INDEX:

• Intro
• Topics for further discussion (Survivability/Legendary Drop Rates)
• Extra Notes (Player Appreciation Package etc.)
• Known Issues being investigated (Bugs & Patches)

Hello everyone,

Before we get into today’s news, I wanted to touch on community news scheduling. We’ve been active in the community every single week since long before launch already, but we’ve never properly outlined specifically when you should be able to expect news by, which has left to confusion on occasion.

To make it perfectly clear: For the foreseeable future, we aim to provide news in the form of a thread (or thread update) such as this one every Thursday as a minimum.

We/I will still be active in threads and will provide responses or perhaps shorter news updates on other days, so please do treat the Thursday dev news check-in simply as the main, but not exclusive, touchpoint for when you can next expect to hear something significant. That might be (news of) a patch release or a larger discussion as to what is currently going on.

This outlined scheduling is just for community news, and patches may still release on a Tuesday or other days in certain weeks.

Our social channels will now also slowly start sharing more fun, game-dev unrelated posts on non-dev-news days, as we also want to celebrate the community a bit more. If you have any fun or interesting content you're keen to see, let us know!

Now let's get into it.

https://preview.redd.it/rszojqhbwo171.png?width=2058&format=png&auto=webp&s=4aef354be0a30fbc511cbd983b4979ebcb89189d

First things first:

We have not done a good enough job of explaining or surfacing certain mechanics and decisions in the game to players.

To that end, I am planning to, over the coming weeks, create a series of threads that will shed a bit more light on how certain systems are designed to work in Outriders. I’ll also make sure that these threads are shared via the in-game news-cast system so you won't miss them. My hope is that a more widespread & better understanding of these mechanics will make the game more fun to you, but will also help us identify key pain points more accurately.

A few initial focuses for further discussions:

• Damage Reduction and Survivability Mechanics
  • Outriders has a number of mechanics including Shields, Armour, Resistance, Spike Damage Protection/Healthgate and more that all work together to calculate how squishy or tanky your particular character is in the face of certain damage.
  • However, as mentioned above and observed in a few discussions recently, these mechanics are not 100% clear and, in some cases (e.g. spike damage protection/death protection & invincibility), are “secret” mechanics with hidden cooldowns.
  • Understanding these mechanics is a key aspect of understanding damage mitigation or one-shot kill instances and related issues.
• Legendary Drop Rates
  • We’re aware that some players are unhappy with legendary drop rates as they currently are. This is a topic that, across various game modes and difficulty levels includes many layers and further questions.
  • To that end, we’re planning to share more information about legendary drop rate mechanics in future to help you understand the system a bit better and to help make your farming more targeted and less frustrating.
  • Note that this is just an initial step regarding this matter, but it is required for us to make informed choices.
• Balancing
  • I actually wrote a good 3400 word-draft for a thread about balancing in the week following our Bullet-build re-balance to respond to the concerns raised by the community at the time. This thread explained how we wanted to go about balancing, why the bullet build changes were necessary and it included an FAQ to answer just about every balancing design question you had/have (Why were there only nerfs/why is balancing even required/which players do we look at when considering balancing + many more questions). It also talked about the difficulty and learning curve that we had in mind when designing Outriders and Expeditions in particular.
  • However, the subsequent issues around inventory restoration and damage mitigation made such a thread quite out of touch to post at the time. I’m hoping to be able to revisit this draft and share a more current version of it in future to help better explain our initial vision around balancing.
  • Regarding further balancing, we first want to see how things shake up regarding our latest patch, since damage mitigation issues or malfunctioning mods could push the meta in certain directions... not because something is unbalanced, but because players might not have been finding certain aspects of play reliable enough to use consistently. And yes, we'd want to focus primarily on buffs, not nerfs.

Extra Notes:

• ^{Next Patch}
  • ^{Our next patch is currently undergoing testing, with the intent to release in the latter half of next week. We’ll confirm this next week when testing wraps up. We will share specific patch notes with its release.}
  • ^{We know that our previous patch took uncomfortably long to release, but we do hope to be able to be patching the game much more frequently now.}
• ^{Player Appreciation Package}
  • ^{This is currently undergoing testing and I will share more news around this as soon as we have a confirmed go live date.}
  • ^{The tech for this package is based on the restoration script we used, but needed additional coding as we are, for example, attempting to ensure that players would only receive a Legendary Weapon that they previously did not obtain.}
• ^{Personal note:}
  • ^{I will be out of office next week (May 31st to 6th of June} due to personal reasons.) u/RobbieSquareEnix ^{will, however, be posting any news updates here on Reddit in my stead. This is just a note to indicate why you may not hear from me for a few days after this Friday.}

Known Issues & Issues still being investigated [Updated 10 June]:

• Sign-in issues
  • We are aware that some users on Xbox in particular are continuing to experience significant issues regarding signing in and we are continuing to investigate and make progress on this matter. Our next patch will include a change that may well help most people encountering this problem.
    
