OUTRIDERS First Impression - And How xCloud Made This Fun
This is a game I regularly see while scrolling down the Xbox Cloud Gaming list, but I never took much attention to it. Barely knew much about it, but it looked too western to be made by Square Enix and be good.
Today, two friends were here and we planned on playing something together as co-op using xCloud, since we all have Gamepass. They were using laptops, I was on my desktop.
My friend got really interested by Outriders, it caught his attention. I was bored out of my mind so we decided to take a look... And I'm impressed.
We've played about 3 hours only so far, but the game has provided way more depth and a way more intriguing (even if cliché) story than we first thought. It seems like it has all the ingredients for a good looter shooter.
The game plays a lot like The Division, just way more linear and with a bigger focus on storytelling, and I'm all for that.
It's that satisfaction and addictiveness of just shooting mindless hordes of enemies, hoping for good loot and then facing off against some rather difficult and fun bossfights.
The class system also helps give you more choice, even if restricting your character a bit, but this makes total sense as this is supposed to be a co-op game. I went with the tankiest class and in the beginning, it doesn't feel much different from what my friends were playing, but as we got newer skills, it definitely seems like the dynamics will shift a lot and I'll be a lot more useful for our little squad.
The star of the show today though... Was the pizza we had, it was really cheap for how delicious it was, couple that with a nice soda and dang, it was good...
Oh yeah, and Xbox Cloud Gaming! It allowed two friends of mine who don't have access to powerful hardware, much less portably like that, to all play a game with me just like that. The graphics looked good, barely any streaming artifacts and absolutely no input lag as far as I could tell. It was great.
At 6, one of my friends had to go home, but he just kept playing there. We opened up Discord, put the mic in between me and my other friend and done. Felt like the 3 of us were there.
Kinda like a physical metaverse.
Honestly, just a great experience, and having fun moments like these with friends or even by myself, realizing all the graces and positives of cloud gaming, just make me want to see this service evolve, it becoming something big.
Not just xCloud, but everything going to the cloud as our internet capabilities worldwide get better. It's a revolution, and somehow, I can even see web3.0 fitting into all of this.
Even just doing some gaming with friends has got my mind thinking about all this, it's some crazy new times, folks, so let us enjoy them.