Last night’s Outriders livestream brought us a tonne of new information. From a new look at gameplay, to details about mechanics, and even confirmation of the absence of microtransactions and Denuvo. But one particular gameplay mechanic that may gone unnoticed is developer People Can Fly’s approach to world tiers. A world tier is typically an element of end-game progression. When players finish all meaningful content, games automatically advance them into the different world tiers. With every upgrade comes higher-tier loot and more difficult enemies. However, the way most games handle it ends up locking players to their current world tier. While you can drop down, your character’s higher-level gear makes encounters in the WT below easy, and the experience ends up being a bit of waste because you won’t be growing your character unless you return to the world tier your gear was made for.
Outriders, however, essentially treats world tiers as elastic difficulty levels. The better you do, the more powerful gear you’re going to get, and the more challenging enemies will also become. This is how you advance through the different tiers. The biggest difference, of course, is that the game allows players to dynamically drop down the tiers if things get too tough. Anytime you die, your world tier bar loses a chunk of progress. People Can Fly says that prevents players from running into impossibly difficult situations. In other words, you won’t advance through the tiers unless you can handle the challenge. Though we’ve yet to test this system ourselves, I imagine it’ll also make content ever-relevant, and hopefully avoid some of the problems games like The Division 2 run into with its WT implementation. We’ll find out later this year when Outriders arrives on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X.
