Update #2: I thought earlier today that I should test yesterday's update more extensively. After a few hours without any bigger issues, I then had the bug that was supposed to have been fixed with the last update as well. And it happens to be the worst bug you, as a player, can have.

Because my WHOLE GAME PROGRESS is gone. COMPLETELY! Inventory empty, loot gone. 80 hours of gameplay wiped. Thanks for nothing, you incompetent morons.

–––––

Update #1: They released a rather big patch today (April 9th, around 2.4GB in size) and the crashing issues still exist for me. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

–––––

I wish I hadn't bought OUTRIDERS.

But let me say one thing up front: OUTRIDERS is a really good game, or at least it CAN be a really good game. It is extremely fun, especially in co-op, and thoroughly entertaining. The visuals are beautiful and the atmosphere is top notch, the aiming is very reminiscent of good old CS 1.6 times, making it very direct and snappy, and all in all you COULD give OUTRIDERS a positive review.

That is IF THE GAME WOULD ACTUALLY WORK!

Guys, I've seen a lot of really buggy games, and I'm talking about games like Skyrim, which needed community mods to fix bugs that Bethesda never seemed to be able (or willing?) to fix. Anyway.

The things I encountered in OUTRIDERS during my ~75 hours of gameplay are hard to beat. I'm not going into the catastrophic and absolutely outrageous "performance" of the servers during the game's launch – servers that you need to be able to connect to in order play the game at all, mind you – because games like this often have to deal with server problems when they are released.

What I'm talking about is the fundamentally terrible performance and stability of the game. I really don't have a bad PC (i9 7980XE @ 4.60 GHz, ASUS RTX TUF 3070 OC, 64GB RAM, SSD only, fully water-cooled), so the argument that I "just need to upgrade" is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. Still, OUTRIDERS manages to crash MORE THAN ONCE PER HOUR for me on average. Sometimes it's an Unreal Engine error, sometimes the game just shuts down, sometimes it freezes, then there's supposedly not enough VRAM available on my graphics card – although according to task manager and resource monitor there's never more than 6GB VRAM (out of a total of 8GB) used. As of today there are crashes when opening or closing the inventory, which were supposedly already fixed in the beta. lol.

In a good 8 out of 10 cases (yes, really!) I can "provoke" the crashes by trying to modify weapons at Zahedi or travel to another area at Channa. Whenever I confirm the dialog with "E", the game crashes. This has now gone so far that I had to get a friend to join me in my lobby so that he could start the journey to another area for me instead. WHAT THE ♥♥♥♥ GUYS?!

Despite changing the graphics driver versions (as recommended by the devs) several times, switching from DirectX 12 to DirectX 11 (as recommended by the devs) several times, experimenting with different graphics and game settings and more, absolutely nothing changes for the better and the game is and remains an unstable pile of crappy code.

If we take into account the other things that could be legitimately criticized, namely:

• always-online requirement (even for singleplayer!)
  
• bad audio mixing
  
• bad matchmaking
  
• bad servers
  
• bad and too many unnecessary cutscenes
  
• no option for loadouts
  
• no functionality for trading with your crew
  
• no possibility to "lock"/secure your equipment from accidentally selling/scrapping it

... then it seems to be absolutely crystal clear what the developers should take care of with highest priority, right? WRONG! Instead of addressing and fixing the many, many major stability and performance issues, THEY RE-BALANCED THE GAME BY NERFING SKILLS AND MODS FIRST!

All things considered it's really not surprising anymore that you need an active server connection to get to the main menu before you can close the game properly. Yes, you read that right: Without a server connection, you can't get to the main menu, and you have to "close" the game (for example, in case of server problems) through ALT+F4. Think about that!

I don't know what to say, guys, but I definitely wouldn't recommend to spend any money on OUTRIDERS right now. There are many issues to fix and I don't think that will happen in a timely manner. Maybe, and hopefully, the developers will prove me wrong, because as I said before, OUTRIDERS has the potential to be a great game. But until then I won't touch the game anymore.

