'ReCore' gets an enormous patch to fix loading times, game-breaking bugs

By Gabe Gurwin October 5, 2016

Recore: Load Time Controversy, Fast Travel, and Death respawn timed

ReCore isn’t exactly the best game Microsoft has published for the Xbox One. Many of its issues lie in basic game design decisions and a reliance on padding, but for some of the issues more technical in nature, Wednesday’s gargantuan patch appears to help substantially.

Xbox community manager Josh Stein revealed some details of the patch last week, including shorter load times, “audio and visual improvements,” and changes to achievement tracking and checkpoints. The Windows 10 version previously saw users downloading the entire game again whenever they installed an update, and this should also be rectified.

Reddit user “FlameCats” reported his firsthand experience since installing the 5.5GB patch on his Xbox One on Wednesday, and it appears that the improvements affect a few of the game’s most troublesome areas. Loading times, which were ludicrously long in previous versions of the game, have apparently been been significantly reduced thanks to the update. One area called “Shifting Sands,” which takes place near the end of the game, will still leave you waiting for a little longer than you may like, but you’ll be able to spawn back into Joule’s Crawler ship in very little time at all. These issues primarily affected the Xbox One version of the game, with Digital Foundry finding that loading times on the PC were less than half of its console counterpart.

A platforming glitch would previously cause protagonist Joule to immediately die over and over if she happened to be in the wrong spot, and the Reddit user says this is now “completely fixed.” Bugged achievements now load “immediately” after playing the game, and some upgrades have been made to the texture work on Joule, enemies, and the environments.

More content-based issues with ReCore, however, will remain unsolved. It still requires players to gather 45 Prismatic cores in order to reach the game’s ending, though getting to the last area requires half of this. But with less time waiting for the next part of the game to load, it shouldn’t be as much of a hassle.

ReCore is now available on Xbox One and Windows 10.

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Gabe Gurwin has been playing games since 1997, beginning with the N64 and the Super Nintendo. He began his journalism career…

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