If you’ve been playing the Outriders demo since it launched last week, you may have noticed an annoyance: uploading scenes.
People Can Fly’s third-person spoiler shooter (Bulletstorm, Gears of War: Judgment) plays a short scene whenever you want to move to a new area.
These scenes show everything from a character opening a door to climbing an edge. They include a full fade to black opening before playing the scene, then another fade to black before you get back to the action.
These scenes sometimes border on hilarious. One I noticed while playing saw my character take a dramatic leap across a broken bridge:
I’m not sure if I need a scene for that jump, Outriders pic.twitter.com/djZ25EyHhO
– Wesley Yin-Poole (@ wyp100) February 28, 2021
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It doesn’t help that in these scenes your character will magically abandon the armor you just wore to show your face and hair. And then, when you materialize on the other side, the armor is magically put back on.
The problem is sometimes compounded by the prevalence of these cutscenes. There are parts of the demo, which revolves around the Rift Town mission center, where you can find yourself trapped in a loading cutscene vortex as you move through different areas.
Clearly, these scenes are hiding the loading in the background. In the clip I tweeted, you can see my character approaching the gap in the bridge, so I press and hold square (I’m playing on PlayStation 5) to enter a new area. Then, we get the scene for the transverse jump. When the cutscene ends and I’m back in action, I’m in this new area.
These are not continuous transitions. Video games have had more elegant and less loading transitions that break immersion for years (who can forget the slow movement through a tight space before entering a new area?). But Outriders do things differently.
So, what is happening? I spoke with creative director Bartek Kmita and chief designer Piotr Nowakowski of People Can Fly to find out.
As expected, there is loading from the new area going on here. But there is another reason for this shocking transition: co-op.
The batsmen can be played in cooperation with three players throughout the game. And without dedicated servers, Outriders need to bring all players together when they want to enter a new area. The game cannot have all players running in totally different arenas at the same time.
“It started in a very pragmatic way, because we needed a system that would help us to teleport players and transmit some other content to start loading the other arena,” Kmita told me.
But why scenes showing the transition of your character, performing trivial actions, such as opening doors, climbing overhangs and jumping abysses? After all, Outriders is not the first cooperative game to offer different arenas for players to explore at the same time. In the last generation we had Destiny, and in the previous generation we had Borderlands. There are many other examples, each with their own solutions to keep cooperative players perfectly playing together in the virtual world.
Because of the feedback during the playtests, People Can Fly said. Initially, the Outriders did not have these loading scenes. Instead, there was a simple fade-in and fade-out when all the players were brought together. But some test players complained that they were disoriented when they loaded into a new area. They did not know where they had gone. And so, the brief scenes showing his character physically moving to a new area were born.
“A good example is to open the door,” said Kmita. “That was just because people in the playtests said, ‘oh, where am I? Why was I teleported? ‘ So, we needed to have these scenes. We couldn’t have done it manually, you can go through the doors, because we have a multiplayer game that opens up different problems for us. “
Specifically in the jump scene that I tweeted about, Nowakowski explained what is happening under the hood:
“I am the person who is starting the journey, so I want to jump to the other side and start a battle on the opposite side. Let’s imagine that one of my friends is close to the city, in Rift Town. The second is traveling along the main path. towards the enemies there. I can’t just go over there and trigger three different areas, because it won’t work in a game without dedicated servers.
“Secondly, if I just trigger this transition, the other two will be teleported. Then they will see, ok, where are we? Our idea – it might not work exactly as we wanted – but the idea was, ok, show all players the that’s happening, that we’re jumping to the opposite side. So they can see, ok!
“The same goes for the doors. Okay, we are entering this area. Our idea was to explain what is going on. In addition, we just need to bring all the players together and not separate them into different areas.”
The alternative solution would have been to automatically separate groups of players as they load into new areas in the game world, but People Can Fly was desperate to avoid this for Outriders.
“Without dedicated servers, our solution would be: if two guys want to go to different parts, we have to separate them so they can’t play together. Since everyone needs to compute AI and everything on their machines, we would have had to share the party”, explained Kmita.
“I would like to have the animation of opening the door for two seconds, but still playing with my friends, instead of just breaking through the transmission. So, we chose this solution. We understand that it is not the best.”
Kmita went on to suggest that People Can Fly will perhaps try to improve these loading scenes so they are not so annoying, but it seems unlikely that fundamental changes can be made. “We will try to look at this, but I cannot promise that a big improvement can be made,” he said.
These area transition scenes are more shocking when playing Outriders solo. When playing the game as a single-player story-based looter, which People Can Fly insists is a perfectly viable way to play, the game’s structure faces difficult comparisons with other single-player story-based action adventures. for years it has offered players more elegant solutions to the problem of loading new areas.
“In other games, where the transitions are more continuous, there is a lot more space, you [the player] you need to run, drive or things like that, “said Kmita.
“The streaming, the loading that is happening in the background in our phases is very intense. We just needed this solution to stream everything, prepare the next arenas. And also to have the team united to play in a single arena, not to divide. “
In turn, People Can Fly said that the prevalence of loading scenes decreases a little the further you progress in the game. In Rift Town, where missions, new areas and scenes are densely occupied, this problem is being felt intensely.
“[Rift Town] it was the initial stage of the game, so we tried a lot of solutions, missions in the middle of the arenas, things like that, “said Kmita.” The two doors being in the same place, being close – the structure point of seeing is good because you are traveling, you have both doors. But from the point of, okay, cutscene here, cutscene there, so if I’m going from one to the next, there are some cutscenes in a row.
“So there are some solutions that we’ve noticed and, later in the game, it’s more consistent, I’ll say. So fewer things like that are happening. Still, they’re there. And we need to go with it and make it work as well as possible.
“I think at Outriders we have some interesting solutions from the design point of view. This one is not necessarily as good as we expected! I believe there are some that are working very well and I am very proud.”