When talking about examples of live service games, I’d love to talk more about “The Outlast Trials” and the ways in which it uses the live service elements in a multiplayer horror game.
In all honesty, I wanted to cover this almost a week ago and even played through some of the recent event quest with friends before writing this. Even so, a bit more time and more conversation around live service games helps me formulate a stronger opinion on how Red Barrels uses their live service game as they do.
For those who might be unfamiliar, “The Outlast Trials” is a live service game that shares its name and world with Red Barrel’s previous hit horror IP “Outlast.” With a welcome twist to the game, The Outlast Trials is a multiplayer entry with repeatable missions that are interspersed with familiar objectives but random generation. The story-based single player linear narrative is more traditional and I’d go as far as to say this is a bold direction to take their game, but I personally believe that Red Barrels absolutely nailed their mark and continue to execute some of the best examples of live service I’ve seen. I’d like to take a moment to recommend the experience as a frequent enjoyer, being $40 on Steam for one of the best multiplayer horror games out there.
Before getting into their recent Escape, Under Surveillance update, I want to share a bit more detail about the game’s early development and the path they’ve taken. Red Barrels began the game’s early access in May of 2023 with 3 main trials and about 6 “Mk-Challenges,” miniature adventures set in the environments they’d made with their main trials. It was a pretty significant amount of content despite the low numbers—with some difficulty adjustments and modifiers that changed gameplay, I found myself fighting for my life with friends as we made it to the end of the game’s content at the time. It has had an official release in 2024 with 5 trials and more content as well as consistent seasonal updates that has left us now with 6 main trials—
Wait. There’s 7?
Ok so this wasn’t going to be a praise piece on how fast Red Barrels posts their content because I believe that the art of posting a reasonable amount of content over time for live service is a more complex one than just “make more content.” However, it turns out that The Outlast Trials releases enough consistent content that even I’ve lost track with over 70 hours in the game. I barely remember playing much of trial 6, much less a 7th that I’m now gonna have to plan to play through with my group.
Back on track: The game’s been going through a great introduction of new content and systems that constantly leave something fresh for the game’s audience. It also, as noted by the newest event, continues to expand its story in ways that affect the entire audience with a powerful use of adjusting its gameplay elements. As a rather casual player considering my failure to keep up with current trials, I’d have probably been lost on a lot of the changes that have come from the Escape event that was ongoing during 2024. It was a pretty in-depth experience from my understanding—introduction of a new character Amelia with players working through trials to assist in her escape plot. I came back to cover the second part of this in which an escape was possible, adding a quest given to us as an alternative ending to our time at the Sinyala Facility.
The game makes this event’s presence known, replacing passive sounds in even the loading screens to new code words and ominous messaging from Amelia such as “they can’t kill us all.” The game’s normal mission select gives players the choice to escape through a hacked message—it’s unclear at the first point if choosing to ignore it means that you’ll lose access to it. It feels incredibly real and immersive, hard to miss because of its nature but feeling like every second ticking and waiting for friends to join in is wasted. I wanted to leave the contents of the mission a secret for those that might end up playing it, but it looks as though it will be properly disappearing in a couple of days and likely never returning as it was. It’s a rather simple mission—a completely new environment and some simple mechanics to eventually run out and escape the facility through the garbage disposal system. It’s incredibly standard in every way but the assets and visuals used to make the differences of these facility walls apparent in comparison to the normal trials. The ending is a very simple but effective one, all of the players running out into the open world before letting you remake your reagent for continued play. It doesn’t consume the tokens used for releasing agents through the normal systems, but it counts as an additional reagent released (at least from my limited knowledge) for your statistics. The worldbuilding around The Outlast Trials and Red Barrel’s understanding of this in order to make their events pop is a key feature of their live service journey.
The point is that with the usage of development time for specific limited time events that open the world helps highlight just how well their worldbuilding contributes to the horror of their survival game, making it a stand out feature of this new entry to the Outlast series. The strange sense of fear I have that this escape only exists as a limited event is palpable—newer players or ones that aren’t active right now will maybe never get a chance like this to experience this secondary ending. While this begs the question of FOMO—the “Fear Of Missing Out,”—I think The Outlast Trials avoided making this escape quest particularly long or unique because this was meant to be missable in that way. To put long development time into new systems or mechanics would cause a lot of wasted effort that also would be annoying for players that miss it, so Red Barrels instead opts to put in some visual effort to make the look memorable in a way that amplifies the experience for living through it while still being somewhat accessible through videos and content past the ending date. Despite this being their first live service project, they demonstrate a phenomenal mastery of how they want to implement content in a way that I think any horror fan would enjoy running through with a group of friends.
Alright now I gotta go and play some more to see all the new things I’ve missed—