Yeah blow through everything on WT1 because you don't get hardly any extra experience for higher world tiers. Technically you get more for enemies higher than your level, but higher tiers take so much longer to clear it's a wash. Smash out side quests quickly for exp chunks. Put armor/weapons with tier 3 mods in your stash so your new character can dismantle and craft with high level shit immediately. Then once you beat the campaign just grind some expeditions until you reach challenge tier 8 and then you're caught up to anything you'd get in WT15.
For a quick mindless epic gear farm I suggest a hunt with a flag nearby. I've been doing Splittooth a lot the past couple of days. Two to five purple drops per clear in about two minutes round trip. Occasional legendary after WT8. Clear the hunt, warp back to flag, abandon quest and pick it up again.
So I bought this game this weekend after playing the Demo, and I really enjoyed the demo. Writing was tropey but servicable enough to move the plot along. Breaking the game with some dumb weapon combos and builds was fun. So, I put down my money.
I think I regret it. Game was ok, but the deeper I got into it the more glitches I started to see, and the more I feel the developers don't really understand their own game so much.
So, my playthrough is as a Trickster. I did a build similar to the ME3 Vanguard. Zap in, big damage shotguns with health and reload on kill, then rewind out. Or, pop the time stop bubble and run around in a big death or glory murder spree. It was a blast. Then I hit boss fights. No cover, some have no adds during phases so you can't kill/reload off adds. The bosses have a lot of 'fuck you don't get near me' mechanics that will nearly instagib you. It really ruined the playstyle. I persevered cause it was ok, and just carried extra weapons loaded with lifesteal and just played dumb rifleman through those parts.
However, the last act of the game lost me. For one, the story goes... well. I'll save that for spoilers for those who haven't gotten there yet, but it went full modern day. The last boss though? Yeah. No thanks. He is pretty much designed to make most all my Trickster abilities useless. Rewind? Small square arena, where am I going to rewind to? REwind is just as likely to get you killed cause of all the aoe and crap being thrown out. I just have to circle strafe near constantly, so no on the rewind other than the buffs I can get. Warp behind? Yeah. Thats dangerous. IF you time it wrong, die to boss instagib mechanics, though you can take advantage of the slow. Boss resists my sword blade, though the slow is useful. Time bubble? Yeah. Boss's shit isn't slowed by it, and he doesn't really seem to be affected by it either. Spin just gets you killed. So basically its a big game of strafing in circles to dodge mechanics and hit him enough to keep health up. Oh, and his 'adds' don't refill health and are immune to all my Trickster abilities during first phase. Yeah. Thats... not really that interesting of gameplay. Plus, it completely kills the playstyle Trickster seems built on.
So yeah. Story boss fights in this game are shit. The 'hunt' ones and all are ok, but the solo arena shit. Garbage. FWIW I was WT 10, level 30 when I hit it. Oh, and if you fail 'phase 2' it makes you start all the way back at phase 1. So, its more tedious than enjoyable at that point. I just said fuck it and set it to WT 1 cause it was after 1am when I finally got sick of it and wanted to go to sleep. Story had pissed me off so much by that point I didn't care anymore.
Spoilered my rant, just as much to save you from my ranty diarrhea as to save you from spoilers.
So... Yeah. Its all the white man's fault. No shit. As you get towards the end, you find out that somehow, the Caravel. Which was shown getting blown the fuck up because of engine failure in a cutscene, was some how repaired after you all left, and sent to the planet. Not just repaired mind you. Repaired, with a faster engine, that allowed it to get there before you did. Now mind you. How? It makes no sense. The space elevator was destroyed during the launch of the Flores. Where did they find the resources, the know how, the orbital capability to get all that up there, and to get it fixed. Yeah... Umm. What? But no. Some warlord apparently took over and somehow did what the people leading the world couldn't do in repairing it and launching it, and make it so good it arrived first? You know. Whatever, that's just stupid.
But of course they arrive to find a perfect Eden, with 'natives' who are peaceful and pure and not even physically capable of malice. Literally. Living in one with nature, no industry, just... at peace, with their magical gaia powers over the anomaly. IT allows them to farm, and build, and its fucking magic. OF course, the white man is jealous, wants to know how they do it, and doesn't trust them and thinks they are going to kill the white man so what does he do? Enslaves and tortures them of course. Have to learn their secrets! Somehow they neglected to warn us about the nasty storms and how they have to do the magic ritual when they appear otherwise shit goes bad. So... when a storm appears and our electronics start to fail, we find them at a mystic glowing obelisk and since no one told us, we think they are causing it, so we kill them.
