To follow Outriders’ post-launch journey is to watch an Olympic game of whack-a-mole. Developer People Can Fly will stamp out one issue, only for another to pop right up. The latest: Some players are apparently getting instantly killed by attacks that otherwise would not cause instantaneous death.
“We are aware of the issue whereby damage mitigation isn’t acting as expected for some players, resulting in those players dieing [sic] very quickly or in some cases instantly when hit by an attack,” People Can Fly wrote in a tweet.
Twitter user Artorious shared a video clip that illustrates just how immediate some of these deaths can be. Their character, a Trickster rocking legendary equipment, takes on the Blood Merchant boss (from the Paxian Homestead post-game expedition) and an alpha perforo. Artorious is at full health and sporting the Trickster’s temporary shield, which should mitigate some damage. And yet, they go down in a single hit. (Alpha perforos suck and Blood Merchant suuucks, but neither are “die immediately” levels of suck.)
Another player posted a similar clip, also from the Blood Merchant fight, showing their character dropping from five figures of health to nothing in a second. Other players have shared similar stories on social media, with some claims dating back to the middle of April.
In a Reddit post detailing the issue, People Can Fly stressed that last week’s update — the “biggest” Outriders patch to date — “did not intentionally change any formulas” that could’ve tweaked the game so health bars are essentially meaningless. Armour isn’t any weaker. Enemies aren’t any stronger. Rather, the developer wrote, it appears this is a bug that affects “some players under certain conditions” (emphasis People Can Fly’s). It’s been on the developer’s radar for some time.
“We’ve been tracking a similar issue with damage mitigation since before our last patch released,” the studio wrote. “As we were unable to find a consistent reproduction of it at the time, it was not addressed in the latest patch and our investigation is ongoing. This thread will help us further identify the cause.”
It is unclear how many players are affected, nor what the timeline is for a potential fix. When reached for comment, Square Enix, Outriders’ publisher, did not provide specific figures or details about a time, but did point Kotaku toward two potential workarounds. Affected players should try un-equipping and re-equipping their armour. If that doesn’t do the trick, they should take off all their armour, close the game completely, reload, and then put their armour back on.
Further, People Can Fly did not state a timeline for a fix, instead pointing affected players to a 20-question survey that poses questions like “Did you change your armour to another item and back again before you noticed the issue?” and “Are you sure that you were one-shot or could you have been hit by two hard-hitting attacks [in] very quick succession?”
Spitballing a solution: Adding a self-revive feature to solo play would go a long way toward easing some of the frustration from unanticipated deaths.
Read: One Month Later, Outriders Still Can’t Catch A Break
Meanwhile, reports of connection woes persist. Connectivity isn’t nearly as bad as it once was — the notorious “sign in” issue, where players would end up stuck on the login screen for up to 10 minutes, is far better than it was at launch — but it’s still not flawless, with some players saying they’ve been dropped mid-game or can’t connect to the server. (Outriders is an always-online game.) And then there’s the still-persistent issue of inventory wipes. Though People Can Fly has reportedly patched against future inventory wipes, previously lost gear has not yet been restored to players, and some of those impacted characters are still reportedly locked.
But, hey, if you reframe your perspective, you can spot the glint of a silver lining. As one player put it in a tweet: “Can’t get one-hit killed if your character is unplayable.”
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