Outriders continues to struggle with server issues and it is diminishing what has been a promising start for the looter-shooter. When developer People Can Fly first launched the Outriders demo, there were server crashing issues as well. However, the developer was quick to respond with assurances that it was unprepared for the sheer amount of players attempting to jump into the Outriders demo and the full launch of the game would be a better experience. So far Outriders has struggled to meet those expectations, and while People Can Fly has been very transparent through the entire process, gamers are frustrated.
Although server issues have been apparent since Outriders' launch on April 1, yesterday marked a pivotal point for the game's launch week. Several players were reporting varying issues such as not being able to sign in or getting kicked out of the game to the title screen. People Can Fly responded by temporarily shutting all Outriders servers down in an attempt to bring everything back up running smoothly. Servers around the world were booted back up one at a time with U.S. servers last to join, and it seemed at first to be valid fix. However, more server issues today have proved otherwise.
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The official Outriders Twitter account recently posted a message stating that the developer is aware of current server instability and is once again working on a fix. At the time of writing it has been around three hours since the initial message and it looks like servers came back online temporarily. Yesterday's shut down and reboot spanned a similar time frame, but another tweet quickly followed up and indicated that servers for the game might be down for another hour.
Only more time will tell if Outriders servers will stabilize but some damage has already been done. Besides multitudes of players losing progress when unstable servers kick them mid-game, there are some gamers that are very unhappy with the state of Outriders at launch. While many modern game launches come with day one patches and other additions during launch week, not as many have had the same volume of server troubles Outriders is currently experiencing (though it's not unheard of). Unsatisfied players are venting frustrations by flooding Outriders with negative reviews on aggregate websites like Metacritic.
Hopefully People Can Fly can iron out these server problems for the future, or else Outriders will lose more players due to a bad initial experience. It's a tough break for the game because Outriders quickly passed the Steam peak player count of Marvel's Avengers (another Square Enix published game) on day one of launch. There's no shortage of players interested in exploring the harsh world of Enoch, and as long as People Can Fly can get Outriders' servers under control, it should still be well on the way to becoming one of 2021's most popular games.
Outriders is available now for PC, PS4, PS5, Stadia, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.