There was a lot of buzz about how Anthem was next great loot-shooter but that didn’t end up too well and the game has now faded into obscurity. Anthem was also a hallmark for NVIDIA’s raytracing technology. Today we have Outriders, another technology hallmark for NVIDIA but not for raytracing but rather DLSS. This game has been out since April 1 for all Playstation (4/5) and Xbox(XB One/Series S/X) as well as Stadia and PC. Now 1 month removed from launch and the playerbase reaching equilibrium it will most certainly start attracting attention from players that are waiting for it to reach sale price.
This article will be divided into two parts: an opening review segment to give you my personal opinion of the game and then we’ll move on to our performance analysis review. We’ll be testing with RTX 30 series cards primarily to see how the game plays and we’ll also analyze how dramatic the improvement DLSS adds to this game. Let’s jump right in!
Plot
The world is ravaged by climate problems that has driven humanity off-world to seek a new home world. The new world government, the ECA (Enoch Colonization Authority), finds a new Earth-like planet named Enoch and sets off to colonize it with space arks. The rest of humanity left to itself afterwards. Two mega arks, the Caravel and Flores were bound for this mission but only the Flores makes lift-off.
The game now opens to your character, an Outrider: elite soldiers tasked with recon to survey landing zones prior to Flores landing. It doesn’t take long for the planet to bare its nature as the Outriders discover the planet’s energy storm patterns only for their entire party to be silenced by the ECA. With the energy storm and ECA forces taking nearly everyone, your character is sent to cryosleep only to awaken 31 years later to a civil war brewing with remnants of the ECA and rebel factions dubbed Insurgents. Fighting for resources and power, these parties have waged the past decades at war with the supply they had with them while also contending with the planet’s alien wildlife as well as its destructive energy storm patterns. Having survived the energy storm 30 years earlier, your character discovered that he/she is Altered: a mutant result of the Anomaly that grants powers to those that are lucky to survive the storm.
With this, you now set out unravel the secrets of the planet, the humans who survive, the Altered and the Anomaly.
Gameplay
I meant that synopsis to be spoiler-free but I would like to state the while the story is substantial, it is quite small than the end-game goals you want to spend time on. I went into this game under the impression that it is a story-driven game. Hence, I let the game proceed at its pace. You have a character level and a world tier level. As your character progresses, you can wear newer and better gear that coincide with your character level. Your world tier dictates how hard the campaign story is and how good the rewards are for combat.
But this is an RPG and I missed the most important part: story is just a barrier to the end-game where you take on expeditions. In expeditions, you play ever-increasing difficulty challenges where you battle huge hordes of humans, aliens and wildlife as you try to finish each in record time to score some great loot. Rinse and repeat.
Players could go through the entire game player on World Tier 1 with a level 5 max character by endgame and still have access to the expeditions and this is where players should focus on. But regardless how you want to enjoy the game, both segment has their thrills.
The core gameplay of Outriders is being a third-person shooter with RPG elements. You shoot. You loot. It’s that simple. As you eliminate enemies, complete story arcs and finish quests, you’re rewarded with gear such as new weapons and helmets or body armor, etc. Each of which contributes to how strong your character is as well as molding your gameplay when it comes to the shooting part.
The other RPG element this game has is a unique character class. You have the choices to go with a Trickster, a Pyromancer, a Devastator or a Technomancer. Trickster uses time-based skills like slow, a time dilation sphere, and teleportation for use in combat. Pyromancer has fire based skills for both attack and support while the Devastator has seismic-based skills. The Technomancer uses support devices and turrets. Characters have a few skills to choose from and slot in up to 3 for use in combat. These skills can be bolstered by weapon and item mods which buffs the skills.
A few missions in, the game will allow modifying your “mods” on your weapons and gear. The game makes it integral that you farm items so you can break them down to get more mods. The strongest mods are Tier III mods which most commonly show up on Legendary-tier items which are very hard to come by.
As mentioned, items are classified in tiers with Common, Rare, Epic and Legendary being the tiers and for wearable gear, there are also set items which give player set bonuses.
Items can be placed in your backpack or a stash or can be broken down for other in-game currencies used to do other things. You can also sell items in store merchants. By end-game you should have 3 merchants in your camp at all times while most places will have at least 1 or 2 depending on how far in the campaign you are.
You can level up items manually but you’ll be limited at how large a level you can go. This restricts players from buying powerful item outright.
