Developer People Can Fly and publisher Square Enix recently released the all-new Outriders, a third-person, looter shooter cover-based game in a sci-fi setting. The game follows the adventures of, unsurprisingly, Outriders - soldiers that have the critical task of exploring the planet Enoch. In fact, the game's plot is that Earth has not survived climate change, and humans tried to build colony ships that could host hundreds of people and travel across space to populate an alien, Earth-like world in order to save the race.
Outriders features alien creatures (even though, technically, humans are the aliens on Enoch), a war between human factions, god-like abilities, and of course, lots of weapons. Players take on the role of an Outrider surviving the Anomaly and being affected by it, becoming a so-called Altered. That's when superhuman abilities come into play, as the players get to choose their class between four available: the Technomancer, the Trickster, the Pyromancer, or the Devastator.
Despite this premise, Outriders remains at its core a game where having the right weapons and appropriate pieces of gear to sustain fights when powers are on cooldown is critical. As such, players cannot just go about semi-naked and with no weapons to fight mutants, creatures that absorbed powers from the Anomaly, and other humans. As such, it is predictable that players are afraid to play the game because of one of Outriders' bugs that is persistently wiping inventories.
The Inventory Wipe Bug In Outriders
Outriders had a rocky launch, there's no denying that. However, the game keeps garnering strong player numbers, high engagement, and overall success in terms of sales. This shows just how strong the community's desire to have a good looter shooter is, and Outriders delivers on that front for many. It might be not polished enough for a proper launch, it may have lots of issues, glitches, and crashes, but people simply want to play the game.
Outriders' inventory wipe bug was something that started occurring by the end of the demo already, and People Can Fly put a lot of effort into patching it and restoring lost loot to all affected players. Sadly, one week into the launch, the bug re-emerged. Many players started encountering it, especially when trying to connect to online lobbies, either through normal online matchmaking or via crossplay.
The bug is particularly vicious, as it deletes all items the characters possess. This issue often means that players incurring in it end up losing content and time, maybe content worth hours upon hours of farming sessions just to get specific rolls, mods, or legendary items. PCF replied to players' concerns, and it stated that it is working on it and a new, upcoming fix should bring things back in check.
The Solution People Can Fly Found
People Can Fly and Square Enix announced the solution they found is live now, and in the weekend, they can monitor how things go. This solution does give them a bit of leeway if things go sideways, though, so that they don't start focusing on restoring all the items lost by players thus far prior to the solution being a certified one.
However, the patch is likely to be followed by issues with the online connectivity, multiplayer instances, accessing lobbies, crossplay, and matchmaking. This, in turn, might result in players "momentarily" having their inventories wiped. According to the developerand Square Enix, this is nothing but a visual error of sorts that is part of their ongoing safeguarding measures against all instances of inventory wipe. The solution to this minor issue would be to wait a little while, then rebooting the game. If the patch proves to be successful in addressing the inventory wipe bugs and no further reports signaling the bug is back appear, then the issue will be tackled with a follow-up patch.
This approach feels a lot like a statement implying that players are test subjects for these changes. By no means does this patch guarantee that players won't be finding their inventories wiped when trying to join online activities.
The worst part about it is that, if the solution ends up not working properly, then even more players will experience the issue and more time will be required for PCF and Square Enix to sort things out. Whether this depends on a tight time schedule, the team working on fixing a plethora of other issues ranging from average to severe in terms of priority, or simply lack of proper testing, some players do feel like they are being poked fun at and insult is being added to injury in the form of nerfs to popular Outriders builds.
However, PCF does genuinely care about Outriders, and communication-wise transparency has always been a strong value held by the company. Furthermore, if the patch makes things properly working again, then it is People Can Fly's intention to restore all the items that players lost over time up until the fix is in place.
Outriders is out now for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series S/X, and Stadia.