An Outriders player has discovered that the game’s frequent crashes on their PC is causing crash report files to fill up their storage drive. The new looter shooter from developer People Can Fly had a pretty rocky launch when it released earlier in April, with major server outages and players on PC encountering stuttering and crashing due to issues related to Microsoft’s DirectX 12. The studio even took the game’s servers offline completely, in what it called “the mother of all turn-it-off-and-on-agains” in an attempt to stabilize them, but the developer can at least be credited with being very transparent with its launch woes.
One of the more severe issues players have encountered since the game’s launch is a glitch that completely wipes all story progress the player has made. The problem first arose after the game’s latest patch, which itself was meant to fix a previous glitch that could delete everything in a player's inventory. Rather than correctly addressing that initial issue, though, the intended fix is ending up affecting players in an even more devastating way, and the issue has yet to be resolved at the time of writing.
Outriders player and Reddit user Toasteroven47 reported their experience on this latest issue on the game’s subreddit (thanks, VG247), sharing that the game saved almost 23 GB of crash files to their SSD. The game, like many other games developed on Unreal Engine 4, creates reports whenever it crashes. These reports, which include crash file dumps, can help developers figure out what may have caused the crash and hopefully fix it. While crash file dumps aren’t unusual, the ones created by Outriders in particular are incredibly large and could easily fill up a user’s storage drive after repeated crashes, as seen in this particularly egregious case. Worryingly, commenters shared that they've also had similar experiences with oversized crash report folders while playing Outriders on PC.
23 GB of crash files from outriders - No wonder my SSD was out of space - Fix your game from outriders
It’s currently unclear why exactly the crash file dumps for Outriders are so large, and developer People Can Fly has yet to respond directly to the issue. Other than causing storage drive space issues, though, this latest problem thankfully isn’t very severe or game-breaking. Of course, it can still be annoying, especially for players with limited storage drive space. Players can just delete the crash reports if they’re running out of space on their drives as they aren’t necessary for the game to run, but it's an unwieldy step to be forced to take to play a 2021 game to say the least.
While not as severe as server instability or save file corruption, this crashing issue is just the latest in the growing list of problems players are experiencing with Outriders. For such a promising game that could potentially take on the likes of Destiny 2, it’s pretty unfortunate that the game is off to an incredibly rocky start. Hopefully the studio is able to finally get on track and fix the game’s issues sooner rather than later. At the very least, the studio is hoping to be able to restore what players have lost due to the ongoing glitches.
Outriders is available on PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, PC, and Google Stadia.
Source: Toasteroven47/Reddit (via VG24/7)