YMMV / Outriders

• Awesome Moments:
  • After the player discovers they are one of the Altered, and pulls out the pipe that impaled him/her, they stand straighter and basically say, "Okay, then. It's on," and proceed to lay on the whoop-ass.
  • You've just beaten Gauss, the first well-and-true Altered enemy you face in the game. Doubtless you're feeling kind of good about yourself. Seth shows up again and starts talking down to humanity, calling them weak and feeble. The Outrider scoffs, asking Seth if they should follow in his footsteps and play at being God. Seth looks at them for a moment as his eyes start to glow and power boils around him. Then he telekinetically hauls the Outrider off their feet and drags them over to him, and all of a sudden the player is feeling pretty small.
  Seth: I... am NOT playing.
• Best Boss Ever: The Molten Acari is easily considered one of the best fights in the game, bar none. Up until this point, you were fighting bog-standard human adversaries like the riflemen, with the occasional Perfori for some variety. Suddenly, you're dropped into the base of a Volcano against what is effectively a giant molten spider, and it's awesome. Unlike all the fights before, it lacks any usage of cover, forcing you to face it head-to-head, dodging its attacks and shooting at it's weak spot as it jumps around the arena. It also have three phases, changing up its attacks as you wittle down its health, with the final phase in particular, standing out as the Molten Acari suddenly grows into this monstrous Thresher Maw-esque form with a completely new attack pattern and constant spawning of fodder enemies.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Snipers will wreck any unfortunate player who doesn't utilize the cover system, almost always landing a damaging hit and sending you flying backwards. Hell, even if you DO use cover, they'll almost immediately shoot you when you poke your head out to retaliate. Thankfully, you can goad them to waste a shot if you peek your head in and out, quickly, but the game tends to pair them with 1-2 other snipers that stagger their shots.
    • Also, higher-tier sniper variants get indirect area-effect and/or area-denial abilities (or are deployed alongside enemies with them, such as Incinerators) so one can flush you out of cover and another can shoot you.
  • The Strix are one of the game's only flying units and easily one of the toughest you'll encounter midway through the story. They have unmatched mobility, zipping around and making it hard to shoot at with a sniper or rifle weapon, and pack a ranged attack much like the Venomous Perforo, lobbing them with striking accuracy even at a distance. And if you think it's just like the Venomous Perforo and weak up-close, then you're in for a nasty surprise, since the Strix packs a mean melee attack that hits hard, is near impossible to dodge and throws you backward, most likely against any other opportunistic Perforo. Their only saving grace is that they're relatively rare in the main story, at least.
  • If there's one thing players learn fast, it's that Perforo Brood Mothers (the towering bipedal monsters that show up in a lot of the game's promo material) are to be feared and loathed. They're the Lightning Bruiser trope distilled into its purest form - distressingly fast and distressingly tough with devastating, near-unavoidable attacks. Not only that, but they spend most of their time immune to crowd control effects while liberally dishing out knockbacks and damage over time. About the only good news is that they're huge targets, so every player in the team can keep pouring fire into them until the hurting eventually stops.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Among the cast, Jakub has proven to be the fan-favorite within the community. With some fans even saying he is the Cayde-6 of the game.
  • Zahedi is one of the more liked characters, simply because he is one of the few who isn’t an asshole, a Deadpan Snarker or a mixture of the two. It helps that he also proves helpful in both the story and upgrading your gear.
• Fan Nickname: The Migraine, a legendary submachine gun looking like a gun-shaped lump of spareribs with a scrotum for a magazine quickly gained the unflattering nickname of "The Ballsack".
• Friendly Fandoms: With Anthem (2019). The Outriders demo launched the day after BioWare announced that they were going to be ending any further development on Anthem, so players decided to give the demo a try and were pleasantly surprised by the presence of a cosmetic eyebrow piercing that bore a strong resemblance to the Anthem logo.
