Deus Ex: Mankind Divided Augmented With First Patch

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided [official site] has received its first patch-me-do, now ready to be added via Steam. It's not a biggun by any means, but should stop some of the more immediately annoying crashes people have experienced. They've also made some suggestions about improving performance by, well, telling you to switch off MSAA altogether.

So according to the patch notes, this update is primarily about preventing crashing, presumably with some sort of Icarus Landing. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided appropriate joke for you there. The fixes are:

• Fixed crashes caused by third-party programs interfering with the game.
• Fixed crash that occurred after viewing the intro videos.
• Fixed issue that could cause a crash at the end of the Prague intro scene.
• Fixed mouse invert setting not being displayed correctly in the options menu.

If that was what was bothering you, rejoice. If not, grumble for a little longer.

In an attempt to stem other grumbling, Eidos Montreal have taken the odd measure of suggesting that people seeing performance issues with recommended specs or higher make sure to entirely switch off MSAA anti-aliasing - the thing that makes diagonal lines look like diagonal lines and not staircases.

They say,

"We are seeing people reporting performance issues when playing the game on Very High/Ultra settings with MSAA set to 2x, 4x, or 8x. We would like to emphasize again that these options are very demanding. We recommend everyone that is running at recommended spec or higher to start with the High Preset and MSAA turned off, and then tweak the options to optimize your experience."

This rather sort of doesn't really seem good enough to me. MSAA is certainly system intensive, but I'm pretty sure most games don't include it with the suggestion that no one ever use it. (Also, "High" is two steps below the top setting, "Ultra", so I would really love to know what the hell system is required for Ultra?) Much better at this point would be a statement that clarifies what precisely would be necessary to use regular graphical features like MSAA they've included in their game, rather than suggesting those with machines above their recommended spec should never have expected to be able to take advantage of them in the first place.

Alec went into a lot more detail about performance issues this morning, and I can't see Eidos's response doing much to quell the fuming hordes. A little more honesty and clarity seems absolutely vital at this point. Also, let us sodding bloody well close the Tab menu with Tab in the next patch, you MONSTERS.