If you play video games in the 21st century, you are no stranger to this: a popular game is launching that requires an internet connection. Interested players buy it, cannot access the servers, and cannot play what they paid for. The last culprit is Outriders, a class-based loot shooter from developer People Can Fly.
Outriders launched yesterday to some sort of sputtering across platforms. Some players could not get past the initial load, stuck on a perpetual “Logged in!” screen. (The key was just to practice patience, life’s rarest virtue.) Some couldn’t even get to that initial frozen screen, while others got kicked out of the game during missions.
Last night I worked with Kotakuis Zack Zweizen to test the cooperative. We both play on PlayStation 5 and we both have a relatively stable internet service. It took us 24 minutes to party. After about an hour of play, I was booted from our session at the start of a mission. It took us another 11 minutes to party again.
We are not alone. Social media channels to be widespread with users share comparable experiences(My personal favorite? Reddit post with the headline, “Are the servers also on Enoch?”) Kotakuis John Walker tweeted that the Xbox servers shut down when he was at the end of a mission and then didn’t let him in the game at all.
These connectivity issues persisted right up to the second day of the game, which is what People Can Fly is recognized in a tweet. At the moment of writing, the Outriders server Status website lists multiplayer as ‘operational’ and core components as ‘major outage’. (Hmm …) Earlier today, core components were marked “operational”, while the multiplayer service was listed as “partially operational”.
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“We are aware that a small percentage of players are experiencing certain issues and our teams are proactively collecting information and working on updates and fixes,” Square Enix representatives told me via email yesterday.
That a launch failed online only isn’t exactly surprising. We’ve seen it with Autumn guys The division Destiny, and Assassin 3 kind ofWhat’s curious here is that People Can Fly has stuck to that Outriders is not a service game – like Destiny or Avengers or The division– and rather is one you can pick up and play as “a complete experience out of the box”. Although Outriders Shines as a cooperative game, it is also designed to be played entirely as a single player experience, yet you need an internet connection to play.
“We have a lot of stuff in the backend, so you need to be connected to the internet to play,” said Bartosz Kmita of People Can Fly told IGN
Needless to say, this is a total bummer. Obviously, you need servers to enable multiplayer connections, and it is clear that it is impossible to predict exactly how many players will flood those servers on the first day. (People can fly said that more than 2 million players have tried the game’s free demo. Those numbers were revealed before Square Enix, Outriderspublishing house, announced that the game would be available on Game Pass at launch.) But I feel like the game’s intention to be single player means you should just be able to load and play it. Friends are nice, but not necessary in the end Outriders to work. Do not get me wrong. I love the game and am having such a blast so far. I wish I could play it reliably.
Update: 4 p.m. ET: People can fly took the Outriders servers offline.
Update 6:04 PM ET: People can fly said Which Outriders servers were back online everywhere, except in the United States States.
Update 6:46 PM ET: The US servers are apparently back online