People Can Fly’s looter shooter launched today across PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and S as well as straight into Xbox Game Pass and Google Stadia, and it is struggling to cope with the influx of players. I’ve spent some time this evening stuck on the initial authentication screen, which has prevented me from playing at all. Eventually, you’re presented with an “Internet Connection Error” message that lets you know you failed to connect to the Outriders servers. There’s nothing to do after this point but try again. Some players have reported they eventually managed to log in after repeated attempts, but it’s a far from ideal start. Over on Outriders’ official status website, there’s a notice of an outage that’s affecting the game. There’s an accompanying note from PCF to say the developer is “investigating this issue”. It’s not the only issue. There’s a performance problem affecting the multiplayer (again, PCF is looking into it), and a desynchronization between PC and console code that’s causing players to be kicked out of a crossplay multiplayer game. In a post on reddit, publisher Square Enix said: “We are treating this issue with the highest priority and we are working on patches that will synchronize all platform code, which will resolve these issues.” Steam and Epic players can play together, Square Enix said, and PlayStation and Xbox players can co-op, too. But Square Enix has temporarily turned off automatic matchmaking between PC and consoles. “Should you invite a console player into your PC game via an invite code (or vice versa), the game will initially connect, but one player will eventually be kicked out of the game,” Square Enix warned. “We highly recommend against doing this until we have patched all versions of the game.” That patch will not be released today, Square Enix stressed. There’s a thread on reddit that rounds up all the game’s early issues and offers solutions and workarounds where available. While you wait to login, why not give our most recent Outriders impressions a read?
