Outriders is quite rich in terms of lore, and thanks to journal pages players can learn a lot of insightful information about characters they meet along the way, or even characters they'll never cross paths with. It is also a game of mysteries, and its story does deliver in terms of building up to the revealing scenes, the plot twists, the emotionally charged deaths, and the advancing of the plot.
It is not uncommon for Outriders to have quests where players will feel the narrative more deeply, empathize with characters, suffer with them. Despite all the wars, the misery, the powerlessness, even when the main character has the powers of a god, Outriders still is about hope. However, the game is also about humanity's dark side, and how its atrocities affect the lives of many. The game goes long lengths to show just how many lives cruelty can touch, and how it extends its malign tendrils over others.
The Pax, And How They Gave Up Freedom To Regain Freedom
Throughout the game, the players learn that the planet Enoch was inhabited by what seems to be an almost extinct race of peaceful humanoid creatures. They are called the Pax, probably from the Latin word for "peace." The Pax communicate, somehow finding a way to learn the language of humans, and they are highly intelligent. When the first humans reached Enoch with the Caravel, the natives worshipped the newcomers like gods.
Little did they know that Monroy, the Caravel's captain, would imprison them, enslave them, and exterminate them all because of suspicions, inability to understand them, and greed for power — namely, the Anomaly's power. The Pax were too peaceful to fight back, and probably didn't really know how to do so. But, at some point, they willingly transformed into the so-called Ferals by stabbing themselves with Anomaly-infused knives. They lost everything, including their nature, to become bloodthirsty, violent beings, capable of defending themselves and regaining freedom from their tyrant.
The Unsolved Mystery Of The Ferals
Players learn about the Pax turning into Ferals when their alien companion, August, sacrifices himself to save his friend Tiago from death. That's when August, reluctant to carry a gun and use it, stabs himself with one of the Anomaly-infused knives and becomes a Feral. His peaceful nature is gone, but this way he manages to save Tiago's life. However, when the man tries to talk to August, he doesn't recognize him anymore. He sees red, and all he has at that moment is a primordial desire to kill.
This sad, emotional scene also poses several questions. The first time players meet the Feral, they are setting an ambush for the player to have other Ferals kidnap the rest of the group. This means the Ferals are not simply aggressive brutes, but they are capable of concocting plans. Still, they seem to be unable to speak, unlike August.
The question is: how do they manage to be organized? It may be that Ferals communicate with cries, or they may speak in non-verbal ways that are unknown to humans. Pax seem to be able to speak, but by only meeting August, there is no way to know for sure how he would communicate with other members of his race. They could have telepathic powers players are completely unaware of, for example.
There is another question that players do not know the answer to, which is: why are the Ferals not aggressive towards one another? Considering August's sacrifice scene, gamers are able to infer that the Ferals just surrender to violence. They lose filters imposed by their original species' peaceful nature, thus not distinguishing friends from foes. It may be this, or it may be due to Ferals despising humans for what they have done to them, so they automatically become ferocious when encountering one.
Lastly, Ferals also seem to retain some form of primitive societal structure. They even seem to have a hierarchical society, with a distribution of roles: there are warlords, warriors, hunters, protectors (the so-called "Bulwark"), and more. How can the Ferals build a functional society with separate roles for each individual? Aren't they supposed to be savages devolving into a frenzy when in battle? Unfortunately, these questions remain unanswered in Outriders, and players can only speculate about them at this stage.
Outriders is available on PC, PS4, PS5, Stadia, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
