Will Outriders End Up Like Anthem? Users are Concerned, Dev Comments
It's been a few weeks since the launch of Outriders, and the title still attracts crowds of players. Even the mixed reviews and numerous technical problems did not prevent the game from being successful. However, the community is worried whether the game will not share the fate of Anthem, which used a similar formula.
- One Outriders' player expressed his concerns about the endgame on Reddit;
- The concern among the community is the game's difficulty scaling;
- The concerns were answered by one of the game's developers, who tried to explain in detail the rules on which the gameplay systems are based.
Outriders from People Can Fly, which launched two weeks ago in so far has sold well, despite many technical issues. However, the game's community begins to have some concerns about the game's endgame phase, and to be more specific, difficulty level scaling along with the progress. One Reddit user, known as GuerrillaSteve, expressed his concern, comparing this situation to Anthem:
"It's being talked about in several posts, but I think that many players are oblivious to it right now because the game is still relatively new and they haven't reached the endgame or late endgame content yet, but the downscaling in this game is poorly designed and creates unnecessary frustration that I worry will turn many people away from the game.
We saw this in Anthem when someone pointed out that the best gun in the game was the level 1 P.O.S. you started the game with... not the max level god-rolled legendary you farmed for hours to get. You could imagine why that's a problem in a game that relies on investing your precious time into grinding endlessly for loot and carefully min-maxing your character.
(...) if the scaling doesn't get addressed I fear it will catch them off guard when the bulk of the player base realizes that the character they worked so hard to become OP can't complete a CT10 expedition with their perfectly rolled gear. And nobody seems to understand the math behind this, which is also scary because that means someone most likely will figure out an exploit that makes a joke out of the game."
Outriders operates on a tier system: both in terms of difficulty level of enemies and quality of equipment. The further we progress in the game, the more we increase the difficulty level of the world we face, thus gaining better loot and so on. Difficulty is automatically adjusted by the game, but we can also select is manually. There are also Challenge Tiers (CT), independent from the world level, available for expeditions.
One of the developers responded to Reddit user's concerns in a thread under the post:
"We are open for discussion on the over leveling and how it should be adjusted. Possibly the biggest flaw of the system is that it's a black box that isn't explained at all so in order to have informed discussion here are the rules it uses.
The system uses the difference between average item level and enemy level as a base, you can check average item level on the details tab in inventory as well as bonuses it provided
it will only work if your average item level is more than 2 levels higher than enemy level
when the system works it scales player damage and enemy damage as if the player average item level was equal to enemy level +2 (so the player can have 2 level advantage). On tier 1 the system is turned off regardless of level difference.
We are aware of one bug where the firepower bonus is not applied properly when you equip much lower level weapon leading to weird results."
Time will tell if Outriders' endgame proves to be properly balanced and engaging enough. Let's hope that the game, contrary to the fears of some players, will not share the fate of Anthem.
