How’s this for a horror story? You spend hours farming gear in your favourite loot game. You find some truly awesome stuff, including some legendaries. Then, one moment, out of the blue, it’s all gone. Everything, to the point where your character is basically naked. For some Outriders players, that’s less a terrifying nightmare than it is a very stark reality.
Outriders, out last week for every major platform but the Switch, is the latest buzzy cooperative looter-shooter. An always-online game, Outriders launched to a day of server issues. Some players had trouble logging in; others would get booted mid-session. Even those who tried to play solo experienced some turbulence. On Friday evening, developer People Can Fly took the servers offline entirely for a few hours for emergency maintenance. Matchmaking, though relatively more stable now, still isn’t perfect. Outriders supports crossplay across all platforms, but PC players and console players remain unable to party up with each other, and even inter-console players might run into the occasional hiccup. (Last night, I, playing on PlayStation 5, experienced two disconnects with a teammate on Xbox Series X.)
[referenced id=”1213068″ url=”https://www.kotaku.com.au/2021/04/outriders-launches-to-a-day-of-server-problems-like-every-other-online-game/” thumb=”https://www.gizmodo.com.au/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2021/04/03/cpn42xq7d8bgralxpbvj-300×169.jpg” title=”Outriders Launches To A Day Of Server Problems, Like Every Other Online Game” excerpt=”If you play video games in the 21st century, you’re no stranger to this: A popular game launches that demands an internet connection. Interested players buy it, can’t access the servers, and can’t play the thing they paid for. The latest offender is Outriders, a class-based loot shooter from developer…”]
It’s not terribly astonishing to see an online-only game launch with a litany of server woes, seeing as that’s the norm these days. Nor is it too surprising to see a big-budget game launch with a raft of minor bugs. Those things tend to get ironed out eventually. But a bigger shadow looms over Outriders, which is apparently plagued by an insidious bug that eliminates all of your hard-earned gear, and it’s unclear when a fix might come in.
Over the past few days, players have taken to social media to share experiences about suddenly losing all of their gear. A prominent working theory suggested that gear wipes only happen when trying to pair up with random players, but others have detailed instances in which they’ve lost everything while playing with friends. This morning, one Reddit user posted a collage of wiped inventories with the headline, “This is starting to be really scary.”
The developer is aware. “We’re still figuring out whether the best way would be a one-to-one customer support team method (which may be more accurate but would take much longer and may not be feasible if there are many cases), or whether we are able to (as previously) run a mass-one-off restoration event via our backend,” representatives for Square Enix wrote on the game’s known issues thread on Reddit.
After the Outriders demo became widely available on February 25, players quickly figured out how to farm for legendary weapons. In some instances, those legendary weapons would suddenly disappear from inventories without warning. On March 25, People Can Fly took the game’s servers offline for an hour, a period of maintenance that ended up restoring lost legendary weapons.
It’s unclear what the timeline is for a fix for the current inventory losses, if there are any developer-approved workarounds, or if there will be any recourse for afflicted players. When reached for comment, Square Enix pointed Kotaku to the game’s social media channels.
In the meantime, Square Enix, if you’re reading this, before today, I had all of the game’s legendary weapons in my inventory. Yup. All of them. True story. No need to look into it, though: When, or if, a fix comes in, you can just take my word for it and restore it all. Thanks in advance!
More Outriders
[referenced id=”1213179″ url=”https://www.kotaku.com.au/2021/04/square-enix-that-redneck-mob-storming-d-c-line-in-outriders-is-pure-coincidence/” thumb=”https://www.gizmodo.com.au/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2021/04/06/epcgjchk6crubmqzmwz9-300×169.jpg” title=”Square Enix: That ‘Redneck Mob Storming D.C.’ Line In Outriders Is Pure Coincidence” excerpt=”There’s an offhand line in Outriders that sure sounds like a reference to the failed January 7 insurrection in Washington, D.C. According to the game’s publisher, any connections one could make there are “purely coincidental.””]
[referenced id=”1213018″ url=”https://www.kotaku.com.au/2021/04/five-good-settings-to-tweak-in-outriders/” thumb=”https://www.gizmodo.com.au/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2021/04/02/wmboeyigmtzvlz5iaxuc-300×169.jpg” title=”Five Good Settings To Tweak In Outriders” excerpt=”As if there weren’t enough looter-shooters around, Outriders is out today. It’s a whole lot of game, with a whole lot of settings that can affect how you play. Some are obvious; some are not. It goes without saying that such things are a matter of taste, but I’ve found…”]
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