Outriders, the new third-person looter shooter from People Can Fly and Square Enix, is a game with many mechanics, currencies and systems layered on top of one another. While the game does an OK job at explaining these all to you, there are some things that are left for you to figure out, and can be a bit confusing.

So whether you're a veteran from the demo, or you're just picking up the game for the first time, this guide will help you with everything you need to know before trying to take back Enoch.

Beginner's Guide to Outriders

Classes and Skills

Choosing your class is permanent. However, you have multiple character slots to choose a new class if you like. Once you complete the prologue with one character, you can skip most of it with future characters, allowing you to get right into testing new classes and skills.

Each class has a unique way of healing. It is important to remember how to activate and cater towards your healing ability, as the enemies are aggressive and dangerous, especially if you are playing solo. The different classes heal in the following ways:
- Trickster - Close Range kills, provides Shield Generation
- Devastator - Close Range kills
- Pyromancer - “Marking” enemies with skills, then killing them
- Technomancer - Strong “Weapon Leech” and “Skill Leech”, allows for healing from a distance

You can pick whichever weapon you like in Outriders, however, some weapons provide bonuses depending on your class and their skills.

If you want to learn more about what each of your Skills do, head to the Skills tab for a detailed description of a given Skill’s attributes. This can be important for seeing which Skills have the Interrupt attribute, or which Skills might be able to heal you immediately upon casting.

The Class Skill Tree has 3 distinct paths for each class, allowing you to tailor your character to be specialised at different things. Inspect each branch to see what perks you might like to aim for as you level up.

You get 20 points to upgrade your Class Tree, so you won’t be able to choose everything at once, but you can always reassign the points in your Class Tree without penalty, so feel free to experiment.

Head to our Classes page for a deeper breakdown of the strengths and weaknesses of each class

Missions

Main Missions and Side Quests can easily be repeated, so if you get stuck with low level gear, or want to increase your character level, you can easily go back to older missions. To repeat Main Missions, choose “Select Story Point” from the character selection screen, and choose where you would like to start. Side Quests can be repeated in the world from where you activate them in the first place.

Side Quests are not exclusively started from within hub spaces. You can also find the Yellow Exclamation marks on the paths in the open areas. Be sure to explore if you are looking to level up or see all there is to see.

Difficulty in Outriders is determined by World Tiers. As you progress through the game, the World Tiers available to you will increase from 1 to a maximum of 15. Each World Tier increase will provide a higher chance for better loot, at the expense of increasing the difficulty of every combat encounter.

If you are finding some combat encounters difficult on your own, you can open Matchmaking and have friends or random players join your squad. You can also lower the World Tier at any time.

Look for glowing ore as you move around the environment. These deposits can be harvested to provide you with resources, such as Iron.

Keep an eye out for equipment crates off the beaten path, as they may have different gear and weapons for you to try out.

Once you have completed your main objective for a mission, you may be shown a glowing Outriders logo. This will allow you to fast-travel back to any other fast-travel location, which is helpful to hand in the quest you just finished. You can walk back if you like, but there are rarely more things to find in an area if you go through it a second time.

Combat

If you are low on health in a firefight, you have a couple of options outside of your class healing. Most classes can heal by using their melee ability which is helpful when you are surrounded and waiting for skill cooldowns. You can also retreat and your health will regenerate up to a certain threshold of around 1/3. This can let you get back in the fight and use your skills to heal up.

When you fight another Altered, there a few things to keep in mind. Many of their attacks can be Interrupted when they are charging up. You can Interrupt them by using specific Class Skills, or by Meleeing them. Interrupting an Altered with the same attack multiple times will allow them to resist your Interupt, so try to mix things up.

If you find yourself pushing an enemy back in an encounter, be careful not to push too far. If you push right into their spawn locations, you are very likely to become suddenly surrounded by enemies who will almost instantly destroy you. Stay a ways back and pick at them from a distance, or let them come to you for close range.

Some Class Skills will allow your team to use their own weapons or skills more effectively. Try co-ordinating your Skills with your squad once you have all gotten to know your character abilities. For example, Pyromancers can pull enemies out of cover, allowing Technomancers to snipe them with ease. Tricksters can also place their Time Distortion bubble near fast enemies to keep them away from your ranged team members.

Scattered throughout the world are ammo boxes. Using these before fights is good so you don't run out of ammo, however they have a hidden perk. Using them also reloads all of your weapons, which can be very useful in the middle of a firefight, or if you have a gun with a large magazine/long reload.

Equipment

Keep a couple of spare guns in your inventory. It may be tempting to stick the highest numbers in your active slots and dismantle the rest, but you may find yourself at a disadvantage for the enemies you are about to face. Eg, if you have accidentally equipped shotguns only, you will be vulnerable to long range targets.

When starting out, it's best to dismantle your Common (White) and Uncommon (Green) gear instead of selling it, as you get more resources like Iron and Leather that way. Once you unlock crafting, make sure you are dismantling your Blue gear as well, as this will unlock Mods for your Mod Library, a fundamental part of late-game crafitng.

Instead of marking all items individually in the shop sell menu, mark all items of a particular colour in your character menu first. Do this by selecting the corresponding coloured squares in the bottom right of the character menu. Then, back in the sell menu, sell all of your marked items at once.

There is an Auto-Loot feature in Outriders that you can use to help you be certain that you haven’t missed anything. When leaving an area, or dying in an area, all loot will be picked up. If you would like to manually pick up the loot, you can do that by pressing Down on the D-Pad.

If your inventory is full when you Auto-Loot, any excess items will be sent to your stash. If your stash is full, excess items will be automatically scrapped.

You can change the threshold for the rarity of gear that you want the Auto-Loot feature to pick up. This means that it won’t pick up equipment below the designated rarity, which you can determine in the settings. It is good to set this to Common, so that you will pick up everything in the early game, but as you get stronger, you may wish to make the feature more strict.

If you are low on gear, or just want to get the most out of your available rewards, don't forget to check your World Tier rewards from the pause menu, or the Accolades Rewards from your Character menu.

Crafting

You will unlock crafting after completing the mission “Salvation”. This allows you to use resources that you have gathered to modify and level up your existing equipment. This can be helpful if you are finding yourself stuck in a certain area, or if you want to make the most of the class skills and abilities at your disposal.

Crafting allows you the following options:
- Improve Rarity - Change you equipments base value: Eg, Upgrade an Unusual (Green) Item to a Rare (Blue) item.
- Raise Attributes - Increase an items Secondary Bonus. Requires Shards.
- Mod Gear - Change an items Mod for one of your Known Mods.
- Swap Variant - Change a particular item to a different version of the same item.
- Level Up - Increases an Items level to the equippable item level cap.

It's a good idea not to spend too many materials on low level gear, as you will be constantly swapping out your equipment for something better in the early game. The resources required to upgrade your items will become necessary for mid-late game content if you want to take on harder encounters, so if you are upgrading early on, choose wisely.