Atomic Heart mods are here

1 year ago 254

The protagonist of Atomic Heart with a robot at his shoulder

(Image credit: Focus)

BioShock-esque FPS Atomic Heart has been out for less than a week, but mods are rolling out already. Nexus Mods has more than 30 available, and so far they've racked up over 48,000 downloads between them.

At the moment, graphics options and tweaks are proving to be the most popular. Custom Field of View (opens in new tab) lets players adjust the FOV from the default of 80 up to 140 if you want to be able to see your arms looking all stretched and gangly when you hold the axe, Skip Intro – Pass Through Comrade (opens in new tab) does what the name suggests it does, and so do Larger Subtitles (opens in new tab) and Disable Vignette (opens in new tab).

Vignetting—the graphical effect that darkens the edges of the screen to draw your attention to the center or to simulate a camera—has become something I disable whenever I can after seeing how much better Mass Effect Legendary Edition looked without it (opens in new tab). Atomic Heart cranks up the vignette effect when you crouch, so you may want to leave it enabled if you like that reminder you're trying to be sneaky.

Cheats and difficulty modifiers are popular too. Those who find the enemies a bit bullet-spongey can try Buffed Weapons (opens in new tab), which lets you choose whether to scale weapon damage upward by 1.5x or 2x, and does the same for weapon upgrades as well. More Resources (opens in new tab) lets you choose how much you want to boost material collection by, while Increased Inventory and Storage (opens in new tab) gives you more space for extra stuff without having to pay for upgrades.

Given the lack of a photo mode in Atomic Heart, Free Camera (opens in new tab) will help you approximate one. It includes a HUD toggle and options to alter the game speed, pause, and teleport to the camera's location. That mod will require you first install ABPML for Atomic Heart (opens in new tab), a mod loader that will also enable the developer console. Most of the other mods can be installed by finding the Content\AtomicHeart\Content\Paks folder wherever you've got Atomic Heart and unzipping files into it, but make sure to read each mod's description first just in case. Most of them should work with the Game Pass version as well.

If you want to get weird—and you knew I was going to get to the weird stuff eventually—then modders provide. Mr Swede (opens in new tab) will give your axe a glow-up with Swedish colors and a face. Saul Goodman is Literally an Axe Now (opens in new tab) also alters the axe model, swapping it for Saul Goodman from Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. The hitboxes remain the same, but you'll be swinging around a 3D model of a lawyer in a suit.

If you expected there to be mods to remove clothes from Atomic Heart's lady robots, you'd be right. In a sense. Unmasked Twins (opens in new tab) shows that beneath the blank metal faces of the towering Twins are placeholder assets, meshes of a default woman's face that you'll be able to see staring blankly into space if you install this mod. You're welcome?

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 (opens in new tab). He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun (opens in new tab), The Big Issue, GamesRadar (opens in new tab), Zam (opens in new tab), Glixel (opens in new tab), Five Out of Ten Magazine (opens in new tab), and Playboy.com (opens in new tab), 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.