Video Game / Outriders

Leave Humanity Behind

"We awoke... from one nightmare into another. Not on our Dying Earth, but somewhere much worse."

Outriders is a 2021 Action RPG Looter Shooter developed by People Can Fly and published by Square Enix.

After decades of environmental devastation, Earth has been rendered uninhabitable. Humanity's only hope lays in the colony ships sent to the Planet Enoch, each holding 500,000 humans aboard the ship. Of those two ships, only one, the Flores, made the journey. Among the remnants of humanity are the Outriders, a group of elite, highly-skilled explorers and soldiers whose job it is to establish the beginnings of Human Civilization on Enoch under the authority of the Enoch Colonization Authority.

Unfortunately, things go wrong almost immediately. Enoch proves to be a much more hostile environment than anyone ever could have predicted. An unnatural storm breaks out, bringing with it all manner of physics-defying phenomena. Many Outriders are killed that day and you are placed in suspended animation. Upon being awoken 31 years later, Enoch is a radically different place. The once lush green valley you landed in has been turned into a muddy battlefield, a hellscape resulting from the decades-long war that has broken out between the remnants of the ECA, and the Exiles, an insurgent group trying to overthrow the government. Even worse, the storm has never let up in the decades since and has fried all electronic technology. The storm also kills most people exposed to it, but the few that it doesn't kill, it changes. These people are referred to as "The Altered."

Shortly after waking up, your powers awaken and you find yourself tasked with finding a way for humanity to survive. Your only hope lies in finding the source of a mysterious signal being broadcast somewhere out beyond the impassible storm that surrounds the valley.

Outriders launched on April 1st, 2021. A demo containing the prologue and Chapter 1 of the story (with the caveat of game balance changes mentioned in the FAQ on the game's website) was released to the public on February 25th, 2021.

On November 16th, 2021, the game received an Update, New Horizons, which added new Expeditions, a Transmog System, and several quality of life updates (such as a rework to Expeditions that removed the timer).

An expansion titled Worldslayer was released on June 30th, 2022, bringing with it a new post-story campaign, reworks to the endgame, new progression systems, new Expeditions, and a new endgame activity.

Promotional materials:

• Official Website
• Official Youtube channel
• Reveal trailer
• Journey into the Unknown trailer
• Demo Launch trailer
• Worldslayer Trailer
• Class Highlights:
  • Devastator
  • Trickster
  • Pyromancer
  • Technomancer

---

Outriders contains examples of the following tropes:

