Copying my review on steam from late 2021. Thanks to the person who put me on this game, you made me waste money on a piece of shit.
After so many months waiting for this game to fix its incredible issues, I was left disappointed. The white-knights who claimed this game would never die, that nerfing the players and buffing nothing was a good thing, and that because they "probably" didn't experience any bugs it meant the game as a whole for EVERYBODY shouldn't be dealing with bugs... all of you, this is your fault for encouraging this studio's behavior because everything you claimed absolutely was not the case. This game is still a bug-riddled unplayable mess, just being able to play the game past the title screen is a gift from god. The nerfs were eventually walked back because they very much were NOT a good thing, but far too little and too late. It still wasn't enough after all the nice buffs they did. The game is a shallow seedling compared to how it started, being currently outlapped in terms of active players by 5 year old fighting games, XCOM 2, and Monster Hunter games not even a full 6 months after Outrider's release. The game has no roadmap ahead of it as all the devs do is abandon their subreddit and constantly push "bug fixes" that don't seem to really do any bug fixing but somehow add new bugs to the game. Such a shame that the game was insanely enjoyable and had so much potential with free updates down the line when it launched, ignoring the bugs and TERRIBLE servers. Within two weeks, PCF decided to kill their own game with a terrible nerf update, fixed nothing for months, blamed the players for "simply not understanding the drop rates" when they knowingly hid drop-rate information from the players, and then remove future support for this game. This game needs some voodoo, dark magic, blood-signed deal to save it. The way I see it, this is a bigger failure than Anthem ever was because at least the Anthem team PRETENDED to care instead of ignoring their own subreddit for so long while the listed admins were CURRENTLY ACTIVE in other subreddits (ironically enough this included the Destiny subreddit).
The story is insufferable. The pacing, the dialogue, the characters, they all suck to the highest degree. BUT... I will say the backstory and the lore are far more interesting and in fact outright pretty good. The Wanderer was clearly going to be a heavy focus on any planned expansion or DLC, if there ever was a plan to begin with however is up for debate now. The locations are actually interesting. The armor and gun designs are insanely well made, the skills/mods and the ability to move mods over to other equipment you can level up was a genius design choice. I would rather outright have transmog or layered armor but, this is a pretty close second. The skills, when they weren't all nerfed and then poorly rebalanced as an apology, felt incredible to actually use and the skills themselves were really creative and interesting. There WAS plenty to love about this game until future support was killed off, bugs ran rampant and made the game unplayable for most, and the overall design of the balancing and the endgame (which consists of TIMER BASED MISSIONS, aka the fucking DEATH of interesting and fun builds as now its DPS or nothing) being left the way it is leaves Outriders in the camp of "What Could Have Been Great 2 Electric Boogaloo" alongside Anthem. Rest in piss, Outriders. Eat your heart out PCF, sticking to your guns isn't usually a bad thing. But in cases where the majority of your playerbase was complaining about legitimate concerns and the ground you stood on was anti-fun? Standing your ground only works on solid ground, and I hope you see now how spoiled and rotten that ground you chose to stand on is.
The only thing that could save this game is going F2P after fixing your game, and then making DLC expansions, akin to what Destiny 2 did. I wish I were kidding but that's honestly the only future I see for this 2,000 concurrent players on average mess.
Oh, oh right the co-op. It constantly crashed my game. Consistently. I've heard from many people this has not changed. So, it's not even worth it as a co-op game. Yeah, sorry. Sucks, huh?
After so many months waiting for this game to fix its incredible issues, I was left disappointed. The white-knights who claimed this game would never die, that nerfing the players and buffing nothing was a good thing, and that because they "probably" didn't experience any bugs it meant the game as a whole for EVERYBODY shouldn't be dealing with bugs... all of you, this is your fault for encouraging this studio's behavior because everything you claimed absolutely was not the case. This game is still a bug-riddled unplayable mess, just being able to play the game past the title screen is a gift from god. The nerfs were eventually walked back because they very much were NOT a good thing, but far too little and too late. It still wasn't enough after all the nice buffs they did. The game is a shallow seedling compared to how it started, being currently outlapped in terms of active players by 5 year old fighting games, XCOM 2, and Monster Hunter games not even a full 6 months after Outrider's release. The game has no roadmap ahead of it as all the devs do is abandon their subreddit and constantly push "bug fixes" that don't seem to really do any bug fixing but somehow add new bugs to the game. Such a shame that the game was insanely enjoyable and had so much potential with free updates down the line when it launched, ignoring the bugs and TERRIBLE servers. Within two weeks, PCF decided to kill their own game with a terrible nerf update, fixed nothing for months, blamed the players for "simply not understanding the drop rates" when they knowingly hid drop-rate information from the players, and then remove future support for this game. This game needs some voodoo, dark magic, blood-signed deal to save it. The way I see it, this is a bigger failure than Anthem ever was because at least the Anthem team PRETENDED to care instead of ignoring their own subreddit for so long while the listed admins were CURRENTLY ACTIVE in other subreddits (ironically enough this included the Destiny subreddit).
The story is insufferable. The pacing, the dialogue, the characters, they all suck to the highest degree. BUT... I will say the backstory and the lore are far more interesting and in fact outright pretty good. The Wanderer was clearly going to be a heavy focus on any planned expansion or DLC, if there ever was a plan to begin with however is up for debate now. The locations are actually interesting. The armor and gun designs are insanely well made, the skills/mods and the ability to move mods over to other equipment you can level up was a genius design choice. I would rather outright have transmog or layered armor but, this is a pretty close second. The skills, when they weren't all nerfed and then poorly rebalanced as an apology, felt incredible to actually use and the skills themselves were really creative and interesting. There WAS plenty to love about this game until future support was killed off, bugs ran rampant and made the game unplayable for most, and the overall design of the balancing and the endgame (which consists of TIMER BASED MISSIONS, aka the fucking DEATH of interesting and fun builds as now its DPS or nothing) being left the way it is leaves Outriders in the camp of "What Could Have Been Great 2 Electric Boogaloo" alongside Anthem. Rest in piss, Outriders. Eat your heart out PCF, sticking to your guns isn't usually a bad thing. But in cases where the majority of your playerbase was complaining about legitimate concerns and the ground you stood on was anti-fun? Standing your ground only works on solid ground, and I hope you see now how spoiled and rotten that ground you chose to stand on is.
The only thing that could save this game is going F2P after fixing your game, and then making DLC expansions, akin to what Destiny 2 did. I wish I were kidding but that's honestly the only future I see for this 2,000 concurrent players on average mess.
Oh, oh right the co-op. It constantly crashed my game. Consistently. I've heard from many people this has not changed. So, it's not even worth it as a co-op game. Yeah, sorry. Sucks, huh?