We have played more than 3 hours to the new People Can Fly and Square Enix, which will arrive this Christmas from 2020 to PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X.
We fly to Warsaw (Poland) to play more than three hours to the new People Can Fly and Square Enix: Outriders, in addition to being able to interview part of the development team in order to discover all the keys of the game, which will arrive this Christmas to PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X. Here are our detailed impressions to determine the strengths and weaknesses that the title presents.
The most ambitious project of People Can Fly
People Can Fly was founded in February 2002 by Adrian Chmielarz. They started as a small team and the first game they released was Painkiller (2004), a shooter inspired by works such as Quake and DOOM. Years later they added other titles to their trajectory and were acquired by Epic Games in 2007 (later they also allied with Square Enix). Now they say they are embarked on their most ambitious project to date, Outriders, which will be released by Christmas 2020:
“From the beginning we wanted to create an RPG shooter, since it is a genre in which we feel comfortable and have experience having taken titles such as Painkiller, Bulletstorm and Gears of War: Judgment,” says Szymon Barchan, senior narrative designer, “We had Clear approach from the beginning, when we started developing Outriders 4 years ago. When the prototype was ready, we showed it to Square Enix and they loved it. ”
A detail that the director of the study, Sebastian Wojciechowski, assures from the beginning is that it will not be a game as a service, so in Outriders we will not find loot boxes or pay to win shortcuts, provided that all the progress we make and what that we get is by playing and not by disbursing a good amount of money.
A somewhat crazed argument
Thanks to various trailers and the opportunity to play the introduction of Outriders, we can discover how its main story will be raised. We are in a dystopian future, in which the Earth can no longer house human life due to numerous wars and harmful climate change. Since they could see what was going to happen to them, in recent years a plan for the survival of the human race was created. In the year 2159, two huge colonies were sent to the lush and unexplored world of Enoch. After 80 years of travel, with the crew in a cryogenic sleep state, only one of the ships managed to reach its goal.
In this ship, "Las Flores", travel the special forces of the Outriders, responsible for securing the planet Enoch as long as the human race can resurface again and have a place to live. As they explore the new world, full of wild nature and loaded with potential, a mysterious thunderstorm emerges and catches them. Much of the Outriders disappear in the storm, but some manage to absorb part of that mysterious storm and obtain a strange power. As long as our protagonist survives, he returns to the ship to enter again into a state of cryogenization.
30 years have passed since that moment and, when we woke up, everything has changed. The storm, now called Anomaly, continues to appear. The flora and fauna of Enoch have changed, hyper-evolved, and the plants and creatures that were once harmless are now deadly. The colonization effort has failed. Falling into despair and fighting, the remaining settlers are trapped in a valley, stripped of all advanced technology, unable to leave due to the powerful Anomaly, and waging a wild civil war between them.
Our Outrider is one of those special humans who manage to absorb the Anomaly and become "Altered", who develop impossible powers from the ability to manipulate fire, gravity, time and space. Thanks to this, he will be unstoppable in combat… at least until he finds powerful altered enemies that will make things difficult for us.
As you can see, it is a plot quite similar to other stories that we have already enjoyed in literature, movies and even other video games. Even so, on paper, it seems that Outriders strives to present a world interesting enough to keep our attention and arouse our desire to know more once the prologue is over. As for our protagonist, we can design it in detail thanks to a character editor that makes us choose between a series of faces, hairstyles, colors, scars and others. Something to be thankful for is the fact that this Outrider has its own voice, both male and female.
“We intend to tell a mature story with strong and well built characters. We have about 100 years of lore for the history of Outriders and we can discover everything during our game, ”says Barchan,“ We still cannot explain much about the narrative of the game, but we can assure you that a few turns are waiting for you and surprises in the main story ”.
As for the characters we know in Outriders and their relevance in the main story, the director of narrative assures us that they have dedicated time and effort as long as we can discover their particular stories, help them in character missions and, ultimately, Know all about them. They detail that we will see several hours of kinematics in the game and that the main characters that appear have been created from the motion capture system in order to ensure a quality and realism at the level expected.
4 classes, skill tree and more
In Outriders we will have at our disposal up to 4 classes to choose from, related to the aforementioned powers that we have thanks to being “Altered”. In the demo we only played with 3 of them, which we could try when creating different characters, since we must choose a class for each Outrider and we cannot modify it once we start the game:
"You can have up to 5 character slots in each game so you can try all the classes to find out which one best suits your playing style," explains Rafal Pawlowski, level designer.
