The first of a planned series of monthly broadcasts for Square Enix and People Can Fly’s upcoming shooter-RPG, Outriders, released today and let loose a lot more interesting details. Outriders was somewhat of a surprise when it was revealed last year, and any extra details we can squeeze out about this mysterious title is always welcome.
We’re going to go over the broadcast below and as an added bonus, we were able to speak with People Can Fly‘s Bartosz Kmita (Game Director) and Piotr Nowakowski (Senior Designer) whom both chipped in to clarify a few questions that we had while watching. And of course, if you want to just watch it yourself, you can so above. Otherwise, let’s dive into our summary and interview.
The First City
Outriders Broadcast
This, as you can probably guess is the first colony that humans created to begin their life on the planet of Enoch. It’s actually just a piece of the massive spaceship that was brought down to the planet to serve as a temporary settlement and power source.
Enoch is a very unfriendly place and just about every living thing on it wants to kill you. Something referred to in the demo as an anomaly storm ripped through the first city early on and damaged the colony and their power source.
In fact, it caused a nuclear explosion that covered the area in radiation –not ideal. And the result of all that chaos is the First City turning into a giant slum wrought with death and unfriendly human factions. The ECA, AKA the good guys, are at odds with the humans that still scavenge The First City.
The inspiration behind Outriders, didn’t come from any specific product or idea People Can Fly confirmed in our conversation. It was a mix of things but all of these movies, games, etc. that inspired them all had one common aspect they said: “gritty sci-fi that meets this fantasy vibe.”
Humans are searching the planet for something known as a mysterious signal. The first part of the broadcast’s gameplay showed a combat section where the ECA are searching for a truck that contains important information about these anomaly storms and the mysterious signal, whatever that is.
It’s not an easy task as the humans need to fight off other humans and also a very angry, hostile, alien creatures native to Enoch. They are reminiscent of the Zerg from StarCraft 2 and attack in swarms.
We get a look at the various fire-based abilities of the Pyromancer which, as you can imagine, uses fire-based abilities to damage enemies both with AoE and more focused attacks.
While all of the classes we’ve seen so far have abilities with fantasy spell-like elements to them, the Pyromancer seems the most “mage-y” so far. Like Destiny though, balancing traditional gunplay (Outriders is third-person not first-person) and special abilities is the key to playing effectively.
