Outriders Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

Lamentation of Outriders

February 6, 2024 by Belghast

Good Morning Folks. I’ve been spending a bit of time over the last few days thinking about a game that could have been, but never really was… Outriders. I reinstalled it recently and it is still an enjoyable looter shooter experience, with its roots in the fundamentals of ARPG build diversity and design. It was the hoped Destiny Slayer that would come along and offer a more interesting gameplay experience. It had some connectivity issues out of the gate as often is the case with most new online games, but it recovered relatively quickly and offered a really enjoyable gameplay loop. Lets talk about some of the high points of the game.

First off it had a pretty freaking long story, at least compared to Destiny or any of its expansions. There was a lot of interesting gameplay wrapped up in that story as well and all of it was repeatable. It became commonplace to grind out your favorite story missions for loot in the endgame. While it told an exceptionally bleak tale that turned off some of my friends, it was a mechanically enjoyable experience from start to finish. It did a good job of easing you into combat and giving you progressively more difficult encounters as you learned the ropes of how to use your new powers. The male voice acting was less than amazing, but the female voice actor was pretty freaking great.

The class design and the powers that came with it were extremely fun. I spent most of my time playing the Devastator which uses Earth powers to “devastate” the enemies. My build of choice was to use Earthquake as an opening salvo, Tremor as a lifetap aura or a sort for everything fighting up against me, and Impale to lock down the biggest enemies while mopping up the weaker ones. The game had a talent point system that allowed you to really accentuate the abilities that you wanted to focus on, letting you lean into a specific gameplay style. For me it was all about being tanky and being able to take a lot of damage while dishing it back out in the form of elemental attacks. Other gameplay styles leaned into stealthy fast killers that flit across the battlefield or maybe being the best sniper you could possibly be. Classes had an identity and this was supported by custom gear sets and such making you feel like you were able to lean into a particular fantasy.

Then there were the weapons that not only looked cool but had some wild unique abilities on them. The craft system allowed you to replace any one node on your weapon with any other node you had unlocked to that point allowing you to craft some wild combinations. What I liked the most about this is that it was pretty easy for me to keep using the same sort of weapon over and over as I leveled through the game because I could keep bringing forward the attributes that I enjoyed the most. I imprint heavily on specific weapons in this sort of game and the fact that I could keep using them was huge for me. This is my big problem with a game like Halo where you end up having to spend most of your time using random trash weapons rather than the really good ones.

With later updates, there was a full cosmetic system that allowed you to swap up what your character looked like. This included weapons appearance swaps so if you had a specific loadout that you needed for your build, but you really liked the look of another weapon you could change that up and run around with whatever you liked. I personally with with a cowboy thing going on with a duster and everything. I think more than anything I appreciated how well the game played and how all of the cosmetics were unlocked through playing the campaign and for completing achievements. That said this is absolutely a game I would have happily paid for microtransactions in similar to how I happily pay for them in Path of Exile.

Now let’s talk about the downfall of Outriders. Prior to the launch of the game, the two biggest talking points were that it would have zero microtransactions and was “Not A Live-Service” which is a weird message for a game that required online connectivity and also was being touted as something that could compete with Destiny. Looter Shooters need content updates to keep bringing players back. You can look at the SteamCharts for Destiny or even The Division and see that there is a pattern. When new content is added to the game, players come back… there is a surge in player numbers and a slow drop off in numbers as players feel like they have gotten their fill and move on to other games. This is how this sort of game survives. Path of Exile has quite possibly the most predictable pattern each time a new league launches, there is a spike, and then after a few months a valley.

The game as a whole was reviewed reasonably well considering there were active campaigns attempting to review bomb the game during the first few weeks of connectivity issues. There were a lot of publications that reviewed this as an overwhelmingly positive game. The biggest concern that kept being raised however was whether or not the game was going to be supported in the long term. The constant drum beak of “Not A Live-Service” set up a bit of a paradox. Players engage in these sorts of games now as live services, as experiences to be revisited every few months each time a new drip of content is released… but as this game is reportedly a “finished product” it was setting up a scenario where it just could not sustain the players necessary to make things like matchmaking function.