• Absurdly High Level Cap: Zig-Zagged. On the one hand, the level cap of 30 isn't particularly high, and you will likely hit it before you even clear the campaign, even without doing all of the side-content. On the other hand, World Tiers and Challenge Tiers allow you to push the enemy levels higher while allowing you to equip higher-level gear, pushing the game's effective level cap to 50, which will require some serious endgame grinding to achieve. Worldslayer bumps it up to 75 with Apocalypse Tiers replacing the Challenge Tiers, and Ascension Levels that can go up to 200.
• Action Bomb: In Eagle Peaks, you can encounter Arachnids, dog-sized exploding spiders.
• After the End:
  • The initial codex unlocks summarize the Apocalypse How that forced humans to escape Earth and colonize Enoch: tectonic activity destroyed the Earth civilization, and 500,000 settlers were put on the colony ship Flores and sent to Enoch.
  • The storm that happens in the prologue is the beginning of another End: after Maxwell authorizes the landings, colonists are dropped right in the middle of storm-related hell that destroys all the advanced tech and forces people to take cover underground with little resources, leading to the war between ECA and the Exiles.
• All for Nothing: Channa's dream of reuniting with the protagonist in a field of flowers turns out to be a vision of a picture of a field of flowers on a bank of monitors.
• Amplifier Artifact: the video featurette that describes endgame content of the game also features several details on the game's crafting system and equipment mods. Armor mods are, in general, this, modifying your class skills to have a larger area of effect, longer duration, more uses, more targets hit etc.
• Anyone Can Die: Does a character appear early on and look like they're going to be a major character? Yeah, don't get attached. Cuthbert, Skarstedt, Tanner, Maxwell, Jane, and Seth can all vouch for that.
• Apocalypse How: According to the in-game codex, first a seismic-related Planetary Total Extinction on Earth happened, forcing the half-million remnant to evacuate to Enoch, and then, already on Enoch, the Anomaly led to what's at least Regional Societal Collapse. You learn the former during the prologue and witness the latter during the opening of Chapter 1.
• Base on Wheels: The Convoy is both the means of transport and a base of operations for the protagonist. In areas away from civilization, a small camp is deployed around it, granting access to the stash, a gear store and a crafting bench. Additionally, if you play in co-op, the Convoy consists of as many trucks as there are players in the group.
• Bilingual Bonus: In the prologue, you can hear two mechanics having a conversation in Polish while fixing one of the trucks. They're talking like Polish mechanics, going from a tool request, through complaining about the ECA government and hoping things will change on Enoch, to diagnosing the fault in the vehicle as a busted gasket.
  • The final sidequest involves a bottle with a note on it. While the content of the note isn't translated, the in-game texture is clear enough to invoke Freeze-Frame Bonus and read it.
    "Whoever finds this bottle better leaves it alone or I'm gonna fuck them up! And if I croak, bury me with it, and not drink it all!"
• Black-and-Grey Morality: The war between the ECA and the Insurgents is sort of this, although it's really more 'dark grey and even darker grey'. Both sides have a horrendous history of atrocities and are run by people who range from 'flawed but well-intentioned' to 'sadistic psychopaths', and it's clear that it would be much better for humanity if they could find some way to put their differences aside rather than grinding their species into extinction through selfishness and mutual loathing, but the ECA is incrementally more sympathetic during the time of the story thanks to having a slightly higher proportion of sane long-term thinkers in its ranks, making it slightly better equipped to get the human race out of its present rut. The independent enclave the protagonists set up at the end of the main story contains defectors and refugees from both sides, but the ECA leadership are presently the only ones it has cordial diplomatic relations with. Worldslayer shows that, while some of the rank-and-file Exiles have sympathetic motives, the leadership are all Social Darwinists whose ultimate goal is for the chosen few to ascend to the godhood of being Altered, even though this will result in the majority of humanity (including 99% of their own troops) being wiped out.
• Black Comedy: Enemies afflicted by a slow effect are animated in slow-motion throughout the effect's duration, making it easy to land accurate shots on them. Their deaths are also animated in slow-motion, which makes their usually-highly-brutal demises kinda funny to watch while everyone else is normally looking busy with the firefight.
• Body Horror: Some of the Altered showcased in the demo:
  • Gauss has bone spikes poking out of his elbows and lining down his back, along with some frankly disgusting discoloration.
