Square Enix's new sci-fi project Outriders gets its first teaser video ahead of E3 2019

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Someone's waking up from cryosleep, and they look pissed

Today, Square Enix released a short teaser to get us all hyped for Outriders ahead of E3 2019. It's one of the many E3 2019 games coming our way next week. Ahead of Outriders' full debut on Monday, June 10 as part of the Square Enix E3 2019 showing in the E3 2019 schedule, you can get a glimpse of its angry-looking protagonist (or villain?) waking from cryosleep.

If you didn't know Outriders existed before just now, don't worry - it's been largely under wraps for more than a year, so consider this to be Square Enix dropping a few bread crumbs before we find out what the game actually is. While there's no official confirmation just yet, Outriders seems to be the project Square Enix is making in partnership with People Can Fly, the Polish studio behind rock-solid shooters like Bulletstorm, Gears of War: Judgment, and the Painkiller series. PCF even helped Epic Games make Fortnite: Save the World before going independent again in 2015 (and missed out on all those ridiculous Battle Royale profits). 

The Outriders Twitter account quietly spun into life in May, dropping a series of lore snippets for a world we still know nothing about. The gist is that Captain Simon B. Archan, commander of the Flores ship, is charting a course from a ruined Earth to the planet Enoch, which "may well be humanity's last hope and salvation." It seems like trouble may be afoot when the crew arrives, though, judging by Archan's notes that "Sgt. Major Maxwell's army on board the Flores gives me little comfort for our own safety, particularly given his hostility towards Captain Tanner and his Outriders." At the moment, I'm picturing Outriders taking place on the Flores in Enoch's orbit, with the player emerging from cryostasis into a ship of nightmares (a la System Shock and 2017's Prey).

We first caught wind of Outriders back in 2018, when PC Gamer reported that Square Enix and People Can Fly were working on a new "AAA shooter," with PCF opening two new studios to help make it happen. News on Outriders has been sparse since, save for People Can Fly CEO Sebastian Wojciechowski telling DualShockers that the "ambition around this game and the scope of the game grew over time, so it is a much bigger, much more ambitious project than what we pitched back in 2015."

We'll find out for sure what Outriders is - and hopefully how it plays - when Square Enix pulls back the curtain on June 10. You can set your clocks for 18:00 PT / 21:00 ET / 02:00 BST to make sure you don't miss it. 

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Lucas Sullivan
Lucas Sullivan

Lucas Sullivan is the former US Managing Editor of GamesRadar+. Lucas spent seven years working for GR, starting as an Associate Editor in 2012 before climbing the ranks. He left us in 2019 to pursue a career path on the other side of the fence, joining 2K Games as a Global Content Manager. Lucas doesn't get to write about games like Borderlands and Mafia anymore, but he does get to help make and market them.