New Outriders patch aims to stamp out worrying inventory wipe bug
Is it safe?
Outriders has a new patch designed to tackle the awful inventory wipe bug.
The patch, out now on Steam, Epic Games Store, Xbox and PlayStation platforms, addresses the bug that, since the previous update, caused the inventories of certain players to be wiped.
There is no mention in today's announcement of the Stadia version, which lags behind the other versions in terms of patches.
As we reported this week, Outriders' inventory wipe bug has in some cases scrubbed nearly 100 hours of investment into the game from players.
On Thursday last week, developer People Can Fly said it was working on restorations for players who were affected by these inventory wipes. But it's this restoration plan that has added further stress to players who have invested so much time into their character builds.
Players - particularly those who have reached Outriders' endgame - are spending a lot of time and effort trying to obtain items with "god rolls" that will push their character build to optimal heights. In Outriders, weapons and armour drop with random mods of varying quality, and random stat categories (bonus firepower, long range damage etc). The "god roll grind" is one of the chief pursuits of endgame players.
People Can Fly has said its restoration plan means "restored items may not have the exact same stats as the lost items". This statement has terrified players who have put time and effort into the god roll grind.
People Can Fly said its efforts to restore items are a separate process from today's released patch.
"Restoring the inventory of affected players is still our highest priority, while today's patch is intended to prevent the issue from continuing to occur," PCF said.
"The restoration process is run via our server database and does not require a patch to be implemented. We will have news of this very soon."
Of note: with this new patch, some players may occasionally encounter multiplayer connectivity issues followed by inventory items being momentarily invisible. This is a known and only "temporary" behaviour, PCF insisted, that is part of its inventory safeguarding measures.
"Restarting your game or waiting a few minutes and then restarting your game should make your items appear again," the developer added.
PCF said it's "confident" this patch will prevent inventory wipes in the future, but it wants to use the weekend to keep an eye on things before moving onto the restoration process.
PCF also said "we have also continued to look at ways of improving our restoration process". Could that mean players will get items lost exactly as they were? Fingers crossed!