The first major patch for Outriders will be available next week, developer People Can Fly revealed in a blog post today. If you’ve been waiting for general fixes regarding connectivity and inventory wipes, you’ll still have to wait. But, hey, at least the coolest class is getting some serious nerfs.
Yes, the Trickster, that crafty class who wields temporal space magic and can teleport around battlefields like it’s a walk in the park, is taking a hit to its power. The base cooldown for Twisted Rounds, the ammo ability that causes bullets to deal exponential damage, will leap from 16 to 25 seconds. Some abilities that can boost Twisted Rounds’ power will also take a hit: Three nodes on the Trickster’s hero tree—Disruptive Firepower, Scion of Power, and Outrider Executioner—will have their power reduced from 50 percent to 35 percent.
People Can Fly isn’t only nerfing the Trickster. The Technomancer will now deal 15 percent extra damage against poisoned enemies (that figure was previously at 30 percent). At the same time, the Pyromancer’s Trial of Ashes hero tree node will be reduced by the same amount.
Meanwhile, you’ll no longer be able to receive legendary weapons from repeatedly cashing in historian, bounty hunt, and monster hunt missions.
“While we do understand the satisfaction this kind of power can bring, it is currently vastly outperforming our wildest expectations, and we, therefore, need to bring it down a notch,” the developer wrote.
People Can Fly also says there are no plans in the works to include a player-vs.-player mode in Outriders.
Today’s blog post addressed the insidious issue of inventory wipes, where some players log in only to find all of their hard-earned gear missing. The good news: A fix is indeed incoming, and it’s likely to be a “one-time event,” so you needn’t go through a one-on-one session with a customer service rep. The bad news: People Can Fly says it’ll likely only be able to restore epic and legendary weapons and that some weapons might come back from the dead with different stats—date TBA on when this fix will go out.
One notable absence in today’s notes: the issue of PC-console crossplay. During the demo, players across platforms could team up, though it wasn’t exactly butter-smooth. You could get into sessions, but players were frequently dropped, and sessions would sometimes sputter out entirely. Square Enix told Kotaku at the time that Outriders “will have a 1.0 launch version of [the] crossplay system at launch.”
Following a launch weekend plagued by instability, People Can Fly turned off crossplay between PC players and console players. (Xbox and PlayStation players can still team up with minimal turbulence.) On Tuesday, People Can Fly said in a tweet that a fix for PC-console crossplay would be batched in with “the overall patches that we are currently cooking up and running through testing.” It’s unclear when it’ll get turned back on.
Representatives for Square Enix, the game’s publisher, did not respond to a request for comment from Kotaku in time for publication.
The launch of Outriders has no doubt been rocky, with a weekend of connectivity issues to the point where players couldn’t log into the game (despite being playable entirely single-player). As a recourse, People Can Fly is offering a legendary weapon and a chunk of titanium, the high-tier crafting resource, to anyone who’s played the game between March 31 and April 11. (If you play outside that time frame but suffer an inventory wipe, you’re also eligible.) Those players will also be able to claim the “Frustration” emote.