Outriders Game Freezes Are Discouraging Me To Reach Peak Endgame Content

People Can Fly’s Outriders has been out for exactly a week now and I've spent an unhealthy amount of time on the latest looter shooter and loving most of what it has to offer. I finished the campaign and while I'm still on the journey to reaching the last portion of it’s endgame content, I'm feeling discouraged, as I feel like I'm slamming my head against the wall every hour.  

The difficulty isn’t the problem here. Combat, itemization, the options and the process to strengthen your character to a particular playstyle - People Can Fly nailed it for me as I’m enjoying my Pyromancer’s progression from raising measly flames to damage and apply a burn effect to taking down multiple enemies at once by sprouting a volcano-like lava eruption in between their legs. 

After the end of it’s lengthy campaign, expeditions unlock and this endgame content consists of 15 gauntlet-like missions that reward you loot once you’ve reached the end and killed every enemy on the map. The overall endgame goal? Naturally, It’s to overcome Tier 15 expeditions with ease, the highest difficulty available, and beat the Eye of the Storm expedition. I'm loving the climb to get there.

But Expeditions is an entirely different experience in a technical perspective if you compare it with the campaign. Aside from the server outages that occurred in the first days since Outriders’ release, the campaign barely had crashes and bugs, and I spent roughly 30 hours on it, finishing all sidequests available. It was a smooth run to say the least. Then, I enter Expeditions and I find myself frequently resetting the game due to game crashes, freezing, and disconnects. I get the game freezing on me during a run the most, where the game stops moving completely but the background music just plays. At first, I thought my console locked up on me but I can open up the PS5’s dashboard to force close the application. 

It’s demoralizing to get these freezes as they mostly occur during an expedition. After 10-minutes of constantly burning through waves of enemies, staying alive and hopefully finishing the run at record speeds to get the best rewards, the last thing you need is the game to lock up on you and lose all of your progress. Time wasted. Nothing progressed. Just yesterday, the first expedition for the day froze on me. But it was the start of the day and my first cup of coffee had already kicked in, so I was eager to have another go after the freeze. But It froze again, at the last wave of enemies, too. It happening two in a row really hurt my eagerness to reaching Tier 15. 

It didn’t feel good, and I'm mostly playing solo as the cross-play and matchmaking isn’t reliable at the moment. Plus, I love the challenge doing it solo. I have no problems with the difficulty as you can adjust the difficulty to hit that perfect balance of having enough challenge and rewards to progress forward. The frustration simply lies on having a good run and having it end abruptly with nothing saved.

I started playing alternate characters and even brought my Pyromancer back to the campaign to cool my head, and to my surprise I haven’t had a crash or freeze since doing non-expedition content.

What’s up with the endgame content? Who knows but it’s definitely not stable. As more people reach the endgame, more could experience the same thing, though, I hope that won’t be the case to the rest of you. I’m not the only one as there are other players reporting similar issues in the Outriders’ subreddit. This issue seems to be present on all platforms.

I was hoping to include the Tier 15 expedition experience in my thoughts when completing my full review of the game, but at this point that will depend on how the second weekend will go. Hopefully, People Can Fly can isolate these issues found in the endgame because they’ve created something great overall.

Interested in what I think about the game overall? Read my full review on Outriders.

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