Ultimately that is what we saw when it came to concurrent player numbers. There was an impressive peak of just over 125k players, and then by month three a constant fall off down to around 1000 players just before the first major patch, and a bump back to around 10k shortly after that. Then again a a bleed of players down to 1000 players again before some pre-expansions patches that introduced new things to the game and another bump of around 12k players with the release of Worldslayer dropping down to under 1000 players starting in November 2022 and continuing in that state to this point where at the time of pulling these numbers there was a 24 peak of just over 300 players. Without the rhythm of a live service game, there just wasn’t anything to glue the players to this game.

I will always be wistful of what might have been with this game. This game is my new Hellgate London, a game that I greatly enjoyed… felt was far better than the other offerings that were available… but just was not supported and died an early death as a result. The main difference is that I can still revisit Outriders and enjoy it, and at least so far its corpse has not been crudely reanimated by a KMMO company. Outriders is still a damned fun game, but it would be a better game if people actually played it. I go through periods where I reinstall it, and play a bit of it… get my fill… and then wander off again because there is literally no reason to keep playing it after that point. The devs announced to the community/influencer groups in March 2023 that they were not releasing any more content for the game. So it is effectively a “dead” game at this point.

This is a case where you can get all of the fundamentals of this sort of game right, and release a technically proficient and at times phenomenal game experience but if you don’t have the follow-through support the game will flounder. The looter shooter and ARPG genres are all about nailing a release cadence and by publically announcing from the start that there was no “Live-Service” they sort of shot themselves in the foot. There are just certain genres that NEED to be a Live-Service with releases after the sale in order to survive. We’ve seen this backlash against that sort of game, but mostly in genres that did not need to have a cosmetic shop or carefully timed content drops. We are currently dealing with one of those games right now with the Suicide Squad, which everyone seems to wish was just another Arkham game… but instead attempted to be something akin to the Avengers.

Outriders though had everything aligned to be a great game that would grow over time… it had all of the hooks that could have supported a reasonable microtransaction shop in order to fund the development. Instead, it gets added to the list of games that should have worked… but never quite did. I will always lament the death of Anthem in a similar vein, but Outriders was way more technically competent than Anthem ever was and still could not quite make it. All of this said, if People Can Fly came out tomorrow and said that they were making an Outriders 2, and this time it would be given all the support that the first game deserved… I would be there and ready to go. That however is never going to happen because I think Square Enix has a bad taste in its mouth over how Outriders performed, and the IP lives in that murky territory of having too many cooks in the kitchen that would need to sign off on a sequel.

Anyways! I will always have a special place in my heart for this game. If you’ve never played it, it is probably super cheap on every platform it was released on. It is worth a gander because it is doing a lot of interesting things.

Many Games and Little Focus

July 8, 2022 by Belghast

Good Morning Friends! I find myself in a weird position right now where I am picking at the bones of several games but not terribly engaged with most of them. There was a time when I used to create these “regularly playing” posts, and in theory that is what today’s post is going to largely be. However, I just don’t really feel like reviving that format. If I was going to say I had a primary game at the moment it would be Path of Exile. I am very much in a bit of a honeymoon phase with that game… or as “honeymoon” as you can be with a game that is actively trying to make interactions with its systems difficult. I am not in my 60s on the Explosive Arrow Champion build and I have a few baby alts that are doing different things that I am poking around with as well. We have several folks from the AggroChat podcast playing right now and as a result, we have a “Greysky Armada” guild up and running. Not that I actually understand half of what there is to do with a guild… but we have a Guild Hideout and at least some Guild Stash storage.

