NieR: Automata's Steam update will finally land this week with fixes

A release date has finally been attached to the promised Nier: Automata update that is headed towards Steam users. This long-awaited update is coming to the 2017-released action title by PlatinumGames on July 15, aiming to resolve some of the issues the PC port has sat with since launch while also adding a handful of new graphics features.

When Square Enix brought Nier: Automata over to the Microsoft Store as a part of the Xbox Game Pass offerings in March this year, it carried a range of improvements that were missing over on the original PC release. This did not go over well with Steam users that were stuck on the old version who needed mods to alleviate various problems. This even led to users review bombing the title.

The update includes a borderless windowed mode that should fix the stretched resolution issue of the current full screen mode, AMD Fidelity FX Contrast Adaptive Sharpening support, HDR, 4K resolution UI textures, 60FPS cut scenes, and more. See the complete list of changes below:

• Borderless Video Settings - Borderless video settings have been implemented.
• Fidelity FX - A Fidelity FX CAS feature has been added.
• HDR - The system will now detect whether HDR has been activated in the Windows display settings, and automatically boot the game in HDR mode if it has.
• Anti-aliasing - Adjustments to the anti-aliasing functionality
• UI textures (4K) - Approximately 270 UI textures for icons, backdrops and UI elements etc. now support 4K resolutions.
• Cut scenes - The bit rate has been improved and all pre-rendered cut scenes adjusted, so they will now play in 60FPS and display in the correct aspect ratio without stretching the picture.
• Global illumination - A new “Global illumination” feature has been implemented. This can be set to three different levels; High, Medium or Low.
• Ambient occlusion/ bloom - The rendering targets for ambient occlusion and bloom effects have been changed to dynamic resolution based on the game’s resolution.

As for bug fixes, the update will have these:

• It is now possible to switch between recently selected display modes for screenshots, such as between full screen and windowed mode or between borderless and windowed mode, by pushing the Alt + Enter keys together.
• The mouse cursor is no longer displayed when using a game pad controller.
• The frame rate has been stabilized at 60FPS under default settings.
• Other stability related fixes have also been implemented.

The work on the Microsoft Store port was done by QLOC, and considering the similarity of the changes, it should be the same studio that's implementing the Steam version's changes.