The first of the three classes we play is the so-called “Trickster” (Trickster). If we choose this class we must concentrate our shots on close-range and close combat. Tricksters have powers that allow very agile mobility and skills that provide control over the laws of space and time. They can slow down time, something that is ideal for both defensive and offensive and can teleport across the battlefield to get closer or away from enemies. In addition, they have the ability called "Temporal Slice", a large melee attack that turns the unfortunate enemies into skeletons.
On the other hand is the Devastator, the backbone of any group of Outriders. Strong and resistant, they control gravity and use the power of the earth to crush their enemies. Specialists in hand-to-hand combat that are launched against enemies and whose powers allow them to cover their entire bodies with a rock barrier and send their enemies flying with powerful ground attacks.
Finally, we could also try Pyromancer, a specialist in mid-range Area of Effect attacks. Controlling the power of fire, they cover the battlefield with their burning fury. One of his abilities is called "thermal bomb" and serves to turn any enemy that reaches into a walking bomb that explodes when that enemy dies. Its walls of fire cross the battlefield and expel the enemies from its cover. Pyromancers are not as tough as the Devastators or as agile as the Tricksters, but their explosive arsenal makes them a threat in any situation.
As we move forward in the game and level up we can unlock new special movements and attacks, which are detailed in a skill tree that we can complete in order to develop our character in one way or another. According to the People Can Fly team, we can unlock up to 60 attributes in order to build one build or another. It will depend entirely on our style of play and personal preferences.
On the other hand, we have at our disposal a wide arsenal of weapons among which we can find guns, rifles, shotguns, snipers and more of different ranks (the golden ones will be the best, while the green ones are the basic ones, for example). Although they have a spatial design, we do not find any particularly particular weapon or with special effects, since they follow a system that we have seen hundreds of times in other shooter.
Devastator Skill Tree
Playability: better in cooperative
Most of our game session was in the company of two other Outriders in local mode. Thus, we were able to test the cooperative mode of the game, which allows up to 3 players to meet in online mode in order to advance together through the history of the game, complete main and secondary missions and discover the universe of the title in company:
“You can spend the entire game alone or in a cooperative with up to 3 players. We have made sure to balance the level of difficulty equitably as long as the experience remains interesting for everyone, ”Pawlowski details.
At this point, in relation to the correct balancing of the difficulty, we disagree with the declarations of the level designer. As we progressed in the demo the "World Tier" was increasing. It is a parameter that increases the difficulty and power of the enemies as well as the rewards and quality of the weapons and armor pieces that we find. At the time we had to face the boss of the level, the World Tier was at 4 and with the arsenal and protection we had obtained so far we did not have enough to overcome it easily and easily.
To this we must add the considerable amount of bugs and technical problems that we encountered in our game session. One of them caused the most powerful ability of the Devastator to fail, which was key in order to break the enemy's guard and prevent him from regenerating his health. Another bug made the ammunition box inaccessible, so we couldn't reload our weapons in order to keep firing. Therefore, we were half an hour clock in order to end the fight and not because it was complicated, but because of the errors mentioned and other parameters that the development team must adjust and improve.
On the other hand, something we found strange when playing cooperatively is the amount of kinematics we witnessed. It is understandable if the game were focused on the single player, but because one of the key concepts of the game is to be accompanied by other Outriders, we were taken out of the action by having to spend several minutes listening to a character talk and have that stop the conversation with our partners in order to concentrate on the plot.
An intergenerational game that will reach PS5 and Xbox Series X
"We believe this is the perfect time to launch a new original IP and an exciting dark science fiction universe, along with the new wave of cutting-edge console hardware," the study director explained in the presentation.
Even so, the available gaming stations were all PCs, so we couldn't get to the controls of the new generation of consoles. When asking about how it was to develop for these platforms, we obtained a refusal in response, since Microsoft and Sony prohibited them from specifying any details in reference to PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X.
What we could play on PC seemed quite powerful in terms of graphics but with much to fix in the technical section. Bugs, long loading screens and errors such as those mentioned above made it clear that these months that the People Can Fly team has ahead until the launch of the game will be necessary in order to fix everything they have pending in order to get the best Possible version of Outriders.
Remember that currently the launch date is in the framework of "Christmas 2020" and will be an intergenerational title to reach both PlayStation 4 and Xbox One and PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X (in addition to PC). For now, we thought it was a promising bet but that it must finish taking off correctly in order to invite players to visit a new universe and that the ship in which they travel does not stay halfway.
