Earlier this week Bulletstorm developer People Can Fly unveiled a brand-new trailer for its co-operative sci-fi looter-shooter Outriders, and now, as promised, it’s shared a choice selection of gameplay details and videos as part of a half-hour long livestream reveal.
On a fundamental level, it perhaps wasn’t the most revelatory of unveilings for Outriders, with little shown to truly distinguish it from its peers; it’s a “dark” third-person cover-based shooter set in a “brutal nightmarish world” that ticks all the usual lite-RPG boxes are far as classes, skill trees, customisation, and rarity based loot acquisition goes. That doesn’t mean it’s a bust though; it looks to have an interesting premise, a striking, surprisingly diverse planet to explore, and, of course, People Can Fly’s undeniable expertise when it comes to gunplay.
Outriders – Official Gameplay Presentation Watch on YouTube
Breaking all that down, Outriders tells the story of a group of mercenaries tasked with exploring Enoch, a lush, untouched planet chosen to be the site of a new human colonisation effort. Shortly after landing, however, the group encounters a mysterious signal, and, in attempting to trace its source, runs into a devastating storm known as the Anomaly. To escape its effects, the Outriders retreat into cryo-sleep, awakening 30 years later to an almost unrecognisable world.
War has broken out, flora and fauna has hyper-evolved to deadly degrees, and the Outriders’ whole DNA has been rebuilt, turning them into super-powered humans known as the Altered.
Outriders – World and Story Watch on YouTube
What follows is a continued quest to locate the source of the still-detectable signal, one that sees players – either solo or in co-op teams of up to three – journeying across Enoch “to the edge of civilisation and beyond”. From the technology bereft War Zone that opens the game, players explore the world as part of a convoy, shifting from hub area to hub area (the developer stresses it’s not an open-world game), stepping out across diverse biomes, from shanty towns and desolate cities, to autumnal swamps and lush jungles, even deserts and mountains.