Team Ninja's Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty was released on Steam on March 3, and since then the reviews have been mixed, with the recent trend being overwhelmingly negative. The reason for this has little to do with the quality of the game, as the console versions have received much better reviews, but many of the issues that continue to plague the PC version months after its release. Every negative Steam review I've seen mentions performance issues, with the latest being a cohesive sentiment of "not worth the money on PC."

This situation has not been helped by Team Ninja's usual ninja-like public relations efforts, but now the studio has posted the first in what will likely be an ongoing series of letters from the director, written by Wo Long director and producer Masakazu Hirayama.

The letter primarily outlines new content that will be added to the game and presents a roadmap of free and paid DLC additions through December. Perhaps the most notable free elements are a new boss rush mode and collaborations with "Jin-O" and "Lie P," but all substantial new elements are included in two paid packs.

Then came the section titled "PC Version Optimizations and Bug Fixes," where Hirayama began by addressing the elephant in the room and apologizing to players of the PC version.

"We can't talk about the future without talking about the game's past and present difficulties, and we apologize to everyone who has played the PC version of Garyu for the inconvenience it has caused since its launch. I can assure you that the development team has read every single report posted on the various forums, social channels, and customer support departments, and has made optimization and bug fixes a top priority."

"We are very happy to announce that the game is now available on the PC version, and that we are working hard to make it better.

Very good, but Hirayama then makes a rather odd point about the PC as a platform, which, while true, is not a good basis for a studio with Team Ninja's resources and experience to ship a poor PC port:

"However, there are many combinations of PC environments in each home, and while our team continues to expand the environments in which we check the game post-launch, it takes time to reproduce and properly fix problems. We promise to continue to make improvements so that you can play the game with confidence as soon as possible. We apologize for the delay."

So ...... Sorry for the bad porting, sorry, but we need a little more time to fix it. Had this not been written right below the monthly DLC announcement, it probably would have landed better. The base version of this game is clearly not working well for a significant number of players who pay a lot of money to play it on PC.

Team Ninja at least acknowledges this problem, but it seems disingenuous for one of Japan's leading action game studios to show such disappointment. The problem is that they don't seem to be in a hurry to fix it rather than release the game in a bad state. Apologies and roadmaps are all well and good, but some people want to play the games they buy without being hampered by technical problems.