At first sight, Outriders might look like a game you’ve played a thousand times: a sci-fi third-person shooter where you shoot things to get better equipment to shoot more things. But there are plenty of quirks that make this loot shooter more complicated than you might think. Since the game’s launch in early April, a few of us have been with us Kotaku spent a lot of time on it. The following advice should help you begin your journey through Enoch.
Read our review here
Dying will degrade your World level experience.
Outriders has two experience bars. The first, your character progression, works in the standard way: kill enemies and complete missions and it goes up. Along the way, you’ll earn skill points and regularly unlock new skills.
Your world level, meanwhile, determines the difficulty of the game. There are 15 levels, each boosting your enemies. In turn, jumping on a world level increases the drop rate of rare or legendary gear and allows you to use higher level weapons and armor. So it’s a tradeoff.
Every time you die, you get a small hit in your World Tier experience. However, you will not go down in World Tier. So, for example, if you die at the very beginning of World Level 7, you will not be dropped to World Level 6. You will likely decrease your World level progression to 0 experience points. (By the way: when you try to quit a fight that has already started, you trigger a 10 second countdown, urging you to return to the fight. If that goes to 0, it counts as a death and weakens your experience. the World level. as a result.)
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Don’t forget to claim your world level rewards.
Every time you unlock a new world level you will earn a sweet reward, but you will not automatically receive it. You have to open the World Tier menu (the Options button, on PS5) and claim it manually. More often than not, you will get a weapon that is better than anything else in your inventory, at least for a level or so.
Don’t sell your stuff. Dismantle it.
Selling equipment gives you a decent chunk of scrap metal, which is the game’s main currency. You can use scrap metal to buy weapons and armor from vendors on the various social hubs, but there’s little reason for that, at least in the early and middle of the game. You’ll find new gear with such a fast clip that whatever you buy will be replaced within half an hour anyway.
Disassembling gear, on the other hand, gives you valuable resources essential to the game’s robust crafting system. Generally, breaking down weapons earns you iron, while armor decomposes into leather. Better yet, you can also earn Shards for specific attributes from a dozen categories, such as Max Health, Critical Damage, and Cool Down, which can then be used to improve those attributes on other equipment. Finally, if you dismantle an outfit equipped with a mod that is not part of your mod library, you will keep that mod for future use – with no restrictions. If you’re constantly dismantling your gear, you’ll rarely, if ever, find yourself short of the resources needed to mod (more on that in a moment).
You still get scrap when you play.
You can disassemble everything of a certain rarity.
In your inventory, check the color-coded boxes in the lower right corner.
Against! Against! Against!
Halfway through the First City segment – that’s the game’s third major plot point – you will be given the opportunity to customize your weapons and armor. Full Stop: Modding is just about the most important thing you can do Outriders
Outridersis essentially a luck-based loot game. But thanks to modding, you can get around the indifferent tendencies of random number generation. You can trade mods that change the behavior of gears. You can change the firing mode of each weapon: for example, if you prefer your automatic sniper rifle to fire a few bullets, you can change that. You can make your SMG shoots catch fire instead of fully automatic, or have your shotgun fire into a spread instead of like a snail. And if you like guns, really love guns, you can level them up to keep them level with your character’s progression.
Some words of caution:
- Once a mod is in your compendium, it is in your compendium for good. (There is some sort of strategy to pick your post-mission loot through the mods you can add to your library by removing gear, rather than the instant stat boost you’d get from equipping it.)
- You can’t get double benefits by equipping the same armor twice, so don’t bother to double.
- For equipment with two slots, you can only replace the mod in one slot. You can change the mod there as many times as you want, but the other lock will remain locked for good.
Learn the mod shorthand.
There are a handful of indicators related to that mods Outriders can’t really explain well.
- A small wafer symbol means you already have that mod in your library.
- A little wrench icon means you adjusted that piece of gear before.
- Two red squares means you have already equipped that mod with a piece of armor, which means you won’t get any additional benefits.
You can share mods between characters – sort of.
On paper, you cannot share mods between characters. Doesn’t mean there is no solution. Let’s say you want your Pyromancer to have the “soul devourer” mod, but you have yet to track it down. Meanwhile, your Devastator character has been overrun with weapons equipped with it. By dropping one of those weapons into your supply, your Pyromancer can take it out, dismantle it and add the mod to its library. (Obviously, this trick is better suited for weapon mods, which can work in different classes, than it is for armor mods, which are usually limited by class.)
Bracket progression is shared by all your characters.
But you will have to customize your truck and banner for each.
Don’t forget to automatically loot.
Pressing the d-pad will automatically loot any device dropped by enemies in a specific area. Make sure to do this before moving on to the next area. It saves you the time and energy of manually picking everything up, and if you don’t get that stuff, you can’t come back for it. You can designate a threshold so you only pick up gear at a certain inventory level or higher, but there is little reason not to pick it up, because again, resources are key.
(Note: This feature does not automatically loot chests in the area; you’ll have to find and open them the old-fashioned way. But if a co-op partner opens a chest on the other side of the battlefield, you can automatically loot the equipment without trudge all the way to their position.)
Don’t skip the hunts.
Shortly after you reach the literal name Trench Town, you can hunt bounties (tough human enemies) and monsters (kaiju-sized versions of common creatures). These yachts will send you to regions you’ve already traversed – sometimes to battlefields you’ve cleared before, sometimes to new ones – but you can also pick them up outside of Trench Town. Just keep an eye out for wanted posters (bounties) and bloody carcasses (monster hunts) to add these quests to your log. If you exchange them at the saloon in Trench Town, you will get an epic loot for your troubles.
Spam your abilities.
Compared to certain other games that give you space magic skills, the skills are in Outriders charging in an instant. Make the most of it. Use your abilities constantly. Not only are they great, they are also something to make Outriders stand out from a crowd of seemingly similar third-person shooters – but they’ll also get you out of a tight spot far more often than your guns. In Outriders you heal by dealing damage, which then restores a percentage of that damage as health. Your skills tend to hurt your enemies a lot more than your guns. You do the math.
Try out the ammo changing skills.
They’re not as sexy as the turrets and time knives and tornadoes of fire, but the skills that change your ammo performance are among the best in the game. For example, the Technomancer’s Blighted Rounds will poison anyone you shoot; tormented enemies, in turn, will poison everyone around them. The Trickster, meanwhile, can use a move called Twisted Rounds, which increases the power of every bullet you fire. You can imagine how effective those connections are with, for example, an SMG or LMG. (In the first patch for Outridersslated for next week, People Can Fly plans to extend the Twisted Rounds cooldown because it’s just so damn good.)
Try all of the lessons.
Once you’ve completed the prologue, you can create a new character from the start of Chapter One, also known as ‘where the game gets good’. Replay the same area may sound annoying, but it can fly by, especially if you skip the cutscenes. (Skip them by by pressing Circle or B.) In addition, all four classes are so different that battles you have played before will feel completely different when you continue with a different class. I’d like to say that at the end of the Eagle Peaks region you get a good idea of which class suits your playstyle, but damn I’m way past that point with three characters and still haven’t settled for a mainI think I should just play this game a lot of more than. Oh yeah!