Last week, soulslike Wuchang: Fallen Feathers got a patch that rendered a number of its bosses unkillable, seemingly in response to pressure from some Chinese players. For those who aren’t keen on the patch’s changes, which particularly transforms the challenge you’ll face in the game’s fourth region, there’s now a mod dedicated to undoing them by letting you roll back to a previous version.
For a more in-depth view of the changes patch 1.5 made and what they mean for the game, it’s well worth reading our Jeremy’s story on it from last week. The short version is that a number of big foes associated with the Ming dynasty have been made to fall down in exhaustion when you defeat them, rather than being killed. As you might imagine, this has implications not just in terms of the minute-to-minute experience of playing Wuchang, but also the story it tells.
As with Fallout 4‘s busted next-gen update last year, modders are trying to help players who’re keen to roll their game back to a previous version. AVK95 has stepped up to the task with the self-explanatory ‘Rollback censorship patch‘.
“Wuchang 1.5 massively downgrades the game experience,” its creator wrote in the mod’s description. “Most late game bosses, NPCs and enemies now get exhausted instead of dying and give you meaningless banter instead of story advancing dialog from the original game. Basically patch 1.5 has ruined the game’s story and immersion.”
The mod will take you back to version 1.4 of Wuchang, which meas that in getting rid of patch 1.5’s boss tweaks, you’ll also be ditching more useful changes like quickened up healing animations and a revamping of how Wuchang gets back up after being knocked down. If you choose to download it, you’ll get a file called WuchangRollback.exe, which it instructs you to extract and then run in your game’s root folder.
Once that’s done, you’ll have to disable the game’s ability to automatically update by heading into its properties menu via your steam library. Lastly, you’ll need to start the game each time by clicking a file called ‘Project_Plague-Win64-Shipping’, rather than clicking play on Steam itself.
It’s a fair amount of palaver to go through, but with Steam lacking a feature like fellow storefront GOG.com’s built-in rollbacks for games that don’t offer previous versions as betas, it’s probably the best you’ll get for now. As you saw with that Fallout update, there can be other ways to pull off rolling back a patch, such as re-downloading old depot files, but that’s usually no walk in the park unless you find some instructions you can follow to the letter.
There might end up being a better solution if someone develops a mod that only gets rid of patch 1.5’s controversial changes or, ideally, developers Lenzee opt to offer a version of the game that does the same. As of right now, there’s just AVK95’s mod, which also doesn’t work with the Xbox Game Pass version of Wuchang.