• Game-Breaker: Three of the four player classes have a power which fills their current weapon with a load of empowered bullets, lasting until you reload or change weapons - Pyromancer's "Volcanic Rounds" (piercing, incendiary bullets with a bit of extra damage), Technomancer's "Blighted Rounds" (chaining, poisoning bullets with a fair bit of extra damage) and Trickster's "Twisted Rounds" (damaging, heavily damaging bullets with a lot of extra damage). The game breaker part comes from combining them with any of a number of ways ways to refund or replenish ammo, letting them be used more-or-less infinitely.
• Goddamned Boss: The first fight against Moloch can be this in solo sessions since, while his attacks hit hard enough, most are very easily telegraphed and can be interrupted with the appropriate "Interrupt" ability. The real problem is that he has a staggering amount of HP and if your weapons aren't up to par, you'll be spending upwards of 15 minutes doing nothing but unloading onto him while he continuously spams his abilities. You'll probably end up getting hit just from being careless and inattentive more than anything.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • Shortly after the first balance patch went forward on April 8, 2021, it was discovered that completing the quest "The Outriders' Legacy" would cause all of the chests at the end of the mission to drop legendaries, granting players a whopping ten legendaries when they completed the questline.
  • Maybe not so much a bug as it is an unintended interaction but as a Devastator, in the fight against the Molten Acari, the small kamikaze spiders that would usually pose a threat to other classes instead not only do nothing to the Devastator, but in fact heal them, because they recover HP for any enemy that dies near them, and said spiders technically die near them.
• Heartwarming Moments:
  • Shira kept the photograph that the two of you took on the first landing day for the past several decades.
  • In a blink and you'll miss it moment, Bailey, who started the expedition with a nigh-seething hatred of Channa, attempts to comfort the heartbroken young woman by placing a hand on her arm after the party learns that the "garden" from Channa's vision was nothing more than a recording instead of a vision.
  • When they reach the Signal source, Zahedi mentions Jane, a minor character who was killed off very early in the game, and wishes she could have been here.
• Memetic Badass: The fandom is in awe of Bailey's seeming ability to navigate practically any type of terrain in her wheelchair.
• Narm:
  • Several moments in the game are supposed to be serious, but come off as cheesy due to weird facial animations, hammy voice acting or cheesy writing, similar to People Can Fly's earlier production, Bulletstorm. For example, The Outrider's reaction to Cuthbert getting disintegrated, or Eva audibly stumbling over some of her lines on top of consistently flat delivery. There's also the fact that the setting is a World of Snark alongside World of Jerkass so whatever emotional moments are there can get ruined by inappropriately-timed joking.
  • Narm Charm: Some people have come to like the game because of these things, and have even argued that People Can Fly may be doing it deliberately. Considering one of their last major projects, it's definitely not outside the realm of possibility.
• Obvious Beta: To put it mildly. Players have reported hours-long loading times, textures that persistently refuse to load, massive server instability, crashes, and some Good Bad Bugs.
• Play the Game, Skip the Story: The game tries so hard to be Darker and Edgier with its story, but it ends up sliding into Too Bleak, Stopped Caring very easily. The gameplay, on the other hand, is top notch.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The time-based nature of Expeditions has been met with quite a bit of criticism, as they push out anything that isn't a straight-up DPS build and leave no room for Tank, Support, and CC builds. It's gotten so bad that the Devastator class, which is meant to be a Stone Wall, will get kicked out of endgame Expeditions on principle. Mercifully, the time was removed in the New Horizons update.
  • The lack of a self-revive in Solo play. In group play, you get one self-revive and an unlimited amount of revives from your teammates, but in Solo play, you die instantly if your HP reaches zero.
  • Enemy accuracy is said to be way too high. Enemies are ridiculously accurate even at long range and are capable of peppering you with a huge amount of unavoidable damage.
