in fact_ I quite like it (Outriders Demo Impressions) -

 this video is brought to you by nvidia and ino 3d the hardware that allows you to take advantage of dlss when playing outriders stick around to the end of the video to learn more about how inno3ds next generation gpus will transform the way you play i am not here to tell you that outriders is amazing definitely not there's a lot of reasons to dislike this game and a lot of people do dislike this game intensely if you take a look at the coverage on youtube in the press on reddit on forums whatever you'll see that this is plenty polarizing with more than a fair chunk of people declaring outriders bland recycled derivative clunky and uninspired here's a thing right i think a lot of that is fair there's quite a few things that i look at in this package and i'm like huh i don't know about that but for me outriders is putting in the work where it matters in the lunar shooter genre and it's doing it in a way that very few looter shooters or looters in general have done i think the central throughline of outriders is that it exists as a response to the worst aspects of the ludo shooter genre this is a genre that typically has no story or it's really pushed to the background outriders has a story and it's really front and center even if it's quite cringe this genre is typically built around the live service model propped up by micro transactions outriders is not a live service and it has no micro transactions most looter shooters don't get you to properly engage the loot aspect of the game until the campaign is finished in outriders you are immediately making meaningful decisions about your build because even low level gear has completely game changing perks that alter your playstyle this is a genre that fiercely protects that feeling of power cordoning it off until you reach deep into the end game so as to incentivize you to keep grinding in outriders you immediately feel like this whirlwind of destruction and that feeling is only amplified if you play with other people as your ability synergies are just crazy so there's a lot to hate in this package yes definitely the story is bad ish the level design is terrible the performance on pc is not good the camera shake and motion blur wow what the [ __ ] man what the hell were they thinking with that there's definitely a lot of issues here but bottom line as a fan of the luda shooter genre this game is ticking boxes for me plus this is the first looter beta that i've walked out of and i haven't felt the need to like ring the alarm bell so yeah so far i'm on board outrider's story and world is a lot it's it's it's a lot you play an outrider an elite soldier person who was frozen in cryosleep while the world around you went to [ __ ] 30 years on ice you wake up ready to kick ass only to realize that your ass kicking potential has significantly increased because you're now altered a superhuman capable of leveling entire platoons with your elemental base superpowers most of these altered are selfish [ __ ] that generally don't give a [ __ ] about humanity but you've only just woken up and you haven't been peer pressured by your altered buddies into that lifestyle yet so for now you're gonna help out humanity and see how all that goes so right from the get-go it's clear that outriders is doing the story thing in a way that other looters don't destiny warframe division ghost recon breakpoint these are all games that have a story but it's not the focus of the experience you have to dig to find it like in destiny or it comes in spurts like in warframe or just doesn't exist at all like in the division outriders is like no we have a story whether you like it or not this means that you can expect a lot of cutscenes in fact maybe too many the demo was the full prologue and opening act of the game and you really couldn't go more than a few minutes without some sort of cutscene kicking in more story is definitely an admirable goal in this genre but if this opening section is anything to go by it looks as though people can fly overshot the mark a little then there's the issue of the story itself which sort of feels like if zack snyder were to do a remake of avatar replacing all the blue people with supermen and all the colors with brown the story is very schlocky b-grade sci-fi like the mortal kombat movie or highlander or the chronicles of riddick actually yes that is what it is it's the chronicles of riddick the movie which was [ __ ] not the video game which was awesome every character you meet here is like i'm a [ __ ] badass don't get in my way and the main character just runs around executing everybody i mean look at this who's orders parker uh he runs the hounds gang he's trying to take out all the vendors in rift town it won't work for him worse than all of this though is the way that all of these scenes are shot oh my god okay check this out what's on your mind boss i know that look you get did you see that this is just two dudes casually talking in a sunny prairie but still for some reason the cinematics director felt the need to do aggressive camera shake as though they were in the middle of some battlefield pinned down under enemy fire every single scene is like this every scene feels like it was shot on an iphone attached to the end of a vibrator it's crazy and it really just makes these seats  painful to watch it's like dude relax just put the camera on a tripod it's fine story is baked so deeply into the outriders experience that it does get in the way sometimes for example repeating quest is a thing you can do if you want to farm gear or just because you enjoy the quest right now if you want to repeat a quest you have to go through a cut scene every single time there's no way to skip