In both Arc Raiders and Marathon, you and up to two other players venture from a safe hub into hostile areas, shoot a bunch of enemies, grab a bunch of loot, and return back to safety. These games are built around a loop meant to draw players back repeatedly, and have become bona fide hits as a result. But these shooters owe a great debt to one maligned 2021 loot-shooter: Outriders.
People Can Fly’s Outriders, published by Square Enix and released on April 1, 2021 (not a joke!), wasn’t an extraction shooter, but it hit many of the same beats. You and up to two other players decamped from a hub city, venturing into hostile areas where you’d shoot a bunch of enemies and grab a bunch of loot before returning back to safety to sift through that loot, at which point you’d fine-tune your builds to do it all again. Again, Outriders was not an extraction shooter — the stakes were lower, for one, and it didn’t feature PvP — but the feedback loop scratched a similar itch as the shooters du jour.
Ostensibly, Outriders was a story-driven game. Set in the 22nd century, it focused on a contingent of humans who flee Earth for a star system some 12 light years away (at least according to number-crunching fans). They attempt to establish a post-Earth colony, only to discover an exoplanet whose native lifeforms very much do not want humans around.
They also get space magic superpowers. Some sci-fi plot beats — cryosleep, planetary anomalies, civil war, all that stuff — tee up a compelling story you’d expect to propel a single-player game. But take it from someone who voraciously played at the time: Outriders kinda sucked as a single-player game.
It absolutely ruled with friends, though. Classes were the main draw of Outriders. When making a new character, you could select from four classes: the Trickster, who could create localized bubbles of Matrix-style bullet time; the Technomancer, who deployed fancy gadgets like turrets and land mines; the Devastator that tanked damage with stone shields; and the flame-wielding Pyromancer.
In early areas, you could brute-force your way through mobs of enemies by yourself as pretty much any class. Later in the game, you’d face uphill battles unless teaming up with friends. And combining classes in your party was key to that success.
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