Outriders: This is what you can expect from the big update - patch notes

Outriders

The turbulent launch of the loot shooter Outriders is now a little more than a week ago. For the development studio People Can Fly it is slowly but surely time to release the first major update. As the team announced on Steam's community page, its release is planned for next week - but a specific date has not yet been set. At the moment, People Can Fly wants to concentrate on the localization and elimination of particularly difficult technical problems and then focus on the update.

But at least there is a first preview of the changes that you will experience in the first major Expect patch for Outriders (buy now € 59.99). Among other things, the update should provide a noticeable performance boost, which among other things alleviates the stuttering and the problems with DirectX 11 and DirectX 12. The team also wants to improve the general stability of the matchmaking system and then reactivate the crossplay feature. There are also various bug fixes and optimizations. Here is a preview of the patch notes, which are by no means final:

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

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Widespread ‘Outriders’ Nerfs After A Week Set A Bad Precedent

Outriders

People Can Fly

We are on day eight Outriders’ release, and on day seven, People Can Fly unveiled a list of coming nerfs that will hit the game next week on a number of fronts.

You can read all of them here, but the basics are nerfs to popular Technomancer and Trickster builds, making medals harder to get on two Expeditions, reducing loot drops from certain boss monsters and eliminating targeted legendary farming through re-runs of 10-step questlines.

Again, after a week.

Outriders has been successful in the wake of its excellent marketing campaign that showed what people wanted out of a looter, and then delivering on that promise. They seem to know the scene better than anyone else who stepped up to the plate initially, which is why these instant nerfs on so many fronts feel especially tone-deaf.

I can’t say with 100% certainty that none of them are warranted. I get that some builds are emerging as stronger than others, and yet it’s also the case that only a select group of players has even hit the endgame at this point, and even fewer have gotten enough gear to experiment with a wide range of builds. And these nerfs affect the other 99% of players that are not at that point, and will see their power drop because of it.

Outriders

Outriders

Other solutions just feel clumsy. Doing ten full beast hunts in a row to snag a piece of legendary armor felt like a worthy investment, and one of the few instances of anything resembling “target farming” in the game. But because of an exploit that allowed people to get multiple legendaries quickly from this, the entire system has gone away, rather than the exploit itself being fixed. And drop rates from monsters? Time ranges for expeditions? How much data is there even to look at after just a few days of people hitting these points in the game?

The other problem is that all of what’s listed here is detrimental to the player and player only. There are no nerfs to say, enemy snipers that are one-hit laser beams that will drill you the moment you glance in their general direction. The glitchy movement of Strix. The absurd immunity of Alphas and Brood Mothers. If things need nerfing, I’d look in that direction.

Nor are there any player buffs. It seems pretty clear at this point that almost all classes maybe short of some Devastator builds need anomaly power damage buffed as it pales in comparison to firepower based builds and skills that mainly serve to…increase firepower. But nothing like that is coming, nor any buffs for Devastator period, just nerfs to the other three classes that are outperforming it.

Outriders

People Can Fly

I’m the guy who called to nerf Gjallarhorn in Destiny 1. Believe me, I’m all in favor of nerfing things even in PvE content when they unbalance the game. But I think outside of maybe one or two of these changes, blanket nerfing so many different things, from skills to builds to loot sources, after just a few days of endgame play feels like a big rush to judgement, and will have ill-effects down the line to players who are not exploiting or speed farming. It just doesn’t seem like a priority, and it’s weird to see them pounce on this stuff so quickly.

I disagree with the idea that just because a game gets balance patches that means it’s definitely a “live service,” a term Outriders wants to avoid. And yet even if those are needed, especially in a PvE only game, it’s wise to lean more heavily on buffs to underused things and increasingly loot generosity rather than the other way around. And if supposedly People Can Fly doesn’t care if players stop after 40 hours or 400 hours with no microtransactions to sell them, people getting too much gear too quickly doesn’t seem like it should matter all that much.

It’s just the wrong foot forward for the game’s first patch. I can barely even play endgame content between crashes and connection issues, and there’s already a slate of nerfs across the board arriving when that stuff is going to get fixed. Not great. I hope some of these changes are reconsidered, and the next patch after this one will nerf a few enemies instead of the player, and have a few buffs in tow.

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