You might have heard, but the launch ofWuchang: Fallen Feathershasn’t exactly gone over well on Steam. Or it’s gone over really well - I guess it depends on your perspective. Yesterday, we reported two remarkably conflicting things:a concurrent peak of over 100,000 players, and an “Overwhelmingly Negative” user review score.
If you’re an unwise bean counter, the former is cause for champagne; if you’re forward-thinking enough to recognize thatsuch a disastrous customer perception of your product can lead to rapidly-shrinking long-term sales prospects, you might hold off on the confetti. In the 24 hours since our initial report, both sides of Wuchang’s proverbial coin have gotten all the more extreme - its latest peak is 130,000 (wow) and its user reviews have dipped below 29 percent (also wow).
Will Patch 1.3 Save The Day?
The bulk of Wuchang: Fallen Feathers' player criticism has revolved around its dreadful performance issues. That’s not to say there aren’t critiques;our own reviewhighlights bizarrely back-and-forth difficulty curves and a confusing open world. But if you don’t feel like you can play the video game you just purchased, that kind of cancels out the rest.
Suffice it to say, developer Leenzee and publisher 505 Games have been paying attention. Earlier today, the devs launchedPatch 1.3, which aims to resolve several key technical stopgaps. It’s an appreciably rapid response. Whether it will be enough to shore things up in a big way remains to be seen, and it doesn’t “excuse” the state of the game’s launch, but at least we know there’s work being done.
To quote the announcement post itself, Patch 1.3 involves the following tweaks:
Given the dire state of Wuchang: Fallen Feathers on so many PCs, anything that says “lower-end GPUs” has my attention. As it stands, the prevailing sentiment has been that on anything less than top-of-the-line computers, the PC version of Wuchang: Fallen Feathers is a complete mess.
Patch 1.3 also features seemingly extensive bug fixes as well as a single difficulty-oriented gameplay adjustment centered on rebalancing the number and relative danger of the landmines encountered in Wuchang’s second chapter.
Only time will tell how Wuchang: Fallen Feathers will fare in the eyes of the gaming community, be it on PC or consoles. Leenzee has a long and laborious road ahead to get the game where it needs to be, and I don’t envy their position right now.
