Hello everyone!
We're just one week out from launching Outriders fully on April 1st, 2021. 7 Days to go!
We've got a lot of things to cover today, so lets jump right into it.
Note that your progress and characters should be waiting for you in the main game. You do not need to manually transfer them.
Here’s an index that will help you focus on the things that interest you the most.
- Preloading & Launch Timings
- What's Changed between Demo and Launch?
- Patches & Post-Launch support
- Item Restoration For Players Who lost their Legendaries
- Our Policy on Cheating and Hacking
- Hells Rangers Info
Preloading & Launch Timings
Pre-loading:
- Steam – We are still determining our preload options here and hope to share news about the possibility of pre-loading next week.
Launch Times:
- Unified single global time for PC:
- Outriders will release on April 1st at 17:00 BST / 09:00am PDT on Steam
What has changed between the latest Demo build and the launch day build of Outriders?
Below is only a condensed overview. In truth, the launch day build contains a multitude of additional general improvements, balancing, bug fixes and crash resolutions.
Highlights include:
- Lots of demo content bug fixes, including for example, mods on some Legendary weapons not triggering properly.
- Balancing changes for various items, mods, enemy stats and loot drops.
- Balancing is an ongoing process and we have learnt much from internal playtests, the Insiders preview and the demo over the previous months. However, we’re sure that we will continue to learn more from the launch of the main game and the feedback provided by you, our community. So, keep it coming!
As you progress through the main game you will also have full access to the crafting system, character levels, all World Tiers and more. No more Grinding for Legendaries at WT5! We recommend playing through the story and enjoying the experience first. Legendaries will drop naturally over time as you push your WT higher and get into Expeditions content.
Patches & Post-Launch support
We currently have a few patches undergoing testing and submission.
Below are our pre-planned patches. However, as with the demo, we will be carefully monitoring the launch and it is our full intention to on short notice hotfix any issues that we are able to reproduce and resolve on our side and that are deemed severe enough.
Issues of lesser severity that we are able to reproduce and resolve will likely be bundled into the bigger “Post-Launch Follow up Patch” for the sake of efficiency.
Day 1 Patch
This is a patch we're hoping to have ready and integrated into pre-loading even before launch. If everything goes to plan you won’t even have to download this on Day, but there is a possibility that this patch will release on April 1st (day one) and will therefore require an additional download.
- Many bug fixes and improvements, with a particular focus on the latter sections of the game.
- Performance improvements for pacing/stuttering that was observed during the demo
- Camera Smoothing improvements for cutscenes and dialogues. This should reduce the camera shake that some players are struggling with
- Cutscenes/dialogues frame rate improvements
- PC cutscenes will have the option to choose from 30, 60, 90 and 120fps
Post-Launch Follow up Patch & Upcoming Optimizations
This is a pre-planned patch that is intended to address any recently-reported issues or bugs coming out of the demo that the run to launch didn't allow us enough time to implement beforehand. The resolutions for any non-urgent bugs that are discovered during launch may well be rolled into this patch.
At this point in time we do not yet have a set release time for this patch as its release will depend on the amount of content we want to roll into it. We are expecting this to roll out at least a few weeks after launch. Newly discovered severe issues will be hot-fixed earlier and separately from this patch of course.
Below are our intentions for this patch.
- Controller adjustment options such as deadzone adjustment, acceleration settings and legacy layouts.
- Loading Time Improvements for Xbox One and PlayStation 4 consoles
- Further Performance Improvements for Co-op games
- Bug fixes including, for example:
- Lore collectibles bugging out on second characters
Item Restoration For Players Who lost their Legendaries:
As mentioned in our previous dev update, we intend to restore Legendaries to players who lost them as a result of a specific bug.
This restoration is taking place right now, as part of today's maintenance (Thursday, March 25).
Restoration:
- Is a one-off event for the global player population
- Restoration will take place on March 25th and will restore any Legendaries lost before March 22nd
- Only Legendary Weapons that were lost can be restored
Please check whether your lost Legendary Weapons have been restored once the Maintenance has ended.
Since we implemented our fix for this bug, we have observed a smaller number of continued reports regarding lost Legendaries. We believe most of these to be down to the regularity of the game autosaving rather than a specific bug. Put simply, if you found a Legendary but the game was terminated before an autosave could occur, that Legendary (or any other item) would never have made it into your server inventory/our logs.
Instances of this occurring include:
- Players using specific farming methods that are so fast that they prevent the game from triggering an autosave cycle before the farming run is reset. In extreme cases, some players may go for long periods of time without autosaving.
- Players crashing out of the game just before/after they pick up a Legendary.
We are continuing to investigate such use cases and we are looking into how we can mitigate against them in future.
While we hope that we managed to restore as many Legendaries as possible, we expect there to be niche cases of players not having a Legendary restored because it never arrived on our logs (as per the use cases above).
If this is the case, please reply to the Steam forums gather thread so that we can track and be aware of how many cases were missed. We will try to provide news around further steps when we know more.
Our Policy on Cheating and Hacking:
Since demo launch this has been a hotly debated topic, so we wanted to provide some perspective on it as well as outline our policy regarding cheating and hacking going forward.
For context:
- At the time when we reached around 2 million players, we identified 200 players who had clearly cheated. In percentage terms, that’s 0.01%.
- We can see you all. Yes, even the person who gave themself 600 Legendary Weapons.
Repercussions of being identified as having used cheats:
- Repercussions are account wide, not character specific
- You will not be able to matchmake with legit players
- Matchmaking will likely take significantly longer
- You will still be able to play solo
- In future, your HUD will have a discreet but visible watermark placed on it so that gameplay footage created on this account can be readily identified as coming from a flagged account.
All accounts will be checked for evidence of cheat use on launch day - April 1st, and then at regular intervals thereafter.
Any account logs found to have evidence of cheating on them on or after launch day will be permanently branded.
If you cheated during the demo "just to try it out" but wish to go into the main game unbranded, you must DELETE ALL CHARACTERS AND ITEMS ON YOUR ENTIRE ACCOUNT in order to wipe the slate clean. You should not carry over any progress between demo and main game if you previously cheated but do not plan to do so in the main game.
What is considered cheating?
- Intentionally running the game on PC without Easy Anti Cheat (EAC)
- Modifying game files to enhance a character: levels, skills, inventory, etc.
- Externally modifying game time to reduce time dependent features such as vendors and challenges
- Using a trainer program or similar to gain advantages within the game
- Using gameplay altering programs such as aimbots or wallhacks
Individual players who are found to be being regularly kicked by multiplayer hosts shortly after joining may also be manually reviewed as an additional anti-cheat/anti-grief safeguard.
Using performance tweaking software (such as RivaTuner for example) to improve a personal game experience is not considered cheating.
Farming is not considered cheating. Even though the amount of battering that that captain underwent could be considered unethical. RIPThatCaptain.
We reserve the right to update and change this policy in future.
Hells Ranger's Info
The Hell's Ranger Content will become available via your stash for anyone who owns it. This means that even if you progress through the story without it, you will not miss out on acquiring it in game.
Please note that this gear is level-locked to level 10, so you will need to meet its requirements (achieving level 10 or playing on certain level boosting World Tiers) before you are able to use it.