Outriders Part 3

 I finished the campaign in Outriders last night (which leaves several side quests and endgame expeditions). I have thoughts. I'll try to save spoilers for last.

The way the game handles scaling and difficulty seems a bit odd to me. Maybe good, but definitely odd and not all that well explained. 

Character level is pretty common and thus widely understood. You get XP for kills and missions and level up. Some levels unlock new powers. Some levels give you character points for a skill tree. Strangely, it seemed like some levels were 'dead' while other gave two skill points. I'm still not sure what's up there, but I finished the campaign at level 29 of 30.

Then there's World Tiers. These are a difficult adjustment mechanic that was a bit lacking in explanation of some details, but from that I have seen - higher WT means 1) enemies are harder and 2) drops are better. Item drops can range from a couple levels below your character level to several levels above, depending on WT. You do not suffer any notable XP loss from using low World Tiers, except that you can only earn toward unlocking the next WT at the highest one you have unlocked. I played about the first half of the game with the 'use highest available World Tier' box checked and got to about WT 8 before feeling things were getting beyond challenging and into annoying hard. With some effort, I unlocked WT 10 (of 15) along the way, but finished most of the campaign on WT 7, switching down to 5 for a few harder encounters. I've read some people recommend playing the campaign on WT 3 and worry about unlocking further tiers after reaching level cap.

Then there are Challenge Tiers at the end of the game. They seem much like World Tiers (adjusting difficulty and drop level/changes), but are specifically for the endgame Expeditions. That seems like an unnecessary complication to me, but I guess Expeditions are designed to handle higher difficulty than the campaign-associated quests?

It's a little odd, but I guess it works. My only real reservation about the systems there involve how grindy it may be to unlock tiers as you get better gear.

The main storyline itself... well... some spoilers time...

It's pretty bleak and dark. There is a sense of exploration that I was hoping for, but I wish it ran a little deeper. Unraveling mysteries of what's going on is important, but it's a bit overshadowed by how f'd the colonists are most of the time.

So, Earth is screwed. War, famine, climate change, it's a little vague but bad. Two colony ships are built and along with the selection of important and valuable people, a group of elite mercenaries are drawn from around the world to be the first line scouts of the new world - the Outriders.

The engines of the first ship blow up in a massive disaster, wiping out a lot of the best-and-brightest. The second ship (arguably with the B-Team) manages to set out to the livable world that has been found and studied, Enoch. Through wonders of cryogenics and 60-ish years in travel, the Flores reaches Enoch and the advanced team sets down - Outriders and a small group of the corporate/government types in charge of the expedition.

While searching for beacons to coordinate the landing, a few things happen. 1) A beacon is located and found to be receiving a signal that implies intelligent life on the planet has been sending it. 2) The team runs afoul of an aggressive and lethal "black goo" fungus that infects a few people. 3) The team is introduced to a physics-defying anomaly storm killing people and tearing stuff up.

With the sudden threats, the Outriders want to call off the landing. The company guy on the scene, however, proceeds with reckless abandon. Fighting ensues and in the chaos, the PC is hit by an anomaly and shoved into a stasis pod to be treated later.

And then... the is woken, largely by accident, into a post-apocalyptic settlement some thirty years later.

You find out the landing was fouled up and premature. The people came down, but not all the supplies did. They were able to build (at least for a while) using their machines and local resources. That explains the large number of concrete structures, but I still have doubts about the resources involved in making tanks and keeping them running for decades. But the lack of planned supplies causes scarcity issues and the anomaly storms get worse as time goes one, actually ending up disabling most electronics and reducing most technology to rough industrial levels. Colonists retreat to areas that seem safest from the storms and end up fighting over what they have.

A small percentage of people who encounter the anomaly storms end up empowered by them - self-healing to the point of near immortality and wielding elemental powers that may as well be magic. These "Altered" seem prone to psychopathy, but are revered and reviled on the battlefield.

So the PC shows up as a reasonably sane Altered and among the last Outriders with the frequency of the mysterious signal. They are sent out to find the source. Some view it as a sign there may be place to move to that's safe from the storms. Some view it as means to get to a functional transmitter to, at least, call down the remaining supply pods from the orbiting Flores. The signal represents a hope, whatever it may be.

Along the way of traveling farther than anyone else has successfully gone, there are numerous signs that... someone has already gone before. A group survives in the forests in spite of the rampant fungus, though their cure may not be worth the price. It turns out there are sentient natives, though there don't seem many of them who aren't feral. Evidence turns up of human technology way beyond where any known humans could have reached.

I was starting to suspect a time loop of some sort.

And... well, that's not what happened, but some basic assumptions of those in the game world are definitely proven wrong. I'll leave some specifics out here.

Along the way, some notable NPCs die. And there is a background of tragedy and attrocity as well.

One thing I kind of like, though others may dislike, is the PC's reaction to much of this. The Outrider is a jaded mercenary from Earth - moral, but perfectly willing to put a bullet in someone.

In a scene that amused me probably more than it should have, the Outrider talks to a vendor who owes a loan shark and is going to have to play the guy's "game," which no one ever survives. The Outrider goes off to meet this loan shark and says, "I'm taking this guy's place." Dude's amused, pulls out a revolver, puts it to his own head and pulls the trigger - click. He hands it to the Outrider, who unwaveringly does the same - blam. A moment later, the Outrider, with a flicker of anomaly energy, sits up and slides the gun back across the table. "Your turn. Hey, if there's only one bullet, you're safe, right? Do it or I'll shoot you myself." Blam.

That's some serious blasé attitude toward his/her own immortality there. It's a little questionable as we've seen Altered killed for good by this time, but I kind of appreciate that the character, having been through so much coming from Earth and seeing so much fall apart just has no fucks left to give predatory, cheating people like that.

When the dust of the campaign settles a lot of the main questions have been answered about the signal, the natives, and the mysterious human tech. The anomaly powers themselves, however, are not explained - they just seem to be a thing that happens on Enoch so far. There is hope some things may be a little bit better, but there's no real sign that the survival of the colonists is more likely in the long term. So if one goes in expecting the story to wade through darkness and come out into a shining future, they will be disappointed. But there is room for further exploration via expansions or sequels, and I think I'm still intrigued enough by those possibilities to want to see that.