Outdoors, the online shooting, looting and superpower game by People Can Fly, finally has a way to pause, but to do so, you must use an Nvidia graphics card (via Kotaku). Despite working as a single player, Outdoors requires an internet connection to play, which means that it was impossible to reach this solution in the middle of a battle. Even if your menu is open, enemies can still attack you.
Using Ansel, which is a feature of Nvidia GeForce RTX graphics cards that enables a kind of photo mode, even in games without one built-in, you can ‘stop’ Outdoors by immediately pressing “Alt F2”, get up and take care of business. Because Ansel is specific to Nvidia’s Geforce Experience software, the interruption is limited to computer gamers, which means that anyone playing on the console or with another graphics card is out of luck.
Dealing with interruption and single player content in Outdoors is similar to Destiny 2, to of which it has aesthetic and mechanical similarities. Destiny 2 sells a battle pass and annual expansions with new story content, and it justifies – at least in part – that these are only online requirements with the promise of new weekly and monthly changes in the form of live events and other features.
The difference is that Outdoors is sold very explicitly as a more traditional single player game, with the publisher of the game Square Enix addressing the issue on its website,Outdoors is a complete experience outside the box, ”it writes. For some reason, there is still a need for an internet connection, which not only hinders a basic function such as the interruption of the game, also contributes to Outdoors‘launched a mess on April 2nd. Players have experienced problems with the game’s servers to play in single player and multiplayer, for which developer People Can Fly can go. publicly acknowledged and apologized.
The game seems to be working well right now, and this weird Nvidia loophole means that the experience of playing single can be a little more comfortable, but Outdoors certainly illustrates the constant difficulty of making a game online only.