Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana received a major update on PC, introducing a lot of improvements, as well as a new feature that is not available in the PlayStation 4 and Nintendo, Switch releases.
The new update introduces some major visual enhancements as well as improved animations, support for high-refresh monitors, HBAO+ support, a high-quality texture pack and much more.
- Arbitrary main rendering resolution enabled
- Improved frame-pacing and animation sync accuracy at all framerates
- Improved menu opening/closing behavior
- Character and enemy animations now correctly timed at 100+ FPS
- Support for high-refresh monitors and >60 Hz V-sync
- Replaced ineffective anti-aliasing blur filter with high-quality screenspace AA
- Bloom, refraction, and glare post-processing effects now scale with resolution
- Minimap rendering resolution now adapts to rendering resolution, preventing pixelated map at high resolution
- Greatly improved quality of menu backgrounds (replacing low-res screen capture)
- Improved standard shadow filtering without performance loss, plus two new, higher quality filter options
- Added option for rendering additional environment shadows
- Added supersampling/subsampling option (which also affects secondary 3D rendering)
- Improved shadow rendering performance by preventing unnecessary memory traffic
- Fixed animation speed of HUD elements at >30 FPS (e.g. full health bar)
- Improved the quality of volumetric lighting
- Implemented HBAO+ ambient occlusion as alternative higher-quality SSAO option
- Added a draw distance setting which applies to grass/clutter, monsters and NPCs
- Implemented anisotropic filtering setting
- Added high-quality texture pack (generated from original sources, partially with AI upsampling, and full mipmaps)
- Character poses in the equip menu now update at >30 FPS
Input, stability and more have also been improved by the new Ys VIII update.
INPUT/UI
- Improved camera mouse controls, replacing joystick emulation with direct 1:1 control
- Movement keys are now individually bindable
- Added keybinding for walking (slow movement) with keyboard/mouse controls
- Changed default bindings to fit common usage by PC gamers
STABILITY
- Fixed multiple video memory leaks
- Fixed potential crash when switching between languages
- Switched to 64-bit build to prevent address space fragmentation issues in long sessions
- Improved render thread synchronization to prevent specific types of race condition crashes
- Removed superfluous asset encryption
MISCELLANEOUS
- Fixed unlocking of some achievements when playing with mouse/keyboard controls
- Fixed several typos and dialogue/text issues throughout the game
- Fixed slightly-too-low cloud save limit when using a very large number of saves
The new update also introduces local co-op multiplayer to Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana. This will not make the game any easier, as all player-controlled characters do not benefit from the halved damage AI-controlled character get in single-player mode.
- Need to supply two Xinput controllers
- You must have 2 or more characters in the party in order for the second player to join the game.
- SP is shared
- Second player does not receive the “AI cheats” (ie. AI controlled characters only take half damage, whereas second player in co-op mode will take the full amount of damage.)
- Not officially supported and limited support will be available for troubleshooting
To enable co-op mode:
- Open Steam libraries through the Steam client
- Right-click on Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of DANA, and click “Properties”
- Click “Set Launch Options”
- Input “--coop” into the parameter and click “OK.”
- Launch the game
- Press “Start” on the second controller to enable second player
Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana was released in an extremely bad state, but with the latest update, it has become the definitive version of the game.
Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana is now available on PC, PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch worldwide.
