Wuchang: Fallen Feathers Performance Patch Makes Drastic Changes to Enemies and Story, and Players Aren’t Happy

Last month, Wuchang: Fallen Feathers developer Leenzee Games promised fans that a number of performance and optimization issues plaguing the game since launch would be patched out promptly. Now, patch 1.5 does seem to address many of these issues, but with a strange cost: it also makes sweeping changes to many of the game’s enemies, dialogue, and story that have fans even more unhappy.

If you look at the patch notes for 1.5, they initially seem pretty inocuous. There’s some bug fixes, and a lot of good improvements such as a sped-up healing animation and the ability to dodge cancel out of the recovery animation. There’s also an “optimization” in there that the patch notes say is in preparation to allow players to respawn closer to bosses they’ve died to, which will be another welcome change when it lands.

But tucked in the lengthy patch notes are a couple oddities:

Added dialogs for some NPCs to complete some plots. We will further optimize the exhaustion animations in the future to improve the plot performance.

Fixed the faction bug in Chapter 4, adjusted the level design, and increased the performance effect of BVB.

Added some ‘Wuchang’ voice to complete the story, and added some NPC dialogues.

So what’s all that about? As documented on Twitter/X by Lance McDonald, the update has made significant changes to certain NPCs, bosses, and enemies to make it so they canonically do not die.

Prior to the patch, you were able to target and kill certain human NPCs you encountered throughout the game. These characters were passive, uninteractable otherwise, and didn’t attack you, but you murdering them affected your character’s “madness” mechanic in a way that made for legitimately interesting gameplay. Now, that’s no longer true — the NPCs are untargetable and unkillable, effectively removing the ability to choose to interact with the madness mechanic in that specific way.

Additionally, this change also significantly impacts the game’s fourth chapter, which was previously quite chaotic and difficult to manage due to a number of human enemies trying to attack you. Now, a large portion of those enemies aren’t hostile at all, turning what was once a very challenging chapter into a bit of a cakewalk.

On top of this, multiple challenging bosses no longer “die” when you defeat them. Instead, they simply stand there, “exhausted,” or run away to live happily ever after, or claim the intense battle that just took place was all just a “trial.”

While the first two issues impact gameplay directly, the boss changes are being roundly criticized by players for how they impact the game’s story. Wuchang: Fallen Feathers heavily focuses on themes of death, and being able to accept the death of a loved one or a period in one’s life. Many of the enemies in Fallen Feathers are actively trying to thwart death, or prolong something that will inevitably come to a close. So in several of these cases, them not dying at all completely flies in the face of the game’s message of accepting death’s inevitability.

As of yet, developer Leenzee Games has not explained why these changes were made, or made any statement at all beyond the patch notes (IGN has reached out for comment). However, many players are correctly pointing out that the characters impacted by the changes seem to have something in common: they’re all humans who are affiliated with the Ming Dynasty in some way.

Fallen Feathers is historical fiction, and takes place in 1600s China at the end of the Ming Dynasty, the last dynasty ruled by the Han Chinese before the Qing took over. Though the story of the game originally used the ending of the Ming Dynasty to effectively frame its message about death and moving on, now, none of the Ming characters die or move on, rendering the premise ineffectual. As a result, a number of negative Steam reviews and posts on various social platforms are accusing Leenzee of self-censoring, allegedly due to feedback from a segment of largely Chinese players upset about the game’s treatment of the Ming characters.

“Improving game performance is welcoming,” reads one “not recommended” Steam review from August 13, by someone with 58 hours in the game. “But this must be the first time I’ve heard of story plot change post release. As far as I am aware. Plot change made the story completely different, and even make some of the characters motivation pointless. I don’t know what kind of pressure Leenzee got to go as far as changing the games plot. I’ve read that it was criticized by some gamers for not being historically accurate. But the story is ficiton is it not? I have decided to stop playing for now, and hope Leenzee undo the plot changes. Or at least make it possible to rollback to patch 1.4.”

Interestingly, the r/wuchanggame subreddit seems to be almost completely devoid of criticism of the patch, but users of other subreddits are claiming that the moderators of that subreddit have been deleting any posts that are critical of these changes.

IGN reviewed the release version of Wuchang: Fallen Feathers at launch and gave it an 8/10, calling it “yet another great soulslike to add to the ever-increasing pile, featuring excellent combat, wonderful level design, an incredible skill tree, and fearsome bosses.” So if you can find a way to play on the pre-patch version, it seems like that’s the way to go for now.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.