Vanquish PC version receives beta update, remedies damage tied to frame rate bug

After being a console exclusive game for almost seven years, Vanquish landed on the PC last week. Although regarded as an impressive port, the game suffered an unfortunate bug where enemies were essentially dealing double damage to PC players who are running the game at 60 frames per second.

Frame rate related bugs in PC ports aren’t unheard of, with a rather famous example being Dark Souls 2, where playing the game at 60 frames per second caused weapons to degrade and break at double the rate than intended. Although From Software eventually fixed the weapon degradation bug with an update, it was more than a year after the game was released.

Thankfully, Vanquish players won't have to wait that long to see a remedy, with Sega already pushing out an update to fix the damage problem. The caveat here is that as it's a bank holiday in the UK, the update has not gone through QA, and is only available in beta form. This means that the beta update could introduce unforeseen bugs, crashes and other undesirable effects, or on the other hand, it could run flawlessly.

Those who are still interested in taking the risk and using the beta patch can accomplish this by going to the game's properties on the Steam library, navigating to the BETAS tab and entering the code 'PatchBetaTest' in the text field. Afterward, a new entry by the name 'public_patch' will appear in the drop-down menu, and selecting it will download the update.

The full changelog provided by Sega for the beta update is as follows:

• Fixed an issue with invincibility frame timing (which sometimes allowed the player to get hit more frequently at higher frame rates).
• Fixed an issue with health regeneration at higher frame rates.
• Fixed an issue when resetting to default on the options menu.
• Fixed an issue with video cutscenes skipping early for some players.
• Fixed an animation issue when sliding backwards and aiming using keyboard and mouse.
• Adjusted cutscene audio volume.

There are also two new command line options in the update, '-monitor 2', where the number allows players with multi-monitor setups to switch which monitor the game will regard as the primary display. Lastly, '-window' which will run the game in windowed mode when used.

Source: Steam | Image: Vanquish (Steam)