  • Seth's entire face is covered in ugly scars, his skin is deathly pale and his Glowing Eyes have a sunken look of someone who hasn't slept in the past decade.
• Boom, Headshot!: Not only can heads be reduced to gory smears, there are Challenge tiers for it. The Outrider finishes off Bounty targets this way as a Coup de Grâce.
• Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick: One of the loading screen tips reads "Some Altered are able to read minds, most are immortal, and a few urinate sulphuric acid." It's suspected in-game that an Insurgent Captain you killed during the "Marshal's Bunker" Expedition was the source of the 'acid urine' rumour.
• Broken Pedestal: A majority of the human population of Enoch, such as the Exiles, feel this way about the ECA and the Outriders. The Outriders promised to lead humanity to planet Enoch, believed at the time to be a lush paradise, so they could build a new home for themselves and have a chance at a fresh start. What they got instead was a Death World besieged by massive reality warping storms and vicious alien creatures, with humanity ending up no better than they were on Earth. You can learn it from Captain Reiner's Motive Rant in Chapter 1.
• Color-Coded Item Tiers: The "Expeditions" featurette contains a section on gear crafting with references to this trope. The items come in five tiers: Common (grey), Uncommon (green), Rare (blue), Epic (purple) and Legendary (orange). However, there is a limited pool of Legendary items, each one with its own unique model and two preset mods, only one of which can be swapped for a different one.
• Convection, Schmonvection: The boss fight against the Molten Acari happens in an active volcano, with arena floor floating in the lava.
• Crapsack World: Earth has been completely destroyed. Only a million people survived long enough to escape the planet aboard two Generation Ships to their planned new homeworld. Only one of those generation ships ever made it to the new planet. And the supposed promised land of Enoch turned out to be a nearly-uninhabitable Death World. Oh, and the survivors who land there immediately break out into a violent civil war. Have fun.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: The prologue shows two cases: first, there's Skarstedt, who gets suffocated by highly toxic, rapidly multiplying sludge (with Shira speculating that it's some kind of parasitic fungus), and then, there's Cuthbert, who slowly disintegrates, feet-first.
• Death World: Enoch, as mentioned by Captain Reiner. Between the reality-warping storms that kill most people and give weird space magic powers to few, hostile wildlife and the neverending war, there's more than enough ways to die on that planet.
• Distress Call: While the trailers only mention it as "the signal", the prologue reveals that one of the initial probes dropped by the colony ship was set to relay it, as it's coming from outside the valley chosen as the colony site. Once you're done sorting out Shira's troubles in Rift Town, you're tasked with finding the scientist who attempted to track it.
• Downer Ending: Jakub dies to help the Outrider defeat Yagak, only for it to be rendered pointless since Yagak just gets up and flees after his defeat, free to restart his genocidal plans. The expedition is a complete failure, as not only is there no way to stop the Anomaly, but literally the entire planet outside the Valley is revealed to be a barren wasteland incapable of supporting life. All the Outrider and their few remaining allies can do is buckle down and continue to fight ultimately pointless battles to buy humanity a few more days as the last of the Valley's supplies and manpower slowly depletes. Pretty much the only positive of the ending is that the man responsible for causing Enoch's downfall is killed, and even that's iffy since by the time the Outrider kills him, he's been reduced to a crippled, senile and delusional old man.
  • Things are slightly less bleak by the conclusion of Worldslayer. Yes, Shira is dead and the Anomaly is still raging across Enoch, but the civil war is over and Ereshkigal’s genocidal plans have been stopped. The ECA survivors now have a place safe from the storms, thanks to the help of the last remaining sentient Pax, the shaman Atumna. With the threat stopped, the Outrider leaves their allies behind, vowing to discover the secrets of the Pax city. After fighting their way deep into the vaults, the Outrider discovers records showing that the last Pax king had visions of humanity’s future arrival and the Outrider specifically, and built an army to combat them. Unfortunately, the Pax failed to realize they were centuries too early and unleashed the Anomaly on the planet. Now with more questions, the Outrider makes plans to discover what else the Pax were preparing for and why their king was interested in the protagonist.
• The Dreaded:
