Outriders full game impressions thread: Class matters

The full game of Outriders is out now and I've played some. I'm now beyond the scope of the demo into the next area. So far I'd say that it's a little disappointing because it feels very similar to the demo area. There's a couple new enemies and it's much bluer in color scheme, which is nice, but beyond that it's just an extension of what they showed. No wildlife yet, though they've suggested there will be some, and no real change of pace. I thought maybe the game would slow down a bit and do some storytelling, but this is clearly meant to be a multiplayer product so the action keeps flowing. Gotta keep up that grind.

I'd say the biggest change for me is the fact that class does, in fact, make a huge difference. I played the technomancer in the demo, which is very much a cover and range based class, and I switched to the trickster for the main game because everyone kept saying how this is not a cover shooter and it's all about getting into people's faces and blasting them. I agree that as the trickster that's the best route, since you can't recover health at a distance and this game is just relentless with the firepower it pours out at you. I picked the trickster because I remember enjoying the Vanguard in Mass Effect and it's similar in concept, but so far I don't think it's nearly as fun.

The main problem with the trickster is that once she shoots her load with her powers, the time waiting for cooldowns to pop is just brutal. The game says that you should get in and get out, but at least so far I don't have any great powers for getting out. You blink in behind an enemy, slash them with your big energy knife, start shotgunning, pop a time bubble, and then you're extremely vulnerable unless you've got enough people around to keep shotgunning and maintain your health. I guess you can pop the time bubble and try to find a way to blink out, but the problem is that the blink targeting isn't that reliable, especially when there are a lot of enemies around, so often blinking out just pulls you out of your time bubble and into the fray.

Obviously loot and class points will help this out. I already reduced my reload times by 20%, which really helps in keeping up the damage (close range damage is how the trickster heals), and I have some equipment that enhances my skills such as providing two of the big energy knives, which will kill most enemies. But I still feel really fragile pretty much all of the time, and it's super easy to get into trouble if I blink to the wrong guy or the ammo drops aren't flowing.

So far I like the Technomancer's more methodical play better, even though the Trickster annihilates bosses that I had to slowly whittle down as a Technomancer, but I'll keep going and see how I feel.

So far the game feels like a mix between Gears of War (especially with all the shotguns), Infamous (the super powers and battles between super powered guys), and Bulletstorm (some of the script and the visual design of the second area.) I like all those games but the whole seems less than the sum of its parts so far. It's okay but it seems like it should be better and I can't quite put my finger why it's not. Maybe it's a bit too chaotic for me. I like a somewhat more methodical shooter, which is why Technomancer suited my playstyle.

Anyway I thought it would be good to have a thread to share thoughts, feelings, strategies, and complaints, given that a lot of people will be playing this thanks to ye olde Game Passe.

Been playing on gamepass. Decent game. Obviously story is nothing to care about but gun play is cool. Runs great on series x too.

I am playing the tank class. Right now I plan to just solo and I figure with only 4 classes, each will be able to output damage. So far I am maining shotgun and just getting up in faces and popping off. I occasionally get close to death but then I pop an ability and it's working granted I am early in.

I have just finished the game. It took me 9 hours and change on world tier 7, playing the devastator class. I found the game to be incredibly boring, the mission structure is the same from the 1st hour to the last. There is only 1 mission type, clear the path of enemies, continue and occasionally fight a boss. The story is C tier Sci-fi and does not really go anywhere towards the end of the game. I am currently playing the post game but i think my time with this game is over after today.

@wwfundertaker:

I think you just described why this is a GamePass "freebie." I really feel sorry for anyone paying full price for this on Playstation or PC. They should at least add it to PC gamepass.

@heelbill: The game is not worth full price and the lack of commitment from the devs for post launch content, makes it real easy to say try it on gamepass or even just try the demo. By the end of the year a lot of people will have forgotten that this game came out.

I am glad I did not buy this game. I played a little more last night and early this morning and the game is monotonous. It does improve in terms of environment and also enemy types, but it feels janky in a lot of places (cut scenes often end abruptly, the fact that you can't fast travel unless you get to a fast travel point is bad, side quests feels pointless, etc...)

