Original PC Version Features
If you haven't done so already, you can read about that release here. It included a lot of work on ultrawide aspect ratio support, as well as a bespoke mouse and keyboard control scheme which tries to get close to some of Falcom's previous PC ports such as Ys Origin. We also included high-quality anti-aliasing, and unlimited draw distance, among other things.
As I noted back then, for us at PH3, this was the first time we are porting a game which originally released for a very low-tech -- by today's standards -- platform. Some of the challenges we faced were related to this, and that continues to several of the improvements we made since. However, this relatively low level of technology also makes Nayuta extremely suitable to e.g. the Steam Deck, and we made some further improvements in that regard.
New Features and Improvements
I'm going to split this discussion into two parts -- the first one for general and smaller changes and tweaks, and the second one for everything that improves the Steam Deck (and portable PC gaming in general) experience in particular. Let's start with the first category:
- Add an in-game setting to toggle HD textures.
- Support for arbitrary UTF-8 installation paths (we got you, Björn!).
- Fix some minor errors, e.g. a partially broken special skill.
- Improved multi-controller support and settings UI.
- Many additional map geometry fixes, one example of which is pictured above.
The following improvements are particularly relevant for the Steam Deck, but also improve general quality, efficiency or compatibility:
- Texture deduplication, reducing the storage footprint by up to 40% compared to the baseline game with high quality textures.
- 16:10 aspect ratio support, which means you can enjoy the game on the Steam Deck without black bars!
- We implemented Steam Dynamic Cloud Sync for smoother switching between playing on multiple computers or devices.
Conclusion
As always, I particularly want to thank all of the great QA testers involved with this project. Without them, the release would certainly be a lot less polished and stable. And of course all the members of PH3 who worked on the port, NISA for the localizations, as well as Falcom for the original game.
- Peter "Durante" Thoman, CTO, PH3
