The latest game to pitch itself as your daily hobby

The question that comes up whenever a new competitor to the likes of The Division or Destiny comes along is a simple one: Is it worth the investment?

These are the kinds of games that offer themselves up as hobbies, with activities and rewards that encourage daily play. But they’re also massive time commitments. So a newcomer like Outriders doesn’t just have to sell people on a new game, it also has to convince its most likely audience that this new hobby is better than the hobby they’ve already spent 1,000 hours playing. 

You know what, though? Outriders has me sold.

I come to this guns-and-space-magic-fueled adventure through an alien world as a seasoned veteran of its particular flavor of action game, which is built primarily around a chase for ever-more-powerful (and often more tactically interesting) weapon and armor loot. So when I say Outriders nails it, that belief is backed up by, quite literally, thousands of hours spent playing the kinds of games it’s here to take on. 

It starts with the story and the 30-hour lineup of quests built around it. I’ll leave the specifics of the prologue a mystery here; it’s enough to say you play as an elite soldier — one of the titular “Outriders” — who’s serving as part of the vanguard force tasked with settling a distant alien planet in the years after Earth is rendered uninhabitable.

‘Outriders’ has to convince its most likely audience that this new hobby is better than their old hobby.

The settlement efforts don’t exactly go as planned, however, and so you awaken from cryogenic stasis to find a hobbled recreation of human society that’s been split by tribal divisions. Part of the reason for that is the world we’re now calling home, which turns out to be unexpectedly hostile and blanketed by “Anomaly” storms that present a grave risk to human life.

Those same storms are also a source of tangible power, however. Some of the humans who came into contact with the energy generated by these storms were left fundamentally changed. These “Altered” individuals possess unique powers, and those powers form the foundation of Outriders‘ four main character classes.

There’s the Trickster, a close-range fighter whose latent abilities favor hit-and-run tactics; the Pyromancer, a ranged damage-dealer whose abilities are derived from heat and fire; the Devastator, a high-health, close-range fighter who’s equally effective at beating down baddies and drawing fire away from less defense-focused Outriders; and the Technomancer, a support class built around healing allies and dealing indirect damage via status effects and turrets.

As you play and level up within a chosen class, you earn points for unlocking nodes on a skill tree that allow you to further specialize and focus on particular strengths. With my own Technomancer, I chose to invest those points in souping up various turret abilities. But I could have gone a different route, focusing instead on Technomancer powers that charge your bullets with extra effects or manufacture limited-use firepower out of thin air.

Best of all — and this is one of those spots where Outriders distinguishes itself — you’re never locked into any of those choices. By the time you hit the max level of 30, you’ll only have enough points to unlock about one-third of your class’s skill tree. That’s by design, since each class has three focused (but malleable) specializations. But at any time, you can press a button to simply refund all your unlocked class points, as they’re called, and start over.

Outriders isn’t the first game of this type to offer that degree of flexibility, but in a cool and welcome twist the three specialization paths on each skill tree have nodes where they cross over. This creates an opportunity for players to toy with hybrid character builds that favor a wider and more varied spread of abilities. I’ll turn to an example here: If you love Diablo III specifically because of the “elective mode” that lets you mix and match different ability combos, you’re really going to like how Outriders does the same thing.

That sense of freedom extends to your gear as well. Loot in Outriders is color-coded by rarity — a standard for the genre — but one twist allows you to spend some resources on upgrading the rarity of a weapon or armor piece. You can also spend to level up your gear, meaning that level 28 shotgun you love so much doesn’t have to get left behind once you’re pulling gear at higher levels.

Then there are the mods, or ability-boosting perks randomly slotted into much of the loot you collect. Dismantling a piece of gear with a mod you’ve never seen before unlocks that mod for your collection, allowing you to add it to any other piece of gear you pick up. The resource cost for shuffling mods around is kept low, too, so there’s never any reason to skip tailoring your mod picks to your chosen class and favored abilities.

This probably sounds like a lot, and that’s because it is. But at no point does Outriders expect players to grasp these rules and features immediately, or even early on. There’s nothing but benefit to playing around with gear upgrades and mods early, but it’s not until the latest stages of the game — after you’ve got plenty of hands-on experience — that you really have to grapple with a full understanding.

The learning curve in ‘Outriders’ can be as steep or as gentle as you want.

The learning curve can also be as steep or as gentle as you want, thanks almost entirely to the unique approach Outriders takes with difficulty. Fans of The Division games are familiar with the concept of “World Tiers,” a sort of global difficulty setting that sets the baseline health and damage-dealing potential for baddies while also, at higher levels, boosting the quality and quantity of the loot that drops in kind.

