Baffling nerfs. Connection issues. Inventory wipes. Since Outriders launched a month ago, the game has been plagued by issues. For every step forward, the loot-shooter seemingly takes two back. Today’s update, the first significant one in several weeks, is no exception.
A major patch released this morning is billed as the “biggest” one yet, and purports to address more than 100 ongoing problems with the game. Even the snipers — the fucking snipers — have been nerfed, technically: Going forward, players will have more time to dodge shots. The patch notes don’t say anything about the real issues with snipers — that shots deal stupid amounts of damage and stagger you for what feels like a second past the point of fairness.
Crucially, the patch addresses the game’s notorious “sign in” issue, which has afflicted the game since its demo was released in late February. Outriders, an always-online game, requires players to sign in from a starting menu before accessing the character selection screen. When players would log in, they’d sometimes end up with the screen stuck on “signing in.” During the demo period, the solution was simple: Close the game and reopen it.
After the game’s full release, the issue persisted. People Can Fly suggested a new workaround at launch, which was just as simple as the old one but exponentially more arduous: just sit and wait. Once you eventually made it into the game, there was a nonzero chance you’d just get disconnected and have to start the process from scratch.
I’ve played a whole lot of Outriders over the past month and have found that waiting around indeed sometimes worked. I also found that the age-old trick of “turn it off and back on again” worked, too. (For context, I play on PlayStation 5.) Point is, it’s erratic and unpredictable, but was undeniably busted across the board.
This morning, I closed and restarted the game five times to see if the problem really was addressed. Every time, I made it to the lobby in seconds — a remarkable improvement over the nearly 15-minute wait times I’ve experienced over the past month. Sure, that screeching feathered space pterodactyl was still there every reboot, but, hey, baby steps.
Classes received apparent tweaks as well. Tricksters, you know that thing where you activate the Hunt the Prey skill and, instead of teleporting across the battlefield, you just…don’t go anywhere? That’s addressed. There’s also this line item, for Devastators: “Fixed a crash that could occur if you Boulderdashed into a wall.” I have never seen nor heard of this crash but holy hell that sounds hilarious. (If this has happened to you, please email me!)
Despite introducing much-needed fixes, today’s rollout isn’t all peaches and gravy. For one, the patch notably doesn’t do anything to address long-awaited inventory restorations. Shortly after Outriders launched, some players reported entire inventory wipes. They’d log in, only to see all of their weapons and armour missing, with no apparent way to reclaim it. In certain edge cases, there was no way to even play as those characters any more. This issue persisted well into April. An April 15 patch prevented the issue from affecting any players going forward, yet didn’t do anything to restore missing gear.
There’s a fix in the works to restore that stuff, but it won’t be perfect. Any gear that’s rated rare (blue) or lower is likely gone for good, but People Can Fly believes epic (purple) and legendary (gold) stuff will be salvageable, albeit with potentially different stats. On April 16, People Can Fly said it hoped to release news about the update early the following week. A development update shared via Reddit on April 23 basically amounted to “we’re still working on it.”
Today People Can Fly detailed the holdup in the patch notes, writing that, “[it] has been hard to provide an exact date on its go live date so far, mainly because it has hovered on the very threshold of releasing for some time, but a small number of edge cases have forced us to reiterate and retest the process several times over.”
The patch also didn’t exactly go off without a hitch. Shortly after it became available, some Xbox users reported an inability to log in. People Can Fly suggested those users power down their console completely, unplug it for a few minutes (thus clearing the cache), and try again.
What’s more, the Killing Spree mod — a popular tier-3 weapon mod that increases damage out for a period of time after you kill an enemy — saw its length inadvertently reduced from 20 to 10 seconds, essentially turning it from a devastating powerhouse tool to a toothless waste of space. To address this, People Can Fly took the game’s servers offline at 10:30 a.m. for a half-hour period of maintenance — reminiscent of yet not quite as bad as the three-hour shutdown on launch day.
Following the maintenance, Xbox users apparently still had issues logging in. People Can Fly suggests those players create a new character to get into the lobby. You can create up to six characters in Outriders. It’s an edge case, but, for folks who have all six character slots full already, will they then have to delete one of their characters to get into the game? It’s unclear. Kotaku has reached out to Square Enix, the game’s publisher, for clarification but did not immediately hear back.
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