Have you tried out the Outriders demo? The new looter-shooter from People Can Fly seems promising, as we discussed in our first impressions piece.
But it also has a one weird quirk- like a transitioning to a new location requires a fade-out, a short cutscene of you either opening a door or jumping a ledge that’s less than 10 seconds, before fading out again to the new location.
It’s jarring, especially when big budget video games have been good at hiding these loading transitions, or made it less momentum-breaking. But there’s a good reason for it.
Eurogamer asked the question to creative director Bartek Kmita, and lead designer Piotr Nowakowski about Outriders’ weird quirk. The answer is due to how the game handles co-op play.
“It started quite pragmatic, because we needed a system that would help us teleport the players and stream some other content to start to load the other arena,” Kmita said.
The need for the oddly short cutscenes comes from feedback received during playtests. Before this, it would just fade out into a different location. And for co-op partners, this can be disorienting when you are not the one instigating the location transition.
“A good example is opening the door,” Kmita said. “That was only because people in playtests said, ‘oh, where am I? Why was I teleported?’ So we needed to have these cutscenes. We couldn’t have done it so manually you can go through the doors, because we have a multiplayer game that opens different problems for us.”
During co-op play, a countdown will appear before players enter the location transition, signaled by the cutscene. The way locations are split like this is similar to the Borderlands series.
The reason the location has to be split like this is due to the choice developers People Can Fly make on only using peer-to-peer (P2P) connection for co-op play. With this, the game has to ensure that players are not triggering too many parts of the game at a time.
The developers understand this issue, and may look at how to make the loading cutscenes less annoying, but it’s a fundamental element that doesn’t have an easy fix. “We will try to look at this, but I can’t promise a huge improvement can be done,” Kmita said.
They also mentioned that later areas won’t see the weird, short loading areas to be as annoying as the opening location Rift Town, which is densely packed and as such make the issue more prominent.
If the use of the fade-outs are reduced a bit (and the transition cutscenes a bit longer to be worth it) maybe it won’t bother people as much. But at least of all the things Outriders have problems with, it’s minor ones like this.
Outriders is coming out on April 1 on PS4, PS5, PC (Steam, Epic Games Store), Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S and Stadia.
Source: Eurogamer