Outriders is still slated to come out this year, but with only four months to go, we’re starting to run out of runway in 2020 (thank goodness). Recently Twinfinite had an opportunity to go hands-on with People Can Fly and Square Enix’s looter-shooter to see how it was coming along. If 2020 is still the plan, one would think that Outriders should start to play and feel like something close to the final product by now.
Overall we walked away impressed with what we were able to get a good feel for but still unsure about a few things that we weren’t able to get enough time with.
Four hours were spent just using the newly revealed Technomancer class which is definitely a blast to play for players that like to play somewhat of an offensive-support role hybrid.
Without further ado though, let’s just dive right into the most important elements of a good RPG looter-shooter and see how Outriders is coming along in each of those areas.
Character Building
The most impressive part of Outriders in my experience was the character building. I’m a sucker for well-defined classes with lots of different options for customization. Outriders is loaded with this even before taking gear builds into account.
There are a total of four different types of character classes which can each be driven down three different specialization trees.
You are not bound to three and are free to focus heavily on one or split across all three if you like. It’s extremely similar to Borderlands 3 in this regard as you’ll have enough points from leveling up to max on one tree with a little extra for the other two.
During Twinfinite’s recent hands-on session, we had four hours to play with the newly revealed Technomancer class.
The Technomancer’s gameplay style revolves heavily around a few key features. The most obvious is its unique ability to summon a powerful turret to the battlefield that can be customized through various skill trees to fit certain situations and/or playstyle preferences.
In addition, the Technomancer excels at slinging around status effects especially cryo and poison. I’ve always been a big fan of the art of damage over time (DoT) classes that earn their keep in prolonged battles.
The ability to slap down DoTs and have part of my job done for me automatically has always been incredibly satisfying to me.
So what I did was spec my Technomancer to be an expert with poison attacks. My turret covered anything that got near it in a powerful poison that chips away at anything it touches.
I also dumped points into an ability that allows me to load a magazine of poisoned bullets to quickly spread DoTs all around. With this setup, if an enemy so much as got in my line of sight, they started to wither away shortly thereafter.
I didn’t have to go this route at all though. The Technomancer also specializes in calling in temporary, but powerful, heavy weapons such as a Rocket Launcher, and as I mentioned, cryo damage as well. If I wanted to be Mr. Freeze instead of Poison Ivy I could have been.
It also excels well in long-range scenarios and you could spec out a Technomancer that is focuses primarily on sniping as well. There’s a lot of options.
All of the classes in Outriders will have similar options at their disposal.
