Outriders
Outriders is a smash hit new IP, the result of good marketing and solid word of mouth after a month long demo across all platforms. It’s the most literal interpretation of “Diablo with guns” to date, and for many players, it just works and is a lot of fun.
For others? Not so much.
I usually turn articles into videos, not the other way around, but we’re working backwards from a video I published yesterday on this topic, as I want another avenue to reach players who may be giving up to soon. For my money, Outriders has a bit of a rough onboarding process for a few reasons, and I wanted to warn players about what may “feel bad” at the start here, and can be changed to make for a more fun experience.
The Cover Problem
Outriders sets itself up as a cover shooter, considering the first thing you do in the combat tutorial is hide behind cover, and pretty much every encounter in the first full zone is a bunch of maps with chest-high walls. But if you try to play Outriders like it’s The Division or Gears, it will suck. Enemies will ping you down with perfect accuracy and lob massive AOE grenades if you stay in cover for more than a few seconds at a time.
Rather, the key to Outriders is aggression, and using your class’s heal-on-kill mechanics (close range kills for Trickster/Devastator, all damage from Technomancer, marked kills for Pyromancer) to gain health and not worry that you’ll be constantly taking damage. Healing also will get better in time as you unlock more skills and get things like skill and weapon leech, which heal as you damage on any class.
30+ hours in on three characters, I do not use cover 99% of the time unless it’s an extreme emergency. Ignore it, and force enemies out of it.
Outriders
The Pyromancer Problem
Another issue I’m seeing are players picking the most immediately inaccessible class right away, the Pyromancer. It lights things on fire, it sounds more basic than the other three more nebulously named classes, and yet it has the most complicated heal-on-kill mechanic of the four, and the early skills it starts with are not great.
Two pieces of advice for Pyromancer here. Play at least until you unlock the Volcanic Rounds skill, which really opens up damage and healing potential. Or just…don’t pick Pyromancer first. If you don’t know what class to go with, I always recommend Trickster which has more immediately fun skills and easier healing.
The Difficulty Problem
Until you get used to the combat, or even if you do, you will find that Outriders can get pretty hard, pretty quickly. This is because of the World Tier system which bumps up enemy levels as you play, giving you a higher range of gear, but forcing you to deal with harder enemies even as your gear lags behind.
But you are free to turn the world tier down at any time, and I recommend that you do so in tough encounters just so you don’t feel like you’re hitting a roadblock. Farm up better gear for a bit, then move up. There is plenty of time to make progress through all world tiers, but if you are dying 5-6 times on an encounter, it’s probably time to follow the game’s tooltip and turn it down, then you can bump it up after a few more gear drops. This is how the campaign is meant to be played, and I would have gone crazy had I not done this in a few segments.
Outriders
The Gearset Problem
My final piece of advice is to play at least until you get a full set of blue gear with mods that affect your current build’s skills. Outriders skills can seem relatively ho-hum at baseline, but each of them have 4-5 different mods that can affect how they function in a big way, and you can get those on blue gear, which should start dropping in levels 6-10 or so. Epics will come more around level 18-20+, and change things even further with two mods per item.
Always, always, have gear on that compliments your build, as it’s cheap to mod it and it has dramatic effects on gameplay. You will not truly understand how combat feels until you have your skills buffed with these mods, and that alone might change your mind. It will also look better as you level, too. The aesthetic really changes the deeper you get into the game.
That’s my advice. Stick with it. If you get past all this and still don’t like it well yeah, maybe it’s not for you, and you can move on.
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