If you’ve been playing the Outriders demo since it came out last week, you may have gotten annoyed: loading playlists.
The third-person loot shooter game from People Can Fly (Bulletstorm, Gears of War: Judgment) plays a short track when you want to move to a new area.
These tracks show everything from a character opening a door to climbing a ledge. It contains a full fade to black opening before you play the scene, and then another fade to black before you get back into action.
These cut lines sometimes border on the hilarious. One I noticed when I was playing was seeing my character make a dramatic jump over a broken bridge:
I’m not sure I need a scene for the jump, Outriders pic.twitter.com/djZ25EyHhO
– Wesley Yin-Poole (@ wyp100) 28 February 2021
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It does not help that in these cuts your character magically destroys the armor you just wore to show their face and hair. And if you then realize on the other side, the armor is magically on again.
The issue is sometimes exacerbated by the appearance of these cuts. There are parts of the demo, which revolve around the quest for Rift Town, where you can get caught up in a rechargeable vortex as you move through different areas.
Clearly, these tracks load the background. In the clip I tweeted, you can see my character approaching the gap in the bridge, then I press and hold square (I play on PlayStation 5) to enter a new area. Then we get over the scene for the jump over. When the cut ends and I’m in action again, I’m in this new realm.
These are not seamless transitions. Video games have had more elegant, less immersive-loading transitions for years (who can forget the slow glare through a narrow gap before entering a new territory?). But Outriders do things differently.
So, what’s going on? I caught up with creative director Bartek Kmita and chief designer Piotr Nowakowski of People Can Fly to find out.
As you would expect, the new area is loading. But there is another reason for this shocking transition: cooperation.
Outfielders can be played with three players throughout the game. And without dedicated servers, Outriders must bring all players together if one wants to enter a new territory. The game can not lead to all players walking around in different arenas at the same time.
“It started very pragmatically because we needed a system that would help us teleport the players and stream other content to start loading the other arena,” Kmita told me.
But why did excerpts showing your character transition perform banal actions such as opening doors, climbing ridges, and jumping over ravines? After all, it’s not like Outriders is the first cooperative game that offers different arenas for players to explore at the same time. Last generation we had Destiny, and the generation before that we had Borderlands. There are many other examples, each with their own solutions to let cooperative players play seamlessly in the virtual world.
People Can Fly said due to feedback during play tests. Initially, Outriders did not have these charging recordings. Instead, there was a simple fade and fade as all players were brought together. But some play testers complained that they were disoriented when loading to a new area. They did not know where they were going. And so, the short tracks that show how your character physically moves to a new area were born.
“A good example is to open the door,” Kmita said. “It was just because people said in play tests, ‘Oh, where am I? Why was I sent?’ “So we had to have these tricks. We would not be able to do it so manually to go through the doors, because we have a multiplayer game that opens up different problems for us.”
Specifically on the jump scene I tweeted about, Nowakowski explained what was happening under the hood:
‘I’m the person setting the journey in motion, so I want to jump to the other side and start a fight on the other side. Let’s think one of my friends is next to town, to Rift Town. The second journey along the main road to the enemies there. I can not just go there and cause three different areas, because it will not work in a game without dedicated servers.
“Secondly, if I would just cause the transition, the other two would be sent. Then they’ll see, okay, where are we? Our idea – maybe it’s not working exactly the way we wanted – but the idea was, okay, show for all the players that happen, that we jump on the other side.They see, okay!
“Same with the doors. Okay, we’re going into that area. Our idea was to explain what’s going on. Besides, we just have to gather all the players and not separate them into different areas.”
The alternative solution would have been to automatically break up groups of players as they loaded into new areas in the game world, but People Can Fly was desperate to avoid it for Outriders.
“Without dedicated servers, our solution is if two guys want to go to different parts, we have to separate them so they can not play together. Because everyone has to calculate the AI and everything on their machine, we would have to split the party,” Kmita explained .
“I would like to open the animation of the door for two seconds, but still play with my friends, rather than just break apart through the broadcast. That’s why we chose this solution. We understand that it is not the best . “
Kmita went ahead with the suggestion that People Can Fly could look at improving these charging screens so that it is not so annoying, but it sounds unlikely that fundamental changes can be made to this. “We will try to look at this, but I can not promise that a great improvement can be made,” he said.
These area transitions are shocking when you play Outriders solo. When the game is shot as a single-player story-driven loot, which People Can Fly insists is a perfectly viable way to play the game, the structure of the game is confronted with other story-driven pre-difficult comparisons single-player action adventures For years, players have been given more elegant solutions to loading new problem areas.
“In other games, where the transitions are seamless, there is a lot more space, you [the player] have to run, drive or things like that, ‘Kmita said.
“The flow, the loading that takes place on our levels in the background, is really intense. We just needed the solution to flow everything, to prepare the next arenas. And also to have the team together in one to play a single arena, not to divide. “
People Can Fly, in turn, said that the further you get into the game, the less clutter you get in the game. In Rift Town, where search, new areas and evictions are packed, this problem is felt thoroughly.
“[Rift Town] was the early stage of the game, so we experimented with a lot of solutions, searching in the middle of the arenas, stuff like that, “Kmita said. The two doors are in the same place, close – from the structure point of view it’s good because you travel, you have both doors. But from the point of, okay, here, where it is, so when I go from one to the other, there are a few cuts in a row.
“So there are some solutions we’ve noticed, and later in the game I’ll be more consistent. So fewer things like that happen. Yet it’s there. And we have to work with it and make it work as well as possible.
“I feel like in Outriders we have quite a few interesting solutions from the design point of view. One is not necessarily as good as we expected! I believe there are some that work very well and that I am really proud of. “