After being another game suffering from launch problems, Outriders shows a practice that is becoming irritatingly common in the game industry.
Occasionally the game industry seems to make a point of playing in our faces that this is a medium that does not deserve our affection. Becoming more and more common to see titles that were released without having been properly polished, unfortunately we are getting used to the idea that some games will only become minimally satisfactory after a certain time and the most recent to leave that first bitter impression was the Outriders .
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Credit: Disclosure / People Can Fly
Developed by Poles from People Can Fly ( Painkiller , Gears of War: Judgment , Bulletstorm ), some people created a great expectation for this which was treated as a game with the potential to be a new Destiny . But despite the creation of the Warsaw-based studio has its qualities, what has stood out at the beginning are the various problems that the Outriders have been facing.
It all started on the 1st ?????? April, when the title was made available for PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One and Xbox Series S | X. In the days that followed, getting into a game became a virtually impossible task and according to a publication by the staff of Square Enix, who is the publisher of the game, the problem was in the way the calls were being made on the servers .
But even with the effort on the part of the developer and in the transparent way in which the problem was treated, a good part of the players ( myself included ) were bothered by the instability and a rain of complaints fell on social networks. To try to alleviate the frustration, People Can Fly promised to give some gifts to those who played Outriders in the first two weeks, but this initial difficulty would shed light on something even worse.
As with most of the so-called loot shooters, this one also requires us to be connected at all times, even if we are playing alone. In addition to keeping us out of the game in case the servers experience problems, an instability in our connection may simply suddenly take us out of the game and believe me, sooner or later it will happen.
Also know that this is a game that does not allow us to stop the action by pressing Start or entering the inventory. What makes this imposition even worse is the fact that the Outriders are divided into locations that serve as arenas, so, except for the city that serves as the central hub, if we are not in an area filled with enemies wanting our head, we will be heading for one.
Now, we are talking about a title that despite having combat as a main point and that encourages cooperative matches, it can very well be faced alone and has an interesting plot. This makes us question the reason for this obligation to always be connected and although I suspect it has to do with the loot system, nothing justifies the annoyance of not being able to face a shootout because we can’t get a connection or even the time it can take to get in. on a server.
Credit: Disclosure / People Can Fly
The inventory that was no longer there
But while some people struggled to enter the servers or mourned the problems related to the games between consoles and PC , there is another risk that has worried many people, which is the disappearance of the items in the inventories. Occurring at random and without having an explanation for it yet, the bug has been merciless to those who are affected, causing everything that players collected during their game to disappear.
On Reddit it is possible to find several reports of people who saw their inventories being emptied and try to imagine, for example, how revolting it must be to enter a game and discover that 94 hours of “work” were simply thrown in the trash, with your character having only the undergarments were kept.
Apparently the problem would be happening mainly among those who are in the most advanced parts of the campaign, but without a pattern being detected, by Steam the developers are trying to collect information to better understand what is causing the Outriders to present such a gross error. There, they also promised that soon everyone will get back the missing items, something that for some should be as impactful as “the Blip”.
But if in any type of game this would be a bug worthy of criticism, when it comes to one that has as its main attraction the collection of items, the failure gains a much greater proportion. Just like in other titles of the genre, the Outriders try to hook us when we see our characters find a much more powerful weapon or a cool outfit and as he has been criticized precisely for not having a big difference or for not being revolutionary, the addictive factor proposed by collecting loot ends up becoming what keeps us interested in continuing to play.
However, by delivering such a hard blow to collectors of player stuff, People Can Fly managed to put their creation in evidence, but in a way that no studio would like. It remains to be seen how long they will take to correct the error, but regardless of when it will happen, it will be too late for Outriders not to join a list of games with problematic releases and which is no longer as select as we would like.
People Can Fly office in Warsaw (Credit: Disclosure / People Can Fly)
Changing the tire with the car in motion
Some will say that it is nothing more than pure laziness on the part of the developer, but the truth is that to meet insane deadlines or by sheer budgetary constraints , seeing games being fixed after they have been released is a practice that should become increasingly common.
A few months ago we saw something similar happen with one of the most anticipated titles in recent years, Cyberpunk 2077 and the explanation for the disappointment it caused is precisely in its troubled development .
This bad first impression could also be seen in titles such as Final Fantasy XIV , No Man’s Sky or Fallout 76 and some may even remember the notorious Error 37 , which plagued Diablo III leaving many people without knowing what was happening and, mainly, without get to know the long-awaited Blizzard game.
The similarity between these cases is that, over time, their respective developers managed to turn the situation around, making their creations much better and managing to win over even those who criticized them. Whether the same will happen with Outriders or even Cyberpunk 2077 , only time will tell. Until then, we can only hope that another major launch does not reach our hands with such a huge amount of problems.