• Multiplayer connectivity issues related to rubberbanding and lag
  • We are continuing to work on improving the multiplayer experience and an upcoming patch is planned to implement some significant improvements.
• Crashes and Memory Leaks
  • Upcoming patches will continue to address occurrences of these and improve the overall stability of the game.
• Stadia:
  • Our team is also hard at work on the Stadia version of Outriders, and are preparing upcoming fixes and stability updates.

Specific Bugs:

Note 1: This is not an exhaustive list of things being worked upon. This is also not a list of patch notes for the next patch. Upcoming patches will address issues that may not be listed here. The team are currently also going through our database to identify and prioritize or freshly investigate issues that, as requested, were raised in the previous patch thread – this includes /u/tyronefenton*’s list of observed issues.*

Note 2: “Investigated” means that we have been able to successfully reproduce an issue on our dev environment and are currently looking at the root causes of said issue. If we have not yet been able to reproduce a specific issue, it may not be listed here, but that doesn’t mean we’re unaware of it.

• All Items being marked as new when entering a new gameplay session
  • Issue identified and will be resolved in a future patch.
• Trickster movement impeded when using Cyclone skill and being stunned
  • Issue identified and will be resolved in a future patch.
• Hells Ranger items not appearing for players on the Epic Store
  • Issue identified and will be resolved in a future patch.
• Certain Mods not working, in particular when you’re the client during multiplayer sessions
  • This is currently being investigated. As it may be related to specific latency thresholds, this may be part of the above mentioned bigger multiplayer connectivity issues investigation.
• Scrap Grenade mod stops working after cutscenes
  • Issue currently being investigated
• Weapon mod 'Ravenous Locust' does not deal damage if used together with the 'Weightlessness' mod
  • Issue currently being investigated
• Players dying while a shield is active
  • Issue currently being investigated. Rather than shields not properly mitigating damage, this issue may be caused by (either) the UI not catching up properly or it may be a case of certain shield mods continuing to proc their shield after death has occurred under certain edge cases.
  • Example: A player continually generates shields and their death prevention mechanics are already on cooldown. They are then hit by enemy damage waves that deplete both shields and health at a greater/faster rate than the shield can regenerate in that window, leading to cases of player HP reaching 0 for a split-second before another chunk of shield is added.
• Trickster's Hunt the Prey does not turn player towards an enemy’s back if aiming down sights immediately after activation
  • Issue currently being investigated
• Devastators Gravity Jump can cause a client player to get stuck
  • Issue currently being investigated
• Devastators Statue Set bonus ends after 8 seconds (which is not stated in the description)
  • Issue currently being investigated
• Technomancer’s Borealis set bonus is not applying properly
  • Issue currently being investigated
• Pyromancers Feed the Flames skill may not properly proc Ash effect in multiplayer
  • Issue identified and will be resolved in a future patch.
• Revive functionality not working as intended during multiplayer sessions with high latency/packet loss
  • Issue currently being investigated
• Journal entries/pick ups not appearing on secondary characters
  • Issue being reinvestigated
• “Damage Blocked” Stat on Expeditions results screen occasionally appears inconsistently or abnormally low
  • Issue currently being investigated

Recent Informative Dev Reddit Comments:

• Legendary Drop Rates Complexity Comment (Posted 28 May)
• Note regarding One-Shot Kill Prevention Mechanics (Posted 25 May)
• Discussion around Communications (Posted 20 May)
• Damage Mitigation Gather Thread (Last updated 18 May)
• The Testing Process Explained (Posted 17 May)
• A few words on no nerfs currently being planned (Posted 14 May)
• Patch Release Days Explained - Why previously on Fridays? (Posted 7 May)

Other Helpful links:

• Outriders Status Page: http://status.outriders.net/
• Square Enix support team: sqex.to/support
• Outriders Discord: Discord.gg/Outriders
• Outriders Reddit Mega Threads Collection
• Outriders FAQ Reddit Thread
• Outriders General FAQ
• Outriders Demo

External link →