Outriders’ first paid expansion Worldslayer launches a fresh campaign in June

Square Enix have announced tonight that People Can Fly’s online sci-fi co-op looter shooter Outriders will get its first paid expansion, Worldslayer, on June 30th.

Worldslayer is adding in new story content to the Outriders’ world of Enoch – always good to hear – and a new endgame. It all centers around the creepy original Altered, Erishkigal, who exudes some serious Zuul vibes and is named after the Sumerian goddess of the underworld. I googled it. With Worldslayer, People Can Fly say they’re delving more into the extraterrestrial shenanigans of Enoch’s backstory.

I don’t reckon people or aliens should go around just slaying worlds, personally, but if you do want to skip straight to that part then you can bypass the original campaign and get boosted to the right level to take it on. Canny bit of easing in if you avoided Outriders at its buggy launch last year.

This is a jam-packed expansion from what Square Enix is ​​showing off. If you’re into the grind then there will be new guns and mods, plus Apocalypse loot that can only be earned through drops at the new Apocalypse Tier difficulty levels. Me, I love a good skill tree, so the new PAX class tree that acts as a way to specialize your Outrider into subclasses sounds sufficiently noodly for my tastes. Oh, and there’s a new endgame, the Trial of Tarya Gratar, that People Can Fly are keeping shtum about for now.

Worldslayer’s campaign is set in the foreboding ancient city of – you guessed it – Tarya Gratar, where the game’s alien Pax are from. Not to be confused with PAX East, which we’ll be sharing things from this week. Worldslayer peaked my interest back in November thanks to the slightly more darksynth, Trevor Something feel it seemed to be going for when Erishkigal was teased along with the New Horizons update, so I was always going to be dipping my toes in for this one.

Steve Hogarty had a good time with the base game in his Outriders review. “But the loot mechanics aren’t bewitching enough, or its action varied enough, or levels surprising enough, to sustain the momentum needed to send me back out in search of better space-trousers,” he decided. Ed thought an average time was a good time in his take, and former vidbud Colm bestowed upon Outriders the RPS most right game of 2021 award.

Outriders has been patched up since launch, most recently in the weighty free New Horizon update Alice O highlighted back in November. Square Enix seemed to think Outriders was the start of a franchise after it apparently hit 3.5 million players in its first month, but Graham was dubious.

Outriders Worldslayer is coming to Steam, Epic Game Store and Windows Store, along with PlayStations, Xboxes, GeForce Now and Stadia. Have any of you stuck with Outriders and are you ‘cited for Worldslayer?