Endgame & Crafting in Outriders

(A Short Sneak-peek Preview)

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In every Looter game (be it an aRPG hack and slash, a shooter-looter, or another loot filled game) there are two things that are in the top 3 of driving forces that keep people playing the game or (not playing it if those are done badly). Two of those are the Endgame (post-story) content and Itemization. ‘Crafting‘ is often used as a broader term not just for creating gear from scratch but also for systems that allow the players to upgrade and tinker with gear in various ways. This is the case with Outriders where we ‘craft’ items by taking an item ‘base’ and do all sort of cool things to it to make it to our liking. This post sums up the information I could find on Expeditions, the endgame in Outriders as well as on Crafting.

Info Video footage:

Endgame – Expeditions:

After finishing the campaign in Outriders, which would take on average around 40 hours to complete (without the need to do all of the side missions), players will unlock Expeditions – a vicious but highly addictive post-campaign mode. When the main story line is over, players will find themselves in a new camp (which kind of makes you wonder what happens to the old one during the story). Among other new additions, there will be a station/table where players will access a map that shows new areas to explore.

All of those areas will be completely new zones and content an the devs claim that there will be ZERO RECYCLED CONTENT from the main story. Expeditions are big, hand-crafted, new levels with their own mechanics, challenges and story-lines.

Before starting an Expedition, players will notice a system called Challenge Tiers.

The faster players clear a mission, the better the rewards at the end will be. It’s important to note that players won’t get loot as drops but rather get all rewards at the end of the mission IF they manage to complete it. But have no fear as even failing a mission would yield some rewards. Here’s an example where players can get some Epic & Rare loot + 3 new Tiers. This is because the player has picked the highest available Tier at this moment (T3).

Players can always lower the Tier/Difficulty to make it easier but with lesser rewards and Loot Level as seen below:

Your newly earned Tiers are needed for 2 things.

First, Tier progression will unlock new locations for the players to discover.

Unlocking all Locations will grant access to the final Expedition – The Eye of the Storm (which has a minimum Tier difficulty of 15).

Second, and similar to the world Tiers system, selected challenge Tiers also determine the difficulty of the missions but also the Loot Level. The maximum Level in Outriders will be 30 upon release, but Loot Level will go up to 50 in expeditions.

A higher challenge Tier level will shows you a Higher expected Enemy & Loot level.

This means that players may need to properly synergise their builds and most likely repeat certain Tiers to get sufficient gear upgrades before attempting to tackle a higher Tier.

The devs say that Expeditions won’t be simply tough but rather a BRUTAL experience that will challenge how good of a build and gear you’ve got as well as how well a team plays together. The hardest content is intended for the top few % of min-maxed builds. To me, this seems kind of boring – to lock content behind meta instead of the meta just letting you run the content much, much quicker when compared vs the non-meta builds.

I personally think it’s better if META is about HOW QUICK instead of IF one can do the hardest content with their build & gear. But we’ll have to settle for endgame designed for the top 1% of builds where we’ll need be be slaves to the meta and fun, non-meta builds will not be able to do that content.

Crafting – Min-Maxing Your Gear:

And speaking of min-maxing, let’s have a look at one of the most important core features of Outriders that is heavily linked to creating that ultimate build you love to play – modding, crafting, & everything in-between. Upgrading & modifying your gear is an integral part of Outriders and provides players the freedom they need to strive for that “feelsgood” build.

There will be a myriad of combination for players to experiment with to maximize their build’s effectiveness and make it more suitable for specific content. The ‘crafting’ system will provide players with countless hours of tinkering fun & will even be a mandatory thing when pushing those expedition Tiers up.

Gear Mods & Modding:

Now let’s look at Mods & how modding our gear will work. Mods are passive skills that can alter the way our weapons, armor or abilities behave significantly. For example, they can add effects to our gun’s fire, regardless of our class by applying status effects on our enemies like Freeze, Bleed, Weaken, Toxic, and many others. With rare & specialized mods equipped, players can even get access to the powers of another class.

Here’s one example – Golem’s Limb, a Legendary Shotgun that grants its wielder the Devastator‘s Golem Skin power for 3 seconds after every kill.

