Outriders kicks off a day of server problems just like all other online games

If you’re playing video games in the 21st century, you’re no stranger to this: a popular game is launching that requires an internet connection. Interested players buy it, can’t access the servers, and can’t play the thing they paid for. The last offender is Outriders, a class-based loot shooter from developer People Can Fly.

Outriders launched yesterday to a spit of sorts on the platforms. Some players could not exceed the initial load, stuck on a perpetual “Connected!” screen. (The key was to simply practice patience, life’s rarest virtue.) Some couldn’t even access that initial frozen screen, while others ended up getting kicked out of the game mid-missions.

Last night I teamed up with KotakuZack Zweizen to test the cooperative. We both play on PlayStation 5 and both have relatively stable internet service. It took us 24 minutes to party. After about an hour of play, I was kicked out of our session at the start of a mission. It took us another 11 minutes to party.

We are not alone. Social media canals are rages with users sharing similar experiences. (My favorite? A Reddit post titled, “Are the servers on Enoch too?”) Kotakuby John Walker tweeted that the Xbox servers went down while he was at the end of a mission and weren’t letting him come back into the game at all.

These connectivity issues persisted until day two of the game, something people can steal. recognized in a tweet. As of this writing, the Outriders server state The website lists the multiplayer as “operational” and the core components as having a “major failure”. (Hmm…) Earlier today, core components were marked as “operational”, while multiplayer service was “partially operational”.

“We are aware that a small percentage of players have certain problems and our teams are proactively collecting information and working on updates and fixes, ”Square Enix representatives told me by email yesterday.

The fact that an online-only launch went awry is hardly surprising. We saw it with Fall guys, The division, destiny, and Hitman 3 (type of). What is curious here is that People Can Fly held firm to the line Outriders is not a service game, like destiny or Avengers or The division– and it is rather the one who you can pick up and play as “a complete out-of-the-box experience”. Although Outriders shines as a cooperative game, it’s also designed to be played entirely as a single-player experience, and yet you need an internet connection to play.

“We have a lot of stuff in the backend so you need to be connected to the internet to be able to play,” Bartosz Kmita of People Can Fly says IGN.

This is, needless to say, a total disappointment. Obviously, you need servers to allow for multiplayer connections, and it’s obviously impossible to predict exactly how many players will invade those servers on day one. (People can fly said that over 2 million players have tried the free demo of the game. These numbers were revealed before Square Enix, Outriders‘editor, ad that the game would be available on Game Pass at launch.) But I think the game’s intention to be a gamer means you should be able to just load it up and play. Friends are nice, but ultimately they are not necessary to Outriders to work. Do not mistake yourself. I love the game and am having so much fun so far. I just wish I could play reliably.

Update: 4:00 p.m. ET: People can fly took the Outriders offline servers.

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