Since Outriders Worldslayer just released, I am spending some time playing around in that game. I enjoy the mechanical systems but am a bit frustrated with how limited the expansion actually was. Essentially at its core, it adds one new activity to the game… the Trial of Tarya Gratar. If for whatever reason you don’t want to engage with the time commitment of that event, then you are stuck doing the same familiar grinds that have been in place since the release of the game. However, with the game being way more generous about dropping legendaries, I am actually trying to build a proper gear set focused around the Seismic Commander set. At the moment I am wearing mostly the “purple legendaries” gear until I can get a decent roll on all slots of the actual gear set.

I am still logging in pretty regularly to Guild Wars 2, but I am not really doing much of anything. At a minimum, I farm resources in the three guild halls that I can farm each day, and gather what home instance nodes I have. Most days I try and figure out a quick path to getting 3 dailies done and get my 2 gold. However lately I have not even been doing that. Essentially I need to pick a goal and then focus on that because while I have a wealth of things that I could be doing… I am pretty directionless in actually doing any of them. I could focus on my Skyscale or knocking out the karka hunting achievement which would give me some way of disposing of excess ascended materials. The problem is that I fail miserably at actually sitting down and focusing on any of them.

I am in a similar “maintenance mode” with New World, where I am logging in most days and harvesting enough materials to get 3 of the Hidden Stashes which turn into diamond gypsum, and one of the proficiency caches that gives me emerald gypsum. I then take these out to Shattered Mountain where my inn is bound, craft some gear for expertise boosts and then log out for the day. Doing this has allowed me to take all of my armor slots, sword, shield, and warhammer to 600 expertise. Right now I am working on pushing up greataxe and hatchet. At some point when the major patch drops that take away dungeon keys I will probably start running some of these again through the new group finder tool. The devs made a joke about calling them tuning orbs and expeditions… but I am sorry… that is obtuse and weird. They are dungeons and they are keys and “ya done fucked up” by not naming them the industry standards.

I am even in a worse state with Final Fantasy XIV right now. Basically, I am logging in every 4 days… either to go house shopping among the ever-dwindling number of housing plots… or to collect my money from the lottery system because I lost yet again. None of these interactions make me happy. I am very sad about the state of housing in Final Fantasy XIV. The lottery while it helped in some ways by keeping me from having to set up an auto clicker in order to succeed… but I also feel pretty hopeless still about my prospects of acquiring a house. Now that there are additional catch-up mechanics, I really should dive back into the systems and catch a character up. However, there is a mental barrier between me and this game at the moment. If I win a house I will once again have the desire to spend time in this world, but so long as I am homeless I am lacking that traction.

My return to Diablo III was a whirlwind romance. While it was not my fastest season in the world, now that I have finished up with those achievements and gotten the rewards… I have very little desire to keep playing. I had started a Hardcore Seasonal character, simply because I had never actually played in that game mode. I have to admit what knocked the wind out of my sails was when I realized it worked vastly different than I was expecting. I assumed that when I took a death, the hardcore seasonal would turn into a softcore seasonal. I mean this is how it works in Path of Exile and my brief jaunt into Hardcore Minecraft… but my assumptions were wrong. Instead, your character is just gone, and I cannot stomach the idea of wasting time on a character that poofs. This combined with the fact that I just got into Path of Exile has more or less stopped this project dead in its tracks.

Lastly, we have Diablo Immortal. This one is mostly just a footnote because I have uninstalled this game from all of my devices and not looked back after my “fruitless grinding” post. There were a lot of things I liked about this game and the way some of the systems interacted. I specifically loved the way that legendary items worked, and how you could extract the “legendaryness” and apply it to other items. It appears that Diablo 4 is going to do something similar to this, so it makes me very excited for what that game might end up feeling like in the end. However, the monetization of Immortal is going to give me a great pause for what the future of Blizzard games looks like. I have to admit though I had some fun while it lasted, and if they at some point in the future come to their damned senses and make this a more reasonable option… I might return. Considering most of the reputable sources have stopped covering the game aside from the occasional dunk on it… I will be interested to see what the revenue stream looks like on this going forward. I am also curious to see what lasting impact this will have on the Diablo player base… since this essentially nuked the goodwill from orbit.

