People Can Fly’s Outriders demo is out now in the wild, and while it’s impressive enough, one thing that folk can probably do without is the annoying loading cutscenes.
The third-person looter shooter game from People Can Fly (Bulletstorm, Gears of War: Judgment) plays a short cutscene whenever you want to move to a new area.
These cutscenes show everything from a character opening a door to climbing a ledge. They include a full fade to black opening before playing the cutscene, then another fade to black before you get back into the action.
Clips like this are often used to camouflage level loading (never forget that Mass Effect elevator), and to an extent that's the case here as well. But creative director Bartek Kmita explained to Eurogamer that the system is also used to bring co-op players together when they're moving from one area to another.
Outriders initially used a simple fade-in, fade-out during area transitions, but People Can Fly made the change after playtesters complained that they weren't aware of what was happening or where they were going when one of their partners triggered a move to a new area. Playing a brief video when moving between areas ensures that everyone is aware of where the team is headed.
“I’m the person who’s triggering the travel, so I want to jump to the other side and start a battle on the opposite side,” lead designer Piotr Nowakowski said, explaining what is happening behind the scenes.
“Let’s imagine one of my friends is next to the city, to Rift Town. The second one is travelling along the main path towards the enemies there. I cannot just go there and trigger three different areas, because it will not work in a game without dedicated servers.
Second, if I will just trigger that transition, then the two others will be teleported. Then they will see, okay, where are we? Our idea – maybe it doesn’t work exactly as we wanted – but the idea was, okay, show all the players what’s happening, that we are jumping on the opposite side. So they see, okay!”
These area transition cutscenes are most jarring when playing Outriders solo. When playing the game as a single-player story-driven looter shooter, which People Can Fly insists is a perfectly viable way to play the game, the structure of the game faces tough comparisons with other single-player story-driven action adventures that have for years now given players more elegant solutions to the loading new areas problem.
As for why it's necessary to sit through all those same cutscenes when playing Outriders solo, Kmita said that the background loading is "really intense," and that the studio "just needed that solution to stream everything, to prepare the next arenas." He also suggested that there's not a whole lot of room to refine the system, saying, "We will try to look at this, but I can't promise a huge improvement can be done."
Outriders is set to launch on April 1, but the demo is available now on Steam. I spent several hours with it over the weekend and enjoyed it more than I expected to: I encountered a fairly common crash error (and the suggested fixes in this Reddit thread unfortunately did not help) but the mix of gunplay and powers (and exploding skulls) made for some very satisfying action, and even though the setup is thoroughly hackneyed, there are elements that have me honestly curious about where the whole thing is headed.
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