Yesterday, Biomutant‘s first patch came out. It was something like 20-30 MB and took approximately 100 years to install for some reason, but it was totally worth the wait because of how it fixed or mitigated two of Biomutant‘s main problems: combat floatiness and a wordy, incessantly needy narrator. I don’t normally pay attention to (much less cover) post-release updates, but this update is substantive and makes a dramatic difference in how the game plays. Even smaller features such as a slider to control the amount of motion blur applied to the image—which previously required digging through .ini files to turn off—have been added. Biomutant still isn’t entirely there yet, but this quick patch is a promising sign.
The biggest improvement is by far the ability to shut the narrator up almost entirely. He’ll still pop up to introduce areas, but it’s possible to completely remove him from conversations, leaving the NPC gibberish to play at the same time as subtitles. It’s difficult to overstate how much of a difference this makes to my engagement. The dialog still consists of interpretations of what characters are saying rather than direct translations, but there’s more of a connection between NPCs and the things they say now, and removing the narrator’s rambling instantly halves the length of conversations. This is a significant improvement.
Combat immediately felt more natural and weighty, and while I couldn’t put my finger on why that was at first, it quickly became apparent that it was because of the new sound effects that were added. Before, the melee sound effects didn’t quite fit, which apparently threw off other player feedback stuff (its weightlessness was reminiscent of a video with desynced audio). Some of the hit detection has also been tweaked. Biomutant‘s combat is still on the floatier side (especially the special kung-fu mode), but the new sound effects have added enough weight that I was comfortable sliding and slashing and dodging around.
That said, there are still issues. While several of the bugs have been squashed, including one that made it harder to stack resistances, I encountered some minor bugs and problems while playing on this latest patch. That includes not only getting stuck in combat (see the above video), but also occasional performance hitches resulting in noticeable stutters. These were happening in the vanilla game, as well, but disappeared when I turned off motion blur in the .ini file. Using the slider to remove motion blur doesn’t solve the stutters in the same way, presumably because it’s setting a value to 0 and not turning it off entirely, so there seems to be a performance penalty to the motion blur even when it’s doing nothing.
For the most part, though, Biomutant plays immeasurably better now than it did a couple of days ago.
Oh hey, Biomutant has fixed a bunch of things first appeared on Killa Penguin
