I’m Ditching 30 Hours Of PS5 ‘Outriders’ Demo Progress For Xbox Series X

We are just days away from the launch of Outriders on all platforms, PC, PlayStation, Xbox and Stadia, and we have a unique situation where anything you’ve done in the demo so far carries into the final release.

That means you can have four classes up to level 7 with “maxed” blue gear builds, piles of resources and legendaries that can have at least their mods taken into the endgame, potentially, despite being low level drops.

I did a truly absurd amount of farming a few weeks back on PS5, chest runs before they were nerfed, and I killed that one Captain so many times his great great grandchildren are going to have a grudge against me.

And yet I’ve made the call to leave all that work behind, and switch over to Outriders on Xbox Series X for the actual release, even though I’ll be starting from scratch.

Why? A bunch of reasons. I made a video about this already, but it mainly has to do with fundamental annoyances about the PS5 that are causing me to want to migrate to Xbox where I can, and that includes most third party releases.

In this specific case, we have:

1. Game Pass – While I may end up with a review code for Outriders, the game is launching on Xbox Game Pass day one, which obviously is a big reason for many consumers to pick that version over another, if they’re already signed up. Outriders is $60 on PlayStation (not $70 like some recent games, thankfully), but on Game Pass it can feel “free” if you have a sub already.

2. All the tiny annoyances of PS5 have overwhelmed me. The poor UI and remapping of the home button. Whatever they’ve done to badly screw up the friends and party system. The fact that Outriders (and other games) will still have “copying” phases whenever they are patched (which will be frequently). Any time any game tries to use adaptive triggers. Poor controller battery life. The list is getting long.

3. Tiny, non-Game Pass benefits of Xbox that add up, like Quick Resume and Smart Delivery (the latter doesn’t apply to Outriders, given that it’s already out for new-gen, but it does for other games from Avengers to Cyberpunk). And a UI I don’t hate. And I could pre-load Outriders a week early there.

4. Cross play. In this instance I am not losing access to my friends who will be playing on PlayStation because Outriders is launching with cross play on day one.

5. Am I losing that much, really? Honestly, 30 hours sounds like a lot to give up, but it was mostly farming with horribly low world tier 5 drop rates so it’s was a lot of air. I only ended up with two legendary weapons, and I mean, two weeks into the game, how many am I gonna have by then? The actual content of the demo is like two actual missions and three side missions so it’s really not that much to re-do, plus you will be re-running missions to farm them anyway, that much is clear. I don’t mind a blank slate even if it puts me a few hours “behind” at the start here.

Again, I am not tossing away my PS5. I’m still playing all the exclusives I’ll need to play there, I’m still playing Destiny 2 there (when cross play activates, we’ll revisit this), but for third party games like Outriders and others, I’m moving to Xbox this generation. Sony didn’t try hard enough to retain my loyalty this time around, breaking what wasn’t broken and not fixing clear issues from last gen.

My video on this:

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