooters anymore (outside of a few major franchises) but we get endless repetitive Diablo shooters.

I liked the first Borderlands game, but it really hurt the FPS genre in retrospect.

My secret hope for this generation is that with Game Pass game length will stop mattering so much and quality will be more important and we can go back to having fantastic 8-12 hour campaigns instead of middling 25 hour games that try to use loot and crafting to pad out their length.

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Humanity

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#5  Edited By Humanity

@bigsocrates: Bulletstorm was hurt by it's aggressive marketing campaign and then just kind of getting lost in the shuffle. There is a great post-mortem on Gamastura by Adrian Chmielarz who was the creative director on the game. Notably - and this might also relate to Cyberpunk - there was the the issue with translation:

Do you know any swear word in a foreign language? German, French, Polish? When you say it out loud, no biggie, right? Not a problem to use it during a family dinner, I assume?

That is how all the f-bombs sounded to us. Being Polish, all the strong language in Bulletstorm was just exotic and fun to us. We did not feel its power. In other words, Epic thought this is what we wanted and respected our creative vision, while we had no idea this vision was a bit more than we really wanted.

Adrian Chmielarz

Also games these days are very much looked at with the long-tail in mind. Games-as-service is the new plan whether it fits or not. We have seen the shift in many big franchises to include bigger yet emptier worlds that can sustain hundreds of hours of gameplay rather than more densely and evenly paced dozens. It's a shame and I don't know how the industry plans to climb out of this hole. The typical story is that games are increasingly more expensive, the risk is higher and making a tightly paced 12 hour single player game is extremely risky unless you're an established juggernaut like Naughty Dog.

Outriders seems to be just another live service product that is going to guarantee profits long after release. Or not? Anthem was a colossal failure for many reasons but you could see that they were banking on the Destiny success that didn't come. It might have been a really good single player campaign but with the whole mess behind development and a shift to persistent multiplayer a potentially cool game turned into another treadmill that no one felt all that happy to get on.

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development

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Looks unbelievably generic

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bigsocrates

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@humanity: I think that it's important to differentiate between big empty words and games-as-service. There is often overlap, but games-as-service is more about getting people to stick with a game and keep pumping money into it (like with Apex Legends or NBA 2K series) than necessarily having a big open world, and a lot of the big open world games (like the Ubisoft joints) aren't games-as-a-service, especially when they're single player. They might have some games as a service elements, like some cosmetics you can buy or whatever, but they don't get support for years and they mostly make their money through purchase price and DLC (which is kind of true of Destiny too, but it releases expansions for years like an MMO rather than just a single season pass and done.)

Both models seem intended to provide perceived value over time, which seems to be something that companies think gamers value a lot these days. Maybe it's true; though there are plenty of single player linear games that still sell well. Live Services games, though, are often bets that balance the risk of failure if they don't catch on to massive profits if they do. Fortnite has made Epic billions, and GTA Online appears to be profitable enough that Rockstar barely needs to make games anymore. So something like Anthem is a big swing at huge profits, which might explain why companies are so eager to take chances on them (and EA did get a big hit with Apex Legends.)

One downside of all this is that every game takes 30+ hours to play so people buy fewer games, which makes it even harder for smaller games to compete.

My hope is that the way out of this is something like Game Pass where games don't have to sell at full price to be commercially viable, and shorter more focused games have value because people haven't invested $100 into a deluxe edition and aren't expecting 50 hours of content. We'll see how that pans out. So far it's mostly been successful for indie or other small team games but if subscriptions keep increasing we might see that get better, and not every game feeling the need to spread 15 hours of content over a 50 hour runtime.

As for Bulletstorm's use of language...it was fine. Charming even. They may not have intended it to come off so strong but the whole game was clearly tongue in cheek so I don't know why so many people seemed so put off by it. This was a game where you literally blow people's limbs off and feed them to carnivorous plants and people were really upset by the cursing. I don't get that.

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Humanity

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@bigsocrates: You are correct in that thus far there is still a difference between big open worlds and games-as-service. I think we can both agree that the current trend in design is to somehow blur the line between the two as much as possible. Assassins Creed may not be a service game, but it has holiday events which is already a step towards the live-game model and the robust microtransaction store and clearly laid out expansion roadmap are all there to make sure you keep playing and potentially keep spending money as you wait for the next big thing. But it is still very much a single player campaign, albeit a greatly bloated one.

Bulletstorm is a whole 'nother conversation that is already adding towards our current somewhat off topic discourse so I'll just say that I liked it quite a lot because it had really fun gameplay and also I just don't see a game like that being made these days.

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glots

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Need to wait a little longer, but not for that long. April 1st. There's also a demo coming on the 25th of February, so that's a plus.

I've enjoyed their games in the past, but I can't say I'm too stoked for this, based on the previews. But hey, at least I'll now have a demo to try before deciding whatever to buy the game or not.

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BladeOfCreation

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I've been looking forward to this game to play with my brother. The delay is worrying but the fact that they're releasing what appears to be a rather significant demo is promising.

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petervs

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Gonna smash that game hard

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geirr

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I hope they delay it til it's actually presentable
and then, and only then, will I give my very important verdict
on whether or not I, a dog, have an interest in Outriders.

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roborobb

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Has anyone played the recent Insider Program here?