What's new in New Horizon: Exploring a major update for Outriders

With the release of New Horizon, the role-playing shooter Outriders has expanded its end-game content, introduced several innovations and many fixes based on player feedback. The developers presented the DLC to the press, talked about the work done and plans for the future of the project.

A media round table brought together the marketing director of Friv2Online Games Studio site and the friv game balance designer of Outriders.

“As you all probably know, Outriders is our biggest project to date. We firmly believe in it and intend to make every effort to refine and further develop it. The first steps on Enoch were not easy, the players faced problematic servers, loss of inventory contents and a number of other problems that we had to resolve in the shortest possible time, but thanks to the active community, we learned a lot.”

Game developers talked about a lot of bugs that they had to quickly fix, starting from the first weeks after the launch of the project, smoothing out bumps with each new patch. Friv2Online Games Studio tech team fought the recalcitrant servers until the amount of negative feedback about their work subsided. To date, according to the developers, one of the main sores of Outriders has been completely cured.

With the release of New Horizon, the bugs that led to crashes of session participants and the inability to invite friends to the group were finally fixed; errors that prevented players from completing some quests and expeditions; as well as a number of problems related to the work of modifications and class skills, such as the Technomancer turrets that fell through the textures. Friv2Online Games Studio noted that active players helped them to catch the most unpleasant bugs.

“We received a lot of complaints about the balance of the game, and by the release of the expansion, we tried to resolve these problems definitively. In essence, New Horizon is a DLC that was collected based on the wishes of the community, which we previously could not implement in the game due to technical difficulties. Bullet build nerfs, which we thought would push players in different directions, was a necessary evil that allowed us to listen to players and focus on polishing them, especially when working with mods.”

As an example, game developers cited the Fortress modification, which has been reworked and now increases the character’s armor and resistance by 5% for each of the three levels received for shots, and at the maximum level it gives players a 30% increase in damage for ten seconds.

Balance changes have affected dozens of modifications, skills in the development tree, and bonuses from equipment sets for all four classes. Tricksters and Destroyers have received more protection, Technomancers and Pyromancers have become stronger, and the base damage multipliers of most popular mods have increased.

A key issue in the discussion of New Horizon was one of its main innovations: the developers removed the expedition timers from Outriders, which previously forced players to go as fast as possible to get the best rewards. Timers can still be enabled as an option, but this is no longer a requirement.

“Due to time-limited expeditions, players were forced to sharpen their builds for the offensive, because of which the roles of tanks and support remained unclaimed. We've decided to drop this system so that every alium can play at their own pace, freely experiment with builds, and earn the same rewards. The game was originally conceived as a project for multiplayer, but now even solo players will be able to enjoy the passage of expeditions, and groups can be assigned roles and realize their potential.”

Among other things, now, after completing the Eye of the Storm high-end quest, players can now choose one of three legendary items from the pool as a reward for completing. Friv2Online Games Studio noted that with the release of New Horizon, Outriders has become much more generous with loot and more careful about players' time.

“Speaking of generosity, it is also worth mentioning the new transmogrification system, which, without any resource costs and difficulties, for free and at any time allows the player to change the appearance of one item for another. Not only the appearance will change, but the sounds accompanying the subject. We created this system to further motivate players to come back to the frivgame and get new equipment, and we are very pleased to see the aliums experimenting with appearance.”

And there is a place to return. In addition to the basic set of expeditions, Outriders has four new end-game zones, each with its own story: in the Scorched Core, players will go in search of abandoned equipment in the snowy mountains ; Marshal, they will have to fight rebels testing experimental weapons, and in The Source, players will look for ancient treasures in ruins.

Game developers noted that they have a lot of plans to expand the content of Outriders (new weapons, modifications, armor, expeditions, skill trees, quests), but New Horizon should be seen more as the final stage in working on the base game. The developers hope that they will be able to implement most of their plans in the upcoming Worldslayer content add-on.

“For example, boss battles. Having collected full feedback, we analyzed the errors, and in future boss fights we intend to make them more dynamic and diverse. The same goes for synergy and the scaling system, which we intend to work with further.”

When asked if cross-saves are planned in the future, the developers replied that this solution is not yet considered, not so much because of technical difficulties, but because of the policies of different services. Outriders supports the transfer of progress within the Windows ecosystem (between PC and Xbox), but in the case of Steam or the Epic Games store, this is not yet implemented.

On the issue of porting Outriders to the Nintendo Switch, game developers have so far refrained from specifics, confining themselves to general discussions on the demand for the game in the future, which is still difficult to predict. However, they did not rule out such a possibility, citing their Bulletstorm as an example, which was successfully transferred to a portable platform.

Towards the end of the roundtable, game makers recalled some of the quality-of-life changes that appeared in the New Horizon expansion, such as the ability to change the legendary assortment and buy random legendary weapons in the Thiago shop. And the developers have finally improved the readability of the descriptions of mods, because of which, when playing on the Xbox, it was impossible to parse the fonts, which I talked about in the impression review.

In conclusion, Friv2Online Games Studio admitted that despite good numbers and strong support from Square Enix, Outriders did not start at all the way they would like, which greatly affected the impressions of the players and the reviews of critics.

“I think now we can say openly that we then suffered a strong disappointment in our own abilities. You know, we've been working hard on the game for over five years and invested a lot of time in it, so it was very difficult for us to overcome all these difficulties. At the same time, our partnership with Square Enix and the support of the community has helped us to strengthen Outriders and find the strength to continue to develop the project.”

“It was a very rewarding experience. We realized that Enoch really belongs to the players, so the best thing we can do for them is to take into account their opinions. Feedback, which is the keynote through our conversation today, is the most important tool when launching a new title. Therefore, New Horizon seems to us the perfect opportunity to finally show the community what we have learned from them. Thank you all for your support and forward to new horizons!”

As a reminder, New Horizon is a free update for Outriders. In honor of its release, igrodely prepared a festive fire for all players, including beginners who play the demo version of the game. When Outriders launch between November 16 and November 30, the player's most experienced character will receive a piece of legendary armor. The gift will appear in the character's inventory or storage within 48 hours after logging into the game.