it and just go straight to the quest itself i found this really weakened and cheapened what story is there as you spend so much time just spamming the space bar to get through these cut scenes because you've seen them 20 times already when it comes to the final game i'll certainly be interested to see whether this investment in story hinders the end game experience rather than helps it so do i look forward to experiencing around 35 hours of this edgy grim dark cutscene-laden shaky camera storytelling not so much i don't hate it as much as a lot of other people do but i don't love it i do respect the effort though i respect them willing to go all in like this because this is a genre that's typically too scared to try and tell stories at all for some the way this story is being handled is already enough to kind of peace out of the game fair enough personally i'm keeping an open mind to see how it all comes together in the final product

[Music]

okay so i played this on a pc on an rtx 3080 and an amd 5950x cpu so pretty powerful rig i played it at 1440p ultra settings sadly performance was not great so there's really two frame rates that this game runs at there's the city frame rate which is awful and then there's the actual like gameplay frame rate which is for some reason way better so in the city i was struggling to stay at 60 fps with wild swings as low as 30 fps depending on whether or not i was turning corners or what i was looking at in the broader world when i'm out on a mission frame rates are generally much better typically hovering at around 100 frames and never really dipping below 60. it's important to remember though that my rig is pretty crazy and even i couldn't get a steady frame rate looking at commentary across the internet it's clear that people are having a lot of issues getting this to run well in their pcs and console performance is also reported to be quite shaky as well the bigger issue for me were the crashes i had multiple hard crashes whilst playing two of which forced me to restart my pc i played with some friends as well and they experienced the same thing crashes requiring restarts it happened regularly enough for us to be like yeah okay this is kind of a problem there were numerous audio mix and audio sync issue 

sometimes character dialogue would   extremely quiet or it would be completely out of sync with events on screen this happened across multiple cut scenes so it's looking like a game-wide problem matchmaking is currently broken now i usually i'd be like well i'm sure they'll fix it before launch but the avengers matchmaking was broken during its beta and it was still broken like three or four weeks after launch so we can't assume it will be fixed we just have to watch this space because right now it is booked one of the biggest challenges the game faces currently are its pc options so dlss is enabled by default here and there's actually no option to disable it in game you have to go to the config file to do that which almost no people are going to do the game boots by default in directx 11 but you can force boot it into directx 12 which many are claiming gives a significant performance boost again there's currently no in-game option to do that the real killer though is the motion blur okay let's just pause for a  second developers stop forcing motion blur we hate it we hate it everyone hates it just stop doing it or if you're going to do it by god give us an option to turn it off anyway you can't turn off the motion blur in game here and it's almost as egregious as it was in the avengers uh the developers have said that we're going to be able to turn it off at some point but it's not clear when now we've been through demo beta things before and one truth remains constant a lot of what i've described isn't going to change substantially in the next 30 days before this game launches it might change in the next 60 days the next 90 days but what we see here is most likely what we are going to get on april 1st when the game launches so for this reason i'm of a view that it's best to holdyour cash until reviews are out and the final state of the game is confirmed because we've all been burned too many times and there's clearly some problems here that need to be addressed anyway i spent a lot of time talking about what i don't like or what doesn't work let's talk about some of the good stuff for example this game is really [ __ ]

[Music]

fun were two phases to my outriders demo experience the first was when i played solo i was running the devastator who was this in your face tank style guy who can surround himself with rock to tank damage and teleport across the battlefield and cast earthquakes everywhere all that good stuff now when you first drop into the battlefield and get rolling the first thing you see is all this cover and we've all played gears of war in the division etc we know that when we see cover and there's a snap to cover system in place that we should use the cover so that's what i did i played most of that play through from behind cover coming out only when my abilities were off cooldown and i could blow something up and then i'd go back behind cover i was enjoying myself at this point i wasn't having a ball i was like yeah this is fine then i ran with two mates and i ran the pyromancer who just aoes everything down and one of my mates ran the trickster who i'd never seen before this this trickster class and i still remember laughing out loud with excitement when i saw this ability for the first time this is the trickster's time bubble which slows everything down so enemies are just ripe to be minced and the trickster has spectral blades that literally unsheathes enemies skin and turns them into skeletons and when they die their