Death Farming Hauras

July 5, 2022 by Belghast

Hey Friends! I spent most of the weekend bouncing back and forth between two games. The primary of these was Outriders, which makes sense given that the new expansion dropped. I have to admit there are a lot of things about the expansion that annoy me. One of my favorite aspects of the original was the fact that after I completed the story, I could do some “choose my own adventure” type gameplay as I bounced back to previous flags on the map. There are a number of encounters that would spawn in as you moved through the world, and these were somewhat fun to play. You have to understand in Destiny 1 and 2… my all-time favorite game mode was patrol, where I could just roam aimlessly and kill things for fun and profit. The new story content does not have this functionality and the only way that you can go back to a previous area in the new zones… is to reset your story progress to that specific point.

It is very painfully clear that the studio’s intent was that we would be spending all of our time playing the Trial of Tarya Gratar, because that is the ONLY activity that is easily repeatable. Granted this is a perfectly fine game mode, but for my tastes, it takes entirely too long to do a full run. Once you sit down to play through it, you are committed to thirty minutes to an hour of dedicated attention. Granted you can checkpoint and resume a save attempt if you need to leave halfway through the event, but it will cost you an attempt in doing so. What I have instead been using the Trial for is to drop the difficulty down to apocalypse 10, and breezing through it to farm legendaries for deconstruction. This is giving me access to a good number of mods that I did not have in my repository given how stingy legendary drops were before.

Right now this is my favorite weapon in the game. I honestly do not remember what the original first slot trait was, but I replaced it with Firestorm from one of the new legendary weapons called Sunfall. Essentially Firestorm calls down a beam of fire from above that roasts anything within its radius for 8 seconds. The beam will follow your attacks, so if you get good with it you can have it slowly beam its way through a pack of mobs. This combined with Claymore which calls down an anomaly attack every 2 seconds for over 100k damage, means you can whittle things down very quickly. Firebrand Defiant is a random roll weapon, and I just happened to luck out and get something that worked extremely well for my purposes. Your mileage will absolutely vary given that I have gotten weapons named this… with completely useless perks on them. This also proves that the new purple three-perk weapons can be better than the legendaries that drop.

As far as usable gear goes, I have taken a page back from my old playbook of farming the beasts. In the base game, there are two quest chains that start out of the bar in Trench Town. Specifically for these purposes, I care about the Hauras hunter quest. If you do not have access to this because you have completed it in the past, simply finish up the rest of the hunter quests and that NPC will allow you to restart the entire chain. The reason why we care about this quest specifically, is that you can run in and kill two boss-type monsters… then let the waves of trash kill you as you hit your auto loot key to vacuum up the items. I’ve gotten pretty much all of the gear that I am currently using, as well as quite a few legendaries doing this rather mind-numbing farm.

The key to this success however is that you need to set your level to one apocalypse tier down from whatever you can currently do. Deaths at your current apocalypse tier cause you to lose experience progress, but if you have already filled the bar on a given tier… you can’t lose any progress. So when I was farming this the other day my highest tier was 14, but I was farming it at 13 and weirdly enough was still gaining pretty constant ascension XP regardless of the deaths. The only negative about this method is I have so much sustain that it sometimes takes forever for the trash mobs to kill me off. As a result, you can always go back to the lobby and come back into the game in order to reset at the checkpoint. Keep that trick in your arsenal if you also run into this problem.