I feel like the demo gave a good sense for what this game is, for better and worse. It is really not a good solo experience, though it might be better with friends, but everything is.

I really wish the skill cooldowns were faster. It's not even that the game is super hard (you can always turn down the world tier) but shooting guns doesn't feel great. The game is absolutely swarming with enemies, and you're constantly caught in a massive hail of gunfire from every angle, and the kill to heal stuff just makes it so much of the time it's about attrition rather than skill or gameplay. Popping skills sometimes helps with that, but otherwise it's not great. I like teleporting around the map and blasting fools, but when my skills are down the game is almost always unfun.

Also the third area has some sequences that are ripped wholesale out of Gears of War. 1. A 15 year old game. Call them homage if you want to, and I know People Can Fly made a Gears of War game, but when you're borrowing from a game that old and in the process showing that you actually have less variety and worse encounter design than that ancient game....it's not a great look.

@wwfundertaker: What have the devs said specifically about post launch content? To me this game is very much a diablo/destiny deal where the story is just something to play to level up and get used to abilities until you hit endgame.

But if there isn't going to be much of(if any of) an endgame, and the fact that I AM just playing on Gamepass, I'm debating even bothering putting the time in.

@reap3r160: The devs have pretty much said that this is NOT a live services game and they have no specific post launch content planned, but if they believe demand is there for it they may make expansions or otherwise support the game after launch.

Basically it's not going to get a bunch of small constant updates, but it could get big updates (likely paid though not necessarily) or things added if it does well and engagement is high.

I think the Game Pass deal makes post launch content much more likely because it has really raised the size of the player base. The game is also doing well on Steam so if I had to bet I'd bet there will be one or more expansions or at least DLC additions of some sort.

@bigsocrates: hmmm, that's kind of a bummer. I get it, but still.

Yeah, I'm not NOT enjoying the game but like you and others have said the story is extremely meh, which IS usually an attribute of live service games.

Might be something I come back to later on if they add something meaningful.

I sort of had a feeling this would go the way of Anthem unfortunately. I like the classes though. Like the game itself is solid Imo, it's just thin.

@reap3r160: Looters almost always have bad stories (varied opinions on Borderlands aside) and I think that this is just kind of a throwback game to Borderlands or even Diablo. Not constantly updated but with some end game content and whatnot baked in, and the possibility for expansion.

Whether you prefer live services or all in one package is sort of up to you. There are advantages and disadvantages to both models.

The game is more like Diablo, where you are supposed to play the content over and over to get better loot but there is nothing like a raid or anything like it that right now to prepare for. The post game involves a new wave based mode in which you need to eliminate the enemies as fast as possible, with rewards tied to how fast you can complete the mission. I have played enough of the game and won't be coming back to it, even if they continue updating it.

To be honest I like it a lot. Playing it on Series S through Game Pass. I runs real smooth, the shooting feels great and the story and dialogue is dumb but in a good way. I think the game opens up a bit more after a few missions compared to the demo's more closed of arenas.

Shotguns in this game feel great. It's great teleporting behind enemies and just gibbing them to mist. I havn't played a game like this in a long time so it might just be that old itch getting scratched.

Not been following this game at all, is it possible to play it fully solo, or is it a Destiny/Division type game where you eventually get funneled into group content ?

@ares42: You can play it solo and it works just fine but unfortunately it is always online.

I have no real impressions so far as I only literally just started, but I did immediately think "wow, this is maybe too much lore?" when I went to the encyclopedia/codex/whatever. Doom:Eternal vibes. Also, I think if this game is a huge hit and they make a movie, Nic Cage must play Jack Tanner.

Been playing this game a decent amount on Gamepass....and I'm very glad that's what I'm doing. This game is bizarre and not worth full price, in my opinion. It has something there underneath it all...but everything else piled on makes it a pretty standard/uninspiring cover based shooter.

I went into the game knowing absolutely 0 about it and was pretty onboard with the game in the opening mission. Exploration of a new planet that also happens to be mankind's final attempt at survival? Yeah that sounds fun! New creatures and places, combined with some minor human drama, neat!

