Last night I sat down to check out Immortal Unchained on my PS4…and a notification popped that Dynasty Warriors 9 was installing a new patch so I hurried over and played that instead.

The patch notes, captured terribly here with my cell phone camera or much better here via Koei’s twitter whenever they decide to actually post them, include a couple of interesting things about the visuals. Notably, that they “improved the framerate” and that there are more guys on the screen now.

At first launch, I was horrified. The framerate was indeed much faster…but the foliage draw distance was much-reduced, the lighting quality was simplified, and the foliage I brushed into no longer swayed or moved at all like it used to.

Uh oh, I thought, has Koei finally given in and lowered the graphics settings to appease those who hated DW9’s performance?

Fortunately, they haven’t.

Instead, they’ve taken the two selectable graphics settings, Action Mode and Movie Mode, and made the differences far larger than they used to be. On my base PS4, the only significant visual changes between the two used to be that Action Mode had a lower 900p resolution, and disengaged v-sync.

Now though, Action Mode lowers a whole host of settings in favor of pushing the game to 60 frames per second, while Movie Mode retains the previous graphics quality and manages to hold at 30 with noticeable dips here and there.

This is really cool.

Users now have a proper option for the performance they want to target on console, and hopefully the menu text is updated to better reflect this. And overall performance on Movie Mode is dramatically better than it ever has been.

Hopefully this patch will launch on Xbox soon too and I can see what improvements are available there. I’m cautiously optimistic, because I believe the Xbox One X has more than enough power to push the high settings at a high framerate, but it’s been let down in the past by the default resolutions being way too high. A 1080p setting for the Xbox One X should be enough for it to nail 60 fps while retaining the higher graphical quality.

Once the Xbox version comes out I’ll probably write yet another article with some screenshots of the additional dudes they’ve added. I took some screenshots of the PS4 version, but I forgot to transfer them off the system before coming to the cafe to write today, and it’s a huge pain to do that. So I’m just not going to! Boom!

Even smaller battles, like those spawned randomly from the procedural sidequests, now have many more dudes to fight. It’s very good and fun.

In spite of all the odds and the random bits of hardcore fan hate at launch, Koei continues to improve Dynasty Warriors 9 for free instead of just adding piles of paid costumes to the game. I can’t believe the amount of work they’ve put in, and hopefully this is their template for post-release support moving forward.