Start the Genocide. No, literally we have our Nazi references too. Complete with making us walk through an extermination work camp.
So they natives (Names Pax btw, cause lets pick a more utopian name) decide to devolve into monsters using the warp, I mean anomaly to fight back. So all the humanoid monsters we see are actually the natives, that we condemned to death who mutated themselves into killers to fight us. Which, apparently they can't reverse, and they can't control their minds once it happens. Good choice there. Like, literally, they are so pure that in order to fight back to defend themselves they have to become warp creatures. And now the warp is making the whole planet try and kill us too.
Apparently they were the ones responsible for holding off the anomaly storms, and keeping them from ruining the world. So... once they die, it all goes to fuckers. So the question is, how the fuck did they evolve on the fucking planet to be so peaceful and loving and controlling of the anomaly in the first place? They had to build all the towers and shit to control it? Did they just, evolve with magic powers from the beginning? Cause we see within a month of them stopping the magic ritual, it goes pure straight fuck you world ending cataclysm level shit. So... how did they survive to tame that shit in the first place? How did they even achieve civilization to control the anomaly, if without them the anomaly ruins everything?
They didn't even for a second think of making up some bullshit to justify how things happened. I am reminded of that stupid video of the professor talking about how shaman in Africa can call lightning down on some people, and how we haven't researched the black man's science, and we've privileged white man's science, and that's why it doesn't work. Its that level of dumb. They just wanted the narrative of perfect utopia, ruined by man, and yeah. If they had just put in a little effort, they could have gotten the same message out, without making it trite bullshit. Another faction building a spacecraft? Ok, boom. No more bullshit of dystopian warlords building better spaceflight than the world's greatest. Just, think for a second, make a plausible excuse that allows me to maintain my suspension of disbelief. Don't go so over the top woke it pulls me out of the game. Where did the anomaly come from that allowed the Pax to develop in the first place? Did they ruin their own world back in the day, and had to do shit to save it? Give up on their warlike past to stabilize their world? See. That works. Still shows a utopia, that realized they could save Gaia... I mean Earth unlike us that ruined ours and abandoned it. Same message, even a little better. With some rational that can at least pretend to be coherent. But nope. Pure woke noble savage bullshit.
And lastly. You succeed in getting the pods full of supplies down from the Flores. Lots more stuff, so yay. But so what? Anomaly and storms are still there. Everything wants to kill us. Electronics are still fucked. You can't grow shit on the planet cause apparently (from the log files) the soil is gone fuckers. The planet is still full on warp mutated and hostile, getting worse by the year to kill us. So... yay, we're still fucked and can't do shit to solve it? I mean, I guess we bought ourselves some more time for the sequel to come out and we deal with that? We now have stuff for the ECA and Insurgency to fight over even more? Like, the ending still leaves us squarely in fucksville, but it acts like its all 'yay guys, we're saved!".
Yeah sure whatever. Yes, its 2am. Yes I just finished the game, and yes I am fucking ranty. But Jesus Christ, it went from trite and tropey, but interesting world building with a not so subtle woke but acceptable environmental/moral message, straight into the 'White men ruin everything, back to nature noble savages are the best in a couple hours.
So yeah. Gameplay in general is serviceable with some fun builds and stupid gimmicks, but boss fights are trash, story turns woke trash.
This is god damn disappointing. The way things were playing out, I just assumed they were going to do something different and refreshing. It retroactively changes the nature of the story you are witnessing building into something else, from what I thought it was going to be to something entirely trite and predictable.
It really attacks my desire to continue playing. The last paragraph is where I am at right now just reading it; I can't imagine playing it.
This is god damn disappointing. The way things were playing out, I just assumed they were going to do something different and refreshing. It retroactively changes the nature of the story you are witnessing building into something else, from what I thought it was going to be to something entirely trite and predictable.
It really attacks my desire to continue playing. The last paragraph is where I am at right now just reading it; I can't imagine playing it.
If you need to, just drop the world level and push through it to finish the story. Call it sunk cost fallacy. I did, I was like, fuck I'm this far in. Are we really doing this? And yeah, yeah we did. But... story shitting itself aside, I still enjoy the trickster/ me3 vanguard style gameplay.
However, it appears end game is just redoing old content, and running speed runs of the drop pods for rewards. Faster you run, better reward, so it seems that builds and playstyles are limited at end game. Current meta is just autoreloading guns with the damage bullet skill, and go go go. Other damage skills have too long of cooldowns to compete. I hope as we play more people come up with other builds, but... atm it seems end game is pretty universal no matter your class. Build full damage/auto reload spec, go fast as fuck boi.
