Tons Of Fixes, No Inventory Restoration, And A New Armor Bug

Well, I have some good news and bad news. The good news: Outriders has just released its largest patch to date addressing a number of current issues plaguing the game. The bad news: This is not arriving alongside the inventory restoration for characters stripped of their gear and locked out of their characters.

People Can Fly has once again laid out a long explanation as to just how hard and complicated this restoration fix is going to be, which I can believe, but they decided to just release this big patch separately so non-wiped players can benefit from it. As a non-wiped player, I am happy about this, though at this point I wonder if wiped players are ever even going to return after this massive delay.

Regardless, I wanted to highlight a few of the fixes in this Cyberpunk-length patch note list, where you can read the entire thing here if you want to browse each individual fix. But I think there are some key things to pull out without needing to read all 6,000 words of it.

So, what do we have here?

• Generally speaking, there should be a lot less crashes and less bugs relating to multiplayer, so hopefully more stable sessions there overall.
• They have fixed the eternal “Sign In” glitch. Not sure if this is only the extremely long one (30+ minutes) or the normal-length-but-still long one I’ve experienced on console. I’ll have to check.
• They have adjusted downscaling in a few different ways. Some bugs with mods caused you do actually do less damage at lower tiers. They are also adjusting downscaling more generally, and will let you do more damage and feel more powerful at lower tiers while still not absolutely blazing through one-shotting everything. Will have to see how this feels in practice, but this is a pretty big issue.
• Default matchmaking has been changed from Open to Closed. This sounds like nothing but I think it’s actually a potentially big deal for no longer matchmaking into as many games where a player is just standing around in camp. A lot of the reason that happens is that sometimes someone has just loaded in to change their gear around, but with Open matchmaking, the game thinks they’re ready to start an expedition, so it puts people in that game. If this creates fewer instances of this, that would be a great start to fixing endgame matchmaking.
• The FOV max has been increased from 90 to 130 on PC. Nice!
• They did indeed fix Emergency Stance so the Golem buff does not last forever, even though that does not appear to be listed in the patch notes.
• Enemy Snipers will now give players more time to dodge their shots.
• There will be less knockback from creatures in the Stargrave expedition. And less knockback creatures overall there. Not sure what was so specific to Stargrave as Alpha knockback is a problem everywhere.
• Crawlers now will no longer damage players past their attack range the UI shows. Not sure how much this will nerf them but it’s a start, as they’re one of the biggest problematic enemies.
• No Strix changes other than Strix are now better fighting players standing near walls(??)
• PC Cutscenes no longer have locked FPS which was a common complaint.

And again, a million more fixes BUT there’s also a new issue that has uh, temporarily broken pretty much the entire game.

Sigh.

Something has happened with armor in this patch. Vendor armor values are high but players are logging into find their armor values a fraction of what they once were, absolutely destroying survivability across the board. Outriders posted about this within the hour of the patch launching, saying they’re working on it and it will be resolved:

“Imminent maintenance” implies like, now (Update: yes, I think this is already starting as we speak), but we’ll see. I’m not even going to log in until this is fixed lest it trigger some sort of new permanent damage to my character I’ll have to wait around for because at this point, who knows. If this is resolved in short order, fine, no harm done. If this turns into another “thing” like inventory wiping, that could tank what’s left of the game’s population. But I suppose I won’t focus on the worst case scenario until we know more. I am excited to play with all these other changes live, but I’ll just have to wait a bit longer, I guess.

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