While People Can Fly announced that a client-side patch will be dropping for the Outiders demo next week, the studio has triggered server maintenance today, and this also included a backend (no download required) update. What’s in the Outriders demo March 5 update? The major thing players will notice are changes to how loot drops work. There are enemy changes made as well.

• Related Reading: People Can Fly Not Thinking About Outriders Microtransactions & Battle Pass, Wants to Go “Old School”

Servers for Outriders should be operational now as you read this.

Outriders Demo March 5 Update Patch Notes:

This is the major thing outlined by the studio:

What’s changing?

• Changes to Captains
  • The Captain mob ability “Healing Light” will have its effectiveness reduced.
  • The Captain mob ability “From the Ashes” and “Phoenix Aura” will have their cooldowns increased.
    • Some players were finding it hard to fully kill Captains who would trigger these abilities, making for a frustrating rather than a challenging but fun encounter.
• Changes to Gauss
  • Gauss will have his health points increased for repeat playthroughs.
    • This is to ensure that he remains fun and challenging for players who are overpowered at this point in the story.
  • Gauss healing from his ability “Steel Wall” will be increased.
• Changes to loot drops
  • While we do not want to prevent farming runs (We get it!), the lootcave discovered via the triple chest-run, as well as the store exploit, do not feel to be within the spirit of the game. To that end, we are redirecting farming efforts to mechanics in the game that may be more enjoyable for players to play through and repeat.
    • Epic items will no longer appear in shops and vendors (within the demo).
    • Chests will no longer drop legendary items.
    • Side quest rewards (on repeat runs) will now have a chance to drop legendary items.

Drop rates for enemies are NOT being changed at this time as we feel these are balanced quite well for the average player experience. ^{RIP that captain.}

Note that running this backend update now is also a way for us to pre-emptively ensure that such backend balancing can be a straightforward, low impact method of also rectifying any excessive balance issues in the main game.

Here’s People Can Fly’s explanation on these changes:

A backend update to the demo will be done during a short maintenance on Friday, March 5th at 3pm GMT. This will affect all platforms.

This change should be quite seamless and will not require you to download a patch. We are pre-announcing it now in order to give your advance notice of the changes.

Some of these changes, specifically those related to enemies, are in response to feedback we’ve seen coming in from players as well as what our own backend metrics are showing us.

Other changes are intended to only affect the demo, and may not be implemented in the full launch build.

We would like to issue a explanatory note of caution before getting into the changes: While we have balanced the main game with a certain progression system, this progression may be impacted by heavy farming of gear and/or mods in the demo. As some players are front-loading a lot of that progression (such as by trying to fill their mod library or acquire multiple Legendaries) within the demo content already, their experience of parts of the main game may well be impacted.

Of course, it’s every player’s decision how to play the game for themselves and we do not want to prevent people from farming the demo for gear if they enjoy it. However, we would like to ensure that this process is not overly simplistic, easy or prone to exploitation.

Hopefully, these changes make the game better. I, for one, am not a fan of exploiting the game to get good drops, as I feel that players should be able to get those organically. That said, let us know what you think of the changes down in the comments below!

Don’t forget to read our impressions about the demo right here.