Nier: Automata mod offers fixes while devs investigate problems

Platinum's Nier: Automata [official site] is a cracking game, our Adam will tell you, and from the 16 hours I've played I'd certainly agree. Sadly, technical problems are dragging it down for some -- not all, to be clear -- players. Issues include fullscreen mode upscaling wonkily, crashes, and unexpectedly poor performance. The Automata team have now issued a statement saying they're investigating reports. But in the meantime, players have come up with some good fixes themselves.

Last night's official statement is pretty vague, saying:

"We are happy so many are enjoying the game. We wanted to let you know that we appreciate all your feedback and are investigating the issues that have been reported.

"Please stay tuned for updates."

Shall do!

So which problems does Automata's PC port have? Well! Some folks are reporting crashes or freezes, which are never fun. Fullscreen mode seems to have a bug where it downscales the screen then upscales it, making everything blurry (see the effects in this gallery from Redditor 'igrat'). Some players are finding the game's performance slower than they'd expect. For some it stutters too. Those are the most complained-about problems but Redditers have whipped together a bigger list.

And fixes? Well, we're staying tuned for something official but players have done good work by rummaging in the game's guts.

The must-have fix is a tool by Andon 'Kaldaien' Coleman, whose 'SpecialK' kit has also helped fix up games including Final Fantasy X, Tales of Berseria, and Disgaea. His FAR (Fix Automata Resolution) tool fixes that fullscreen scaling problem and, in a version released last night, has an option to help boost performance. See, 'DrDaxxy' discovered potential big performance gains in fiddling with the global illumination shader in Automata's guts. Tweaking the GI can bring big performance boosts -- some players report up to 60% -- but this can also noticeably change how the game looks. For all-in-one ease, Kaldaien has now added a GI setting to the FAR tool. Igrat nicely explains how to use it all in this Reddit thread (though don't mind the bits about the test branch - GI settings are now in main too) so go look there.

I don't see mega-huge boosts from fiddling with GI myself, even at the lowest setting, but have gained a clear 5-10% by knocking it down one notch - and the game looks exactly the same to me at that level. I won't sniff at a free 10% from a tool I'm using anyway.

On the crashing front, some players report that disabling ambient occlusion, anisotropic filtering, and vsync has helped them. Others, not.

Fingers crossed for something official soon-ish.

How's Nier been for me? Fine, really. The fullscreen issue aside, it's looked pretty, run well, not crashed, and been jolly good fun. My biggest setback so far was accidentally selling my OS chip and therefore dying, losing almost an hour of progress. Whoops.