Outriders is a game whose demo did not impress me that much, but that I decided to play because it came out on Gamepass and there's not much releasing right now, especially not for free*. It's an okay diversion kind of game, not the kind that's worth full price but, hey, I've played much worse.
Since I was switching platforms from PlayStation to Xbox I had to start the game over from the beginning, which did not feel great because the opening to Outriders is slow and dialog heavy and the dialog is terrible. I booted it up this morning, sat through about a minute to log in to the servers, which are sagging under the weight of the GamePass players, got through about 15 minutes, and then wanted to do something else for a little bit. The game can't pause or be suspended because it's always online, so I quit out, thinking it would preserve my progress and drop me right back where I was in the game, at the end of the first prologue area about to go track down the probe.
Nope.
It turns out that the game saves who you talk to and the conversations you have but not your progress through part of the story, at least until certain checkpoints. That means that not only can you not pause the game, but unless you quit out only after hitting one of the checkpoints, and it's not very clear what they are, you're going to lose progress. So I had to go back through the first part of the prologue again when I logged back in.
This is not a game design that makes sense with how people actually live their lives. Games get interrupted all the time, by phone calls, bio breaks, kids, partners, work, whatever, and the ability to pause and later resume, suspend via the console's features, or save and come back later, is pretty critical. Compromising those features is something developers should not take lightly.
Some games have to be always online. Destiny and The Division feature shared social spaces and can't be played purely single player. I understand and accept that. There's a reason you can't pause World of Warcraft and that reason is other players.
Outriders can be played solo. You never run into randoms in the game, only people you're grouped with, and only up to two other players. It's not doing anything that Gears of War Judgement didn't do 8 years ago, and you could totally pause that game whenever you wanted, and can easily suspend it if you're running it on an Xbone or a Series console. Saving was also limited to checkpoints (I believe), but that was much more common back then.
In addition, the always online component compromises important features of the new consoles. PlayStation's activity cards will still work but you have to hit the login server, turning it from lightning fast get in and play to a much slower "get in and wait" design. Xbox's Quick Resume won't work at all with the game. It screws with these features for no reason. As far as I can tell there isn't even PVP in the game, so if the claim is that they need to keep characters on the servers in order to prevent hacking...who cares? Let people hack if they want. It's a single player game. Or try to keep them from doing it the way every other single player game tries to keep them from doing it. Apparently there's already an infinite guns exploit already, so they've accomplished nothing.
In addition, after the servers go down the game will be unplayable. So they've guaranteed I won't buy a copy after I've played it because if I want to go back 10 years from now I probably can't. Heck, if the game bombs you might not be able to go back a year from now (though that seems unlikely.) Disintegration's Multiplayer mode got pulled after 7 months. The more stuff that relies on servers the less preservation you have. We're all more aware of that than ever thanks to Sony.
It feels like we're going backwards in some key user features for a lot of games, even as the consoles and PCs get more and more user friendly and accommodating of how people play games. Meanwhile games continue to insist on hitting login servers and putting more and more online even for single player experiences. It's not necessary unless you're a persistent online world. Otherwise it's just a way for software makers to add failure points to their games and disrupt basic functionality.
Oh, and the reason I'm writing this rant? I decided to play a little bit after lunch (couldn't play while eating like I sometimes do because there's no pause) and as I completed a quest the servers went down and booted me off. Great. Just what everybody wants from their single player experience. The joys of random disconnects.
There's no reason for this. It's bad, and whoever decided to build it this way at the publisher or developer should feel bad. It's possible this was intended as a Destiny type game and that's why it is the way it is, but when they pulled those features they should have implemented true offline play. This trend sucks.
*I will get to Narita Boy soon, but I want to take my time with that so it's probably a weekend thing.
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