Or this Legendary Machinegun – Grim Marrow, which inflicts Slow on enemies that you hit with a cooldown of 4 seconds the same way Tricksters do with their melee attacks.

Broadly speaking, there are two major types of Mods:

• General Mods – that can be applied to boost or alter how your weapons and armor behave

  

• Skill Mods – which are strictly class specific. Those can amplify and change any of the 8 abilities per class but can only be applied to armor.

  

  

  

Some examples are: giving the Trickster a 2nd Temporal Slice, or increasing the dmg radius & ammo of the Technomancer‘s Rocket Launcher, or increasing the number of enemies a Devastator can “Spike“.

All mods are separated into 3 Tiers. You are able to collect mods by dismantling gear that has those mods on it. The rarity of gear determines what Tier mods and the number of mads the item comes with except for Legendary gear, which has dedicated mods that can only be found on these specific items. Once collected, you can mix-and-match mods by applying them however you want.

• Tier I – Basic General or Skill Mods

  

• Tier II – Stronger General or Skill Mods

  

• Tier III – Legendary gear mods that can only be obtained from Legendary items

  

  

Now here’s a cool example: let’s take the legendary Assault Rifle Absolute Zero that shoots awesome freezing bullets.

But it can be even more awesome by striking enemies with lightning while they’re frozen.

So here’s Thunderbird, a legendary Assault Rifle that is lower level and no longer up-to-speed with the content.

Let’s dismantle it to retrieve the mods inside. However, if a weapon already has two mods slotted, we can only change one of those two mods.

Now let’s select the Ultimate Storm Whip mod from the Thunderbird and the slot that we want to place it on.

Now all that’s left to do is to spend some resources and voila, now the top mods slot is locked and can never be changed but we’ll be able to swap out Mod Slot 2 as much as we want.

And this is just one example of what can be done with mods in the game as we can alter & upgrade every singe piece of gear in Outriders. Now let’s look at some of the other crafting mechanics.

Improve Rarity:

Improve Rarity lets us improve the primary stats of every item that IS NOT Epic or Legendary. It adds Firepower to weapons and Armor for wearable equipment.

Raise Attributes:

Hovering over the crafting options reveals a color code that explains what rarity is needed for each craft. This example shows Unusual, Rare, Epic, & Legendary for Raise Attributes.

What exactly Raise Attributes does has not been revealed but the name is pretty suggestive and mostly likely its about min-maxing the secondary attributes.

Swap Variant:

Next is Swap Variant, which allows us to alter the weapon variant by changing the fire mode. As you get more hero levels you will unlock more variant too.

Level Up Item:

And here’s “Level Up“, which allows us to raise the level of an item. This will raise the primary attributes (Firepower or Armor) as well as re-roll the secondary attribute values. An item level can not be raised higher than the current equip-able item level (which goes up as our hero levels up and as our Expeditions Tier goes up after the max hero lvl is reached).

If you, like me, love tinkering with your gear & build, Outriders will provide you with the needed freedom to have lots of fun while doing so.

With 350 individual mods across across weapons, armor, and skills, players will have a ton of possibilities to discover and experiment with. And when you consider that all of those crafting possibilities are directly linked to the passive skill trees of each class, the depth of possible combinations just grows and grows. Add a free respec at any given time and we’re in for endless hours of tinkering & fine tuning to get the build that hits the right spot. And if you start synchronizing your build with your teammates’ builds by covering each others’ weaknesses and complimenting each others’ strengths you should be able to clear any challenge Expeditions throw at you.

I hope you are just as excited about this as I am and that you’ve got some interesting idea for builds already from the very little mods, skills, and other info we’ve seen.

If you’re not sure if this game is your cup of tea, remember that there will be a FREE DEMO Test on the 25th of February 2021. More info here: https://square-enix-games.com/en_US/home2/outriders-demo-available-25-february

You can use the following Epic Games Store Creator Code/Tag on checkout (for some games) to get a discount while generating revenue for me: STRUCKTLF

Here’s an EGS Referral link for Outriders: https://store.epicgames.com/strucktlf/outriders