In Outriders, you level up your World Tier just like you would your character level: By winning battles and completing quests. But at any time, you can pop into the menu and drop down to a lower tier. So if one particular boss fight or enemy encounter is giving you a hard time, you can effectively bend the difficulty to your liking around just that moment, with the tradeoff of lower-quality loot returns. It’s an elegant system that, like so many other things in Outriders, puts the player’s desire to have fun ahead of all other concerns.

And hey, let’s talk about that fun for a minute. The act of running around and shooting up baddies in Outriders is a delight. Most of the weapons feel great to handle, thanks especially to the game’s strong sound design and satisfying visual feedback. 

It’s not quite on the level of Destiny‘s silky smooth, industry-best gunplay. But it’s close, and Outriders further amps things up with varied fights that range from tense shootouts behind cover all the way to run-and-gun-and-holy-shit-there’s-a-million-creatures-behind-me action where you’re constantly moving. All the smartly designed skill trees and player-friendly upgrade systems in the world don’t amount to much if the game they’re a part of isn’t fun to play. But that’s not a problem here.

There’s still plenty of room for Outriders to improve, though. The game has been a technical mess almost from moment one. People Can Fly and publisher Square Enix have struggled to keep servers functional and stable in the week since their April 1 launch.

Bugs are an even bigger problem. I’m playing on PC and I’ve lost count of the number of times Outriders has crashed completely, kicking me out to the desktop and forcing me to work some Task Manager magic. I’m using a fairly new machine, too, one that I built in 2019 and then upgraded earlier in 2021 with a GeForce RTX 3070 graphics card — pretty much the cutting edge for PC graphics right now.

Even with that kind of horsepower, I’m only able to keep Outriders (mostly) stable when I turn down some graphics settings and completely close out of all memory-hogging applications, including my web browsers. These are the kinds of issues that get fixed over time, sure, but it’s frustrating to think back on all the progress I’ve lost across my 50-plus hours so far due to crashes. (It’s also a credit to the quality of Outriders that I even wanted to keep forging ahead in the midst of those issues.)

There are problems with the game that go beyond the technical, though not in a way that’s evident immediately. It’s more evident in the endgame and the range of things you can do there to really put your full suite of powers and experimental builds to the test. 

Expeditions are a great start, for sure. They’re a set of 13 quests with amped-up combat challenges that you tackle on a timer. That timer creates different thresholds for success, with Bronze, Silver, and Gold target times netting you increasingly better loot. They also get progressively harder thanks to Challenge Tiers, which are a little like World Tiers in the way they raise the risks and rewards both. You just unlock them a little differently, with a new Challenge Tier opening up each time you complete an Expedition at the highest level you have unlocked, up to 10.

The reward structure in Expeditions is great, but it’s not quite enough to make for a robust endgame.

But that’s it, that’s the whole Outriders endgame right now. When I look at examples like Destiny or The Division, both of which feature “raids” that twist their respective base games in creative directions to challenge the top players, what’s happening here pales in comparison. Expeditions get incredibly hectic, throwing more baddies at you per encounter than anywhere else. But they’re not any different from the rest of Outriders: Move forward, kill everything, repeat until done.

To be clear, “move forward, kill everything” does a lot of work in Outriders and that’s not a bad thing. The entire suite of story quests sustains itself on that basic idea, and thanks to a variety of factors  — changing environments, different and deep enemy factions, new abilities — it stays immensely enjoyable all the way through. But the endgame that’s here at launch doesn’t do much to twist that basic framework in new directions. The inventive reward structure in Expeditions is a great touch, but it’s not quite enough.

That’s a good problem for People Can Fly to have, certainly. I just spent more than 50 hours playing this game in a very short stretch of time — I started late on March 31 and stopped late on April 5 to start this review — and my biggest complaint is that the thing you’re supposed to focus on after investing 30 or so hours into the story could have more going on.

That brings us back to the hobby piece, though. Outriders wants to attract the kind of audience that cares less about what you do during the first 30 hours than they do about the hundreds of hours that come after. Those first 30 hours are plenty compelling to be sure, offering a whole, entire story with an enjoyable cast of characters and a darkly funny (if bleak) worldview. But it’s the “what comes next” that will make or break the long-term appeal here.

As it stands at launch, that “what comes next” is feeling a little thin to me. It’s enough that I’m still on board for more after 50-odd hours and a very intense week of dedicated play. But I also think it’s a question that’s going to come up fairly quickly for the more committed players. Hopefully People Can Fly is already thinking about what the answer will be.