People Can Fly's upcoming looter shooter, Outriders, is a gritty and dark story about survival on a foreign planet, Enoch. It's a far cry in tone from games it developed like Bulletstorm (which was made alongside Epic Games). Whereas the latter had a level of absurdity, including quotes about a mecha-dinosaur the protagonist posthumously named Waggleton P. Tallylicker, Outriders is a much more serious game. Indeed, it's from experiences like these that an attempt at a game like Outriders was born.
What's notable, though, is how gunplay-heavy games like Bulletstorm and Gears of War: Judgment (which was developed by PCF and Epic Games, published by Microsoft) is a huge part of the developer's repertoire. As such, in a recent group interview with creative director Bartek Kmita and lead game designer Piotr Nowakowski, Game ZXC couldn't resist asking how this gunplay translated over to Outriders.
After all, it's in the name of the genre: "looter shooter." Many games in this realm have fallen short of hitting the mark due to inadequate looter or inadequate gunplay. While Outriders also has some unique classes to compliment gameplay, that may not help if the guns don't click properly. Kmita's answer did not disappoint:
"Without Bulletstorm, without the Gears franchise, it would be impossible to create Outriders. It's not even about the gunplay, but overall about our approach. We wanted to give the shooter as much as freedom as possible, to players, to RPG systems, to build their character. And because of that they can play this game differently. For some, this will be a cover shooter game. For some, this will be an aggressive slasher. For some, cover will be important. For some, it will be non-existent. Some people will be play passively, some people can teleport everywhere and play super aggressively. There's different games in one game.
Because we had experience from Bulletstorm, and with Gears, which are totally different games with different dynamics and different pacing, it helped us understand what is necessary to create this kind of game and try to mesh all these things together in one package and to give freedom to the player to choose which kind of game they will cook.
This sort of player freedom within a shooter seems unique. With cover-based shooters, moving from cover to cover is "forced" on the player. In more direct FPS, it's more about running and gunning. Sometimes, games are less about their guns and more about abilities. It would seem that Outriders finds itself trying to bring all of these together, and that sort of freedom is something fans may truly appreciate. No two Pyromancers will be the same, no two Devastators will be the same, and their approach to facing down Outriders' enemies is seemingly designed to be entirely up them.
With the Outriders demo dropping soon, players will be able to get their first taste of this gunplay and gameplay, and it'll be interesting to see what players discover in these first couple of weeks. Of course, the full game isn't far away either—diving into Outriders' extensive endgame Expeditions with this sort of player freedom may be even more rewarding.
Outriders releases April 1 for PC, PS4, PS5, Stadia, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X. The demo will be available on February 25.