Outriders turned out to be a brand-new experience for the Painkiller and Bulletstorm creators, People Can Fly, as the team has never before made a shooter with a focus on loot. Creative director Bartosz Kmita revealed the sources of inspiration and the main difficulties of the project, adding that devs were afraid that the loot feature would scare players off the game.
Kmita explained that the studio decided on the general Outriders concept back in 2016. The team was inspired by modern action games, like Borderlands and The Division, which incorporated a loot system while remaining shooters at their core. Yet, the Polish studio had to overcome some unique problems while implementing role-playing elements in Outriders, as reported by Gamasutra.
At first, the studio had a hard time explaining to testers how much loot affects their abilities in Outriders, as players just equip the highest-level items to increase general stats like armor and damage. Kmita said that the developers were afraid players would think that Outriders is all about numbers and parameters that drive the gameplay. If players pursue these values mindlessly, they’ll just get tired of failing and dying and would not play the game.
Moreover, there were no classes in the first Outriders concept. It was assumed that players would choose their skills from the general pool, building completely unique characters and customize them via the loot.
However, as more playtests took place, it became clear that testers put together builds with random skills without thinking about their synergy. Even experienced players, who supposedly understood the principles of creating an effective character, regularly made mistakes with the builds. All things considered, the developer decided to add predefined classes to Outriders and distributed the key skills between them.
Outriders has became a big hit for People Can Fly. The game was recently listed among the top five paid games on the Microsoft Store despite being available through Xbox Game Pass at launch. In addition, the looter shooter achieved an impressive number of 125 thousand concurrent players on Steam during the first week.