People Can Fly has released its latest title today of Outriders. A third-person shooter with RPG elements and a whole lot of loot, players will have a handful of content to chew through in the coming days, although post-game content will stretch the shelf-life much farther.
The average length of the content provided remains as a burning question, one that can resolve the "price per hour of entertainment" equation for thrifty gamers. Yet it's difficult to parse precisely how long one will spend within Outriders based on how the content is uniquely segmented.
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The main campaign will take players roughly 40 hours to work through. This average, proposed by the developers, can alter drastically depending on how one is aiming to tackle Outriders. If players are aiming for the highest possible World Tier to maximize drops, with the occasional repeat of missions for additional currencies and drops, this figure will begin to balloon exponentially. For a completionist playthrough, a commonly proposed figure is around 100 hours, yet the newness of the title means that can't be verified just yet.
The title comes in two distinguishable content packages that People Can Fly has revealed, which could make this figure suspect. The first content that players will need to work through is the primary story, where gamers will unlock features such as crafting and weapon stores. This part is the designed narrative with the story arc of the planet of Enoch. The second part is a bit murkier to understand, as end-game raids called Expeditions will unlock on completion of the campaign. These expeditions are the heft of end-game content, offering new hand-crafted levels for fire teams to work through that become increasingly dangerous.
With great risk, comes great rewards. Successfully completed Expeditions will drop far more loot than the campaign offered, with unique mods and items. Upon completion, fire teams can then opt to increase the difficulty tier of that mission for even better rewards.
There are ten Expeditions currently included in the game, each with fifteen different difficulty tiers. In a brief video from People Can Fly showing a peek of the Expedition content, it took the developer team roughly twenty minutes to work through the mission once. To complete all missions, erroneously presuming that twenty minutes is the standard to make the math simple, that implies an additional 50 hours of content in post-gameplay.
People Can Fly has been adamant that Outriders is a complete game from release, eschewing the growing games-as-a-service trend in the industry. This does not infer, however, that DLC will not be added in the future. The inclusion of said DLC would likely increase the time to play, depending on the content offered. The currently available DLC, "Outriders Hell's Rangers Content Pack" only offers cosmetic modifications and a few level ten weapons for players, ultimately shaving time needed to find weaponry by a small margin.
Outriders is available for PC, PS4, PS5, Stadia, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.