This kinda makes the side effect of, for me, only weapons with healing and reloading perks seems viable. Anything else is just scrapped to feed those. IF you had a more ranged damage build you might have more options, but it seems auto reload to keep the damage buff up is a must.
I feel I got a good weekend of enjoyment out of it. They've obviously left it wide open for expansions and I can smell the future DLC in the oven as we speak. The story jumped the shark, but I'm just curious enough, and enjoy the do or die trickster enough I might go for an expansion, just to see how it goes. I've never been accused of being smart though, and I have a reputation among my friends for enjoying bad games so I might be a bad judge.
Atm I feel its 6/10. Started strong, waned in the end, and replayablitly atm is suffering. Dare I say in a way it really reminds me of Anthem, which I enjoyed for what it was, but was also severely flawed.
I noticed that as well. If you happened to play the entire game in a certain way that wasn't quite compatible with how the expeditions need to be ran, you're kinda sol. I liked hanging back and pew pewing mobs, but expeditions want you run up and shoot mobs in their faces as fast as possible.
The games biggest annoyance, for me, is the sound. Its horrible. The levels for voice / sound effects / music are all unbalanced. Not sure how if the CPU can affect sound quality, but since my CPU is a bit too old for this game (imo), I tend to have sound effects cut out a lot. Been thinking of getting a new soundcard, since I've just been using the onboard soundcard, which is now 9yrs old.
I noticed that as well. If you happened to play the entire game in a certain way that wasn't quite compatible with how the expeditions need to be ran, you're kinda sol. I liked hanging back and pew pewing mobs, but expeditions want you run up and shoot mobs in their faces as fast as possible.
The games biggest annoyance, for me, is the sound. Its horrible. The levels for voice / sound effects / music are all unbalanced. Not sure how if the CPU can affect sound quality, but since my CPU is a bit too old for this game (imo), I tend to have sound effects cut out a lot. Been thinking of getting a new soundcard, since I've just been using the onboard soundcard, which is now 9yrs old.
I've had this as well on a slightly newer computer, as well as a loud almost feedback sound on scene transitions etc. It seems like the game needed a little more time in the oven. Its not bad, but yeah. My other favorite bug was I had a camp where none of the NPCs were rendered. It wasn't a crash or other game breaking thing (ask me about Tricksters failure to teleport behind people. Skill triggers, I flash, don't move.) but it was amusing and confusing trying to figure out why everyone was 'missing.'
It's not even close to Anthem territory levels of bad =O
End game is similar to destiny/division on initial launch.
Build variety does look like it suffers a bit in that you lock yourself to some sort of anomaly bullet and endless ammo. Surprised though to see people using so many of the skills in pryo endgame at WT15 and them being viable when Ash Breaker feels so good.
Also how did you guys get so high in WT via story. I think i capped at WT7 when I finished and end boss was easy enough as pyro.
If you need to, just drop the world level and push through it to finish the story. Call it sunk cost fallacy. I did, I was like, fuck I'm this far in. Are we really doing this? And yeah, yeah we did. But... story shitting itself aside, I still enjoy the trickster/ me3 vanguard style gameplay.
However, it appears end game is just redoing old content, and running speed runs of the drop pods for rewards. Faster you run, better reward, so it seems that builds and playstyles are limited at end game. Current meta is just autoreloading guns with the damage bullet skill, and go go go. Other damage skills have too long of cooldowns to compete. I hope as we play more people come up with other builds, but... atm it seems end game is pretty universal no matter your class. Build full damage/auto reload spec, go fast as fuck boi.
This kinda makes the side effect of, for me, only weapons with healing and reloading perks seems viable. Anything else is just scrapped to feed those. IF you had a more ranged damage build you might have more options, but it seems auto reload to keep the damage buff up is a must.
I feel I got a good weekend of enjoyment out of it. They've obviously left it wide open for expansions and I can smell the future DLC in the oven as we speak. The story jumped the shark, but I'm just curious enough, and enjoy the do or die trickster enough I might go for an expansion, just to see how it goes. I've never been accused of being smart though, and I have a reputation among my friends for enjoying bad games so I might be a bad judge.
Atm I feel its 6/10. Started strong, waned in the end, and replayablitly atm is suffering. Dare I say in a way it really reminds me of Anthem, which I enjoyed for what it was, but was also severely flawed.
