While generally speaking I have enjoyed my time with the Outriders demo, especially now that I got my first legendary to drop from the Captain farm, it’s time for a bit of…constructive criticism.
While Outriders gets a lot of things right, a few specifics jump out at me as areas where the game could improve, though with only a month until launch, some of these aspects may be rather set in stone.
Here are what I would deem the worst things about the Outriders demo based on my extensive time with it so far.
1. Shaky Cam Cutscenes
Look, shaky cam is debatable enough when it’s used during action sequences, but in cutscenes that are just people talking to each other? This was one of the most immediate complaints about Outriders, and People Can Fly have already said they’re looking at it, but it’s unclear how much could change before launch. It makes all of these sequences disorienting and weird, and it didn’t help that cutscenes have locked FPS in the demo (that is supposed to change by launch, however).
2. The Entire Prologue
I’m honestly tempted to say that Outriders should just cut the entire prologue and replace it with a single cutscene. It’s a disjointed mess, pretty much having you run from point A to point B in 30 seconds to get between cutscenes, and I don’t think it does a good job of setting up the world, in addition to the actual gameplay of it being lackluster. The game only starts to pick up when you get your powers and start the main course of missions, but the prologue is a poor introduction to what otherwise seems to be a much more fun experience. Not to mention it confuses everyone by reinforcing the cover system several times only to have the best tactic be ignoring it completely once you get your anomaly powers. I just think this entire section is a turn-off, and not the first impression the game needs.
3. A Painfully Un-Open World
Outriders has one of the most awkward game worlds I’ve seen in the current era, mainly because of how badly instanced it is. You may have noticed that every couple of zones you have some awkward door opening or gap-jumping cutscene to sit through, which are not-so-cleverly hiding loading screens for the necessary enemies and areas to appear. I know not every game needs to be some sprawling open world where you can drive a thousand miles across country in a car or on a horse with no loading screens, but Outriders is excessive. Even if the loading segments are short due to SSDs, they’re everywhere, and they get tiresome very quickly. If the entire game is going to be like this, that’s going to be very weird indeed.
4, Generic Story And Dialogue
Just…nothing about the story or characters have gripped me in the opening here. As I said, I think the prologue is poor both narratively and in terms of gameplay, but things don’t get much better after that. While I appreciate that our character has a voice, I find them rather obnoxious, and nothing here stands out to me as the base for an engaging story. Granted, that’s not exactly a staple of the looter genre, and plenty of games from Destiny 1 vanilla to Diablo 3 have had poor stories and characterization too, but so far, it seems to be a weakness.
5. Gear Aesthetics
A few things to note here. I have already complained on Twitter a bunch of times about just how ugly the gear, especially the legendary weapons, are in this game. I think there was a way to do “alien planet corrupts human gear” correctly, but for the most part, this ain’t it, and I don’t particularly enjoy using guns that look like racks of ribs or piles of trash. Additionally, I’m disappointed to see that armor appears to be the same across all four classes, robbing them of a visual identity. I believe this will change for legendary sets, but there probably won’t be that many of those, and it’s weird to have all four classes effectively look exactly the same before they get some hyper specific sets.
The good news? Even with all these issues, they’re not taking away from my overall enjoyment of the game to the point where I don’t want to keep playing it. The combat is fun, the loot shows promise and I’m enjoying myself. Some of these problems could be fixed as time goes on past the demo stretch, others, perhaps not. But those are just my thoughts based on way too much time with the demo so far.
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