skeletal remains go floating through the time bubble in this glorious like terminator 2 judgement day-inspired carnage i was just like this is awesome that moment was really the start of me realizing just how well-designed most of these classes are and how well each of them synergize with each other when we realized how strong that time bubble was we began chaining together our abilities coordinating with each other when we knew enemies were about to spawn so we could round up as many as possible and just dissolve them each class is able to contribute to this in their own way from the devastator who can tank bullets and send them hurling back to the pyromancer who can make living bombs out of targets to the technomancer who can drop a wave of artillery over an area to the trickster who can teleport behind targets and assassinate them it was during these play sessions with my mates that i realized that this isn't actually a cover shooter the cover isn't for you it's for the enemies your job is just to go ham chaining together abilities and gunfire to do as much damage as possible because each class is healed in some way by doing damage this realization made the level design all the more puzzling for me see the level design in this game is bad it's so inorganic so staged so fake it really does look like the old gears of war levels from like the xbox 360 era they look like such video game levels where modern cover based shooters like the division or even recent gears of war games have found ways to provide lots of cover without their levels looking like they were built using consumer grade level editors i'm interested to see how this evolves as we access more areas of the game but right now this is definitely a big sticking point more broadly gunplay is fine it's not amazing the divisions weapons feel better gears of wars weapons feel better destiny's weapons feel worlds better outright as weapons get the job done i'm not talking about specific weapon design by the way which can get kind of weird and crazy looking i'm talking about the fundamentals like sound design recoil aim assist feedback enemy ragdolling etc yes you can give opponents with a shotgun here and it's a nice thrill but you're playing outright is for its abilities first and it's gun play second the other reason you'd be playing it is for its gear now i'm a little blown away by how well outriders is nailing the most critical aspect of the luda shooter genre the loot and it's doing it on a timeline that other games would never dream of implementing so what do i mean by that if you think about your time with loot based games destiny the division anthem avengers whatever one constant is that you never have to engage the loot game until after the campaign is finished yes you look at the numbers and the arrows and you equip the new hulk ribcage if the numbers are better than your old hulk rib cage can't believe that they did that by the way anyway maybe you equip a shotgun instead of a sniper rifle whatever but that's really as sophisticated as loot gets in most of these litters during the campaign all the good stuff the build diversity the mods the synergies between your abilities weapons and armor you essentially park all of that until you hit the end game when you begin making more interesting decisions finessing builds etc outriders is like [ __ ] that immediately you are getting items with perks that are just crazy like hey here's a perk that lets you use your most powerful ability twice as often it's not like three percent more often or five percent chance to proc double damage or some [ __ ] like you'd expect from every other game it's like nope just use it twice as often have fun i played all four classes during the demo and for each of them i found these sorts of items that were radically changing my playstyle immediately i was choosing to forgo certain weapon upgrades because i was eager to hold on to the weapon bonuses in my old weapons i was swapping my skills around because i got a new vest that made one of my abilities way way more powerful this would then push me into a completely different style of player than i would have otherwise had the power to sustain see i think a lot of people look at the lunar shooter genre and they immediately dismiss it because they rightly assume that they're gonna go through the motions on a phone in campaign and the core promise of that genre the loot isn't really available to them unless they're willing to grind for it at the end game the most compelling aspect of outriders to me is that it looks to be the first looter shooter where this isn't true if all of this holds for the final release of the game it looks like those who play the game for the campaign we'll still be able to experience an engaging loot game not just numbers going up for the sake of it but interesting items with interesting perks allowing you to make interesting build decisions and i'm totally totally down for that and related to this is the power fantasy now again this genre specifically makes you feel super weak and ineffective during the leveling process because it wants to juxtapose that with the end game when your build comes online and you can start playing the game as it's meant to be played in adverted commas this is a genre that gate keeps power opening that gate to only the select few willing to push through the worst most grindy aspects of the luda shooter model within a few minutes of playing outriders i was already feeling more powerful than i'd ever felt in any looter except for maybe like warframe because [ __ ] gets pretty crazy there i was immediately just tearing [ __ ] up and that felt good from what i can tell you don't need to play 60 hours of outriders to get to the good gear you don't