Then the game actually happens and....ew. I did not need "grittier, realer Borderlands" the game. The tone of the actual game is so all over the place it's jarring. It rotates between trying to take itself super seriously and then characters cackling psychotically as they just run around shooting everything while screaming "Fuck" more times in a minute than I've heard in any media in the past few years.

The combat is legit kinda fun, but also it doesn't evolve. You go down a pathway between fights, come around a corner and see waist-high cover, and know it'll be a fight. Do that and move on, repeat. I'm playing 100% solo as a Pyromancer and it's also maybe too easy, except when it suddenly spikes like crazy (difficulty balance is kinda whack). I have it set to auto-adjust to the highest world tier and 99% of the game has been a cakewalk, with the 1% painful moments being largely due to a pretty bad minimap radar and checkpoints if you die.

Technically, the game has some issues. All pre-rendered cutscenes tear like crazy, including the opening cutscene which you can't skip for 10 or more seconds, meaning you always have to see it and it's kind of embarrassing. Character models are constantly bizarre also, and the faces break a ton. My lady character gets random hair color in almost every cutscene, different from the ones I selected.

I'm gonna keep playing it, as I do enjoy the combat enough and "free" with gamepass is a good price to pay to see this thing through. I know the story won't pan out well, which is a shame because there is still a path it could take to be satisfying, but the game seems to have no desire to follow that path.

Overall...it's a real weird game and I wouldn't suggest playing it if you have to pay full price. Wait for a sale if you have to play it. I also wouldn't be surprised if this becomes a PS+ game within the year...it kinda has that feel.

I’m in the opposite boat as the person above. Started as a Pyromancer and currently playing solo the game feels a little too hard at times? Basic mobs are shredding through my health and it seems like I am constantly surrounded from every side. I’m on the highest world tier the beginning of the game offers but that’s labeled as “Normal” so maybe I’m just really bad at the game or something. Maybe I just need to get used to the movement because it feels weirdly off and I’m often not sticking to cover or I’m jumping over it because I thought I wasn’t in cover but I actually was. I beat the first boss which is the electric guy at the tower and uhh I dunno. Seems like my heatwave was constantly missing and I just had to sit back and alternate between my pull and my interrupt while pelting him with bullets. The fight actually seemed way easier than all the arenas before it where it felt like I was being shredded by gunfire from every location with snipers in perches hitting me the moment I popped out it cover. I get that you’re supposed to be aggressive and move around to regain health but the moment I leave cover there are literally 6 different guys shooting me while I suck up HP from my one victim.

Nothing else out so I’ll play some more but it all feels kinda sluggish and spongy and this is the very beginning of the game.

@humanity: For this situation I highly recommend the Thermal Bomb skill that makes inflicted enemies become a living bomb and explode if they die while burning from it. It targets enemies through cover and can kill the enemy on it's own until higher world tiers. Then the explosion does massive damage and usually kills anything in the radius near it. All kills this way count as from ability usage so you also go to max health instantly, it's super great. Between that, the Ash Pull thing, and Fire Rounds, I can make quick work of everything the game has thrown my way while also staying pretty much at full health.

The only dumb thing is some pyro skills make you stand up while you cast and there is a weird, few second input delay before the game lets you cover again. It feels more like game lag than intended design, but hard to tell with this game. It has some technical hiccups so I can't tell if something is a bug or working as it should.

@humanity: In most cases unless you're playing a Technomancer you shouldn't really be using cover that much, especially on lower World Tier difficulties where you're generally pretty hardy if you're keeping your damage output up. If you're playing solo then getting shot by a bunch of people at once is, unfortunately kind of to be expected.

Since you're early in the game it's possible you should consider trying some of the other classes out. I haven't messed with Pyromancer but I've read that in some ways it's the worst solo class because it's a bit of a tweener and maybe better balanced for multiplayer play.

The Technomancer sits back in cover and plays like a more traditional shooter.

The Trickster is supposed to dash in and out of the enemy groups (though playing trickster I can say that the getting out part is often easier said than done.)

