Outridersdevelopers used the game’sofficial Twitter accountto promise to explain everything that went wrong with the game’s launch, once all the major bugs have been fixed. Despite its initial popularity,Outridershas been plagued with connectivity issues that prevent players from joining sessions, a big issue in a game built around the idea of cooperative gameplay.
After being questioned if the developers could explain what exactly went wrong on release, developersPeople Can Flypledged publicly to give more details aboutOutriders' shortcomings as soon as everything urgent is patched out. The original tweet reads: “We’re still continually working through it all, but we’re hoping to in the near future share more specific details about what’s going on and what we’ve been doing about it.”
SinceOutriderswas released last week, April 1, players report getting constantly disconnected from online sessions, or being entirely unable to join friends to play online. It didn’t take long for developers to flag players about a desynchronization between different systems, such as PC and different consoles. This is a big issue since one of the selling points ofOutriderswas the ability to cross-play from day one, which means to play online with players from all different platforms where the game’s available. The first workaround was to disconnect cross-play while the developers tried to fix the problem.
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Even without cross-play, players experienced server instability, getting kicked from sessions and losing progress, a huge source of frustration in alooter-shooter, a genre in which players need to collect everything they can in order to get stronger in-game. To make things worse, players from PC and console also reported being unable to even start playing, for which another workaround was found by the devs. Aseries of tweetsrecommend players don’t select the “continue” option on the lobby, choosing a start point manually.
Outriderscurrently hold aneutral score on Steam, the biggest online store for PC players, with 40% of the almost 15,000 reviews being negative. Most of these reviews report connectivity issues.Outridersservers were completely offline Sunday, as the team tried to fix some of the most concerning issues. But even without server instability,Outridersstill packs a lot of visual glitches and bugs, teleporting enemies behind walls and deforming elements on the screen. People Can Fly have a long way ahead of them if they wantOutridersto be the big hit they intended it to be.
If People Can Fly keeps its promise, we’ll certainly get a lot of relevant insights about how a game that was developed during five years to be an online-focused experience can release in such a state.Outridersis now available on Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and Stadia.
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