Nier: Automata's Steam version will finally get its major patch this week
Four years late
Nier: Automata is a great and beloved game, but it was released in a poor state on Steam four years ago. Since then, players have relied on fan patches to get the game to do simple things, like run in the correct resolution or play cutscenes without stuttering.
No more. The long-awaited patch announced back in April is arriving this week on July 15th.
In a post on Steam, Square Enix outlined the changes. It seems to be what people were hoping for. You'll know be able to run the game in borderless mode; pre-rendered cutscenes should now play at a stable 60FPS; and the frame rate in general has been improved.
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There are also higher resolution UI textures designed to work with 4K displays, tweaks to anti-aliasing, new lighting effects, and other minor bug fixes.
It's obviously not uncommon for games to be released in a junky condition, and Nier was far from unplayable. And yet, its condition was particularly maddening. For one, although Square Enix never patched Automata, they did continue to release paid DLC for the Steam version of the game. Then the game landed on the Windows Store and Game Pass back in March with all of the major issues fixed. That meant that a better version existed on PC, but only if you bought the game again, and porting your saves better versions was a faff.
I'm glad that Square Enix are going back and patching Nier: Automata now, and it's nice that players will no longer have to jump through fan patch hoops to get it running to a reasonable standard. No eggnog for Square Enix, though; they should have done this four years ago.