Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana originally released back in 2016 for the PlayStation Vita, but has since arrived on multiple platforms, including console, mobile, and PC. Developer Nihon Falcom and publisher NIS America revealed a major PC update that brings an experimental new feature alongside numerous gameplay, graphics, and performance improvements.
The development team optimized their game with support for over 60 Hz V-sync monitors, improves menu background quality, and fixes HUD elements animation at over 30 frames-per-second. Not only that, a number of new graphics settings were introduced as well, including draw distance, rendering additional environment shadows, and anisotropic filtering setting. The update adds in an experimental local co-op mode, which allows two players to play together as long as you have two controllers plugged in.
Graphics and Performance
- Arbitrary main rendering resolution enabled.
- Improved frame-pacing and animation sync accuracy at all frame rates.
- Improved menu opening / closing behavior.
- Character and enemy animations now correctly timed at 100-plus frames per second.
- Support for high-refresh monitors and over 60 Hz V-sync
- Replaced ineffective anti-aliasing blur filter with high-quality screenspace anti-aliasing.
- 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 over 30 frames per second (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 over 30 FPS.
The patch notes mentioned above are just a glimpse of what the update brings to Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana. The Steam post goes through the remaining changes in detail, in addition to how to activate the experimental local co-op mode.
