Outriders' first major update, New Horizon, is already live across all platforms — it's free for everyone who owns the base game. New Horizon is the culmination of the team's work spent improving Outriders to make it the game fans have asked for since launch.
People Can Fly massively reworked the endgame based on player feedback. One of the most notable additions is four Expeditions, taking you to previously unexplored areas of Enoch. Expeditions are no longer time-restricted, so you can finish the missions at your own pace now without forcing yourself to stick with the highest DPS build for your character to quickly eliminate all foes.
There's also a new transmog system in Outriders now, allowing you to change the appearance of items at any time and at no extra cost. New Horizon also brings new quality of life improvements and bug fixes to the game. Additionally, the dev announced that you can get a free Legendary Armor item just for logging in between now and November 30. And if you've never tried Outriders before, now is a good time to get started, as the game is available at the lowest price ever (67 percent discount) on Steam until November 24. It's also on Xbox Game Pass.
New Horizon has already brought a wealth of new players to the game, at least on PC. According to SteamDB, shortly after the update launched, Outriders' concurrent player count rose ten times on average — from 500-700 to 5,000-7,000. Of course, that's far below the game's all-time peak, currently standing at an impressive 125,000 active players.
Although, there are mixed feelings on the update, despite being aimed to fix some of the most frustrating issues with Outriders' endgame. Players reported several new bugs such as automatic, unprompted moving and aiming. Others point out that plenty of old bugs are still present, including crashes. The team is already investigating the problems, so fixes are hopefully on the way.
Following Outriders' not-so-successful launch, People Can Fly previously announced its new strategy to have one new game release annually starting in 2024. The developer wants to shift towards smaller AA games in new genres but won’t abandon its bigger triple-A projects like Outriders as well.