Wuchang: Fallen Feathers has been called a lot of things: Souls-slop, gooner-bait, a surprisingly good game. You can now add “censored” to the list after a recent 1.5 update made controversial changes to the game, seemingly to quell a backlash from some fans in China. A few diehard fans are now relieved they bought the game on disc knowing they can always access the original version of the action game that released last month.
The newest patch arrived earlier this week and made a bunch of changes, most of which seemed innocuous enough. Some were enthusiastically welcomed, like a sped-up healing animation, the ability to cancel out of a recovery animation by dodging, and improved i-frames when recovering from getting knocked down. Other changes were more ominous than they first appeared. “Added dialogs for some NPCs to complete some plots,” read one bullet point. “We will further optimize the exhaustion animations in the future to improve the plot performance.”
What was developer Leenzee talking about? It soon became clear. As shared on social media by Souls aficionado and early advocate for Wuchang Lance McDonald, “what they mean is they made it so you can no longer kill any historically significant bosses or NPCs, and instead they just get ‘exhausted’ and relax after the fight and talk to you LMAO.” Historical figures that previously died within the fiction of the game like Liu Wenxiu, Liu Cheng’en, and Emperor Chongzhen now live on.
People got mad you can kill the late stage Ming Dynasty “Dragon Emperor” ingame but he was literally dead by this point in history and you kill a horrific zombie version of him to stop his resurrection. Anyone “offended” by that is wild, and having him survive now ruins the plot
— Lance McDonald (@manfightdragon) August 14, 2025
McDonald continued, “Like actual censorship due to pressure from Chinese players who were upset about being able to kill historically significant characters from the end of the Ming Dynasty. Crazy to see it. Players are reporting that the ‘pray’ gesture has been removed that you previously learned from the Portuguese Christian character in the game.” A series of Ming soldiers in Chapter 4 have also been changed to not fight the player, making a previously challenging section now a breeze to get through.
Combined with some more general nerfs to enemy armor and various boss fights, players have been revolting against patch 1.5 on Steam and Reddit, where some have accused the Wuchang subreddit mods of deleting complaints. “After 80 hours on Steam, I pulled the trigger for console,” one fan wrote. “Long Live Wuchang 1.0.” Some players are currently trying to roll back updates on Steam by editing files.
Not everyone’s raging against the latest update, as performance continues slowly but surely to improve on PC. Does that mean Wuchang‘s Steam review rating is finally recovering? Not quite. Complaints of framerate crashes have been replaced by review-bombing over the alleged censorship. For its part, Leenzee hasn’t said why it changed Wuchang‘s story. Update 1.5 went live on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S earlier today.
