You must remember this: a quest is not just a quest

Outriders’ protagonist must fill in three decades of happenings and process their ramifications after tumbling out of a cryo chamber. Developer People Can Fly has a similar chief concern in attaching meaning to its world. Since the prior generation’s consoles were first able to wrap a nigh-inconceivable sprawl around their players, a welldocumented blight of forgettable landscapes and map marker spring-cleaning has set in. And it’s taken PS4/Xbox One’s entire lifespan – and then some – for studios to find an answer to the fundamental question of what to actually do with all this real estate that hardware can now offer.

People Can Fly’s answer to the question appears to be: more or less what we always did, only now with more distant horizons. Outriders’ campaign feels deliberately retro in some ways, conjuring the old bombast of Bulletstorm, Gears et al via tried-andtested set-pieces, clearly defined antagonists whose moral orientation seems to be visibly corrupting them, and a sense of the narrative chains moving forward after every mission. The difference, of course, is that now those same pulpy tales and Hollywood shootouts are happening within a larger framework, one that contains many hub areas, upgrade trees and persistent progression markers.