Throughout the game you’ll be pitted with various enemies ranging from lowly rebel scrubs to elite Altered bosses. You’ll also have to fight giant mega-bosses from the wildlife, the alien natives or some altered in campaign. The end-game expeditions have large boss hordes which means those bosses you beaten in the campaign in 10 minutes, you’ll have to content with 4 in the expeditions while doing it fast. That means your damage has to be substantially high while your armor able to endure blows from these bosses and a large swarm of grunts.
This game isn’t that heavy on spec requirements but with so many elements happening on screen, it is highly advised to play this game on a capable PC. I have not played the console version of this game but thankfully Outrider allows crossplay so Xbox and Playstation players can happily jump in or out of your games or you can join theirs even if you’re on Steam. This is a great part of this game and makes it really easy to find a match. While multiplayer isn’t heavily enforced in-story, endgame or harder campaign bosses benefit from multiplayer sessions and having an equal-level player with just the right gear adds a little more firepower to your quest.
The game promotes a very engaged type of play whether you choose to support and scope out back or go pump-pump with a shotgun zipping around the map. The game sends hordes of enemies from all direction so its vital to check your minimap all the time as well as checking your teammates if someone needs your backup.
Screenshots
Performance Charts
The game plays around 100+ FPS on 1080p on Ultra settings and scales fairly well for the more expensive cards. Based on Unreal Engine 4, its made for next-consoles in mind so graphics are sort of uniform for all 3 top platforms (PC/XBsX/PS5). The game has presets for Ultra and below with very minor detail improvements jumping to ultra. The performance hit is still there though.
This game is notable for being very DLSS-friendly and despite my insistence on using Quality mode for eye-candy critics, going Ultra Performance doesn’t make details suffer that much and given the fast-paced nature of this game, I just want to frag as fast as I can and move on to the next target because there are hundreds of hard to kill aliens gunning for me and I can live dialing down to Ultra-Perf to get almost a 80% boost in FPS. I featured DLSS in our RTX 3070 feature which you can check out below. Outriders DLSS test is around 5:00 mark:
I sincerely wanted to expand testing but these are the only cards I had on me during the time of review at which point they have now been returned and I only have an RTX 3070 for testing and which is what I use primarily for this game. Gaming on a 2560x1440p 170hz screen with DLSS harkens back to playing CS1.3 on low in 480p back in the days. Good times.
User Experience & Conclusion
I’ve had this game for a while and I do admit I haven’t put in as much time as I wanted to on this game but for the 60 hours I tried to finish the story, I really enjoyed it. I’m not a fan of RPG shooters or loot shooters in general but I am a big fan of Diablo and I’ve had very efficient seasons optimizing my characters. This is something I wish I knew earlier in Outriders. As engaged as I was in the story, its many plot holes and narrative weakness overall will not justify your thirst if you’re after a good story.
The main enjoyment this game has is from farming better gear and as grindy as it sounds, its actually not. Well-geared characters can usually run a good TR55 expedition around 8mins and be well rewarded, after which you can rinse and repeat. There’s a certain level of stress that comes with this kind of gameplay hence my insistence on optimal gear. There’s also a certain level of stress if you have a potato PC. With literally hundreds of enemies coming at you at one time in expeditions and you have to be moving at all times to survive, make sure that you meet this game’s recommended system requirements as going bare minimum may just mean you’ll die endlessly as your PC struggles to render that Bloodmerchant blitzing to you or pretty much anything else heading your way. Its a game that really favors higher frame rates not just for the pure fluidity, but ultimately your reliance on how fluid the game flows to get you geared up fast. Because its going to be a grind to earn enough to get those nice gears if they don’t drop.
Obviously, I do enjoy the game but as mentioned I do find flaws in the story and gating the end-game quests crippled this games enjoyment level as many players would rush in blind thinking its a campaign shooter.
If you’re a fan of Anthem (lol), I mean Warframe, Destiny 2, The Division games or Borderlands, Outriders may have something for you. Its nothing fresh and not as heavy in content as Division or Destiny, but it’s enjoyable nonetheless if you like to shoot-n’-loot.
1 Comment
Outriders is far from a well-optimized game, and there seems to be a significant amount of performance left on the table. Despite having hardware that was above the developer’s specified requirements, we were limited to 60 frames per second to avoid frequent screen tearing and frame slope pacing, which made the whole experience seem janky.