I spent some time bouncing around the map trying different spots, and realistically Hauras seems to be the best option. There were a few other areas that I liked, that also gave me access to multiple boss types but the reset cycle was much more obtuse and took longer. There is a specific area in the Quarry for example that I really like, but it involved moving the truck to a new location and back to the Quarry in order to reset the spawns. As much as I hate dying over and over again to the same encounter to farm loot… it really is the most efficient method. I might record a video of the run at some point, but basically, trust the monster fights if you are just wanting to work on your gear. If you can burn through Trial of Tarya Gratar then by all means keep farming the proper endgame content.

Outriders Worldslayer Thoughts

July 1, 2022 by Belghast

Good Morning Friends! Yesterday was the official launch of the Outriders Worldslayer expansion, but I have had access to it for a while now. I did not really spend much time in it because there were some early server issues, and I had other things I wanted to be playing. Last night I pushed my way through the new story content and unlocked the new endgame area. I figured this morning I would talk a little bit about that experience. It is my goal not to really spoil anything in the story, but to be honest this is not exactly an epic fantasy tale… so I am not sure you would care if I spoiled it in the first place.

So I figure I should start out with an explanation for anyone who has not experienced Outriders before. This game is essentially a third-person run and gun looter shooter with a loot system that feels very similar to that of Diablo III. When you deconstruct an item you collect the mods that were on that item and then can modify any other gear to replace a single mod slot from one of the ones you have collected. You play as an Altered, or a character changed by the anomaly that ravages the planet. There is a class system and each class has a talent point system to build your character. I personally spend most of my time playing the more tanky close ranged earth-elemental-themed class called the Devastator and have specced down the Seismic Shifter tree that increases the damage I deal with my “earth” themed abilities. Pyromancer is medium ranged fire-focused class, Technomancer is long ranged focused on turrets and poison damage, and Trickster manipulates time and space while in close range.

The world of Outriders is extremely bleak, as humanity essentially exhausted the resources of the earth and attempted to find a new planet… and then found out when they arrived that it was also ruined in a different way. It is the sort of bleak that sees you nonchalantly climbing up a pile of corpses as you walk through a city that was quite literally a concentration camp. As such, I feel like you need to be a certain brand of desensitized to be able to look past this and see the deeply nuanced gameplay that it offers. If you can deal with the emotional barrage of the story… Outriders is quite possibly the most interesting looter shooter out there with fun and engaging gameplay and an “avoid cover at all costs to keep healing yourself” gameplay strategy. Unfortunately, most of the AggroChat crew could not look past the harsh exterior and get through the game in order to experience the “good parts”.

Unfortunately, as the story goes… Worldslayer is a tale of going from bad to much worse. You are presented with a new threat to humanity as the Anomaly keeps getting worse, this time deciding to freeze the planet in its wake. You also have to contend with a renewed focus on the civil war between the last remnants of the colony forces that you represent, and the insurgency camped just outside its gates. You also find yourself squaring off against “The Commander” of the insurgency which is an ultra-powerful Altered that seems to be able to channel some sort of hentai void tentacles nonsense. The story is still very bleak… but also maybe has a ray of hope for the future. I have to say that across the board the story does flesh out quite a few details about the world itself, and the people who lived here before. We find out that they seem to have also ruined the planet in their own way before figuring out a method for turning back the anomaly.

The new content area is rather small and consists of six story areas and a seventh are containing the new endgame activity. All told it took me around three hours to burn through the story, and I was doing so at a fairly leisurely pace. If you were moving faster there is probably only around 2 hours of solid gameplay here. If that is a thing that concerns you, then you might take that into account because this expansion is more a systems-wide upgrade than a juicy slab of story-driven content for you to explore.

Quite possibly my favorite aspect of the expansion is the unification of the challenge system. Above is a chart that I made trying to relate the two different difficulty systems to each other. Previously you had Story Mode World Tiers, which went up through 15, and that 15 related to around Challenge Tier 8, which was used for Expeditions. The problem is that if you preferred to run World content over and over, it essentially capped out at Challenge 8 and you could get no loot higher than level 42. Now Apocalypse Tiers essentially unify all of this mess. I had progressed through Expedition Challenge Tier 13 before, and the game started me at Apocalpyse Tier 13 with a maximum difficulty rating of 40 that I can unlock over time. This means stupid story mission farms like the Outhouse mission that I enjoyed doing over and over… are a completely valid want to level and get loot.

