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Players are helping The Outlast Trials evolve in its first season, Project Lupara
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Phil Hornshaw
Like the previous Outlast games, the goal of The Outlast Trials is to sneak, run, and hide from the marauding murderers that populate each level—because it's nearly impossible to fight back. There are two kinds of levels that make up The Outlast Trials and its sinister corporate mind control program. Trials are lengthy multi-objective missions that take place across expansive and convoluted maps, while MK Challenges take place on smaller chunks of the larger maps and are quicker to finish.
The Version 1.0 release of The Outlast Trials in March added new maps, reworked player progression and the organization of levels, and rebalanced much of the game. The upcoming first season is set to further hone the formula with even more new content.
That includes a new map called The Docks, which will have its own Trial and MK Challenges. Alongside the new area, the season is also adding a new Prime Asset, the name for The Outlast Trials' frightening killers. Franco, this vicious and powerful enemy, is the first new Prime Asset Red Barrels has added to the game—and he's set to completely change The Outlast Trials.
"We have no ranged enemies in the game, so you can always be stealthy and hide, and when you're getting chased, you can always outrun or outlast the enemy," Game Director Alex Charbonneau told me in an interview. "This is going to be the first time that an enemy has a ranged weapon."
Franco sports a sawed-off shotgun, the Lupara from which the update gets its name. The fact that he can shoot you means that simply running away is no longer as viable a strategy, and players will have to find new ways to survive.
"On top of that, there's going to be a special event running for the first few weeks of the update where Franco can also visit other Trials," Charbonneau continued. "Even as you play Trials that you know, because he's around now, it changes the way you're going to behave or complete the objectives in those Trials. So this one is a huge change."
While Franco's presence might have major ripple effects on how The Outlast Trials feels, he's far from the only thing that'll change how you play in the new season. Red Barrels is also adding Escalation Therapy, a new roguelike game mode.
In Escalation Therapy, players take on a series of Trials and attempt to get as far as possible. With each completed Trial and secondary objective, players will unlock elements like Rigs (which grant players powers like healing teammates or stunning enemies) or other character upgrades—essentially building a loadout throughout the run. Escalation Therapy also adds "Variators" at random to each new run, modifiers that can alter the makeup or rules of a given Trial. If your whole team dies, you'll have to start over with new loadout options and Variators.
"Escalation Therapy is basically a mixtape of all the content that we have," Charbonneau said. "The further you go in Escalation, the harder it gets, because we're throwing in more and more Variators, which completely change the Trials. Also, the fact that you start with nothing."
"It's captivating. The team loves it," he added. "It's the only mode we play now."
There are a lot of other, somewhat smaller changes and additions coming to The Outlast Trials to address player feedback, as well. A new Rig called Barricade will give you the ability to block doors, possibly stopping pursuing enemies or buying extra time to complete objectives. Daily and weekly tasks will also give avid players more to do when they log in, and a new difficulty system will let them fine-tune how challenging they want Trials to be—making the game more approachable for some players and more challenging for others.
And Red Barrels is adding to the Sleep Room, the social area that serves as a lobby between missions, and where you can customize your character and living quarters with cosmetic items and rewards.
Those are all things the community wants more of, according to Charbonneau. Feedback from players has been a huge part of The Outlast Trials' development throughout.
It was player feedback, in fact, that led Red Barrels to push the live service aspects of The Outlast Trials in the first place. Charbonneau told me that Red Barrels always intended for The Outlast Trials to be a multiplayer game, but it was the response of the player community after the release of its original closed beta that helped shape the game into what it is now.
"We didn't know what the reception of the game would be before we came out in closed beta two years ago," he explained. "And it did change a lot of things in our minds after we went public. It's a very unique game—an intense, gory, horror kind of game. And for us as players, sometimes you get too much, and you're like, 'Okay, I'll play just an hour, then I might come back next week,' or something like that."
"But what we realized," he continued, "is that players were super hooked in the game loop, and the fact that it's a persistent place, the Murkoff facility. You meet other players, you play with your friends, and there's just this chain going on."
Realizing how much fans wanted to keep replaying the different Trials, either to challenge themselves with different difficulty levels or to play together with their friends, prompted a major pivot within the studio. Throughout Early Access, Red Barrels worked to make The Outlast Trials into what it is today, rebalancing the game to accommodate both solo and cooperative players and reworking the progression to allow for different difficulty levels.
That focus continues into the first season, with Escalation Therapy and other systems to make the game more replayable and engaging over time.
"When we hit [the release version], we fixed a lot of things and people were really enjoying it. But again, the same comments came back and they're like, 'We love the game so much, we want more replayability,'" Charbonneau explained. "So with this update, we're trying to fix many, many things to make sure that players can really get what they want, which is: they want to come in every day, they want to come in every week. Now we'll have a bunch of systems and new content to make sure that, from this point on, the house is in order and we can just expand in various ways."
Now that the game has hit its stride, Charbonneau hopes The Outlast Trials can function as something of a platform, allowing Red Barrels to expand it with new ideas to see how the player community likes them.
One example he floated was the possibility of a competitive mode—the developers have noticed that some players like to add a little chaos to their cooperative play by doing things like purposely drawing enemies to their teammates or slamming doors in their friends' faces at the worst possible times. A mode in which players are not working together, but are only out for themselves, is a direction The Outlast Trials might explore in the future.
Charbonneau said he and the developers try to be as close to the community as possible. They keep tabs on the ideas and opinions of the player community through Red Barrels' Discord server, Reddit threads, and the team's community managers, and all of those help determine The Outlast Trials' future.
"While we're making a game, we love playing it, for sure, but we also love seeing the players guide us and tell us what they love, what they want, and where they see us going," he said. "So to be honest, whenever we talk about updates, it's not about what we could do, it's mostly like, what can fit in this update, because there's so many things. This update was really an extension of what we have, and just refined many things—but in the future, the next update, the next season, we're always going to try to bring new stuff in the game to make sure it's always a fun and surprising experience. "
The Outlast Trials is now available on the Epic Game Store. Project Lupara, its first content season, launches on July 16.