It took more than five years, but a surprise patch for Remedy's third-person shooter/interdimensional manipulation sim Control means PC players can finally sample Dr. Yoshimi Tokui’s Guided Imagery Experience for themselves.
Dr. Yoshimi Tokui’s Guided Imagery Experience is a side mission most notable for the fact that it features Hideo Kojima as the titular doctor—a big draw for a lot of gamers. But the mission was exclusive to the PlayStation 4 version of the game, unless you were willing to make some Hackerman moves to unlock it.
That's no longer a concern now, though, as today's patch finally makes the good doctor available to everyone. Also unlocked for all players are the Astral Dive Suit, the Tactical Response Gear, and the Urban Response Gear, all of which were previously exclusive for players who'd preordered the game.
If you want to save yourself some hassle, you could just watch clips of Dr. Yoshimi Tokui’s Guided Imagery Experience on YouTube instead of reinstalling and replaying the whole thing just to see what you missed. It's not quite the same as experiencing it first hand, but it's close.
Beyond unlocking a few pieces of mostly-inconsequential content, the new update adds a number of graphical enhancements including native HDR support, a new Ultra ray tracing preset, support for ultrawide monitors up to 48:9, texture streaming fixes, and numerous DLSS updates. "Several bug and crash fixes" are also in the mix.
A number of fans on Reddit and Resetera have pointed out that this patch basically incorporates all of the features in the HDR Ultrawide DLSS RT Patch mod released in early 2023. There's a good chance today's patch will play havoc with that mod, and will at the very least render it redundant, so if you have it installed you'll probably want to disable it before taking this new update for a spin.
Remedy said on Bluesky that the new patch is live now on Steam (although it's not yet showing on the Steam update hub) and should appear on GOG and Epic "shortly." The studio also said it will release the same update for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S editions of Control, but only has a small team working on them "so we want to space them out to give us time to fix potential issues that might come up."
The full Control 1.30 patch notes are below.
March 2025 Update (1.30) Release Notes (PC)
OUTFITS
The following outfits are now available to all players. The outfits can be accessed and equipped from the Control Point in the Central Executive Sector area.
- Astral Dive Suit (formerly a pre-order exclusive)
- Tactical Response Gear (formerly a pre-order exclusive)
- Urban Response Gear (formerly a pre-order exclusive)
MISSIONS
All players will receive the mission Dr. Yoshimi Tokui’s Guided Imagery Experience, featuring voiceover by Hideo Kojima. The mission is playable when you pick up the Dr Tokui Tapes collectible in the Extrasensory Lab of the Research Sector. (This mission was previously exclusive to the PlayStation 4 Digital Deluxe version of Control.)
GRAPHICS
- Added HDR support
- Added new Ultra ray tracing preset, which gets you more rays per pixel and higher temporal stability
- Added ultrawide monitor support for up to 48:9 monitors
- Added an FOV scaling setting for the gameplay camera
- Updated SDR to 10bit (from 8bit), which reduces visible color banding
- Improved graphics adapter detection at startup, with automatic selection between DX11 and DX12
- Implemented screen aspect ratio fixes for ultrawide monitors
- Your current monitor resolution can now reliably be selected from the screen resolution and rendering resolution menus
- Added rendering resolution support beyond 4K
- Implemented texture streaming fixes
- Ray tracing bug fixes
DLSS SUPPORT
- Added DLSS support for arbitrary resolutions
- Added DLAA support
- Updated DLSS to DLSS 3.7, with higher temporal stability
- Film grain added back to DLSS SR
- Fixed shadow resolution when DLSS is enabled
- Added resolution dependent mip map bias for DLSS. This enhances texture quality, for example when applying the DLSS Performance setting.
GENERAL
- Updated the audio on cinematics and end credits to remove unintended channel mixing. You will no longer hear anything that isn’t intended to [[link]] be heard. (It wasn’t the Hiss, it was us. Sorry.)
- Several bug and crash fixes
GameTiger674
The bonuses are nice and offer great value, although they could be a bit more frequent. I love being part of the VIP program, which gives me extra rewards and makes me feel appreciated as a loyal player.