Need for Speed Unbound Releases New Update, Here’s What It Does

Criterion has released a new Need for Speed Unbound update today alongside patch notes that reveal what NFS fans on PC, PS5, Xbox Series S, and Xbox Series X can expect from the update, titled Update 6.1.0. According to Criterion itself, and this is evident by the patch notes of the update as well, the new patch is a “small, quality-of-life” update that makes a few improvements to the game and makes a few fixes as well, all based on fan feedback. 

Criterion notably highlights changes the game’s dedicated PvP mode and Free Road mode. To this end, the playlist rotation now updates daily, while featured playlists will hang around for a week to ensure everyone has a chance to play them. The Tier playlists though will now change daily between various Tiers. Meanwhile, the time between Linkups in Free Roam has been halved. 

While we the patch notes for new Need for Speed Unbound update — which you can check out below — Criterion Games has not provided any information about the file size of the update on any platform. 

Need for Speed Unbound Update 6.1.0 Patch Notes

KEY FIXES

• Allow players to go directly to MP Garage after leaving PVP. When leaving PVP, players will now be put straight back to the Multiplayer garage. So less steps and straight to where you want to be. We debated taking you straight back to the PVP screen, but we don’t know what you want to do. Maybe you want to work on your setup, or drop into Free Roam. We leave that choice up to you, but we removed the extra steps.
• All Nitrous auxiliary items stop working if the player changes vehicles during playlists or if they leave the server and rejoin

Fixed!

• Users are reporting extreme flickering present in-game. We’ve made some changes that should address this issue. Specifically, moved TileLighting and NFS-SSR passes to the cached depth buffer usage since all those passes are on the GPU async queue and there is a chance of inter-referencing. This also fixes a known problem on AMD Vega GPUs. 
• Improve the Idle Kick for players not progressing – PVP specific change. Okay, so on the level… players finding loopholes in XP earning is all part of the game, but players hanging idle in PVP lobbies means fewer people competing and more roadblocks at the start/finish line. Players will now be warned if their mean velocity is under 1mph, and get an idle kick after 60 seconds if they don’t take action. Essentially if you ain’t racing in PVP, then you are outta here.

OTHER FIXES

• Fixed an issue where players could use their own vehicles in a playlist that should be loaner vehicles only
• Fixed an issue in Story Mode, where attempting to back away from the Speed Pass menu would send the user to the pause menu instead of the garage
• Fixed an issue where underglows unlocked through Speed Pass were not visible to other players on the server
• Fixed an issue where PVP lobby playlist tier would show as tier B instead of correct playlist tier
• Fixed an issue where users could navigate around menus when in Find Game menu
• Fixed a camera issue that would cause changes to the player’s camera when another car was close behind