As we head into another week of unknown updates to Outriders, I maintain what I’ve said about the game for a while now. Outriders is uniquely frustrating not just because of what it gets wrong, but about what it doesn’t get wrong, and how close it actually is to being the kind of looter fans want to see.

Outriders feels like a spaceship where it hasn’t exploded on the launchpad like Anthem, or accidentally traveled to the wrong planet like Avengers. But rather it’s like its launch calculations were off by a few degrees, and that means it will still miss the moon it’s aiming for and sail off into black space. The end result of all three of these is that everyone on board dies, but it’s just different paths to get there.

Here, all Outriders needs to do is course correct. If it can manage to knock itself back on the right track, it could still end up at the right place. The combat, the loot, the fundamentals are solid. But it’s being hamstrung by hyper specific issues.

Those corrections it needs to make? To me, the two main immediate things it needs to focus on are:

1) Massively increasing the legendary drop rate

2) Fixing matchmaking in multiplayer

No, these are not the only two issues, but in my eyes, they are indeed the most significant ones impacting player enjoyment. The damage mitigation bugs are annoying, and some skills and perks don’t proc right, etc, but you want people playing, and this is the only way to get them there.

How do you do both of these things?

At this point, Outriders is dramatically overcomplicating the drop rate issue, thinking it has to be “explained” to players before they make any moves. At this point, they are getting lost in the minutiae and the true answer is to simply drown players in legendaries. There is literally no downside to this. Quadruple the rates if you have to, in every activity. I’m talking about massive increase so people aren’t just able to finish that one set they’re trying to build, but multiple ones, and not need to spend 200-500 hours to do so.

There is no reason not to let players “finish” Outriders builds with generous drop rates. This is a PvE game with no microtransactions and no auction house. The only difference between a player quitting after 100 hours of play because they’ve gotten every build completed and a player quitting after 100 hours of play because they can’t find the single helmet they’re looking for is that the latter player leaves furious and the former is eagerly awaiting new content.

The second half of this is how matchmaking works, in that it doesn’t work, almost ever. It takes much longer to actually get into a game than it does to play one these days, between connection errors at least 70% of the time trying to find a part, and when do you land in a lobby, there’s an 80% chance it will be somewhat AFK-ing at camp.

This may require a larger structure change to matchmaking but we should be matching directly into active expeditions every time. Randomize them, I don’t care, whatever it takes. But the current system is a huge obstacle preventing players from enjoying endgame farming.

I know there are more issues at hand. But these two things are the most pressing problems the game has, and if they were fixed, everyone else would have more tolerance on the remaining issues that could be addressed in time. But if we’re about to be waiting another month for a tiny bump to drop rates or something, that’s not going to cut it, and we will keep careening into the endless black.

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