If you play video games in the 21st century, this is no exception: a popular game is launched that requires an Internet connection. Interested players buy, cannot access the servers and cannot play what they have paid. The last offender is Outriders, a class-based loot shooter from developer People Can Fly.
Outriders launched yesterday for a kind of cross-platform sputter. Some players failed to pass the initial load, stuck in a perpetual “Connected!” screen. (The key there was simply to practice patience, the rarest virtue in life.) Some couldn’t even get to the frozen home screen, while others ended up being kicked out of the game in the middle of the missions.
Last night, I joined KotakuZack Zweizen to test the cooperative. We are both playing on PlayStation 5 and have a relatively stable internet service. It took us 24 minutes to get to the party. After about an hour of play, I was kicked out of our session at the beginning of a mission. It took us another 11 minutes to have fun again.
We are not alone. Social media channels are abundant with users sharing similar experiences. (My personal favorite? Reddit post entitled “Are the servers also on Enoch?”) KotakuJohn Walker of tweeted that the Xbox servers went down when he was at the end of a mission and would not let him return to the game.
These connectivity problems persisted until the second day of the game, something that people can fly recognized in a tweet. At the time of writing, The Outriders server status the site lists multiplayer as “operational” and the main components as having a “major disruption”. (Hmm …) Earlier today, the main components were marked as “operational”, while the multiplayer service appeared as “partially operational”.
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“We are aware that a small percentage of players are encountering certain problems and our teams are proactively gathering information and working on updates and corrections,” Square Enix officials told me yesterday via email.
The fact that an online-only release went awry is not exactly surprising. We saw it with Fall Guys, The division, Destiny, and Hitman 3 (kind of) What is curious here is that People Can Fly has remained firm in the line that Outriders it is not a service game – as Destiny or Avengers or The division– and is the one who you can pick up and play as “a complete experience out of the box”. Nonetheless Outriders it shines as a cooperative game, it is 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 on the backend, so you have to be connected to the internet to be able to play,” Bartosz Kmita of People Can Fly said IGN.
This is, needless to say, a total bore. Obviously, you need servers to allow multiplayer connections and, of course, it is impossible to predict exactly how many players will break into these servers on the first day. (People can fly said that more than 2 million players have tried the free demo of the game. These figures were revealed before Square Enix, Outriders‘publishing company, announced that the game would be available on the Game Pass at launch.) But I feel that the game’s intention to be a player means that you should be able to just load it up and play. Friends are nice, but are ultimately unnecessary for Outriders work. Do not misunderstand me. I’m loving the game and I’m having a great time so far. I just wanted to be able to play it reliably.
Update: 16h ET: People can fly took The Outriders offline servers.
18h04 ET update: People can fly said This one Outriders servers were online everywhere except in the United States States.
18h46 ET update: US servers are apparently back online.