Roadmap for fixes

After many long months of delays, Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana's PC port finally landed on Steam today. Despite claims that it would launch in a working state, the game is pretty broken and fans are (rightfully) angry. NIS America is aware of a lot of the problems and has issued a statement on the Steam community forums detailing an outline for what fixes are in the works.

"To begin," the statement reads, "we have isolated one of the widest-reported bugs concerning crashes occurring on start and subsequent issues related to controller support. We have created a tutorial to temporarily solve the issue while we implement a permanent solution. You can find out more in our Troubleshooting Forum post here."

I'm not sure how to begin to unpack that, but I guess we live in the era of patches, so why not just give up on QA and just unleash this mess into the wild? Along with that statement above, other issues include VSync not working, flickering of textures in two areas of the game, Full screen mode not functioning properly, text errors, controller detection issues and audio issues. Wow; that sounds like a travesty.

The current roadmap and plan of attack is as follows:

-VSync issue to be fixed within 48 hours

-Controller Issues (Detection, Joystick Input)

-Fix flickering in Eroded Valley & Towering Coral Forest

-Fix irregular shadows

-Remaining issues noted above

This is all a little surreal to me. I figured the port would be in working order after a nine month delay, but I guess it's better to know about issues and be working on them than to not acknowledge them at all? I honestly couldn't defend this even if I wanted to.

I understand that making a game is hard and any number of minute problems could be the culprit here, but you can't delay a game for nearly a year and promise it will be in working order, then release it in a ridiculously broken state. PC fans have already waited a long time and would more than likely be accepting of another delay, so why even risk the PR blow back that this kind of release will cause?

This makes me seriously worried for the port of Memories of Celceta, though that is at least being handled by XSEED. Still, if a fully 3D Ys game is having this many issues on PC, why wouldn't another one be the same? For that matter, why would any other NIS games on PC not have issues? This just looks bad for everyone involved and that is completely unfortunate. While I hope the port can get into a working order post haste, I wouldn't hold it against someone if they were just done with this game now.

Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of DANA Day 1 Report & Known Issues [Steam Community]

