Outriders, People Can Fly’s online shooting, looting and superpower game, finally has a way to take a break, but to do that you’ll need to use an Nvidia video card (via Kotaku) Although it works as a single player game, Outriders requires an internet connection to play, which means that taking a break in the middle of a battle was impossible until this workaround. Even with the menu open, enemies can still attack you.
Using Ansel, which is a feature of Nvidia GeForce RTX graphics cards that allows a type of photo mode even in games without an integrated one, you can “pause” Outriders pressing “Alt F2” quickly, and get up and take care of your business. Since Ansel is specific to Nvidia’s Geforce Experience software, the break is limited to PC players, which means that anyone playing on a console or with a different brand of video card is out of luck.
The treatment of a player’s pause and content in Outriders It is similar to Destiny 2, for that shares some aesthetic and mechanical similarities. Destiny 2 sells a battle pass and annual expansions with new story content and justifies – at least in part – its requirements only online with the promise of new weekly and monthly changes in the form of live events and other features.
The difference is that Outriders is sold explicitly as a more traditional single-player game, with game publisher Square Enix addressing the issue on its website, “Outriders it’s a complete experience out of the box, ”he writes. For some reason, an internet connection is still required, which, in addition to disrupting a basic feature such as a game break, also seemed to contribute to Outriders‘April 2 release being a kind of mess. Players had trouble connecting with game servers to play in single-player and multiplayer mode, for which developer People Can Fly publicly acknowledged and apologized.
The game seems to be working fine now, and this strange gap from Nvidia means that the experience of playing single-player can be a little more comfortable, but Outriders definitely illustrates the continuing problems of making a game online only.