  • People are rightly freaking out at the sight of the Altered several times: both sides in the beginning of Chapter 1 go "Oh, Crap!" hearing that an Altered is coming at them (the Exiles mean Seth, the ECA means you), the hitman sent to kill Mr Chang prostrates himself before the protagonist as they flash their powers, and Seth even wonders why the protagonist doesn't consider themselves a god after defeating the first boss, Gauss. The propaganda narration in one of the trailers even describes the protagonist as a superweapon that will give ECA a chance against the Exiles who put their Altered as military leaders.
  • The large, titanic creatures seen in the intro and "Terra Infirma" sidequest (called Storm Carriers) are feared by all on Enoch, as they tower over everything else and apparently have the ability to wipe out hundreds of people in seconds. The mere presence of one is enough to cause both the ECA and the Exiles to briefly stop fighting each other when it appears on the battlefield. Even Altered (many of whom consider themselves to be gods) are afraid of provoking their wrath.
• Early-Bird Cameo: Shira orders you to find doctor Zahedi. The "Journey and Structure" featurette, revealed several months earlier, shows doctor Zahedi as a key character in your mobile base - and the man who released you from the cryo-pod in the opening of Chapter 1.
• Eldritch Abomination: The demo gives a few glimpses of the Anomaly, an enormous and terrifying storm that seems to defy the laws of physics and bend reality. As Shira explains after the timeskip, it completely fries any form of advanced technology and vaporises almost anyone unfortunate enough to be caught in it, with those who aren't reduced to atoms having their genetic code restructured, granting them incredible powers. It singlehandedly destroyed the colonisation effort on Enoch 31 years earlier and has since kept humanity from ever leaving the valley where they landed.
• Elemental Punch: The playable classes all inflict a status effect with their melee attacks. Technomancer and Pyromancer have standard ice and fire punches respectively (with a passive skill node allowing the Technomancer to add Poison status to the mix), Trickster melee attack inflicts slow and Devastator inflicts bleeding.
• Elites Are More Glamorous: The initial story paints Outriders as this, even after the incident in which the original corps were wiped out along with their scout ship, the Caravel. Lord Seth only backs off from killing the protagonist upon seeing the Outrider patch on their sleeve, astonished that they survived.
• Empty Levels: Not all levels give you skill points, some levels only grant a small boost to your base stats.
• Equipment-Based Progression: While the game starts out with a relatively standard level-and-skill-tree-based model of RPG progression; after you hit the Level Cap of 30, progression becomes solely gear-based. World Tiers and Challenge Tiers allow the player to increase enemy levels while also increasing the maximum level of loot that you can equip, up to a maximum of level 50, allowing a player to push their stats much higher to contend with the enemies.
• Flamethrower Backfire: The Cremator enemies you encounter at the beginning of Chapter 1 can explode if you hit their flamers' fuel tanks.
• Gameplay and Story Integration: In Trench Town, you unlock Hunts and Bounties. The former task you with killing dangerous wildlife across Enoch, while the latter task you with assassinating wanted criminals. In the Act 1 areas of the game, it's mostly bounties, because the area has been colonized and settled by the ECA and there aren't many places for wildlife to make dens or nests. In the Act 2 areas, there's a much more even mix, because you're on the fringes of human expansion on Enoch, where there's a lot more untamed wilderness. finally, in the Act 3 areas of the game, the bounties disappear entirely and you're left with only hunts because you're further than any human colonists have ventured before.
• Giant Space Flea from Nowhere: The Chrysaloid - a massive, malformed monster that attacks the convoy as soon as it enters the Forest, is immediately fought and killed in a boss fight with no lead-up or fanfare, and is never mentioned before or after.
• Giant Spider: The second boss, Molten Acari, is a massive, fire-spewing spider dwelling in a volcanic caldera.
• A God Am I: As Seth mentions to the protagonist in their second encounter, some of the Altered consider themselves gods, and the Exiles worship them accordingly. The Outrider mocks Seth, telling him he's playing God. Seth immediately makes quick work of him/her, and says, "I am not playing."
• A God I Am Not: After the Outrider kills the Altered cult leader in the "Divine Intervention" subquest, his acolytes immediately start worshiping them instead, to their annoyance. After trying to snap them out of it, the Outrider loses their patience and tells them to "get the fuck out" of there instead.
• Good Scars, Evil Scars: The Outrider falls under the "good scars" side, as the demo's character creator gives several options for stylish scarring. Lord Seth, by contrast, has scarring across his entire face, and vacillates between hostile and apathetic towards the Outrider throughout the demo.