The Devastator tanks stuff and goes face to face with the bad boys.

Pyro doesn't have such a clearly established playstyle, being more about just kind of engaging at medium range and roasting stuff, so it may not be the best class to start with when playing on your own.

From what I've played so far, here are my mildly formed thoughts:

* The aiming feels terrible. So much acceleration and seemingly no way to tweak that

* The dialogue and voice acting are bad. I still can't decide if it's good-bad or just straight bad-bad

* The performance on series x leaves much to be desired considering the games graphics. There's a ton of screen tearing during cutscenes which is ridiculous imo.

* The class and powers seem fun. Freezing people with a melee is something that always satisfies me in games

* I dig lush, green, alien-occupied worlds. If they show more of that, I may be a bit more interested

Overall, Id say I won't be playing this game unless my friends really twist my arm for an extra co-op body.

I played 3 classes during the demo; the only one I don't have yet is the trickster. I started as the pyro. The pyro and devastator are both extremely active classes. The problem I've run into with the pyro is that getting health back is extremely specific: you have to kill enemies that are affected by your flames. During solo play, this is extremely difficult. When fighting only one or two larger enemies, I've just dropped the world tier down to make it easy. I got an automatic shotgun (from the pre-order pack) that grants health on kills, and honestly I think I'll be upgrading that weapon as I go. Even other shotguns that have more effects or do more damage make me less likely to survive.

I'll be playing the devastator as my multi-player character. So far it's my favorite. Tanking in the middle of a metric fuckton of enemies feels great. I agree that the technomancer is much more of a traditional cover shooter class.

I should have more thoughts after I play this weekend.

I have played a bunch more of this now and it is crystal clear to me that the people who made this game do not like the things that I like about games or play them for the same reasons that I play them.

They like doing things like encouraging you to play an in your face style where you zip up to the enemies and execute them, and then throwing a long boss fight in where you literally cannot approach him, while also cutting off your ability to swap out the skill boosts on your equipment or go level up or grind more equipment or whatever if you're not geared up for a long distance fight. Ha. Gotchu! We taught you to play the game one way but it doesn't work here, and you also can't go change your loadout (unless you brought a loadout change with you) to try and do it the other way. Hahaha!

Yes you can pop the difficulty down and beat basically anything in the game, because its absurdly easy on the lower tiers, but since the story in this game is not just trash but trash that shameless rips off a massive blockbuster movie to the point where I almost appreciate just how shamelessly derivative it is, basically the whole point of the game is the loot treadmill, and that treadmill heavily punishes you for reducing the difficulty.

The game also likes to do stuff like introduce a new type of enemy for you to fight with a big cinematic introduction AFTER a massive multi-wave battle that is not checkpointed, so if you screw up fighting the new monsters because you don't understand what they do, you get to do the whole massive battle again.

And it loves to put this kind of stuff far from the nearest fast travel point because, again, if you have to go change up your gear or want to go do sidequests for a bit to power up, you're going to have to go on a nice long jog to get there.

In point of fact the particular fight I'm talking about here has a fast travel point that's right in the combat arena, and there are no enemies there until you press the "release enemies" button, but you can't activate the travel point until you've defeated all the enemies because...that's the kind of game this is.

There's a fair amount of good stuff in Outriders, and there's a lot of content (probably too much content for those who are more story and "get through the game" focused and less focused on the endless grind) but a lot of the design decisions really rub me the wrong way.

Far too often it feels like the enemies are incredibly spongey and your character is very fragile, and your powers are supposed to compensate for this, but way too many enemies just flat out resist the stuff you throw at them. It's not that I can't get past these encounters it's that it's just stressful and not fun. When you're zipping around the map and killing enemies like a Vanguard in Mass Effect 3 the game is pretty entertaining.

When you're being swarmed by huge amount of enemies for long stretches of unrelenting combat and many of them are eating multiple clips from your best gun and resisting all your powers, it's just frustrating, and really does feel like a bad 360 game that substituted unfair stacking of the numbers against you for actually difficult and interesting game mechanics and fair challenge.

