“In order to improve the pacing of the early parts of the game, we’ve edited dialogues to be shorter,” developer Experiment 101 explained. “We’ve also added more enemies and loot to these areas to better represent the experience later in the game.”

Biomutant doesn’t have traditional dialogue since its fuzzy characters all speak in Animal Crossing-esque gibberish, leaving the narrator to translate and relay what’s being said. With patch 1.4, the narrator will now start translating after a “reduced amount of gibberish,” speeding up the flow of conversations. Multiple snippets of tutorial dialogue have also been shortened or entirely removed to speed up the game’s intro, and if you want, you can now disable the narrator’s voice or the animal gibberish. 

On top of adding more loot and enemies to the early stages, patch 1.4 also changed the way that loot drops. Common items will no longer drop from high-level crates, and items will now drop closer to your level. You can still receive higher-level items that you’ll have to grind a bit to unlock, but in general, items will have “level requirements closer to the player’s actual level.”

Experiment 101 has stuck to its plan to patch the game “based on community feedback”; we also highlighted loot and dialogue annoyances in our Biomutant review, so these changes are nice to see. Another pain point since launch has been motion blur, which was enabled by default and lacked any real options. Fortunately, patch 1.4 also added a motion blur slider, letting players reduce or disable the unpopular visual effect. 

Other changes in the patch include expanded perk choices for new game plus, an extreme difficulty setting that increases enemy damage and attack rate, and a new camera option that keeps the focus on the player and prevents the camera from latching onto enemies mid-fight. You can read the full patch notes (opens in new tab) and the dozens of bug fixes inside over on the Biomutant Steam blog.

Ahead of E3, here’s our list of new games 2021.

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How long is Biomutant?

The answer to how long is Biomutant is the same as most games; it depends. Playtimes can vary significantly depending on how each person progresses. Some players will just tackle the main story, others will touch on some side quests but not all of them, while the completionists out there will want to tick everything off before finishing the game.

If you only focus on the main story, the Biomutant length you’ll be facing is approximately 10-12 hours. To beat the game this quickly, you’ll need to only focus on uniting the first couple of tribes and stopping the ongoing war, along with defeating all four worldeaters.

An average playthrough – with some side stuff ticked off but not all – is going to be approximately 20 hours or so. I finished the game after about 18.5 hours having ticked off some of the early side missions but leaving most of the later ones, while GamesRadar’s editor, Sam Loveridge (who also wrote our Biomutant review), did most of the side missions but not all collectibles, and finished at 28.5 hours.

With that in mind, if you’re a completionist and want to nab all the achievements in Biomutant, you’re facing 30+ hours. The game does have a lot going on so you’ll never be short of things to do. After you finish the game, New Game+ will unlock too, so you can tackle it all over again, this time starting from the foot of the Tree of Life and with the option to ally with any of the six tribes at the start. Note that this will reset all your side mission progress and world exploration though, as you’d expect.

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