If you’re playing video games in the 21st century, you are no stranger to this: a popular game launch that requires an internet connection. Interested players buy it, do not have access to the servers and can not play the thing they paid for. The youngest offender is Outdoors, a class-based outdoor shooter from developer People Can Fly.
Outdoors launched yesterday to spread a bit across platforms. Some players could not get past the initial load, stuck on a perpetual “Signed In!” screen. (The key there was simply to exercise patience, the rarest virtue of life.) Some could not even get to the initial frozen screen, while others were eventually kicked out of the game amidst missions.
Last night I teamed up with Kotaku‘s Zack Zweizen to test the cooperative. We both play on PlayStation 5 and both have a relatively stable internet service. It took us 24 minutes to party together. After about an hour of play, I started our session at the beginning of a mission. It took us another 11 minutes to party again.
We are not alone. Social media channel is usurer with users Share similar experiences. (My personal favorite? A Reddit message heading: “Are the servers also on Enoch?”) Kotakusee John Walker tweeted that the Xbox servers went off when he was at the end of a mission and then did not want to let him into the game again at all.
This connection hiccup continued until the second day of the game, something people can fly acknowledge in a tweet. As of this writing, the Outdoors server status website contains multiplayer as ‘operational’ and core components as a ‘major disruption’. (Hmm …) Earlier today, core components were marked as “operational”, while the multiplayer service appeared as “partially operational”.
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“We are aware that a small percentage of players are experiencing certain issues and that our teams are proactively gathering information and working on updates and solutions,” Square Enix representatives emailed me yesterday.
That an online launch went wrong is not exactly surprising. We saw it with Val guys, The division, Destiny, en Hitman 3 (kind of). What’s curious here is that People Can Fly has stuck to the line that Outdoors is not a service game – like Destiny or Avengers or The division—And is rather one that you can pick up and play as a complete out-of-the-box experience. ‘Although Outdoors shines as a collaborative game, it is also designed to play fully as a single player experience, and yet you need an internet connection to play.
“We have a lot of things in the back, so you have to be connected to the internet to be able to play,” said Bartosz Kmita, People Can Fly. told IGN.
This is, needless to say, an overall raid. Obviously you will need servers to enable multiplayer connections, and it is of course impossible to predict exactly how many players the servers will swarm on the first day. (People can fly said that more than 2 million players have tried the free demo of the game. These numbers were unveiled before Square Enix, Outdoors‘publisher, announced that the game would be available during the launch of Game Pass.) But I feel that the game’s intention to be single means you just have to download and play it. Friends are nice, but in the end it’s not necessary Outdoors to work. Do not get me wrong. I love the game and have had such an explosion so far. I just wish I could play it reliably.
Update: 16:00 ET: People can fly taken the Outdoors servers offline.
Update 18:04 ET: People can fly said that Outdoors servers were online everywhere except in the United States State.
Updated 18:46 ET: The US servers are apparently online again.