It's like they played Doom Eternal and came away from it thinking that what made it good was not the incredible mobility and tactical options it offered but the fact that it threw a lot of enemies at you in its combat arenas for long stretches of time and punished you for dying by chucking you back to the beginning.

I'm enjoying this game a lot but dear jesus the difficulty in this game is absolutely brutal sometimes. I don't know if it's the world tier system fucking me or if my loot is just garbage but I'm getting into what are essentially world boss encounters and shitting my pants. I'm emptying, with no exaggeration at all, over 600 rounds into bosses to only do about half their health in damage while I'm getting my body busted open like a rotten coconut. Rolling some better perks on my gear helps a little bit but it's still ridiculous how these enemies soak up bullets like the world's most absorbent sponge wrapped in a Sham-Wow. There definitely needs to be some tuning done to the damage output in this game.

@bicycleham: I wouldn't say the difficulty is brutal, I would say that the game is pretty unbalanced in a lot of way/places. There are parts that I can cruise through, parts where I struggle but the challenge feels legitimate and parts that feel built for a different class (or just badly built altogether.) The balance probably works better for three player co-op, where you're never going to find yourself speced into a close up built in a fight that literally doesn't let you get close to the enemies, and their solution is just to crank the difficulty down to get past this stuff, but it's not really a fun experience to be in places where you feel useless, even in co-op.

The game is just fulll of weird and often bad design choices (like not enabling fast travel from any point on the map, for some reason, and having obvious difficulty spikes far from the latest fast travel point, or not allowing you to do equipment crafting yourself in the field and relying on a vendor to do it, or having to fast travel back to camp in order to move to another area, for some effing reason.)

@haz_kaj: Glad i got to play it on Gamepass also. The server issues were frustrating but im sure they are all working their asses off to fix it. It was a decent distraction for the past few days.

Huh, was going to dust off this Series S and do a month of game pass to try this out. This thread convinced me otherwise.

Well I started a new character as a Trickster and I can confirm it - for solo play it's absolutely way easier.

The same areas leading up to the first electric boss that I struggled to clear as a Pyro were an absolute breeze as a Trickster and I was going so quickly through them that almost up until the very boss I didn't even have chest armor equipped. The game instantly upgraded me to World Tier 4 after the first encounter where I never even unlocked that tier playing as Pyro.

Trickster is just all around a lot more fun and flashy to play as. Teleporting is fun and a basic get out of jail free card when you get surrounded by enemies. While still not as fun as the Vanguard class in Mass Effect 3 (a 9 year old game) it's still pretty cool. Trickster seems to be built around playing by yourself because you have so many outs for sticky situations. Pesky snipers? Just teleport to them. Surrounded? Just throw up a stasis bubble. Also the increased emphasis on mobility alleviates the frustration of using cover which is fairly clunky in this game. So far I've been breezing through everything.

Looking back it's pretty surprising how this 2021 release is still so much worse in almost every single way than the Mass Effect 3 multiplayer was in 2012. The Vanguard or the Adept classes had such awesome power sets and movement felt good with solid snap to cover mechanics. Outriders has that feeling of a studio that is used to first person games taking their first stab at third person cover mechanics. Which is odd because you would assume they had cut their teeth on this stuff when working on Gears Judgement - then again the Gears series is such a completely different beast when it comes to third person shooters that maybe none of that experience translated into this more free flowing game.

Anyway for anyone that started as Pyro and is struggling I would suggest to just go back and switch to another class. Pyro seems like a fun support character in a group that can interrupt and setup tactical situations for your squad to exploit but as a solo character the powerset requires a lot more dancing around than maybe the game is built for.

I just booted this up and man, did they make some *choices* with the narrative direction in this. The writing is impressively bad. It's like they someone tried to write Mass Effect but only using the worst aspects of Call of Duty and Ghost Recon.

Also, whoever made the handheld shaky cam decision for cutscenes probably . . . shouldn't be allowed to make decisions anymore.

I also don't normally care about things like screen treating and think people that complain about it are just PC nuts looking to stir up trouble, but - Jesus Christ the screen tearing.

