After the release of Outriders on April 1st, the developers ‘People Can Fly’ are struggling with massive server problems. The crossplay functionality, which has currently been deactivated, is also affected.
Even two days after the release, many players complain about connection errors and crashes. The developers on Twitter ask for your patience and are working on a long-term solution.
The Outriders servers at their limit: what happened?
In Germany, the loot shooter Outriders was released on April 1st, 2021 at 6 p.m. Players from all over the world should experience a 30-40 hour campaign on the alien planet Enoch with full crossplay support. The first server problems arose just 90 minutes after the release and were resolved after just a few minutes.
People Can Fly then published a status page reporting problems with the online services. At status.outriders.net everyone can see the current status of the server and crossplay functions.
Lost connections continue to cause trouble: On the day of the release, many players also complained of lost connections and difficulties in submitting the “Bad Day” sidequest. The Outriders social media team communicates in an exemplary manner on Twitter and Reddit and provides information on the current situation.
Link to Twitter content
In the tweet from April 1st, 2021, the social media team pointed out the persistent disconnections and gave updates on further problems. The tweet reads:
“Update on Server Issues: We’re still investigating server issues. But the rest of our team is not idle either. We made some changes to the Steam version to alleviate the micro-stuttering for gamers.”
Despite all the problems, Outriders is Square Enix’s biggest Steam release.
Server problems persist
The calm before the storm: On April 2nd, 2021, the servers were initially running until problems arose again at 9:00 a.m. Many players couldn’t get over the loading screen and were unable to connect to the Outriders servers.
The servers were offline for a total of four hours and the social media team apologized for the long downtime and promised not only to fix the symptoms, but also to get to the bottom of the cause:
Link to Twitter content
Have the problems been resolved? At the time of writing the news on April 3rd, 2021 at 8:00 a.m., most of the server problems have been officially resolved. The connection worked during internal attempts, but a disconnect occurred after a short while in the game. We tested the PC version on Steam.
The team announced on Twitter at midnight that all servers worldwide, with the exception of the US locations, were back online. This was necessary in order not to overload the login server. The developers followed the workload and then enabled the US servers again.
Link to Twitter content
The hope remains that the Outriders servers will level off again in the course of April 3rd and that everyone can enjoy the loot shooter. However, there is also bad news for players looking to crossplay with friends on other platforms.
Outriders Crossplay deactivated for the time being
In crossplay, Outriders players are able to play together with friends, regardless of the platform. The function caused problems and was therefore deactivated for the time being. Anyone who wanted to play together with players on Xbox or PlayStation on the PC on the long Easter weekend will not have the opportunity to do so.
On Reddit, developers People Can Fly and publisher Square Enix commented on the problem: The team is working on a solution with the highest priority. To fix the problem, a patch is necessary, which is also installed on the consoles. This means that a patch on the weekend is not possible.
You can find out how good the loot shooter can be when the servers are online in our test report on Outriders after the first ten hours of play.
We’ll keep you posted on ongoing problems with the Outriders servers.