Outriders first Patch News and gifts to Launch players announced

The developers of Outriders revealed today the first patch details and launch date, shared info on the upcoming fixes and surprised the community with gifts coming to early-adopters. Re-balancing is also a popular word in today’s announcement from People Can Fly. Unfortunately for most of us this would result in nerfs. Lots and lots of nerfs.

People Can Fly are showing consistency and commitment to open communication with their constant presence and updates on the latest Outriders issues and bugs confirmed by the community.

Today, as promised a day before, the Outriders developers revealed the details for the upcoming first patch to the game after its launch.

Since April 1st Outriders has been one of the hottest topics in the gaming world. While many content creators and giant media outlets jumped the still trending belief that negativism drives clicks and gets you more popular, the many good parts about Outriders were left behind.

Outriders launched with severe server issues. Being an online-only game showed the world once again that these events are unavoidable. Disconnects and character inventory wipes were among the most frustrating bugs. But they are getting fixed. And you will be rewarded for having gone through this first rocky launch week of the game.

Outriders is a great. No. It’s a fantastic game and if you ignore the traditional launch issues that follow up nearly every modern big game these days, you end up with a real treasure in your hands. The game is so good that both me and Ruby are playing it every free moment we get since last Thursday!

But, how about those changes, eh!?

The first patch comes next week

The first big patch for Outriders is currently targeting a release some time “next week”. This leaves a five work-days window between 12th and 16th of April.

“As of today, the deployment of this patch is scheduled for next week, as we are using this week to identify as many severe issues as possible, fix them and then thoroughly test the changes across all platforms. Submission through platform holders adds on a little bit of time as well, which is why we are not able to deploy this patch any earlier.”

Here are some of the major highlights from the patch notes of this upcoming update:

PC & Console Platforms:

Once platforms have been updated to the same patch version, cross-play across platforms will become viable again
Overall stability improvements for the matchmaking service
Crash Fixes
- Will Fix a multiplayer crash that could result in client players having their inventory wiped
- Will fix the crash when completing the “A Bad Day” side quest.
- Will fix the crash that occurs in No Man’s Land when your language is set to Spanish (Yes, we know. Video game code is a magical thing).
- Will fix crash on launch issues
- Will include many more “random” crash fixes
  - We are confident that these fixes will address the majority of crashes reported, as there are only a handful of root causes but the crashes they generate appear in a number of places.
Will fix the HUD disappearing in certain cases
Will fix bugs that interfere with players re-spawning in multiplayer Expeditions
Will fix bugs with players getting stuck on geometry (including when using Gravity Leap) or falling out of the world.
Will change the default matchmaking setting from “Open” to “Closed”.
- You will still be able to manually change this setting to “Open” through your game settings
- This change will prevent players from joining games where the host didn’t intend to play in multiplayer. It will also cut down on AFK lobbies
- This will also help improve matchmaking times, as the queues will be less likely to be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of constant matchmaking requests generated by “open” games.
Many other minor fixes and improvements

PC Specific:

Will Fix a performance issue where GPU is not being fully utilized. This should help with stuttering and DX11/12 issues

As previously stated, the developers will have hotfixes for things that cannot wait for bigger bundles and patches. But this first patch is shaping up to be quite a big one!

I personally have the HUD disappearing bug every single time I launch Outriders. Not once in these first seven days I managed to get into the game and start playing without having to reload once for the HUD to appear.

The Matchmaking in Outriders launched as “Open” by default. After this patch it will default to “Closed”. This means that unless you specifically decide you want to allow other players into your game or join others in theirs, you will be playing Outriders on your own.

The Appreciacion Package – what’s that

The inventory contents wipe bug has been confirmed to be very real and quite a lot of players have lost their hard-earned items following a game crash.

On top of that the frequent disconnects in the first weekend after the release, made a lot of players more frustrated having to deal with reloading the game after a crash more often than using their abilities in the game while playing.

“After working on Outriders for more than five years, we were as disappointed as you that the launch weekend did not go as planned.”

Speaking of launch issues, People Can Fly have come up with a nice idea of rewarding the player base for surviving through these issues:

“We would like to thank each and every one of you. Beyond just saying it, however, we would like to confirm that we are working on a small “appreciation package” for our launch window players. We are still working through the exact details of it[…]”

To get this package you will need to have been an early-adopter – this means you have to play the game between March 31st and April 11th. If you play the game outside this time period, but you experience an inventory wipe bug, you will qualify for this package as well.

And here are the contents of the package that your highest leveled character will receive:

A level appropriate Legendary Weapon
A level appropriate amount of Titanium
The emote “Frustration”

And one final note from the devs: “These are our intentions, but these details are subject to change based on what is technically feasible for us to do.”

What about the Inventory wipe bug

As highlighted in the patch notes preview earlier, this majorly annoying and unpopular bug, that caused many players to lose all of their gear because of a crash, is getting a fix soon.