If you need to, just drop the world level and push through it to finish the story. Call it sunk cost fallacy. I did, I was like, fuck I'm this far in. Are we really doing this? And yeah, yeah we did. But... story shitting itself aside, I still enjoy the trickster/ me3 vanguard style gameplay.
However, it appears end game is just redoing old content, and running speed runs of the drop pods for rewards. Faster you run, better reward, so it seems that builds and playstyles are limited at end game. Current meta is just autoreloading guns with the damage bullet skill, and go go go. Other damage skills have too long of cooldowns to compete. I hope as we play more people come up with other builds, but... atm it seems end game is pretty universal no matter your class. Build full damage/auto reload spec, go fast as fuck boi.
This kinda makes the side effect of, for me, only weapons with healing and reloading perks seems viable. Anything else is just scrapped to feed those. IF you had a more ranged damage build you might have more options, but it seems auto reload to keep the damage buff up is a must.
I feel I got a good weekend of enjoyment out of it. They've obviously left it wide open for expansions and I can smell the future DLC in the oven as we speak. The story jumped the shark, but I'm just curious enough, and enjoy the do or die trickster enough I might go for an expansion, just to see how it goes. I've never been accused of being smart though, and I have a reputation among my friends for enjoying bad games so I might be a bad judge.
Atm I feel its 6/10. Started strong, waned in the end, and replayablitly atm is suffering. Dare I say in a way it really reminds me of Anthem, which I enjoyed for what it was, but was also severely flawed.
I just got to the Quarry and hit WT7. After meeting
Channa the character with the visions in Trench Town
, I was hoping for the story to take a different turn. Normally spoilers don't bother me but knowing the game has this in store.../sigh. I prepared an argument as to why this Outriders was better than Anthem, in part based upon the lack of math meaningfulness, the quality of life improvements, and the much better travel/world/lore. From what we have discussed here, you can fix that going forward, although woke generally never breaks its hold. All of your narrative improvements work fine for me.
I assumed it was going to be a "Dark Crystal" style ending: That there was a ship that had reached Enoch first and had damaged the planet's "spirit" and that the monsters were the antibodies rejecting us, and that "we would have to restore the balance" or "fix the Equilibrium" or some such narrative device; that was what was driving people so war-crazy and causing such conflict between the ECA and Exiles/Insurgents. Then we would find at least a part of the planet returned to the Eden-like state the Flores was supposed to find and give the players a happy ending after the WWI horror show of a start, and give the hardcase player an arc towards achieving Connection. The Expeditions endgame would be going into this Anthem Maelstorm-esque to maintain this shelter and a jumping off point for whatever sequel they wanted to come up with.
Edit: I can't find the Dr Brown gif explaining how Spider Man 3 made Spider Man and Spider Man 2 retroactively suck; surely Sony's lawyers aren't that good but that's where I am with the narrative, this ending makes the whole story suck rather than be the starting point for an arc that would have giving the terrible conditions of the first part of the story meaning and purpose.
They kill characters in this game like nobody's business. I thought for sure they would soften that approach at some point but it seems everyone is Ned Stark.
I will keep playing and hopefully I will find I am wrong about something, or it sits better than it sounds right now. I was just hoping they would have the courage to do something different and stick the landing, and this right now sounds...so bland and trite.
I really dig the gameplay, but I liked just the combat part of Anthem as well; everything else sucked; crafting, the world, the lore, narrative/the story, travel, etc. In this, everything is pretty good but the story has (edit to remove spoilers) probably taken a super serious hit for me.
Trio leveled new chars last night on wt3 1-27 took about 4-5 hours I guess, with a couple crashes in between, only doing entire main story quest and nothing on the side.
I think the bullets from trickster/pyro/techno are broken, there really shouldn't be that many auto fill mag mods in the game, when a pyro walks in and blows away everyone else in damage combined with just their volcanic rounds, there's really no reason not to build around them only. Maybe there's some other combination of skill/mods that we haven't seen that can compete, but it's mind blowing the damage volcanic rounds do now (even though that's pyros main job) it'll be hard not to run that build to push expeditions, and I don't really expect any balance to be done since this isn't a live service/pvp game.
The games biggest annoyance, for me, is the sound. Its horrible. The levels for voice / sound effects / music are all unbalanced. Not sure how if the CPU can affect sound quality, but since my CPU is a bit too old for this game (imo), I tend to have sound effects cut out a lot. Been thinking of getting a new soundcard, since I've just been using the onboard soundcard, which is now 9yrs old.