  • Quest tracking and navigation is widely considered to be one of the biggest pain points in the game. Maps only tell you what region you're in and don't give you a precise location. And there's no way to set a manual waypoint to guide you. The game also doesn't give you a compass to help to navigate or find your bearings. An automatic navigation system exists, but has an annoying tendency to get confused on where it should lead you to.
  • Getting around the game world can be a pain. In order to get to a particular location, you need to walk to a flag, then fast-travel to your camp, then travel to another region of the game world, and then fast travel to the region you want to go to, sitting through three loading screens in order to get to where you need to go.
• Scrappy Weapon: The pistol is intended to be a back-up weapon since you have infinite pistol ammo, so you're never defenseless if you run dry on your main guns. But this almost never comes into play for a number of reasons. There is almost always an ammo box somewhere in every arena to instantly fill up, enemies also drop ammo, and certain mods and abilities give you a near-endless supply of ammo anyways. About the only niche use for a pistol is that they work decently to inflict status effects if you want to mod your main weapons for pure DPS. But even then, just flat-out killing the enemy is always a better option.
• Slow-Paced Beginning: The first act of the game is fairly slow-paced, and is mostly concerned with getting the Expedition to find the signal off the ground. It's not until the Expedition reaches the forest that the plot kicks into gear and a lot of hard-hitting reveals start coming.
• So Okay, It's Average: The General Consensus is that the game is a fun shooter in its own right, but it doesn't really have a whole lot to stand out from other games on the market. Especially other looter shooters such as Destiny 2 or The Division.
• That One Boss: The Shaman Warlord in the "Shepards of Enoch" sidequest. You'd think that, given the boss's appearance and powers, that they would be a Glass Cannon Squishy Wizard. Nope! They're a Lightning Bruiser Damage-Sponge Boss capable of standing up to builds that can shred through most any other boss in the game.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: A lot of the antagonists get hit with this, especially due to how almost all of them are completely irrelevant to the overall plot.
  • Moloch is name-dropped early on by Lord Seth, and there's even an early game sidequest that delves a bit into Moloch's backstory, but He ends up being a Disc-One Final Boss who disappears entirely from the game after a fight with him about a third of the way through the campaign and doesn't appear again at all until one of the endgame expeditions wherein he is killed with little fanfare.
  • Yagak is the Final Boss of the game and also killed Jakub, but he's not introduced until the final act of the campaign and has zero personality, serving more as a force of nature who keeps hounding you with Anomaly Storms in an attempt to kill you.
  • The Greater-Scope Villain of the game and the one responsible for Enoch completely going to pot is also a half-crazy and totally harmless old man by the time he's encountered and is popped in the head in the same cutscene in which he's introduced.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: It can be pretty hard to care about the characters since everyone is either snarky, a Jerkass, or a snarky Jerkass. The plot gives little reason to care about the world or its people, seeing as how the mold of a Crapsack World is hammered in so hard that even the Outrider wonders if there's anything worth saving, and as Anyone Can Die, that means you have little time to get attached to characters before they're abruptly offed. Most of the Outrider's team openly yells at each other over minor differences, and conflicts are resolved either way too quickly or not at all. Even other NPCs have all but given up, finding Safety in Indifference at best or openly trying to make things worse. About the only person who isn't a complete jerk is Zahedi, who is genuinely friendly (albeit with a little snarking of his own) and helpful with upgrading/modding your gear. But beyond that, it's pretty hard to find a reason to care if anyone makes it out of this alive. The fact that there is no land beyond the storms and no way to stop them, let alone control them, anymore, rendering the mission seemingly just delaying humanity's inevitable collapse again does not help in the slightest.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not Political?: In the prologue section of the game, The Outrider reminisces to Jakub about the time "a redneck mob stormed DC," and most people believed that the Outrider was making fun of what happened on January 6, 2021, where Trump supporters rioted inside the US Capitol building. Square Enix quickly released a statement in which they claimed that the line in question had been recorded several years ago and was in no way intended to reference any real-world events.