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Outlast II Patch Addresses Difficulty Balance
Outlast II launched last month to generally favorable reviews, but some critics knocked the game for its oppressive difficulty. Developer Red Barrels took this criticism to heart, and today released a PC patch that rebalances key sections of the game.
"On Normal difficulty, this will offer players a more appropriately balanced experience while still maintaining higher levels of challenge on Hard and Nightmare difficulties," the update reads. The patch also makes the following changes:
- Global rebalancing of the game difficulty.
- Microphone no longer uses extra batteries.
- Increased the size of subtitles.
- Fixed an issue on Intel HD 4000 cards where most dynamic lights were missing.
- Fixed an issue where flickering black squares appear in the center of the screen at some specific resolutions.
- Fixed an issue with alternate controller mappings and the camcorder UI.
- Fixed an issue with double doors where one of them is locked.
- Fixed an issue causing lost save games when Steam somehow fails to initialize.
- Fixed some heretic sound effects.
- Fixed multiple minor gameplay issues (collisions, crawling, tutorials, etc.)
- Fixed multiple rare crashes.
- Added a "-refreshrate 60" command-line parameter to specify a preferred refresh rate (replace 60 by the desired refresh rate).
- Added a "-notexturelimit" command-line parameter to remove texture size limits based on VRAM amount.
- Added a "-borderless" command-line parameter to use borderless fullscreen and not have to edit INI files.
The gameplay tweaks mentioned above are coming soon to PS4 and Xbox One as well.
Elise Favis reviewed Outlast II for Game Informer and gave it a 7.75/10, saying "If gory thrills are something you seek, Outlast 2 provides plenty to keep you on the edge of your seat as long as you can look past the clumsy storytelling." You can read her full review here. You can also watch us play two hours of the game below:
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