People Can Fly’s Outriders is coming up in April but before that, players across all platforms can try out the demo when it goes live later today. In recent interviews, lead designer Piotr Nowakowski provided some new details on the shooter. He confirmed to VG247 that there won’t be any dedicated servers for its multiplayer.
“When we were developing the game quite a few years ago, when making the choices we made the decision: ‘okay, we’re not going with the dedicated servers’. Of course, on one side is the cost, or the other side are the technical solutions. And because we have three-player co-op we aren’t forced to have dedicated servers – the current structures will be good enough.
“We’ve developed the game with that in mind, and dedicated servers were on the table a long-long time ago, but we made the decision not to go in that direction. If something breaks for some reason, I’ll say I was wrong, but right now: I’ll say it works for us and the way we’re handling players, it should work.”
This doesn’t mean that dedicated servers won’t be used at all. Since Outriders is an online-only title, they’re employed to prevent any kind of hacking. As game director Bartosz Kmita notes, “It’s not a P2P game where everything’s on your machine and you can hack it. You have to log into an account to play because you need to access the server. It’s basically the distribution between how many things are calculated on the server and how many things are calculated on your machine.
“Even in games with dedicated servers, some calculations are on your machine, so it’s about the proportion. So a smaller amount of calculations we have on a dedicated server, but most of the things go on the host machine.”
Outriders is slated to release on April 1st for Xbox One, PS4, PC, PS5, Xbox Series X/S and Google Stadia. The demo will go live today at 9 AM PST, though other regions may see it go live by early tomorrow morning. In terms of content, all four classes will be playable along with the prologue and first chapter. In yesterday’s Outriders Broadcast, People Can Fly revealed that the demo would offer three hours of content. Stay tuned for more details