‘Outriders 2’ Was Real, Almost Finished, Then Incinerated

The looter shooter genre has not had all that many new entries in many years now, after a number of games tried and fail to replicate the success of titles like Borderlands, The Division, Warframe and Destiny. But one really gave its best effort, Outriders, but ultimately did not blossom into a long-running series.

It almost did.

According to a new report, one of the two cancelled games from the beleaguered People Can Fly, Project Gemini, was in fact Outriders 2. Not only that, but the report says that the game was nearly finished before it was unceremoniously axed in early June, which also came with a number of layoffs. It’s not the biggest surprise this was one of the games, but if it was that late in development? What a tragedy.

For me, Outriders is very much a “it deserved better” game. It had an incredibly strong foundation, some of the best looter-shooter elements I’ve seen in terms of gearing and its combat philosophy of “the cover is for the enemies, not you” was a blast. It’s one of the only third-person shooters I’ve actually enjoyed.

It’s a bizarre story. Outriders started out extremely strong and Square Enix bragged about it immediately. Here’s its press release subtitled “New IP posed to be the company’s next big franchise.”

“With over 3.5 million unique players, average play times of over 30 hours and extremely high engagement for co-operative play, we and the amazing team at People Can Fly are so excited with this initial success.”

What on earth happened? A very, very sharp drop-off. It was plagued by tech issues at launch, but it also had a campaign with a pretty clear ending and an endgame that wasn’t fully build out yet. A major update and then a full expansion brought a minimal amount of players back, despite being great additions. But I suspect that the biggest issue for Square Enix may have been that unlike Destiny, this was not a live service. No battle passes, no microtransactions, no endless stream of content, severely limiting revenue. Still, a second game was in the works due to the initial success until…it wasn’t.

What once was a “new IP posed to be the company’s next big franchise” appears to now be permanently dead. Outriders had its issues, but it also did loot-shooting better than many other competitors, even some of its major ones. The game and People Can Fly deserved better. If there’s some remote chance anyone else could pick up that IP, that almost-finished game and that team, it would be a great call.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.