@humanity: I am near the end of the game and I can confirm that Trickster is viable the whole way through on a reasonably high world tier (mostly played on 6 but I'm on 7 now after getting a legendary submachine gun that shreds enemies from close range.)

A couple notes:

There will be a point about 40% through the game where you are going to embark on what seems to be a pretty important trip. Make sure that you have gear on hand that works well at a distance (so both a gun with decent range and some stuff that buffs skills that work at range like Twisted Bullets). I was specced entirely into close combat and things went real bad for me. The Trickster doesn't operate well at range in general because it can't heal well there (unless you get equipment that helps) and lots of the skills are close range, but you need to be able to shift tactics at certain points, both because there are enemies who are very dangerous at close range, with powerful AOEs, and because for certain encounters you literally cannot get close to the enemy. It's impossible.

Shotguns aren't that viable unless you get really lucky with drops so it's best to spec away from them. Auto shotguns were dominant in the demo and apparently got hard nerfed for full release, and they run dry on ammo almost immediately. You can use longer ranged weapons at close range or rely on submachine guns, which are fine, so it doesn't destroy the Trickster's viability, but I spent too long trying to make a shotgun build work only to find that my ammo pool just wasn't big enough for major fights. You can respec your skills at any point for free so it's not a problem if you have some shotgun skills and if you want to do the same trial and error stuff I did I can't stop you, but it's something I wish I knew.

The Trickster is very reliant on skills that directly affect enemies (as opposed to buffing her) and sometimes those can be iffy. There are both a lot of enemies who resist skills later in the game (frustrating but a design choice) and some serious bugs in skill triggering (frustrating and not a design choice.) In later levels Hunt the Prey will often fail to zip you to your target, though your procs will still fire (so if you have the equipment perk that slows targets after you Hunt the Prey them then the target will be slowed) and your skill will go on cool down. Likewise the time bubble skill will sometimes just not work if the game thinks you're in an unviable place for it, and you may get a cooldown trigger without a bubble. That just sucks and the only advice I have is to try not to use it in constrained spaces but focus on more open areas. It stinks!

These things can be frustrating because as you said the Trickster relies on bailing out from dangerous situations, but if your Hunt the Prey doesn't move you, you're pretty screwed, and if your time bubble doesn't proc you can be screwed too. Or if the enemy you're trying to bubble resists, well, then you're screwed but at least in a way the designers intended so it's a choice rather than the game just not working properly, and I get less pissed about that.

This game is very weird in so many ways and it's also very long and at this point I'm just going to finish both because I'm near the end and because I want to see how it resolves all its weird choices and be able to view spoilers and talk spoilers etc...

I haven't had mixed feelings like this about a game in a while. Sometimes it feels like a 7.5-8 and sometimes like a 6-6.5.

@bigsocrates: Sounds like a journey! Honestly I don’t even know if I’ll get that far. The game is fine but I don’t see myself sticking with it solo unless they fix matchmaking and I’ll be able to group with randoms for some added variety. Going through the whole campaign by myself just doesn’t seem all that interesting and I don’t have any friends that play this.

@humanity: Probably the right choice, honestly.

Everyone complained about the 8-10 hour campaigns of the 360 era, but I'm not sure the fix was to make a 15-25 hour campaign with enough story for an 8-10 hour campaign and enough encounter design variety for a 3 hour campaign.

There sure are a lot of environments, though, and many of them are quite pretty.

Just finished this game. The story is fucking wild in like a "why is the last hour of this game an exposition dump," sort of way.

@bicycleham: The story is wild in a lot of ways. I don't want to get into spoilers here but I will say that Outriders definitely doesn't have the BEST story of 2021 but I think it might have the MOST story of 2021. I don't understand how they thought it made sense to include this much in a looter shooter. Diablo has some lore and like a basic story, but not nearly this much, and if you throw in the side stuff then you're at RPG levels of story in a linear multiplayer shooter!

You know what's very cool? Having the Big Bad reveal ruined because the game just decides to not render a cutscene. Very cool. Really adds to the sense of drama.

