What started as a squad of three is quickly whittled down to one. I take my stand towards the edge of the magma chamber to brace for the coming swarm. Dozens of explosive spiders scuttle towards me, supported by a much larger magma spider that’s raining hellfire across the room. My Anomaly-infused rounds carve through the horde and give a clear sight to the boss. I dance around a myriad of AoE attacks with time-warping precision to deliver one final blow. It’s over. As the molten arachnid falls to the ground, one thought sticks out:
“Haven’t I experienced this before?”
Outriders: New Horizon is an upcoming free expansion for Outriders that adds four new Expeditions to the endgame experience. More importantly, this expansion includes a complete overhaul of the Expedition system itself, as well as a variety of balance changes and features the community has been asking for since the game’s inception.
Arguably the most important change in this update is the removal of timed Expeditions. Coming from my recent playtest session with the New Horizon expansion, I can attest that this change is as good as it sounds. Clearspeed isn’t the sole measurement of a build’s success now, giving support characters and more experimental builds room to shine. One of my teammates made a valiant effort to cover enemies in Ash as frequently as possible, offering my Twisted Rounds Trickster a safe window to close the gap and deliver the killing blow. This style of play would have slowed you down before, but now it has a place in the endgame.
Do you know what else was missing at launch? Good drop rates. Legendary items were notoriously hard to farm for when Outriders first came out, but People Can Fly has made significant strides towards easing the endgame loot chase. Recent patches have doubled the drop chance of Legendaries and added dupe protection, and New Horizon goes even further by giving Tiago a proper Legendary shop you can reroll by spending Drop Pod Resources—Outriders’ endgame currency. If Tiago doesn’t have what you want, the game now lets you choose one of three randomly-chosen Legendary items as a guaranteed drop every time you clear Eye of the Storm. Oh, and PCF has buffed quite a few Legendary mods and armor sets in New Horizon, further improving build variety.
As great as these changes are, I can’t shake the overwhelming sense of familiarity with this update’s new Expeditions. I had the chance to play all four of them, and they all follow the same formula as the rest of the game’s Expeditions. Kill this horde, defend this objective, defeat a boss, repeat. As beautiful as the new missions are, the monotony settled in after just a few runs. No new enemy types or mechanics are present, although enemy density seemed slightly ramped up. The developers had a perfect opportunity to create more time-intensive and interesting mechanics now that the Expedition timer is gone, but sadly they’re not present.
My favorite new Expedition of the bunch is Molten Depths, taking you back to the Eagle Peaks mountain that houses that one spider boss fight in the campaign. It had a great mix of open arenas, confined combat encounters where you drown under the sheer volume of enemies, and a fantastic boss fight. For a brief moment, everything clicked into place for me. I was weaving abilities and gunfire to paint the walls in red paste. I was making conscious decisions about which enemies to take out first. It was just fun. The sheer repetitiveness of what I was doing didn’t matter because Outriders’ combat is just so good. But then the bugs set in.
Remember that harrowing tale of soloing a boss I mentioned earlier? My two teammates didn’t die; they were disconnected from the game. And that spider boss I was fighting? It’s a copy of the Molten Acari fight from the campaign. Nothing in these Expeditions treads new ground or introduces new mechanics, and the moments where Outriders should shine are muddled by a plethora of technical issues. Abilities still bug out on occasion. The AI sometimes stops working. Enemies still get stuck behind walls, forcing you to restart the entire Expedition. These moments aren’t exactly game-breaking, but they take you out of Outriders’ gameplay loop.
It’s such a shame because bugs aside, Outriders’ gameplay loop finally feels complete. Weaving abilities into gunplay provides a power fantasy that few games can match. The loot grind is finally respectful of your time. Build diversity is here. Better late than never, transmog has arrived to bring on the fashion endgame. Eye of the Storm is now worth running. But those damn bugs and overly repetitive Expeditions break that loop over and over and over again.
People Can Fly has made it clear that Outriders isn’t a live-service game. The studio isn’t geared to churn out updates as often as its live-service competition. Even with that fact, the Outriders community was likely expecting more than a few new Legendaries and Expeditions over a seven-month silence. If new content is going to be this infrequent, PCF needs to hit the ground running to make it worth the community’s time, live-service or not. Sadly, I think the devs have missed the mark here.
I should reiterate that New Horizon is free. You are getting a rather large sandbox update, four well-made Expeditions, and a transmog system for no charge. The developers could have charged money for this or added an MTX shop to recoup development costs, yet they chose not to. It’s free for all Outriders owners to try, and what’s here is great. If you’re someone who just wants an excuse to play more Outriders, this is the perfect reason to jump back in.
Even so, it all goes back to that one question, “Haven’t I experienced this before?” While Outriders’ competition manages to create new experiences yearly or even quarterly, the game has struggled to innovate in a time when it desperately needs to. If you’re going to release an update to coax players back into playing, you can’t have the main selling point be iterations of the exact same experience veteran players like myself are accustomed to.
New Horizon feels more like the groundwork for what’s to come, the start of a much larger evolution that'll bear fruit with 2022's Worldslayer expansion. I had a great time clearing this update’s new Expeditions with my Trickster, as I’m sure many passionate fans and newcomers will. But as ironic as it sounds, New Horizon doesn’t tread any new ground. Fans looking for a proper expansion to Outriders will need to keep waiting.
Outriders: New Horizon launches on November 16th for all available platforms.