• Gratuitous Foreign Language: The demo shows a lot of Polish. Not only one of the main characters is the former Outrider and mechanic Jakub Dąbrowski, who tends to drop some Polish words at times, but the background chatter from the fistfighters in Rift Town is mostly in Polish as well. This is likely due to developers themselves being Polish.
• Greater-Scope Villain:
  • Lord Seth name-drops Moloch as this after you defeat Gauss. He claims that Moloch is the most powerful and most evil of the Altered and it's Seth's business to defeat him, while the Protagonist should focus on guiding the ECA. Subverted in that Moloch curbstomps Seth and turns out to be the Wake-Up Call Boss, but is merely the first major obstacle faced by the Outrider on his journey.
  • Monroy, the leader of the restored Caravel expedition which managed to arrive on Enoch six years before the Flores, turns out to be inadvertently responsible for both the Altered and the planet Enoch's current state, but has no role in opposing you in the game itself being a harmless old man living alone in the wreckage of the Caravel .
• Guide Dang It!: There's a fairly important mechanic that the game never tells you about. Your Average Item Level is an actual stat, and confers a rather potent bonus to your max HP and your Anomaly Power. Many players who were unaware of this may find themselves wondering why they feel so underpowered, only to learn about this mechanic and then realize that they had a highly-underleveled piece of gear massively dragging their Average Item Level down. Just to make things even more confusing, it doesn't start taking effect until after Level 30; if you notice it before then with all your gear at max level, it'll still show bonuses of 0, so you might conclude it's glitched and doesn't do anything.
• Hailfire Peaks: Eagle Peaks are snow-covered mountains, but one section that actually houses the major boss is a volcano, and the path to it is barren and ash-covered.
• Heal Thyself: One of the "Mantras of Survival" in the trailer titled as such is "Kill to Heal". There are no healing items in the game and every character class has its own way of regaining lost health points, usually tied to their skills:
  • Technomancers heal slightly for all the damage they do with both guns and gadgets.
  • Pyromancers heal by killing enemies marked by one of their skills.
  • Tricksters heal by killing enemies at short range. They heal less health than other classes, but generate shield charge in the process. Their other abilities can also be modified to generate shield in certain circumstances.
  • Devastators get a burst of health regeneration by killing enemies at short range.
  • Finally, there's the universal Weapon Leech and Skill Leech qualities, which grant healing from damage dealt with a weapon and with skills respectively.
• Hub City: The "Journey and Structure" featurette reveals that areas in the game are built around outposts with NPCs as "hubs", connected to several explorable combat areas as "spokes". The Rift Town area featured in the demo is one of the examples, with Rift Town proper being connected to the Hounds' hideout and the battlefield with mission-related sub-areas. Traveling between areas is possible through your Base on Wheels, the Convoy, that is a "moving RPG village" itself, as stated in the video.
• Human Popsicle: All of the colonists, for the trip to Enoch - and then the protagonist gets a second stay, after Shira shoves them into a cryo-pod in the prologue. They emerge thirty-one years later, right in the middle of a war.
• Humans Are the Real Monsters: Humans destroyed Earth, and it turns out humans are the ones responsible for destroying Enoch as well. And it only took them a couple of years to do it.
• Human Resources: The key ingredient for Dr. Scurlock's antidote to the highly lethal fungus is fresh human bone marrow, who's been harvesting it from refugees fleeing the ECA-Insurgent war.
• Have We Met?: Upon rescuing Jakub from the Hounds in Chapter 1, he doesn't immediately recognise his old friend and asks if he and the protagonist have met before after the latter makes it apparent that they know Jakub. Justified as he hasn't seen them in 31 years and they might be wearing a face-obscuring helmet, the Outrider having been in cryosleep all that time and therefore still looking the same as they did when they first arrived on Enoch. When he finally realizes who they are, he's ecstatic about seeing them again after so long.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: the trailers show a shot of the protagonist getting skewered with a piece of rebar - this happens in the opening of Chapter 1. But don't worry - they immediately get better thanks to their newfound space magic powers. The Alchemist, an Altered scientist responsible for creating Moloch, gets a long line of rebar through the head, too. Then Jakub later gets run through with a spear, and doesn't fare so well.
