It didn’t take long for Outriders players to discover an exploit in the co-op game’s first big expansion, Worldslayer. Developer People Can Fly says “a large number of players” have been using the exploit to skip straight to the final Arbiter in the Trial of Tarya Gratar dungeon and farm this boss repeatedly. The latest Outriders patch addresses this exploit, but does it in a somewhat surprising way.
Rather than closing the loophole that allows players to dash straight for the final Arbiter, the latest Outriders patch expands the farming options available in the Trial of Tarya Gratar. The update adds guaranteed Apocalypse Legendary RNG drops to the Cliffside Path, Daughter’s Sanctuary, and The Arboretum Trove areas, giving players more reasons to play the complete dungeon.
The drops are RNG, but they’ll correspond to the targeted loot option for each trove, and the troves will also drop their targeted loot more often, according to the patch notes. The final Arbiter’s Apocalypse Legendary drop rate is getting reduced, but it’ll still have the ‘choice of legendary’ reward when you defeat it. The boss will also drop helmets less often, so you’ll have a better chance of getting a non-helmet piece of gear from that fight.
“Compared to before, where the amount of Apocalypse Legendaries obtained from a full run through of the Trial was a minimum of six, in the new system a complete run through all rooms in the Trial will net a player a guaranteed minimum of nine Apocalypse Legendaries plus RNG chances for others,” People Can Fly explains.
The new system should keep the trial from feeling too repetitive, the studio says. “The most efficient way of farming legendaries should therefore shift to something much more fun and variable, rather than players feeling like they need to repeat the same fight ad infinitum if they want to be as efficient as possible.”
Fixing the exploit itself would have required a lot of development time, and ultimately a rewrite to the way Outriders handles game saves, at least while in the Trial.
“The current exploit is only in place because we purposefully designed the Retries system within the Trial to be player friendly,” People Can Fly says. “We did not want players who need to take a break from playing or whose internet connection momentarily fails to be punished with lost retries or be sent back to the start of the Trial.”
The patch also includes some changes to Technomancer armour sets to make them synergise with the Pax tree more effectively, and addresses a couple bugs – like one that would cause the Arbiter to be killed instantly when players used certain gear combinations.