Morning friends. I have been playing an excessive amount of Outriders over the last few days. I started the game a bit late but have been picking up pace, largely as the story has grabbed me. At this point I am sitting at level 27 of 30 and I believe that I am nearing the end of the main story. The game could of course throw me a monkey wrench at the end but it seems like I have more or less reached the end of the map and also nearing the source of the signal. I would have kept pushing forward last night but I effectively ran out of time and had to be up and around fairly early this morning.
There are a lot of times someone will say a game has “Adult Themes” and what they mean by that is an extreme amount of sexualization. However there is another side of that coin, and that is the side that Outriders lands on. This game deals with the horrors that humanity can enact upon itself and is a slide show of our base instincts. In many ways it reminds me of the early days of The Walking Dead, back when the show still had a point. We have this clear mission… to venture forth into the unknown and find a signal that has been broadcasting since humanity reached planetfall. On this journey a lot of bad things happen and some of them will feel like a sucker punch… and others will feel futile and pointless.
In a game like Diablo 3, each act of the game has a base of operations where all of the infrastructure required to play the game exists. In Outriders this “camp” travels with you as you move across the map. The central conceit is that you have one of the only vehicles that is “analog” enough to withstand the electrical interference brought on by the anomaly. Each time you stop in a new area you set up a base camp until it is time to move the vehicle forward again. This is a bit of weird concept to get used to because, each of these areas ultimately represents a sub-region with its own travel system and then to traverse the larger world map it requires you to pack up camp and move the vehicle again.
Along the way you gather up a group of companions that will end up being more permanent fixtures in the story. I wasn’t sure what I would think about them but I have grown to love them all in their own way. In a lot of ways Outriders feels like an alternate universe versions of Mass Effect Andromeda. Both games have a similar focus on exploring new regions and finding a new home for humanity. In Andromeda a lot of things go wrong… but in Outriders every conceivable thing goes wrong and ends up with humanity mired in an endless war for decades over the few resources that are left. This isn’t high minded exploration… this is slow trench warfare fought in inches not miles.
One of the big things leading up to the launch of the game were all the farming that folks did in order to try and amass a vault full of legendary weapons. I feel like this was largely futile because upgrading legendary and even epic quality weapons is a losing battle. I tried for a bit to keep upgrading the weapon on the far right because it is by far my favorite item I have gotten in the game. The combination of perks was just amazing… and I have held onto it hoping that some day the resources will be plentiful enough to push it all the way to the level cap. The legendaries however… I am mostly holding onto them for deconstruction fodder in order to learn the mods they contain.
These instead are my workhorses that I have carried forward in the game. The sub machinegun I found as a random drop that just happened to have burning bullets… which are extremely powerful. The second is one of the preorder weapons and in both cases I have leveled them forward each time I dinged and was able to push them up one more level. Thankfully I have managed to maintain a good stash of resources and have been able to pull up my gear one level at a time as I progressed through the game. You can effectively do this with blues… but the purples I get I just vault for later deconstruction whenever they cease being useful.
In many ways Outriders is the strange mutant child of Destiny and Diablo 3 and because of that it is directly in my wheelhouse. I really enjoy the gameplay of Devastator with its up close and personal… kill all the things to heal style of interactions. I look forward to seeing what the further gameplay is like once I have finished the main story and capped my character out at thirty. I know at some point I will have to start leveling up my world rank again, but I am largely focused on doing that once I have hit cap. Similarly there are a lot of hunts that I have not partaken in, in part because they seem to reward purple or better items and I wanted to wait until closer to the level cap before doing a lot of these.
It is a really great game, but I still feel like I need to keep warning you… that whatever you think of as a “dark game”, this game is going to keep getting darker. The blend of science fiction and horror reminds me quite a bit of Event Horizon, so that if you were cool with that movie then you might be just fine with this game. Think back through history at some of the greatest atrocities of mankind… and that will also prepare you for the mindset that this game forces you to experience. There are absolutely going to be some folks that just nope out of the game at various points and that is okay. There are moments that make The Division seem cheery. At some point I will do a more holistic overview of the game, but for now I am still engaged and nearing what I think is the end.