So far, players seem to be thoroughly enjoying Outriders now that the game is fully released, but all good things must come to an end. At some point, players are going to have turn off the game and come back to it later, and veteran gamers know to never do this without first making sure that their progress is saved. That said, recent games have adopted autosave features, wherein players aren't able to create, load, or otherwise manipulate their save files manually, and this is one of those games. To put it plainly, players cannot manually save the game in Outriders.
Outriders can be played entirely in single player, but it is arguably meant to be enjoyed in a team of three players. While it may seem odd for a potentially single player game to lack basic saving and loading features, there aren't many instances in which players would need them outside of trying to exploit the system.
Thankfully, there is at least a way to tell when the game is autosaving. At certain points, two yellow circles will appear on the bottom right hand corner of the screen, right above where players can see their equipped weapons and ammo. These spinning yellow circles indicate that the game is currently autosaving, meaning if the player dies or quits and reloads the game, they will respawn no earlier than at this save point. Regarding when this happens, it usually occurs whenever the player changes areas, finishes or starts a quest objective, ends a combat, or something similar.
In some games, players can use backup saves in order to get around this sort of thing, but Outriders doesn't have any offline saves at all. Instead, character data and progression are all stored online in the Outriders servers, meaning there's no way to back up the save data either. Players will have to trust Square Enix and People Can Fly to do that for them. Thankfully, there aren't too many ways that players can mess up their characters permanently within Outriders.
The biggest thing to watch out for is dismantling or selling gear, as this is irreversible and it can be very unfortunate if the player dismantles a legendary item like the Grim Marrow. Players can even respec their skill points, so there's no need to worry about making a bad build. Even though players can't manually save their game in Outriders, the auto save feature does a good job at making sure players don't lose any progress.
Outriders is available now on PC, PS4, PS5, Stadia, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.