There are a few new systems that are added into the game, like Ascension points which are a direct equivalency of Paragon Points from Diablo III. You can essentially max this out and earn 200 of these, slotting 10 points into each attribute line. For example, I have already out 10 into bonus anomaly power, and now I am working on weapon damage. Given enough play time, we will end up maxing each one of these out at 10 points per attribute. This is not a terribly interesting way of gaining power, but it does help out nonetheless.

The more interesting new system is the Pax trees. These give you broad sweeping modifications to your existing builds. There are only five of these points in total and they are unlocked through completing the story, with the final point being tied to completing the Trial of Tarya Gratar end-game activity. I admit I am a bit torn here as to whether I should drop the apocalypse tier down and just burn through the activity to get my final talent point… or if I should gear up and do it at a reasonable apocalypse level for the loot rewards. I guess that ultimately is the decision always if you should grind it out… or go for the quick loot at the highest challenge you can complete.

I guess it is time that I should probably talk about the Trial of Tarya Gratar itself. Essentially this is a series of challenges that you need to complete in sequence and in a single play-through in order to reach the final boss encounter. I’ve played through two of these so far, the first being a ring-style encounter with three waves with the final wave being comprised largely of boss types. The second encounter was flagged as a “skirmish” and largely felt like playing through a normal map where there was a broad mix of enemy types and mini boss types in order to get a full clear. The absolute shortest route through the map sees you completing eleven events and you are given a limited number of attempts to get through the entire sequence. I think the fastest possible clears will take at least thirty minutes, with it taking considerably longer if you are struggling. Getting to the end apparently allows you to choose one of three apocalypse tier legendary items.

I think at this point we should probably talk about the changes to the loot. The above items are currently available as twitch drops, and if you are so inclined I would highly suggest farming them up, especially if you are a new player. Each of these new items has three mods associated with them, and specifically, these twitch drops include a Tier 3 mod that was previously only available on legendary items. So even if you are not going to these them specifically they are worth deconstructing to gain the mod for your character. Epic and Legendary loot now have the chance to drop with three stats like this, which means that a good number of the purples that you are going to be picking up will be functionally better than the original set of legendary items.

The other thing that I have noticed is that the game seems to be way more generous than it was previously. While I have only gotten a few legendary drops, the purples are raining down from the sky. All of the expansion world content seems to also provide drop pod resources, which were key to upgrading gear past a certain point. I will need to spend some time figuring out what the most lucrative solo farm areas are for me personally, and then I will of course share that knowledge at a later point. For a game that seems to want to be Looter Shooter Diablo 3, it is most definitely following that Loot 2.0 progression path and giving me a rain of shiny items to pick up.

So I guess we get down to whether or not it is worth buying the expansion. If you already have Outriders the expansion will set you back $40. If you are completely new to Outriders you can buy a combo pack for $60. Do I think the expansion is worth it for the story? No… it is a short campaign that will only get you around two hours’ worth of gameplay. Do I think the expansion is worth picking up for the other systems that it adds to the game? I am leaning towards yes because it normalizes the rewards structure, adds some long-tailed grinds, and also presents a new raid-type game mode that should be good fun with a full party of friends. I think Outriders is a mechanically better game than Destiny 2, that just does not get the love that it deserves. The challenge with Outriders however is the fact that it is not a live service game, which means future updates will be few and far between and will be largely limited to balance patches.

I am hoping to gather up a group of friends to take on the new Trial and see how that game mode feels with multiple people. I also need to get more serious about my build and tweaking it to perform better. Right now I am very much abusing a one-trick pony in the form of a couple of Tier III weapon perks on the same auto rifle I have been using forever.