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Outriders devs explain why constant loading cutscenes are necessary

Design choice is to help the game's three-player co-op mode.

Developer People Can Fly has explained why there are so many little cutscenes in its upcoming shooter, Outriders.

Speaking to Eurogamer, the studio said that the cinematics - which occur for many interactions, like opening doors and jumping gaps - are there to sync up users in the game's three-player co-op mode.

"I'm the person who's triggering the travel, so I want to jump to the other side and start a battle on the opposite side," lead designer Piotr Nowakowski said, explaining what is happening behind the scenes.

"Let's imagine one of my friends is next to the city, to Rift Town. The second one is travelling along the main path towards the enemies there. I cannot just go there and trigger three different areas, because it will not work in a game without dedicated servers.

"Second, if I will just trigger that transition, then the two others will be teleported. Then they will see, okay, where are we? Our idea - maybe it doesn't work exactly as we wanted - but the idea was, okay, show all the players what's happening, that we are jumping on the opposite side. So they see, okay!

"Same with the doors. Okay, we are entering that area. Our idea was to explain what's going on. Plus, we just need to gather all the players and not separate them in different areas.

Initially, People Can Fly opted to just have the game fade in and fade out when users moved areas, but playtesters said it was disorientating. Hence why the studio decided to have a cutscene showing exactly where users are moving to and from.

"A good example is opening the door," creative director Bartek Kmita said. "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."

A demo for Outriders dropped last week after the game was delayed until April. We caught up with game director Kmita last week.

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Outriders

PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, PC

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Alex Calvin

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Alex Calvin is a freelance journalist and writer covering the business of games. He started out at UK trade paper MCV in 2013 and left as deputy editor over three years later. In June 2017, he launched PC games b2b site PCGamesInsider.biz for Steel Media and has written for the likes of GI.biz, Eurogamer, Kotaku UK, VGC, Games London, The Observer/Guardian and Esquire UK. He can be found on Twitter @gamesbizuk.

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