OUTRIDERS

People Can Fly gears up for its first post-Epic release

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Though nearly a decade has passed since its release, the game most of us think of when we think of People Can Fly is still Bulletstorm. Which is remarkable given the Polish studio worked on Fortnite, back in the days when it was a long-brewing tower-defence shooter rather than one of the biggest games in the universe. At the time, it was part of Epic Games, a satellite studio helping out on Gears Of War and other properties that didn’t offer much chance for the developer to imprint its own personality on the final product.

“We worked with Epic and it was a great collaboration, but we were working on their games – so we decided we want to do something that’s ours,” game director Bartosz Kmita says. “‘Okay, let’s break with Epic and let’s start a new journey’.” So, in mid-2015, three years after it was acquired and two years after it was rebranded as Epic Games Poland, the studio flew the nest to develop its own IP, where its identity could shine through. Four years later, this project emerged as Outriders, a thirdperson co-op shooter-RPG hybrid which lead level designer RafaÅ‚ PawÅ‚owski calls “our most ambitious project to date, for sure”.

Not that you’d know it, playing the game for the first time. Outriders is immediately familiar, the kind of experience best described in terms of others you’ve already had. Imagine a Gears-style cover shooter married to Destiny’s cooldown timers, bottomless arsenal of lootable weaponry and obsession with numbers that keep getting bigger. Those same influences come through just as strongly in the visual design, with a touch of Mass Effect that hints at the game’s RPG ambitions. In the opening section, we catch a welcome glimpse of