• Impossibly Cool Weapon: The Legendary Weapons, revealed on the game's official Facebook page and acquired by some particularly persistent people grinding the demo. They not only have unique, very powerful Rank III mods, but also unique and weird models, like the ice-encased sniper rifle Iceberg, rock-and-bone twin-barreled assault rifle Amber Vault or The Migraine, a submachine gun made of meat.
• Laser-Guided Karma: Lt. McCain, whom you can rescue in a side mission after defeating Gauss, is trapped under some rubble and is rescued by the enemy, whom he thanks by shooting him in the back and tossing a grenade down the hole to finish off the rest. The Lieutenant gets maybe two more lines and is then unceremoniously dropped by an Exile sniper mid-sentence.
• Level Scaling: Enemies will always scale with the player, however, the player has a degree fo control over how they scale. World Tiers and Challenge Tiers allow the player to scale enemies to their level, with a modifier that is dependant on that tier they selected. At world Tier 1, enemies will scale to be two levels below the player's level, while at World Tier 15 (the highest World Tier), enemies will be twelve levels above the player's level, and will drop gear that corresponds to this increase. At Challenge Tier 15, enemies will scale to level 50, and the player will be rewarded with level 50 gear. Worldslayer upgrades it to Tier 40, allowing you to earn Level 75 gear.
• Literally Shattered Lives: Bringing any enemy immobilized by freezing skills and mods to zero health causes them to fall apart into chunks of ice.
• Ludicrous Gibs: Human enemies tend to explode or otherwise splatter around when killed. This is so common that the trailer featuring it had to be age-restricted on Youtube. And when you encounter the superpower-wielding Captains, you'll find out they go overboard with it, leaving massive splatters over twenty feet in diameter.
• MagiTek: In addition to the Technomancer magically summoning heavy armaments like turrets, mortars and rocket launchers, Trickster and Pyromancer have the ability to enhance the ammo for their weapons with anomaly power, either making it incendiary in case of the Pyromancer, or massively increasing damage dealt by the Trickster.
• Malevolent Mugshot: Monroy put his face on his banners.
• Mysterious Waif: Channa Takeuchi, the woman from the vision the protagonist has as they gain their powers. The subtitles don't even reveal her name - before you meet her in person, you can know it only if you have the Steam version and checked the collectible cards for the game.
• Named After Someone Famous: Part of Kang's Fighters is a sniping Huntsman named Simo White, certainly a concept inspired by Simo Häyhä, the White Death.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: Doctor Zahedi tries to save an Exile, if only to extract the location of his hijacked truck from him. It ends up with Zahedi's bodyguard, Jane, killed by that same Exile.
• Off with His Head!: A side mission in Chapter 1 involves bringing the head of Captain Reiner to a wounded soldier. You can oblige, considering he's the one you encountered in the beginning of Chapter 1.
• Oh, Crap!: The beginning of Chapter 1 has two examples: first, the protagonist is dumped outside of the Exiles' fortifications right before the Anomaly hits. Their expression upon seeing the massive eldritch storm coming at them for the second time (after the one in the prologue) is this, complete with the appropriate verbalization. Then, there's the panicked reaction of ECA soldiers learning that an Altered (namely, the protagonist) is coming at them, with soldiers breaking ranks and the officer fruitlessly trying to restore order.
• Playing with Syringes: An Altered Mad Scientist known as the Alchemist was tasked by the ECA with research on the Altered, and supplied with a number of prisoners to experiment on. Originally he was just another scientist, but somehow ended up becoming Altered himself - and went increasingly crazy from both his powers and the isolation. After the ECA backed out, he kept going with the experiments, using anyone unfortunate enough to stumble too close to his lair... until Moloch killed him and Escaped from the Lab.
• Plot-Irrelevant Villain: None of the major antagonists, including the Final Boss, that the Outrider faces on their journey have any real connection to the Outrider or their party, or anything to do with the events that led to Enoch's current state and the failure of the Flores expedition. In fact the closest thing the game has to a Big Bad is Monroy, the man responsible for the planet's current state, who is now a crazy old man with no military resources to speak of, who only blames you for arriving late to his supposed rescue. Too bad that your party just had an extended tour of his atrocities and seeing how much of an unrepentant jerk he is, Channa has enough.
• Prolonged Prologue: The game's prologue chapter is fairly long, going on for easily 30 minutes with very little action to speak of until the very end. However, you only have to play through it once, as you are given the option to skip it every time you create a new character.
