Outriders - Square Enix colonizes space

I should have said as a Trickster, post-nerf. I don’t really have much desire to play through the campaign again as another class, at least not for a long time. But maybe it’s just Reddit doom-mongering.

I have stopped reading most of the stuff out there. expeditions are very solo able. I have run 4 only running into one that I had set to high and was not going to be able to finish. I have found that the devastator class seems to be very gear dependent to be able to dish out damage.

I’m finding the Technomancer more fun than the Devastator, and generally having an easier time of it, though I’m only 18 on that character. Still have to turn down the WT on things like Moloch or some of the contracts where you get boxed in by a swarm of axe wielding dudes and your freeze is down, etc. but generally at WT7 it’s pretty good. The Tech seems more flexible than the Dev, and I’d agree the Dev needs gear, and the right gear, or it becomes fairly ineffective.

And, yeah, the Technomancer is so much easier than the Devastator, and more fun, too. WT 10, level 23, and it’s more fluid with less cranking down the WT than before.

Reached the end of the story, managed to unlock WT6 before doing so by aggressively upgrading/modding my gear. It felt weird to do so, because new gear is dropping all the time, and at least some resources are fairly constrained during the campaign. I kept trying to play it like Diablo, gear-wise, only replacing stuff when the new thing is clearly better, but despite the obvious influence it’s not built that way. Still haven’t found Perpetuum Mobile or indeed about half a dozen other mods I really wanted for my build. Still, I did have Ultimate Storm Whip for much of the game.

Yeah, it really wants you to spend resources/regear to keep the levels as high as they can go. It’s a little un-intuitive, as the WT level boosts the level of gear you can use, and it can be five or six levels or whatever higher than your actual level. I often find myself pondering whether a few points of armor or firepower is worth more than an additional gear level.

Upgrading the level of gear is very expensive, for purples and golds. Not so much for blues, but that extra mod slot is really really valuable. At level 22 I think WT10 everything is purple or gold, so I have to keep finding/buying stuff to keep the levels up. But it does make a difference, as does swapping out skills. On my Dev run, I fell into the trap of going with a single set up for everything. Bad move. The game definitely wants you to think about encounters and swap in and out stuff appropriately.

Oh, just found my first Perpetuum Mobile modded weapon. Sorry. :)

This game has the most complicated difficulty setting I’ve ever seen. I need a difficulty setting to lower the difficulty on the difficulty setting.

Sorry to be that guy, but it’s actually pretty simple! Everything levels with you. That’s the main difficulty setting. When you go up a level, so does everything else. That’s how the game scales.

But to get better drops, you can raise the “world tier”, which shifts the auto-leveling. When you start at world tier 1, monsters and drops are two levels lower than you. Every additional world tier adjusts them by one. So at the aptly named “normal” world tier of 3, monsters and drops are the same level as you. For harder monsters and therefore better loot, just adjust the world tier up.

And that’s it. That’s the sum total of the difficulty setting. When you get to the endgame stuff, world tier is replaced by a slightly different system, but the concept is the same.

-Tom

And different enemies are vastly different in their challenge, depending on your class and build. Some you can take on the max WT you can run, no sweat. Others you have to drop it down significantly, if stuff just doesn’t match up. For me, right now, those Blood-whatever nasties are my krptonite.

Uninstalled the demo, the game is so damn choppy, DX11 and DX12, windowed or full screen, just choppy as all heck. Newest nvidia drivers, even tried different graphics settings.

I have to say, I’m enjoying this game quite a lot now, on the XSX.

Songs like something running in the background. Demo ran fine on my 1070, release is good on my 3070 (though I tend to get some stutter right after loading into an area)

Sadly, I don’t think the game does itself any favors with the default option to auto-adjust world tier to its highest level. Like many other action RPGs, Outriders is perfectly cromulent game at its normal difficulty level (world tier 3).

-Tom

I’m increasingly thinking I should just stick the world tier at 3 and forget about it.

I dunno, I feel like at WT3, it’d be far too easy. WT8 is quite hard though, so it’s kind of crazy to think what happens at max WT.

But ultimately, I think the way they handle difficulty is great, as it let’s you adjust it to whatever you feel like.

You won’t be missing anything.

For giggles, I actually played a bunch of my technomancer by turning off all the interface elements, setting the world tier to 1, and just playing it like a goofy shooter. No minimap, no ammo counter, no cooldown timers, no hit point bars or status icons. Just a bunch of over-the-top gunplay and spell powers.

This was also a great way to learn the AI behaviors of the different enemies.

Well, it’s called “normal” for a reason! It’s not like the difficulty doesn’t scale when everything is the same level as you. It’s a perfectly viable way to get through to the expeditions. And really, there’s no reason to push world tier because all you’re doing is chasing loot you’re not even going to keep. It’s all going to get rendered down into components. Basically, you’re stocking up on scrap, shards, and your mod collection, and you’re going to earn this stuff regardless of world tier.

As I think @stusser said upthread, there’s no point turning everything into a bullet sponge that takes a long time to kill. It’s all about setting a reasonable TTK while you get to the level cap, at which point a whole other endgame system takes over for the expeditions.

That said, pushing world tier up is a really cool way to play the game as well. I’ve really enjoyed it, but I’m glad I didn’t let it get in the way of seeing what Outriders has to offer in the end. Ultimately, I think Outriders is about the expeditions. The storyline, side quests, and 30 character levels are just the way you get you there.

-Tom

I did the giant volcano spider at WT4 and it wasn’t too terribly hard, so you may have a point. Argh, I don’t know.

None of the giant boss monsters are. The volcano spider is just one of a couple of cinematic gimmicks.

-Tom

Difficulty off bosses depends a lot on your build and your dexterity, largely your ability to not get hung up on level geometry and either get swarmed or slapped in the face repeatedly by the big baddie. Often running forward and around the boss is better than the instinctual backpedaling.

I’m at WT 10 and feel no real need to push it any more. Most stuff drops like flies to Blight/Toxic anyhow, and it’s only a few types of bosses that are annoying. I’m 26 or so I think, and have done all the assassination quests and nearly all of the critter quests, and I still have a bit to go to the so-called end game.

Blight/Toxic + large capacity weapon + the right mods + Perpetuum Mobile = mass death machine.

Played this on XSX with two friends on PC and PS - and it worked surprisingly well! There is a warning message that cross play is bugged - but we lucked out and it seemed to work fine most of the time. We played on WT11 or something that one of my friends had unlocked - and that was a totally meaningless experience for me - I did virtually no damage to the enemies, and most of them one-shotted me. Managed to convince the 3rd friend we should go down a few tiers so we could, you know, play the game, instead of being down constantly, just waiting for loot (we wont even keep, as mentioned above). It did not seem to change how much XP we got either?