need to grind 100 hours of outriders to feel powerful you don't need to wait to find the fun you're just right there and given how many people refuse to engage this genre because of all the throttling that goes on i think art writers has a real shot of winning over some people who never thought they'd suit up for another looter one of the biggest criticisms leveled at the game at this point is that it feels kind of budget and yeah i totally agree with that it comes through in the stilted animations the janky visuals the airiness of the gunplay clearly this is not the same production values as destiny or whatever but i think it's super important to remember that it's not trying to be one of the reasons that i have been interested in this game is because it's not trying to follow many of the trends that have destabilized or ruined this genre as an example there's no pvp ask any pve focused destiny or division fan about their thoughts on how the pvp side of their game has influenced the pve side they will not have nice things to say outriders is just sidestepping all of that the game is not a live service though it does require an internet connection to play which kind of sucks still outriders doesn't feel like a game where parts of it are being held back to sell you season passes or dlc later on i mean you can walk up to this kiosk  thing at any time and change your  in-game appearance  bungie is about to add transmog to their game after years of people begging for it and guess what it's tied to real world currency yeah you can do it for free but you can also pay for it which surely means that we're going to be getting some [ __ ] restrictions imposed on this feature to get a spending outriders is like no micro transactions no dlc  just a complete game the other thing i'll say and it's a bit of a weird   comment to make but this team has really  been super super transparent with their comms about this game they've really clearly outlined what to expect from the campaign putting it at around 35 hours they've released this 13 minute video that just spelled out exactly how the end game works talking about endgame expeditions and the crafting and all sorts of stuff like remember anthem when it launched bioware was deathly silent when anyone asked them what the end game was about and obviously that was because there was no end game same thing happened with the division when it launched and same thing happened with destiny all of these games did this outriders is not doing this it's super clear and transparent and so long as all of that doesn't turn out to be lies i think it could be a great case study for how to speak to an audience in the way that they want to be spoken to now as i said at the start i'm not here to tell you that outriders is great this is a demo it's a small slice of the game we have to see how it lands but so far it's ticking boxes for me i'm not expecting it to replace my deep destabilizing destiny addiction because again the game is not trying to do that it's just trying to be a fun game that you play for a while and then you put it down from what i've experienced i think people can fly are on track to deliver and i'm genuinely looking forward to the launch this video was brought to you by the eno 3d range of rtx 30 series gpus and if you haven't looked into how much of a leap this next generation of cards are then you really should put simply this next generation of nvidia gpus are to pcs what the ps5 and xbox series x are to consoles they make 4k gaming actually possible where before you had to turn down too many of your settings to keep your frame rate up more importantly they also make raid tracing a reality something that was just beyond the reach of the previous generation of cards since the performance cost was typically too damn high if you're not familiar with ray tracing it's a vastly better and more realistic way of producing lighting in games things like reflections on metals or glass or on puddles on the street before developers had to manually manipulate light which was both time intensive forthem and never as authentic as it could be with ray tracing light is simulated through an algorithm meaning it bounces and reflects in more ways than was possible before scenes in games like watch dogs legion and cyberpunk 2077 are utterly transformed through this sort of tech and it's hard to go back once you've experienced it the 30 series cards make ray tracing possible through not only raw processing power but through something called dlss or deep learning super sampling it's sort of hard to explain but the long and the short of it is that it uses your gpu processing power more efficiently giving you more headroom to enable more graphical settings including stuff like ray tracing i played control with dlss enabled and it literally doubled my frame rate when i had ray tracing turned on if you haven't got your hands on a 30 series card yet then i recommend checking out the inno 3d i chill lineup which is what i use it comes with a side rotor fan for extra cooling programmable rgb so it can match your rig ultra thin cooling fins for even more cooling and a solid backplate to increase the surface area for memory and component cooling thanks to nvidia and ino3d for sponsoring this video and thank you for watching it  thanks for watching my video if you liked it give it a thumbs up if you didn't give it a thumbs down so i know to do better for next time if you enjoyed yourself consider subscribing and if you really enjoyed yourself maybe consider hitting that notification bell so you never miss a video you can see my patrons here on the left they're awesome they're amazing if you want to join them check out my patreon page thank you again i'll see you next time bye