Ys 8: Lacrimosa of Dana's PC port has been delayed indefinitely, just 10 days after it was given a concrete release date of January 30. The game is suffering from massive framerate drops in certain sections, and publisher NIS America is bringing in a new developer to sort it out.
It's disappointing, especially since the game has already been delayed by a few months because of localisation problems. NIS America said all of its PC builds had suffered from "low framerate issues and memory leak problems" but admitted that it "underestimated the severity" of the issues. It wasn't until the latest beta test (presumably during the past week or so) that it became clear that the game could not release in its current state.
The company had intended to leave the "core programming" of the game alone and just focus on porting it to PC, but now it's going to have to play around with the innards. The memory leak problem should be solved in the next couple of days, but fixing the framerate is a bigger job.
"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," it said in a Steam post.
The new developer, which was not named, will come on board at the end of the month to help fix the issues. NIS America will monitor progress and then decide on a release schedule, giving regular updates in the meantime.
"Again, we truly regret that we underestimated the severity of the issues that have surfaced (and how long it would take to resolve them), and for that, NIS America sincerely apologizes to all of you for this unexpected delay. We are fully aware of how much our fans have been anticipating this release, and will do our very best to launch the game the way it is meant to be launched: without any issues, game-breaking bugs, or errors."
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