If you play video games in the 21st century, you are no stranger to it: a popular game is launched that requires an internet connection. Interested players buy it, can’t access the servers and can’t play the thing they paid for. The last offender is Outriders, a classy prey shooter from developer People Can Fly.
Outriders launched yesterday at a kind of sputter on platforms. Some players they failed to overcome the initial task, locked on a “Connected!” perpetual screen. (The key was simply to practice patience, the rarest virtue of life.) Some couldn’t even get to that initial frozen screen, while others ended up being kicked out of the game in the middle of missions.
Last night, I teamed up with KotakuZack Zweizen tested the cooperative. We both play on PlayStation 5 and we both have a relatively stable internet service. It took us 24 minutes to spend. After about an hour of play, we were kicked out of our session at the beginning of a mission. It took us another 11 minutes to spend again.
We are not alone. Social networks channels are full of life with users SHARE like experience. (My personal favorite? Reddit post entitled “Are the servers on Enoch?”) Kotakuand John Walker posted on Twitter that the Xbox servers crashed when he was at the end of a mission and then didn’t let him in at all.
These hiccups of connectivity persisted into the second day of the game, something people can fly over recognized in a tweet. As of this writing, Outriders server status the website lists multiplayer as “operational” and the core components as having a “major outage”. (Hmm …) Earlier today, the core components were marked as “operational”, while the multiplayer service was shown as “partially operational”.
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“We are aware that a small percentage of players face certain problems and our teams proactively collect information and work on updates and fixes,” representatives for Square Enix told me via email yesterday.
Not surprisingly, an online-only launch has failed. I saw her with All the boys, divided, Destiny, and Hitman 3 (about). What is curious here is that People Can Fly has firmly held the line that Outriders it is not a service game – like Destiny or Avengers or divided– and it’s rather one that you can pick up and play as “a complete boxed experience.” Although Outriders shines like a cooperative game, it is also designed to be able to be played entirely as a single player experience and yet you need an internet connection to play.
“We have a lot of things in the backend, so you have to be connected to the internet to be able to play,” Bartosz Kmita of People Can Fly said IGN.
Needless to say, it’s a total inconvenience. Obviously, you need servers to allow multiplayer connections, and obviously it’s impossible to predict exactly how many players will crowd those servers on the first day. (People can fly SAPS that over 2 million players tried the free demo of the game. These numbers were revealed before Square Enix, Outriders“editor, has announced that the game will be available on the Game Pass at launch.) But I feel that the intention of the game to be a single player means that you should be able to load it and play. Friends are nice, but in the end they are useless Outriders to work. Do not get me wrong. I love the game and I’m so happy so far. I just wish I could play reliably.
Update: 16:00 ET: People can fly it took Outriders serve offline.
Update 18:04 ET: People can fly SAPS that Outriders servers were back online everywhere except the United States State.
Update 18:46 ET: US servers are apparently again online.