@bladeofcreation: Was this during the side quest where you learn the big bad's origin? If so I didn't have any cutscene play either, at a spot where it felt like there should be an important one!

@takayamasama: I feel like that happened a fair amount throughout the game. For example there were a lot of "area transition cut scenes" when you drive between areas and talk about objectives and such, but later in the game the transitions to new areas are abrupt and sometimes you don't even really discuss why you're there or what's going on.

Also the loading screens often contain spoilers in the back half of the game for some reason.

They also do the annoying thing for skipping dialogue where it skips the entire portion of the characters conversation instead of just advancing it to the next line. The game doesn’t have particularly great voice acting and I really wish I didn’t have to sit there and watch two stiff puppets monologue at one another.

Hmm well my time with the game is probably over. Just got to an encounter in a courtyard that is maybe one of the worst designed encounters in a game I've played in the last decade. It's completely designed for multiplayer, and I've been wanting to just see it through solo. I could lower the world tier, but the game's story doesn't justify that attention and time from me, as it is increasingly horrible. Not even good bad, just bad bad.

Nothing is more fun than a huge wave of enemies that can swarm and kill you quickly before you even know what's going on (largely due to this game having little to no hit detection on your character, unless you are glued to your health-bar it's really hard to know if you are losing life!) then to finally struggle through it, get a cutscene introducing a new type of enemy, and have to fight 2 of them and another horde of enemies that swarm you. If you die you get to go back to the start! Woooooo.

This game is bad.

I had a very weird arc with this game, where I was genuinely excited to dig into it. Played a decent chunk all weekend (just finished up the snowy area), was actually having a really good time! Like really good. Stopped playing last night and was excited to get back into it today, but then something happened? I woke up, played for like... ten minutes and boy just could not find myself less interested. I have no idea what happened, if I was just riding some weekend high or what, but playing more Outriders is like the least appealing thing to me right now. I don't know if that's me or the game though, haha.

@takayamasama: This is the exact point in the game I was talking about in post 24 when I said

"The game also likes to do stuff like introduce a new type of enemy for you to fight with a big cinematic introduction AFTER a massive multi-wave battle that is not checkpointed, so if you screw up fighting the new monsters because you don't understand what they do, you get to do the whole massive battle again.

And it loves to put this kind of stuff far from the nearest fast travel point because, again, if you have to go change up your gear or want to go do sidequests for a bit to power up, you're going to have to go on a nice long jog to get there.

In point of fact the particular fight I'm talking about here has a fast travel point that's right in the combat arena, and there are no enemies there until you press the "release enemies" button, but you can't activate the travel point until you've defeated all the enemies because...that's the kind of game this is."

You can go grind out some sidequests and gear up a bit and it becomes much more manageable. Is it worth it? Hard to say. It's probably close to the midpoint of the game and there's a LOT left afterwards, and it doesn't get any different (I think it does get somewhat easier because once you start getting Epic items regularly and being able to fine tune your builds you can make yourself much more survivable.)

But yeah this game is built for multiplayer, where these kinds of encounters are more fun and interesting than when just slogging through them as a single player.

@bigsocrates: wait this is only the midpoint? My God its felt like I've been playing forever and I just wanted to power through to see the ending... but if I got a lot to go and I'm already this exhausted. Yikes.

@takayamasama: I don't know if it's the exact midpoint, it might be 60-70% of the way through, but yeah there is a lot of stuff after. A lot. I spent more time in the beginning of the game because I was doing sidequests and stuff (and dying more often) so maybe I only had 25% of my playtime left to go (not sure) but you are definitely not what I'd call "close" to the end. Don't know what level you are but I was 29 after I beat the last boss, and I think most people are relatively close to the cap by the end of the game, and progression slows down significantly as you get closer to the cap.

@bigsocrates: Yeah there’s definitely parts of the story that had me intrigued for a bit and wondering where they were going to go with it. Then they just ended up having basically the exact plotline I predicted and handwaved some questions and then just let you roam the endgame content. It’s kind of disappointing since I was getting serious Mass Effect vibes a couple hours in, but to have a story so by the numbers you could describe every beat was beyond disappointing. I’d post mire about it here but don’t have any way if blocking out spoilers at the moment.

