How the Outriders Team Revived a Quickly Dying Game.

(AfroGamers.com) A surprisingly good game from earlier this year was Outriders from developer People Can Fly and publisher Square Enix. In a genre that sees many games trying to get in on the money after the success of hit Bungie game, Destiny, People Can Fly chose to take a different route in making a great game. Although the game came out to mixed reviews by critics, its dedicated fanbase loved the game despite it releasing with a lot of glitches and bugs. Over six months after it’s April release, People Can Fly showed that they are not willing to let their game go the way of fellow looter shooter Anthem. This is how they revived Outriders.

Outriders New Horizon

The cornerstone of Outriders revival revolves around the New Horizon content pack that dropped in November. With it, came many game changing upgrades and quality of life changes. The biggest change that came out of it was the endgame 2.0.

One of the biggest issues from much of the fanbase, including myself, was the structure of the endgame. The way that it was set up was aimed at a very hardcore player that made up a very small part of gamers. It was a glorified time trail that had the quality and amount of loot tied behind preset timed tiers. While I understand why People Can Fly initially went in this direction, I think that they didn’t see that the whole time trail method that is popular on game streaming platforms like YouTube and Twitch is something that is more fun to watch than it is to play.

Add on top of this that in order to meet many of these time tiers, you had to have nearly perfected gear sets and it tied you in to specific gear sets and certain playstyles. This, in turn, made more than 90% of the armor in the game irrelevant.

Endgame 2.0 changed this. They took out the time trail aspect of the endgame although you can still do it just for bragging rights. Now, there is static rewards that you get and no time limit to get the rewards so you can be careful and take as much time that you need to make sure that you get your rewards.

They also changed the reward structure of the endgame. Now, if you don’t have the loot, you have a greater chance to get the loot in the future. On top of this, the NPC vendor, Tiago, now offers the choice to reroll his elite offer rewards for a large number of resources. This allows for you to filter through all of the legendary gear over time and pick and choose which ones you get given that you have enough drop pod resources.

Another big change that they made is making the classes seem more… classy. What I mean by this is that for whatever the preset playstyle of your chosen class is, it is easier to play this way. The biggest way that they did this is by increasing the overall survivability of all classes to varying degrees.

Before, the Devastator class, which is basically the close-range tank class, was not very tanky. They had noticeably more armor than the other classes but this wasn’t saying much because the other classes had next to no armor to begin with. They drastically increased the armor of this class and now it is much better. While you can choose to build your class to focus other aspects like weapon damage or anomaly damage to output more damage overall, you can also do what I did and sacrifice damage for flat out survivability and tankiness. This allows you to take massive amounts of damage in the middle of a lot of enemies and over time, widdle down the health of the enemies.

Although they aren’t the killers that the other three classes are, if you have a Devastator built like this in your party, you don’t have to worry about getting kills because all you have to do is clean up the kills that the Devastator has already damaged. You also don’t have to worry about dying because the Devastator can always revive you.

Other Changes with New Horizon

On top of the huge changes to the endgame, there were also many other changes that happened. Although I personally did not care about it, they added transmog, to the game which is something that many players in MMO, looter shooter type of games love. This allows you take any existing armor piece that you have already unlocked and use it like a skin to put on whatever you currently have on to make you look how you want to look. This even goes across characters where you can give your Pyromancer the look of the cool legendary gear that your Trickster have and vice versa.

Some more changes made were four new expeditions added to the endgame to kind of freshen up the expedition rotation. Sometimes, it is underestimated how something small like three or four new maps can completely freshen up something like a map rotation, especially if you have been playing the same ones for a while.

There have been changes to legendary armor and weapons, skill trees, and skills to make them more viable in the endgame and bring them closer to each other in terms of usefulness. This opens up many more options to choose from instead of whichever one gives you the highest DPS. Also, there has been buffs to the skills that those pieces carry.

Lastly, People Can Fly has greatly improved the cross-play experience of the game. I can say, from experience, that the cross play is smooth and close to flawless across the board. There is very little lag and not a lot of dips in the game’s performance even though I am playing on PS4. The only thing missing is cross platform voice chat.

Coming up, along with the announcement of New Horizon, People Can Fly has announced a new expansion coming to Outriders early next year titled Worldslayer.

Staff Writer; Tardell Swift

This brother is new to writing yet has many different interests such as gaming, hip hop, wrestling, and manga.

You can follow him on Twitter; PhirewoodGaming and keep up with his thoughts there as well.

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