Game Freak is wrapping up major updates for Beast of Reincarnation just over two months after launch

Game Freak and publisher Fictions are ending the major update phase for Beast of Reincarnation with a patch planned for today, October 19. The studios flagged the change at the bottom of the version 1.1.01 patch notes on Steam on October 9, saying the next update would be the last of the post-launch cycle and that its date could still shift. The action RPG from the makers of Pokémon came out on August 4 for PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC, which means the near-weekly patches stop about two and a half months in.

The game will still get fixes. The studios say they hope to deal with any remaining major problems in this patch or a later one, and they are asking players to report bugs through Fictions' support site. What ends is the steady schedule of updates that changed how the game plays. Insider Gaming reported the same message on October 16 from the Japanese version the studio posted on X. On the morning of October 19, the notes for the final patch had not appeared on Steam, so its contents are still unknown.

What eight updates changed

The October 9 patch was the eighth since launch, according to its own notes. Its headline addition is for players who stall halfway through. After the Great Wall Terraces zone, a new option lets you skip the next three zones and head straight to the Capital. The same update added a field-of-view slider, which sets how much of the world fits on screen around Emma, and a toggle that hides the prompt for skipping cutscenes.

Earlier patches went after other launch complaints. August brought Nvidia's DLSS 4.5 and AMD's FSR 4 on PC, both of which render the game at a lower resolution and rebuild the image to keep frame rates up, along with ultrawide monitor support, frame generation (which slips computer-made frames between the real ones so motion looks smoother) and faster healing. By September nearly every cutscene could be skipped. Version 1.1.0 on October 1 pulled in the other direction from the zone skip, adding a Very Hard setting, a mode where Emma dies in a single hit and tougher difficulty options for New Game+.

How it was received

Critics landed in the middle. Metacritic lists a 71 for both the PS5 and PC versions, and OpenCritic shows a 72 top-critic average across 135 reviews, with only 47% of critics recommending it.

Players on Steam are split too. On the store page, 3,730 of 6,328 user reviews are positive, or 59%, for an overall Mixed rating. English-language reviews from the past 30 days come in at 67% across 224 reviews, which lines up with the patch run, though that is a small sample. SteamDB shows a peak of 15,001 concurrent players on Steam on August 4, against a high of 150 over the past 24 hours. That drop leaves out a lot of the audience, since the game is also on consoles and launched day one on Game Pass, as we noted in our August release roundup.

The support window is short next to other action games that launched to divided reviews. Pearl Abyss shipped a big Crimson Desert patch almost every week for five months, roughly twice the two and a half months this phase lasted.

What it means if you own it or are thinking of buying

If you already own it, you keep everything the patches added, and nothing suggests any content is going away. No story expansion has been announced either. The only paid add-on is the Deluxe DLC, listed at $9.99 on Steam, which adds a black-and-brown Shiba skin for Koo, a hat and a sword for Emma, 100,000 amber (the in-game currency) and a handful of seedlings.

If you're thinking of buying, what's on the store today is essentially the game you'll keep getting. It lists for $59.99 on Steam in the US, and that build already includes the new difficulty modes and the zone skip. The skip cuts some of the repetition critics pointed to, but it doesn't redesign those zones. Before you buy, check the October 19 patch notes on the game's Steam news page, since they will show which bugs got fixed before updates stop arriving on a regular schedule.