Outriders Dev People Can Fly Reveal Loading Cutscenes

If you’ve dived into the Outriders demo recently, you’re more than likely to have noticed numerous instances of loading that are disguised by obvious cutscenes. We’re talking about jumping small gaps, for example, but being hit with a multi-second cutscene. It can be frustrating, and the developer has explained why these are included.

As shown in the tweet below by Eurogamer’s editor, the problem can be fairly distracting and often take you out of the experience, especially coupled with the painfully slow fade in and outs before the actual scene itself.

Talking to Eurogamer about the issue, the creative director at People Can Fly, Piotr Nowakowski, explained why this happens and how it’s a mixture of loading a new area and the game being online co-op. Since Outriders doesn't have dedicated servers, the developers needed to find a way to bring all players together simultaneously. Through vigorous playtesting, players found the simple fades to be jarring, so the team landed on a adding a cutscene between the fades to be the best solution.

"A good example is opening the door. That was only because people in playtests said, 'oh, where am I? Why was I teleported?' So we needed to have these cutscenes. We couldn't have done it so manually you can go through the doors, because we have a multiplayer game that opens different problems for us."

Nowakowski explained how this works for the player by gathering them and not separating them into different areas. He also noted while they chose this solution, the team understands it's not the best.

"Without dedicated servers, our solution would be if two guys want to go to different parts, we have to separate them so they will not be able to play together. Because everyone needs to compute the AI and everything on their machine, we would have had to split the party."

"So we chose this solution. We understand it's not the best."

Going forward, Nowakowski has said the team "will try to look at this", but "can't promise a huge improvement can be done". It doesn't sound like it's something that will massively change and may just be something players have to grow accustomed to. At least we have some clearer idea of why this is happening, but it doesn't make it any less annoying when it does.

The demo is available to download now and offers the prologue and a substantial chunk of the game's intro.

Have you found this to be an issue in the Outriders demo? Let us know in the comments below.

[source twitter.com, via eurogamer.net]