I played the demo about 90% on PC with headphones and it was fine just using onboard sound and no amp.
Now that I'm on XSX and played it enough to pay attention to the 7.1 audio mix, it's appallingly bad. No useful positional sounds from the sides or rear, and the front 3 channels all sound like a muddy, muffled mess. It's bad enough I had to go take my PC38X away from the computer and plug it into my XSX controller instead. Which is better, but even with DTS Headphone:X I still don't have the positional audio I get from other games.
I just got to the Quarry and hit WT7. After meeting
Channa the character with the visions in Trench Town
, I was hoping for the story to take a different turn. Normally spoilers don't bother me but knowing the game has this in store.../sigh. I prepared an argument as to why this Outriders was better than Anthem, in part based upon the lack of math meaningfulness, the quality of life improvements, and the much better travel/world/lore. From what we have discussed here, you can fix that going forward, although woke generally never breaks its hold. All of your narrative improvements work fine for me.
I assumed it was going to be a "Dark Crystal" style ending: That there was a ship that had reached Enoch first and had damaged the planet's "spirit" and that the monsters were the antibodies rejecting us, and that "we would have to restore the balance" or "fix the Equilibrium" or some such narrative device; that was what was driving people so war-crazy and causing such conflict between the ECA and Exiles/Insurgents. Then we would find at least a part of the planet returned to the Eden-like state the Flores was supposed to find and give the players a happy ending after the WWI horror show of a start, and give the hardcase player an arc towards achieving Connection. The Expeditions endgame would be going into this Anthem Maelstorm-esque to maintain this shelter and a jumping off point for whatever sequel they wanted to come up with.
Edit: I can't find the Dr Brown gif explaining how Spider Man 3 made Spider Man and Spider Man 2 retroactively suck; surely Sony's lawyers aren't that good but that's where I am with the narrative, this ending makes the whole story suck rather than be the starting point for an arc that would have giving the terrible conditions of the first part of the story meaning and purpose.
They kill characters in this game like nobody's business. I thought for sure they would soften that approach at some point but it seems everyone is Ned Stark.
I will keep playing and hopefully I will find I am wrong about something, or it sits better than it sounds right now. I was just hoping they would have the courage to do something different and stick the landing, and this right now sounds...so bland and trite.
I really dig the gameplay, but I liked just the combat part of Anthem as well; everything else sucked; crafting, the world, the lore, narrative/the story, travel, etc. In this, everything is pretty good but the story has (edit to remove spoilers) probably taken a super serious hit for me.
Thing is with games like these story and leveling means shit all in the long term. In a few weeks most people will be max and the true test of this games longevity and staying power will have to be proven. Because running the same shit over and over for more +stat gear can only take you so far. They need some more hooks like Destiny 2 has, super hard secret missions, seasonal content, shit like that. Maybe even add in a 6 man raid over time. I know this game is new so this remains to be seen. Shit, this game does not even have PvP which is huge in those content droughts to hold at lerast some of the people playing.
It was the same shit with Div 2, running the same missions over and over, even with new enemies, gets old real fast. At least im hearing that they nailed the gear and crafting parts which is huge. Im still on the fence about this one because when I played the trial/demo it seemed so generic. But im so tempted because there is fuck all to play right now.
Does nto matter if this resembles borderlands to you bro. Its still a MMO looter shooter which needs to keep their peeps playing or it gets forgotten about.
The sound issues happened to me, especially toward the end. Strange transition pops and booms. Some of the dialog seemed to cut out at the end of a sentence. Was quite jarring. I'm playing on a rig I built less than 6 months ago.
Does nto matter if this resembles borderlands to you bro. Its still a MMO looter shooter which needs to keep their peeps playing or it gets forgotten about.
No, it doesn't, because it was never designed to be that according to the people who made the game. The one and only thing it has in common with Destiny and Division is the retarded always-online requirement. There's no other GaaS shit in Outriders at all.
People will play it until they get sick of it, maybe they'll come back if/when there's DLC or expansion content. That's exactly what PCF intended.
Does nto matter if this resembles borderlands to you bro. Its still a MMO looter shooter which needs to keep their peeps playing or it gets forgotten about.
Hm, no. The game was never meant to be a "mmo like looter shooter". The Dev's got inspiration from the Diablo franchise when designing the game. I think the best comparison is to Remnants from the Ashes, but with a grindy endgame and loot like Diablo. I do not expect much from this game long term, at most I think it'll get 1 DLC and then its done.