But also the developers promise a Restoration. Sadly most of the details about this Restoration process are unknown, because People Can Fly don’t know exactly how they will do it and when will that be possible.

The date when this Restoration will occur is still unknown. What we do know for now is that only the highest tiers of items will be returned to the players – Legendaries and Epics only.

The items that will be restored will most likely be drawing from the random pool of stats each item gets to draw from when looted. This means that what you lost, may not be exactly what you will get. It will still be the same item, but its stats may slightly differ.

And, a disclaimer from the devs about all this above: “Please note that these are our intentions that we are providing here for transparency. While we will try our hardest to make things right, we unfortunately cannot make guarantees for the specifics of the above or the timeline of this, as we may run into technical difficulties that delay our work.”

Nerf bat has arrived, Bullet-time over?

A large number of tweaks and changes have been done on the server side earlier today. All of the things you will read below are already in the game and do not require you to patch your Outriders game.

The changes overview is sourced from the official notes published by People Can Fly on Reddit earlier today.

General Balance Notes

Historian, bounty hunt, and monster hunt quests no longer grant Legendary items for each subsequent completion
- While rewarding players for completing all the Historian, bounty hunt, and monster hunt quests is still our intention, we did observe unintended results when players repeated this activity in combination with a specific multiplayer bug.
- With this rewards adjustment we want to eliminate this exploit behaviour while still making that quest line worth the effort.
- Players who took advantage of this exploit will not be punished.

Adjusted loot on specific enemies: Tooka Beast, Splittooth, Sandshifter and Coldclaw
- These particular beasts are being too generous considering the required effort to take them down.

Chem Plant – Expedition time for Gold/Silver/Bronze adjusted to 650 / 1150 / 1500 seconds (Previously: 957 / 1303 / 1650)
Boom Town – Expedition time for Gold/Silver/Bronze adjusted to 390 / 589 / 776 seconds (Previously: 422 / 607 / 792)
- Some Expeditions seem to be too generous in their required completion times when compared to others.
- We want to avoid such disproportionate discrepancies, as we believe making all expeditions viable leads to a more diverse and thus more interesting endgame.

Critical Rating Damage Multiplier on Tactical Assault Rifle reduced to 165% (Previously: 175%)
Critical Rating Damage Multiplier on Marksman Rifle reduced to 250% (Previously: 300%)
- Marksman Rifles with a 300% crit rate showed up to be dominating multiple crit builds. By making the modifier the same as for a Bolt Action Rifle, we want to offer players more options when choosing what gun to use.

Duration of the Massacre AP buff has been reduced to 3 seconds
- This is a temporary measure until we have fixed an issue with the stacking cap.

Bullet abilities (Twisted Rounds, Blighted Rounds and Volcanic Rounds):

While we fully intend to provide the overpowered feel for the best builds out there, we are also committed to making sure that there is build diversity in the top performing builds.

Late in the demo lifecycle, we discovered a bug with regards to the bullet augmentation abilities damage calculation formula. While we fixed this bug, some unforeseen imbalances were unfortunately introduced, which has led to bullet based abilities vastly outperforming other skills. The main problem with this is that such bullet based builds require much less investment to make them “top tier”, compared to other builds.

To achieve this, we have made a couple of adjustments for the Trickster and Technomancer classes, who benefit the most from their bullet abilities power. It’s uncertain as to whether these changes will prove too strong or too weak, so please do consider this to be only the first step, as we will continue monitoring and adjusting them in the future. Just like you, we hope to see more inspiring and crazy combinations of Abilities and Mods!

The base cooldown of the Twisted Rounds skill has increased to 25 seconds (Previously: 16 seconds)
- While infinite uptime on bullets abilities was always our intention, it is intended to be high risk, high reward playstyle. However, given the current power of this skill, there is very little risk involved in this ability given its short cooldown, even when players fail to trigger ammo replenishment. Increasing its cooldown in combination with adjusting its damage should increase that risk and make this playstyle a more thrilling experience.
The Trickster‘s Hero Tree nodes: – Disruptive Firepower, Scion of Power, Outrider Executioner – have had their power reduced to 35% (Previously: 50%)
- The combination of Twisted Rounds’ increase of firepower on top of the multipliers provided by the class tree lead to huge increases of damage dealt by this ability. While we do understand the satisfaction this kind of power can bring, it is currently vastly outperforming our wildest expectations and we therefore need to bring it down a notch.
“Vulnerable” status – Power reduced to 15% (Previously: 25%)
The Technomancer Hero Tree node -“Damage Against Poison” – has had its power reduced to 15% (Previously: 30%)
- While the Technomancer’s Blighted Rounds do not provide any damage increase on their own other than ignoring armor as Anomaly Damage, they do provide an excellent tool for spreading the Vulnerable and Toxic statuses. which in turn can scale out of proportion.
The Pyromancer Hero Tree Node – “Trial of Ashes” – has been reduced 15% extra damage (Previously: 30%)