• Prophecy Twist: Channa's vision of being in a lush field of flowers alongside the protagonist convinces her that whatever they're doing will work. Unfortunately, the field of flowers she envisioned turns out to be just a video on a screen, with the actual field having been long turned into a desert wasteland.
• Ripped from the Headlines:
  • The journal entry for one bounty target mentions the outbreak of a disease among Insurgent forces that led to several defeats against the ECA. Due to the lack of education among the Exiles, they developed superstitions regarding the cause and spread of the disease, the most prevalent of which was that the disease came from an ethnic group from Eastern Asia on Old Earth, and as a result this group suffered violence targeted against them.
  "Hirsh was among those who led the purges that cleansed these people. It did nothing to mitigate the disease."
• Russian Roulette: Nick "Lucky" Walken plays this and has never lost. This is because he has minor Altered powers that allow him to stop time for a few seconds, letting him shoot an empty cylinder at his head and then swap the cylinder out for a full one throughout the duration of his power. The Outrider defeats this by shooting themselves with the revolver, getting back up without too much fuss, and forcing Lucky to shoot himself with the revolver again which kills him and clearly showed he didn't load a cylinder with a single bullet in it after he swaps them.
• Schizophrenic Difficulty: The mutated fauna of Enoch are generally much, much easier to manage than the various gun-toting factions you contend with, on account of being largely melee-only attackers in a shooter, compared to countless soldiers capable of using cover and sniping from across the map with extreme accuracy. Killing them is the easy part. The game constantly switches between which type you'll face over the course of the campaign.
• Shout-Out:
  • There's a reasonably common pistol called the Space Cowboy.
  • During a side quest, the Outrider will say that they'd rather not take "the electric Kool-Aid test."
  • In the Pyromancer Pax Skill Tree, one of the skills on the Pyromaniac branch is called Master Exploder.
• Shut Up, Hannibal!: After being defeated, Reiner tries to appeal to the protagonist's Altered state and convince him the ECA are the true enemy, after Reiner already tried to murder him out of pure sadism.
  Reiner: Do you know...what they did to us?!
  The Outrider: I know what you did to me.
• Tutorial Failure: One of the largest criticisms of the game, even from just the demo, is that the game's tutorial is awful. Not because it's broken or incomprehensible, but because it teaches you the exact wrong way to play the game. Outriders is intended to be played in a highly-aggressive "run-and-gun" style, where cover is used only as a brief respite when the player is extremely low on health. This is how the game is designed, how the developers intend for the game to be played, and the most fun way to play the game. Unfortunately, the tutorial in the demo places an extremely strong emphasis on staying in cover, to the extent that it forces you to Take Cover! before it allows you to shoot your gun, causing players who don't know any better to try and play the game like it's a Gears of War-style cover shooter.
• Underground Monkey: Other than hostile wildlife, you encounter four or five enemy groups, each with the same spread of enemy types (mook with rifle, mook with shotgun, mook with melee weapons, mook with sniper rifle, tough mook with minigun, miniboss variant of one of the other with Altered powers), though each groups adds some unique touches and variants.
• Vasquez Always Dies: in the prologue, the butch Cuthbert gets disintegrated, while the more feminine Shira becomes an important character. Then, in the First City, the gung-ho sniper Jane gets pointlessly killed just as you rescue Zahedi. Downplayed later in the Forest, where the short-shaven aggressive Bailey gets paralyzed by her own fault.
• Vomit Indiscretion Shot: in one of the prologue cutscenes, Skarstedt throws up right into the camera.
• Wake-Up Call Boss: Captain Reiner for many players - although he is only the target of an early sidequest, its positioning makes it likely he's the first Captain you encounter (and in fact the sidequest is written to introduce the concept). This makes him your first fight against an Altered opponent who not only doesn't melt under your firepower and abilities, but has his own, including Wandering Flame, which is a death sentence to any player who still relies on cover.
• X-Ray Vision: A common side-effect of Trickster powers is that the target's skin, muscles, organs, and other soft tissues are temporarily rendered transparent, leaving only their skeletons (and certain other hard tissue) visible, mottled and brown as if ancient - keeping with the "time manipulation" theme. This doesn't seem to impede them much if it's not a killing blow, though enemies that die within Slow Trap will be Stripped to the Bone.

---