Ys VIII delayed on PC again to fix performance problems

For a second time, Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana has been delayed mere days before it was due to launch on PC. Nihon Falcom's JRPG had been due in September 2017 but was delayed one day before launch, and this new delay comes eleven days before the latest launch date. This time, publishers NIS America are being quite open: it's delayed again because the game runs poorly and they haven't managed to improve performance as much as they hoped, so they will hand the port to another developer, and they're so sorry for all of this. They go into a surprising amount of detail with the technical problems, if you're curious.

NISA announced last night that the game is delayed indefinitely - it'll be ready when it's ready. Company vice president Mitsuharu Hiraoka said in the statement, "we truly regret that we underestimated the severity of the issues that have surfaced (and how long it would take to resolve them)", and apologised. But if you want to get technical...

"Low framerate issues and memory leak problems were apparent from the earliest PC builds we received. To help combat these, we looked into the drawing processes, which lead to an overall improvement in performance. However, we are still encountering framerate drops in specific circumstances. The systems regulating these framerate issues are heavily reliant on the architecture of the original PlayStation 4 version and, as such, are not existent in PC architecture. The memory leak issues are somewhat less complicated and expected to be resolved this weekend. But in order to solve these issues, we have determined that we must modify the core level of data in the game.

"As the PC version of the game was originally envisioned as a port, we avoided touching the core programming as much as possible and focused on PC performance optimization. However, in light of the feedback of those who have participated in the second beta test, we have concluded that we cannot avoid modifying the core programming.

"Once the changes from the relocalization efforts have been implemented at the end of this month, we will be moving development to an entirely different developer who will primarily focus on frame rate improvements as well as other PC optimizations. Once that process begins, we will monitor the progress and determine the release schedule."

While NISA seem bad at planning, they do seem determined to do the PC version right for technoheads. Last year they got Peter 'Durante' Thoman--the fella famous for his tools making Dark Souls and Deadly Premonition less wonky on PC--to consult on the port for a bit, and this latest statement is more open and in-depth than pretty much any I've heard from a publisher before.

When the PC version of Ys VIII does arrive, it'll also include the new localisation which is fixing up a lot of terrible writing from the initial English release on consoles.