@takayamasama: It was the part when you find Seth's body and learn about Moloch.

I feel like there are some aspects of the shooting encounters that are very oddly designed. I'm playing as a trickster and the abilities are all fairly short range, in close abilities. But then you fight bosses that severely punish you for getting in close and the best way to solo them is to play very timidly and kite them around...

Then, the last encounter I played was an area where I had to run up a ramp and there were enemies in front of me and flanking both sides. It was a turkey shoot for them and they could just lob grenades in on me constantly while I had to manage 270 degrees of incoming fire. I died in that spot about 5 times. On my last attempt, I ran up the ramp, drew aggro from two enemies, and then would run back down and lure them through the ramp corridor. Rinse and repeat for all 30-40 enemies and I finally beat that encounter. It took about 30 minutes and I had zero fun doing it.

I keep hearing that this is supposed to be a game where you run and gun but I feel like you get actively punished when you do that. Throw in the lack of grenades while the enemies just spam you TO DEATH with them and the game just feels like combat was designed by someone that has never played an fps before. It's not a matter of difficulty, it's just poor design.

@spectre855: The running and gunning people talk about works for the Trickster class specifically, although I only tried one other class which required a lot more cover taking. I agree it's an extremely mixed bag and it's actually a little shocking how laser accurate all the human enemies are to the point of being able to damage me when I'm behind solid cover. The moment you get out of cover it seems like even rolling doesn't negate the lock-on effect as you get decimated by any goon with a gun in the vicinity.

That said, I do think Trickster is very survivable and can just run around if you're careful. The key is to teleport to the edges of the map where you know there won't be bad guys behind you - although even that is tricky as arenas have enemy spawns that pop out more baddies and I've gotten blindsided by a whole squad of dudes suddenly appearing out of nowhere behind me more than once. The stasis bubble basically makes you not take damage so that always gives you breathing room to get your shields up. Don't forget to sprint and melee for an overhead attack that does area damage and slows guys down for a few secs, but most importantly gives you shields.

As for 1-on-1 with tougher enemies the only real tactic I know that works well is to teleport to them, instantly pop your stasis bubble and throw on the warped bullets power then proceed to dump into the boss from point blank preferably with an LMG that has a big magazine. For 99% of Lieutenants and beasts this will melt their healthbars almost entirely or at least halfway.

That doesn't change the fact that parts of the game are wildly unbalanced though. Today I did two sidequests in the same area and one of them forced me to drop my world tier because the Elite enemy at the end was basically almost not taking damage from my most powerful weapons, and the other quest was a complete cakewalk on the highest world tier available to me. Go figure.

I just deleted this game after dying spending 20 mins on a Challenge Tier 7 Expedition. Being stun locked by a mob of enemies is not fun. There were so many times I felt cheated and one shooted by an ememy that came out of no where. I played through the game solo.

I played a Trickerster class. The game is so unbalanced and build diversity is not there. I chugged along with the game because I did play a lot of the demo to grind out for legendaries, which was really pointless because you'll level up and come across better weapons and the cost of leveling up legendaries cost too much of your resources.

The game isn't balanced in the sense of scaling of enemies, your current level, and World Tier. The amount of XP you lose in your World Tier is punishing if you die a lot and don't realize you're just spinning your wheels because you were 75% filled in your World Tier to get to 10% after dying so much trying to push through whatever encounter. There should be natural progression of getting stronger from your loot, but there are times where you get your loot drop and the stats are worse then what you a have on. Sure you can use your resources to upgrade your weapon and attributes, but I don't feel like that economy is balanced either. There is so many ways to cheese your way through the game just to get to the endgame and to get the best mods, but what's the fun in that.

It's a pretty easy Platinum on PS4. The skipped all the cut scenes because I had no interest in the story, but there isn't much of variety in the gameplay. It's just sections of an arena encounter through out the game. The power/abilities are fun to use, but this is so not a full price game.