Post Script

You must remember this: a quest is not just a quest

Outriders’ protagonist must fill in three decades of happenings and process their ramifications after tumbling out of a cryo chamber. Developer People Can Fly has a similar chief concern in attaching meaning to its world. Since the prior generation’s consoles were first able to wrap a nigh-inconceivable sprawl around their players, a welldocumented blight of forgettable landscapes and map marker spring-cleaning has set in. And it’s taken PS4/Xbox One’s entire lifespan – and then some – for studios to find an answer to the fundamental question of what to actually do with all this real estate that hardware can now offer.

People Can Fly’s answer to the question appears to be: more or less what we always did, only now with more distant horizons. Outriders’ campaign feels deliberately retro in some ways, conjuring the old bombast of Bulletstorm, Gears et al via tried-andtested set-pieces, clearly defined antagonists whose moral orientation seems to be visibly corrupting them, and a sense of the narrative chains moving forward after every mission. The difference, of course, is that now those same pulpy tales and Hollywood shootouts are happening within a larger framework, one that contains many hub areas, upgrade trees and persistent progression markers.

It’s a different solution to the problem of filling spaces in vast game worlds than the one the industry first imagined. ‘Emergent gameplay’ was the buzzphrase circa 2014, press-release shorthand for a convergence of unscripted systems that create random and memorable situations before the player’s very eyes. ‘Fill the space with AI ecosystems,’ the thinking went, ‘and they’ll create the set-pieces for you.’ We won’t forget that time a honey badger appeared from nowhere and set upon two guards who were attacking us in Far Cry 3, eventually causing a fire to break out and a tiger to be released from its cage, savaging an entire outpost. But we also remember the grey hours between those moments, schlepping from marker to marker, the emergent gameplay never quite, well, emerging.

Perhaps driven by the games-as-a-service landgrab, plenty of IPs seemed to focus first on building an infrastructure that could contain years of content drops, and only then turned their attention to populating that infrastructure with content. Destiny walked so that Sea Of Thieves could run, in that regard. And the content does arrive, eventually. Sometimes it’s even excellent. It’s just that we’re very aware by that point what the spirit of the endeavour was in the first place, and it’s hard to shake the feeling of hunting for the good stuff among the menus, rather than visiting a virtualised creative vision.

Not all games followed suit, though. Sit still in a far-off corner of The Witcher 3’s world map and nothing much will happen. You’ll have no tales to tell, other than that of a handsome sunrise and some procedural beard growth. Instead, CD Projekt Red used the world map as a grounding element as you pushed the story forward quest by quest, just as you had in The Witcher 2. The difference now was downtime between narrative beats, spent riding or at campfires, and it made for a more involving journey than its linear predecessors had offered.

Co-op, of course, makes it harder still to marry the player to the game world. Whatever finely wrought dialogue a developer might have penned and recorded is very likely being talked over on a Discord server, and there’s almost certainly somebody doing a dab emote next to every quest-giving NPC in friendly areas. To call upon Sea Of Thieves again, Rare turns players’ proclivity for mucking about into a feature, arming its population with not one but several musical instruments, the ability to throw a bucket of sick over each other, and a gameplay loop that acknowledges a modern game’s role as a hangout space, leaving room for shooting the breeze during lengthy voyages.

‘Downtime’ was probably not written on any whiteboards or PowerPoint decks during Outriders’ development. Instead, furthering the plot is handed over to cutscenes – skip them if you like, but it’s clear that this is exposition you’re ducking out of – and the gameplay loop involves 20 minutes of eye-searing intensity in combat, punctuated by visits to camp to sell, upgrade, craft and dance.

Despite that simplistic solution to holding a co-op party’s attention and telling the story it wants to, much to its credit, Outriders feels like a game first and a piece of software second. People Can Fly wanted to make a cover shooter with Soulsborne mechanics and allow people to be able to play it in co-op trios. That idea came first, you sense, not the imperative to build an online-content-drop Skinner box.

Perhaps the new console generation will herald an era of smaller, intimate, curated game worlds, but the temptation to use the better hardware capability to build bigger worlds isn’t likely to recede. At a certain point, the player decides what kind of experience they want to get out of the game: whether they’re prepared to read all those journal entries and listen to the NPCs, or whether they want to race to the finish line of max character progression and prestige items, alt-tabbing to find walkthroughs for the missions whose quest-givers they skipped past.

Outriders’ campaign feels deliberately retro in some ways, conjuring the old bombast of Bulletstorm, Gears et al