NIS America promise fast fixes for Ys VIII's many issues

After six months of delays to deal with technical issues, the PC version of Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana finally launched yesterday, albeit to less-than-great public reaction. Not because it's a bad game - far from it - but because the PC version is plagued with bugs just not present in any other version of the game. Nonexistent Vsync, flickering lights, wonky controls and more have been reported. Today, NIS America acknowledged the majority of reported issues, and have promised that fixes are coming.

While NIS America note that they are aware of a lengthy laundry list of wrinkles in the game that they've yet to iron out, the only one so far that has a fix on the immediate horizon is the lack of VSync, which appears to be disabled in the game no matter what graphics options you pick. There is already a workaround to this problem - just forcing Vsync via your video card's control panel - but that's still a level of hassle that players ideally shouldn't have to deal with. There's also mention that they're aware of the game crashing on some systems, but no root cause has been mentioned yet.

The rest of the issues on their immediate road-map for fixes are as follows:

Roadmap/Order we plan on fixing:
-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

It's good that they're already on the case, but you'd think that something as plainly visible as torn frames would have been spotted much earlier by testers, especially after several months of delays specifically to address technical issues with the PC release. Similarly, flickering lights in early-game areas being another clear indication that something was wrong.

It's a frustrating situation, and Ys fans aren't happy. Every single Nihon Falcom game released on Steam to date (almost all ported & published by XSeed) has been well received, the only exception being Ys VIII, published by NIS America. With a little more time, effort and some elbow grease they can hopefully get this PC version polished up right, but given the wave of bad press it's generated, I'd be surprised if Falcom - one of the few Japanese studios with a long history of direct PC releases - will turn to NIS America as publisher again.