Outriders wanted to be the Anti-Anthem - did it work?

To talk about Outriders, it's worth looking back at another, very similar game. Or rather: to its inglorious end

On February 21, 2021, a month and a half before the release of the new shooter from People Can Fly and Square Enix, studio BioWare laid its action role-playing game Anthem to rest. launched in 2019 with big promises, the co-op multiplayer shooter was supposed to revolutionize the genre and was even codenamed "Dylan" during development to emulate music innovator Bob Dylan.

But Anthem offered too little depth, only a short and rather weak story, no long-term motivation, no real endgame. Instead, there were bugs and performance problems and the cardinal sin: far too few loot drops and thus reasons to continue playing at all. When BioWare had ironed out the worst mistakes months after release, it was too late, the players were gone, the hype cooled down, the revolution failed.

Crash landing: Anthem never recovered from its failed launch.

Many Anthem fans had hope until the very end, and not entirely without reason: Similar "looters" and "loot shooters", i.e. games that rely on character development through better and better equipment, are plentiful and most of them flopped at launch. Destiny and Destiny 2, The Division, Warframe - all games that left a lot to be desired at launch and only picked themselves up over the course of many years. Even Diablo 3 needed major updates to core components before it could become a modern classic.

Outriders: The looter with an open ear?

The curious thing: The list of failed looter launches is long, and yet Anthem exemplarily repeated all the mistakes that can be made. And it's not alone in that either: in 2020, publisher Square Enix released the Marvel's Avengers loot-brawler, based on one of the biggest entertainment licenses on the planet, and today it's bumbling along with low player numbers.

Outriders takes us to a dangerous planet called Enoch.

Doesn't anyone ever listen? People Can Fly seems to have asked themselves this question. The Polish studio launched the loot shooter Outriders at the beginning of April - with the firm promise of having learned from the genre's past. For months, the developers ran an information campaign on social media, presenting the cornerstones of their game. They seem like the cumulative answers to all the angry-disappointed Reddit threads about looters of the past years:

  • Outriders was supposed to be a complete game at launch, not a service game with drip-feed content.
  • It should offer an expansive and gripping campaign that is more than a better tutorial for the endgame.
  • Of course, there should also be an end game, completely realized at launch and packed with fancy loot for creative character builds.
  • To top it off, there was the mother of modern gaming promises: no microtransactions, no DLC haggling. Whoever buys Outriders should be fully served.

The sentence "We're doing the Anti-Anthem!" wasn't uttered publicly, but it would hardly have been noticed. For two weeks now, shooter fans have been able to see for themselves whether the promises were more than hollow phrases. And basically it's clear: Yes, Outriders delivers!

Complete package for the launch

The story about a distant planet that humans wanted to colonize, but which then turns against them with deadly flora, fauna and climate, is indeed unusually robust and long for a loot shooter. If you take in all the side missions, you'll be entertained here for a good 25 hours - that's more than decent, even if the campaign, which is bursting with sci-fi clichés, unlikeable characters and trashy dialogue, is a matter of taste.

Extremely well done: Loot, crafting & character building

In terms of gameplay, disciples of the old Diablo school will enjoy four different character classes, all of which have different space magic as well as firearms with which they can fight fast-paced battles.

Even before the end game, the possibilities to individualize one's own play style are numerous. This is mainly due to the ingenious crafting system, which allows you to equip weapons and armor with mods that then have unique interactions with abilities and the skill tree. Movement, gunplay and the constant fire of abilities with short cooldowns are also just right: Outriders is fun to play at any moment and feels good and powerful from the start - a rare quality in a genre whose games typically only unleash their complexity towards the end.

That's how it should be! Outriders is not stingy with loot.

An end game with pitfalls

However, a motivating endgame has already been thought of (and quite as promised). After the story, the so-called expeditions become available: Short, but completely newly designed missions in which you have to thin out hordes of enemies under time pressure alone or with up to two teammates and occasionally slay boss opponents. The faster you reach the loot box at the end of the quest, the more loot it contains and the more valuable it turns out to be.

Expeditions in Outriders are how an endgame should be: Rewarding and so crisply difficult that tinkering with strong builds really pays off. Especially in co-op, they are an entertaining, fun affair. Multiple players can unleash a chaos of effects together in Outriders that feels quite unique in its raw uncompromisingness and explosiveness.

As in the campaign, the fact that the actual tasks and battle arenas are banal and uninspired doesn't really matter. "Defeat all enemies" is the only mission objective, the only level types are "sprawling arena full of melee monsters" and "trenches with ranged fighters firing from cover". But that doesn't matter when it's so much fun to wear down the enemies.

However, problems are already looming in the end game: Since the primary goal here is to kill as many enemies as possible in as short a time as possible, creativity in character building is quite limited. Actually, only what causes a lot of damage is valid. If you skill your character to support roles like healing or damage resistance, you'll hardly be of any use in the endgame.

After a campaign that encouraged constant reskilling and trial and error, the expeditions seem to miss the point of the game. The developers have already tried to counteract this with balance patches, but whether this will help in the long run remains to be seen.

Online compulsion & Bug-GAU: This is how the looter curse struck Outriders

Outriders still has some construction sites aside from that. People Can Fly have cleverly avoided many pitfalls of the looter genre, but their game still stumbled over an annoying hurdle at release: the online constra int. Even those who want to play the campaign all by themselves have to log onto a server - and online play without server problems at launch still has to be invented first.

Many players didn't even get into the game until several days after release, plus there were crashes as well as problems with matchmaking and the crossplay function. Two weeks after release, the developers are fighting a persistent bug that can completely delete the entire inventory - a super-GAU for a game like Outriders.

In the first few days, many Outriders buyers only saw the login screen.

All of this would be annoying anywhere, but is even more surprising for Outriders: Didn't this game just want to NOT be a game-as-a-service? Why isn't it at least playable solo offline? Currently, it seems like you're getting the disadvantages of the much-maligned service model without some of the bigger advantages. Firmly planned new content for the future, for example.

More than just "potential

Because there is no doubt that Outriders is a success in spite of everything, in view of the player numbers no doubt. People Can Fly should get a handle on the biggest quirks over time, and the studio's post-release communication continues to be remarkably transparent. If the game can keep its players happy after that, there should soon be calls for new content and activities.

As critical as content seasons or DLCs are viewed by many: Looter fans in particular don't really want to have a truly "self-contained gaming experience" without any hope of replenishment. Only time will tell if and to what extent People Can Fly and publisher Square Enix will get involved.

Outriders still has work to do, but the chance for a golden future.

The word "potential" appears in pretty much every looter release article, and Outriders has plenty of it as well. Unlike many of its competitors, this is a more than solid and actually complete game.

Outriders couldn't completely break the looter curse, but it's far from the fate of Anthem or the in-house problem child Marvel's Avengers. Maybe also because it never wanted to be the Bob Dylan of video games - but simply a game that does a few things really, really well. And hopefully gets enough time and care for the rest.

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