Game developer People Can Fly finally explained the reason for the weird loading cutscenes in upcoming video game Outriders when a player moves from one area to another.
Media outlet Eurogamer asked the developers for the reason of the weirdly-placed loading cutscenes when players move from one area to another and with simple actions too. For example, when a play would jump across a broken bridge, a cutscene would appear, showing the character… well… jump across. That’s it.
Creative Director Bartek Kmita and Lead Designer Piotr Nowakowski state that there is actually a reason for that. Since the game can be played by three players in co-op, it needed something that could bring all players together when one wants to enter a new area and that was the loading cutscenes. It does not have dedicated servers so this is how they made it possible. It was able to have all players go exploring around entirely different areas at the same time.
The loading screens were there for another purpose as well. During playtests, players complained that they would suddenly teleport when their companion would move to another area. They were confused why they were in one area and then suddenly appear in another without something that would notify them. The loading cutscenes were the solution to make them know they were going to another area, even if it looked silly with the simple action of jumping across.
“A good example is opening the door,” 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.”
Nowakowski gave another explanation in great detail:
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. 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.
There was actually another solution, which was to break the groups of players as they loading into new areas. This was not applied because the developers did not want this to happen in the game. They wanted players to play together with their friends and did not want to break them up just because they went to another area.
Kmita promised that People Can Fly will do something about the weird cutscene transitions, but he confessed it will not be that big of an improvement. Hopefully they can find a solution for this.
Outriders will launch on PC, PlayStation 4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S on April 2. Check out our hands-on impressions here.
Source: Eurogamer