Hello everyone,
It's hard to believe that a week has already flown by since we released the Outriders demo to the world… from the bottom of our hearts, thank you so much to everyone who has already taken their first steps into the world of Outriders!
Since demo launch we've closely watched over 2 million players download and battle their way through the war-torn hellscape of Enoch, and we're very excited to welcome many more as we advance to launch day on April 1st and beyond.
To that end, we wanted to share some bundled information about the demo launch week and our plans for the future.
Please use the BOLD FONT to find the issues that interest you the most.
Demo Launch Week - The story so far...
As you will remember, we launched the demo last Thursday.
For a few short hours there were some connectivity issues that impacted players trying to access the game. To cut a long story short, while our planned-for infrastructure was ready for the raw number of total expected players, the speed with which those players were joining the demo during those first few hours surpassed even our expectations. So, while our backend systems scaled automatically and according to player population demand, they were unable to scale fast enough at the time.
Since then we have made changes to the backend and we should not experience a repeat of this particular issue when the game fully launches.
We kept everyone updated on the situation via our Twitter handle, but in future we will additionally rely more heavily on our Status Page to reflect the current situation.
Since launch we have also been tracking issues and providing temporary workarounds for those that we are able to recreate on our side. These workarounds can be found in the Demo Help & Tracking Thread, but our actual goal is of course to ensure that these issues won't affect players to begin with.
Which brings us to what’s next...
What's next? What are our plans for the demo and for launch?
As mentioned previously, any patches and changes for the demo need to be carefully balanced with our work towards launching the full game. Nevertheless, here are our plans for the future of the demo:
Patching the Demo
We currently have a patch in the pipeline and are intending to release it as soon as it has passed testing (likely early next week). Here is what it will address on PC specifically:
- Added a Motion Blur Toggle
- Made minor tweaks to frame rate output for certain items in cutscenes, however, we are working on a more comprehensive fix for the future
- Fixed a crash that repeatedly occurred when opening the menu or inventory
- Made improvements to cut down on the time it takes to Matchmake
- Fixed a bug that deletes player gear if their connection drops out during a transition
- Improved subtitle display and synchronization during the “Bad Day” quest
- Made other minor improvements and fixes
Changes to the Demo
A backend update to the demo will be done during a short maintenance on Friday, March 5th at 3pm GMT. This will affect all platforms.
This change should be quite seamless and will not require you to download a patch. We are pre-announcing it now in order to give your advance notice of the changes.
Some of these changes, specifically those related to enemies, are in response to feedback we've seen coming in from players as well as what our own backend metrics are showing us.
Other changes are intended to only affect the demo, and may not be implemented in the full launch build.
We would like to issue a explanatory note of caution before getting into the changes: While we have balanced the main game with a certain progression system, this progression may be impacted by heavy farming of gear and/or mods in the demo. As some players are front-loading a lot of that progression (such as by trying to fill their mod library or acquire multiple Legendaries) within the demo content already, their experience of parts of the main game may well be impacted.
Of course, it's every player's decision how to play the game for themselves and we do not want to prevent people from farming the demo for gear if they enjoy it. However, we would like to ensure that this process is not overly simplistic, easy or prone to exploitation.
What's changing?
- Changes to Captains
- The Captain mob ability "Healing Light" will have its effectiveness reduced.
- The Captain mob ability "From the Ashes" and "Phoenix Aura" will have their cooldowns increased.
- Some players were finding it hard to fully kill Captains who would trigger these abilities, making for a frustrating rather than a challenging but fun encounter.
- Changes to Gauss
- Gauss will have his health points increased for repeat playthroughs.
- This is to ensure that he remains fun and challenging for players who are overpowered at this point in the story.
- Gauss healing from his ability "Steel Wall" will be increased.
- Changes to loot drops
- While we do not want to prevent farming runs (We get it!), the lootcave discovered via the triple chest-run, as well as the store exploit, do not feel to be within the spirit of the game. To that end, we are redirecting farming efforts to mechanics in the game that may be more enjoyable for players to play through and repeat.
- Epic items will no longer appear in shops and vendors (within the demo).
- Chests will no longer drop legendary items.
- Side quest rewards (on repeat runs) will now have a chance to drop legendary items.
- Drop rates for enemies are NOT being changed at this time as we feel these are balanced quite well for the average player experience. RIP that captain.
- While we do not want to prevent farming runs (We get it!), the lootcave discovered via the triple chest-run, as well as the store exploit, do not feel to be within the spirit of the game. To that end, we are redirecting farming efforts to mechanics in the game that may be more enjoyable for players to play through and repeat.
Note that running this backend update now is also a way for us to pre-emptively ensure that such backend balancing can be a straightforward, low impact method of also rectifying any excessive balance issues in the main game.
Other Notes and Things We're addressing:
- Camera Shake during Cut-scenes and Dialogues
- This is not something that we will be able to address fully for the demo, but we are aware of the desire from players to see the shaking reduced. We believe that removing the 30fps restriction during these scenes will help reduce the impact of the camera movement, but we are continuing to investigate what can be done here.
- Matchmaking
- While the upcoming patch may help alleviate some issues here, we are keeping a close eye on the time it takes to matchmake and are continually investigating where such matchmaking is taking longer than it should.
- The Cover System
- Since the demo launch, we have been paying special attention to all player feedback and have been reading discussions about the cover system in Outriders.
- While this is not something that we will be able to fix within the demo at this time, the main game will not only include a slew of bug fixes for many cover locations, but it will also address and fix a handful of systemic issues that are currently affecting the cover mechanic on a global level.
- Items disappearing from player inventories.
- This is an issue that we are treating very seriously and are doing our utmost to investigate. While our upcoming patch will address one bug causing this issue, we are continuing to track down other causes.
- In the spirit of transparency, while we do not currently have a system in place that can automatically restore an affected player’s complete inventory, our teams are nevertheless working hard to see what may be possible in the near future.
- Once we have identified and resolved the underlying causes for this issue, as well as further investigated the feasibility of a restoration system, we will provide the community with an update and try to get affected players back on their feet.
- Please keep an eye on our social channels and community for further news about this.
- Cheating and players using obvious exploits.
- We are aware of a handful of players who are using third party software to alter the game files and save data in their favour.
- While we cannot go into details (in order to not give such players an insight into our systems), we would like to assure all regular players that we are able to identify cheaters with relative ease via our backend system and that their actions should not affect your regular playing or your co-op experience.
Finally, while we are continuing to work hard on polishing the main game, ready for launch on April 1st, we are continuing to track player feedback and bugs coming out of the demo.
We would like to close out this update by once again thanking everyone for playing the Outriders demo and sharing your feelings about it with us here. We can't wait for you to experience the full journey!
