If you’re playing video games in the 21st century, it’s no stranger to you – a popular game that requires an internet connection is launched. Interested players buy it, cannot access the servers and cannot play what they have paid for. The last offender is Outriders, a class-based booty shooter from developer People Can Fly.
Outriders was launched yesterday on all sorts of platforms. Some players they could not exceed the initial load, stuck to a perpetual “Signed In” screen. (The key was simply to practice patience, the rarest virtue of life.) Some were not even able to reach this frozen initial screen, while others ended up being kicked out of the game in the middle of missions.
Last night I teamed up with KotakuZack Zweizen will test the cooperative. We’re both playing PlayStation 5 and we both have relatively stable internet service. It took us 24 minutes to party. After about an hour of play, I started our session at the beginning of a mission. It took us another 11 minutes to party again.
We are not alone. Social media channels they are full up with users sharing similar experiences. (My personal favorite? Reddit post titled: “Are Enoch’s Servers Too?”) KotakuJohn Walker he tweeted that Xbox servers crashed when he was at the end of a mission and then didn’t let him return to the game.
These connectivity issues have persisted on the second day of the game, which people can fly recognized in a tweet. From this writing, the Outriders server status the website lists multiplayer as “operational” and basic components as “major disruption”. (Hmm …) Earlier today, the basic components were marked as “operational”, while the multiplayer service was shown as “partially operational”.
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“We are aware that a small percentage of players are facing certain issues and our teams are proactively collecting information and working on updates and fixes,” Square Enix representatives emailed me yesterday.
That an online-only release has been twisted isn’t exactly surprising. We’ve seen it with Autumn boys, The division, Destiny, i Hitman 3 (kind of). What’s curious here is that People Can Fly has stood firm in that line Outriders it is not a service game, like Destiny or Avengers or The division“And it’s more than that.” you can pick up and play as “a complete out-of-the-box experience.” But Outriders shines like a cooperative game, it’s also designed to be played entirely as a single-player experience, and yet you need an internet connection to play.
“We have a lot of things in the background, so you have to be connected to the internet to be able to play,” says Bartosz Kmita of People Can Fly he told IGN.
Needless to say, it’s a total hassle. Obviously, you need servers to allow multiplayer connections, and it is obviously impossible to predict exactly how many players will swarm these servers on the first day. (People can fly dit that more than 2 million players tried the free demo of the game. These numbers were revealed before Square Enix, Outriders‘editor, announced that the game would be available in Game Pass at launch.) But I think the intent of the game to be a player means you should be able to load it and play it. Friends are friendly, but ultimately unnecessary Outriders to work. Don’t get me wrong. I love the game and so far I have had a great time. I just wish I could play it reliably.
Update: 16:00 ET: People can fly took the Outriders offline servers.
Updated 18:04 ET: People can fly dit that Outriders servers were back online everywhere except in the United States States.
Updated at 18:46 ET: The servers in the United States are apparently, it’s back online.