So many games and studios can sympathize with one another over the struggles of development during the COVID-19 epidemic. Outriders is only one of many games that got delayed because of the difficulty of developing a game during 2020. It seems that every studio had to delay something because of the pandemic. However, Outriders has something else in common with a fair few games, and it’s somewhat surprising. Outriders is a game about human spacefarers trying to colonize a planet called Enoch. The players are trying to trace down a signal of some kind, believing it to be crucial to human efforts to survive on the hostile environment of Enoch.
Outriders isn’t the only upcoming game about tracing a signal on an alien planet, though, as Returnal has a strikingly similar plot. A human astronaut named Selene comes to a planet named Atropos and crashes there. Although she’s trapped on the planet, she devotes herself to tracking down a signal somewhere on Atropos that seems to be calling to her. Past games have done similar things. In Mass Effect: Andromeda, the protagonist is also a human trapped in space, far away from home. In spite of being so far from Earth, the player is tasked with traveling to a faraway planet for the sake of humanity. It’s sort of odd that so many games in recent history have been about humans seeking out distant planets in this way.
There’s a few reasons that so many games might be doing this. For one, there’s a lot of creative freedom to be had in setting a game on an alien planet. Returnal players will be able to sympathize with Selene’s unfamiliarity with her environment. Alien planets like Enoch and Atropos are compelling to explore exactly because players have no idea what to expect. Writers can come up with all kinds of lore for alien planets, much in the same way that fantasy games like The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim are at extreme liberty to define their settings.
The focus on chasing signals from the depths of space is fairly logical too. One of the enduring questions of human existence is if Earth is the only populated planet in the universe. Humans everywhere dream of receiving a signal from an alien planet and getting the chance to learn about other life in our galaxy. Outriders and Returnal play on humanity’s desire to learn more about outer space and the hope to connect with alien life. A quest to discover and make a connection with an alien civilization is therefore a pretty compelling plot for a sci-fi game to follow, so lots of game developers have taken such a structure for a spin.
Plenty of games besides Returnal, Outriders, and Mass Effect: Andromeda have their own plots based on structures like this. For instance, No Man’s Sky has a plot that’s all about chasing a mysterious signal across the galaxy. From the very beginning of the game, the player is encouraged to find the source of a cryptic message, exploring all kinds of planets and meeting aliens of all kinds in the process. It’s not just video games that do this, either. Classic movies like Star Wars: A New Hope involve receiving a mysterious message and blasting off into space in search of its source.
It’s clear that exploring an unknown planet or chasing a signal from outer space isn’t uncharted territory for sci-fi media. While some might view it as a cliche, it doesn’t have to detract the experience of spacefaring games. Outriders and Returnal can wield this structure to great success as long as they provide plenty of interesting context around the signal for players to engage with. Good lore makes a difference when writing such a traditional plot. As long as the developers of Returnal and Outriders devote time to their settings and characters, the plot at the heart of them all will be gripping.
Outriders releases April 1, 2021 for PC, PS4, PS5, Stadia, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
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