Our guide for hands-on time with the expansion Outriders Worldslayer at Square Enix’s pod at Summer Game Fest Play Days was Lukasz Osinski from People Can Fly, a man with probably one of the more impressive titles we’ve ever heard of, Associate Lead for Balance Design. Osinski was kind enough to take us through a quick primer on the basics of the main Outriders title since we had yet to experience it firsthand, explaining the dynamics of picking a character class and how that begins the start of a long, evolving progression through the game’s mechanics. Outriders scales brilliantly, allowing casual players a way to head through the story mode without directly if desired, but for more obsessive players, a progression system that allows them to carefully upgrade and trick out their characters with better armor, abilities and weaponry. This is designed intentional to speak to feedback from diehard fans where they wanted the ability to scale up their character more and more.
After the smallest of experiences with the beginnings of the trickster class and the temporal/time alerting mechanics it takes advantage of, we shifted to the full Outriders Worldslayer experience. The character at this point is above the maximum of where the main campaign would allow for and the enemies and challenges are ramped up considerably to match. Rather than the simplest of running and gunning, now each conflict is a matter of careful precision, maximizing special abilities to overcome foes that are deadly beyond words. Our first battles involved taking on several teleporting denizens of this far away world, Enoch. After using the Trickster’s ability slow trap which creates a time distorted field slowing down any enemies within it allowing us to quickly carve them up with a temporal slice, we immediately had a showdown with a giant quadrapedal snow beast. Not simply a savage beast, this creature had its own abilities to distort time and badly slow down our Outrider.
A quick jaunt up the hill and there was a bevy more challenges featuring more massively lethal monsters of Enoch. As Osinski instructed us, our goal was to take these monsters out as fast as possible as if given even a moment to get going, they were incredibly hard to overcome. Osinski explained to us that he regarded Outriders Worldslayer as not just an expansion. “More is the way I would describe it…. Just more.” He explained that there was almost 100 legendary items and the progression system (if meticulously pursued for every possible nuance) could mean as much as a couple hundred hours worth of time. The main story of the title would mean for up to six – twelve hours worth of gameplay. For fans of third-person action, fighting and science fiction, Outriders Worldslayer is a blast, one that aims for immersive in the extreme.
Outirders Worldslayer comes out on June 28.