The community is already fixing issues with Nier Replicant's port

While the PC version of Nier Replicant may not be as disappointing as Nier Automata's port, it still has some problems. As Julie Muncy said in her review, "The technical aspects are much improved over the original, which struggled to maintain 30 fps, but they're not quite up to contemporary standards." She experienced technical problems including "serious frame drops when I accidentally unplugged my controller, or a persistent issue where my mouse point kept reappearing on my screen during cutscenes, which was not great for the game's sense of gravitas."

Additionally, players with monitors that have refresh rates over 60hz are finding certain animations are tied to framerate, and when they exceed 60 fps the protagonist zips around so fast he's tricky to control when precision becomes necessary. Meanwhile, other players are finding that thanks to poor GPU and CPU utilization they're getting poor performance on PCs that should be able to run it much better.

Thankfully, the modding and tweaking community has already stepped in and begun repairing Replicant. First there's the Special K injectable by old mate Kaldaien, which will let you get rid of the mouse cursor showing up when you're playing with gamepad, cut down on stuttering by disabling the PS4 HID input, set your own framerate limit, and turn off the internal v-sync. Then there's the Nier Replicant High FPS Fix, one of the first things for the game available on its brand new Nexusmods section. It'll let you run Nier Replicant over 60 fps without borking the animations—except for when you're slow-walking, which might leave you facing the wrong way.

Of course, you could just wait for publisher Square Enix to patch Nier Replicant. After all, it only took a measly four years for an upgrade patch for Nier Automata to be announced.

Jody Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.