Update #2: I thought earlier today that I should test yesterday's update more extensively. After a few hours without any bigger issues, I then had the bug that was supposed to have been fixed with the last update as well. And it happens to be the worst bug you, as a player, can have. Because my [b]WHOLE GAME PROGRESS[/b] is gone. [b]COMPLETELY![/b] Inventory empty, loot gone. 80 hours of gameplay wiped. Thanks for nothing, you incompetent morons. ––––– Update #1: They released a rather big patch today (April 9th, around 2.4GB in size) and the crashing issues still exist for me. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ––––– I wish I hadn't bought OUTRIDERS. But let me say one thing up front: OUTRIDERS is a really good game, or at least it [b]CAN[/b] be a really good game. It is extremely fun, especially in co-op, and thoroughly entertaining. The visuals are beautiful and the atmosphere is top notch, the aiming is very reminiscent of good old CS 1.6 times, making it very direct and snappy, and all in all you [b]COULD[/b] give OUTRIDERS a positive review. That is [b]IF THE GAME WOULD ACTUALLY WORK[/b]! Guys, I've seen a lot of really buggy games, and I'm talking about games like Skyrim, which needed community mods to fix bugs that Bethesda never seemed to be able (or willing?) to fix. Anyway. The things I encountered in OUTRIDERS during my ~75 hours of gameplay are hard to beat. I'm not going into the catastrophic and absolutely outrageous "performance" of the servers during the game's launch – servers that you need to be able to connect to in order play the game at all, mind you – because games like this often have to deal with server problems when they are released. What I'm talking about is the fundamentally terrible performance and stability of the game. I really don't have a bad PC (i9 7980XE @ 4.60 GHz, ASUS RTX TUF 3070 OC, 64GB RAM, SSD only, fully water-cooled), so the argument that I "just need to upgrade" is bullshit. Still, OUTRIDERS manages to crash [b]MORE THAN ONCE PER HOUR[/b] for me on average. Sometimes it's an Unreal Engine error, sometimes the game just shuts down, sometimes it freezes, then there's supposedly not enough VRAM available on my graphics card – although according to task manager and resource monitor there's never more than 6GB VRAM (out of a total of 8GB) used. As of today there are crashes when opening or closing the inventory, which were supposedly already fixed in the beta. lol. In a good 8 out of 10 cases (yes, really!) I can "provoke" the crashes by trying to modify weapons at Zahedi or travel to another area at Channa. Whenever I confirm the dialog with "E", the game crashes. This has now gone so far that I had to get a friend to join me in my lobby so that he could start the journey to another area for me instead. [b]WHAT THE FUCK GUYS?![/b] Despite changing the graphics driver versions (as recommended by the devs) several times, switching from DirectX 12 to DirectX 11 (as recommended by the devs) several times, experimenting with different graphics and game settings and more, absolutely nothing changes for the better and the game is and remains an unstable pile of crappy code. If we take into account the other things that could be legitimately criticized, namely: [list] [*]always-online requirement (even for singleplayer!) [*]bad audio mixing [*]bad matchmaking [*]bad servers [*]bad and too many unnecessary cutscenes [*]no option for loadouts [*]no functionality for trading with your crew [*]no possibility to "lock"/secure your equipment from accidentally selling/scrapping it [/list] ... then it seems to be absolutely crystal clear what the developers should take care of with highest priority, right? [b]WRONG![/b] Instead of addressing and fixing the many, many major stability and performance issues, [b]THEY RE-BALANCED THE GAME BY NERFING SKILLS AND MODS FIRST![/b] All things considered it's really not surprising anymore that you [b]need[/b] an active server connection to get to the main menu before you can close the game properly. Yes, you read that right: Without a server connection, you can't get to the main menu, and you have to "close" the game (for example, in case of server problems) through ALT+F4. Think about that! I don't know what to say, guys, but I definitely wouldn't recommend to spend any money on OUTRIDERS right now. There are many issues to fix and I don't think that will happen in a timely manner. Maybe, and hopefully, the developers will prove me wrong, because as I said before, OUTRIDERS has the potential to be a great game. But until then I won't touch the game anymore.