Is that the goddamn fire-attack at Chibi? Fuck Chibi.
That is a free battle on the Chibi map; it is not the fire attack from the story itself (that one has far more troops and officers, and a Cao Cao that will run away).
While it has some moderate issues (framerate/performance), the open world and other things make it a fairly good addition and mix up to the franchise! Anyone else have it?
“I used to draw, hard to admit that I used to draw...”
I think that as a Warriors game, it's pretty awful, and as a general open-world game it's barely mediocre.
Part of the reason I play these games is for the flashy, varied combat. The removal of unique weapons in favor of a handful of weapon types that anyone can use kind of hurts that. Also, the musou attacks are pretty dull now.
Everyone has a price. Throw enough gold around and someone will risk disintegration.
IDK, I've put about 50+ hours into it and I enjoy it. It actually pulled me out of Monster Hunter: World.
It's definitely not as flashy, but I would hardly call the combat any Musou game "varied." With the exception of Bladestorm and AoT they're all the same?
“I used to draw, hard to admit that I used to draw...”
Yeah I'll probably try it from Gamefly before anything else. I've heard lots of negative things about DW9. Heck even Jim Sterling, who LOVES the DW series, said it was a bad game.
So far, the game seems to run fairly terribly on all four console options (one can see why you probably won't see this on Switch, to put it mildly). On XB1X, you get a slightly lower framerate than PSFro, but at much higher resolution (~77% increase, for anyone counting)--it runs closer to 1440p apparently (this is particularly hilarious when you consider the Xbox is supposed to be a 2160p platform, and the PlayStation a 1440p platform), though at the price of ambient occlusion and some antistrophic filtering. On PlayStation 4, the framerate is pretty bad, and on the Xbox One it's even worse (by1 to 2 FPS) while simultaneously running at a lower resolution. All these modes consistently fall short of the 30 FPS that is the franchise norm.
So, from a technical standpoint the game is kind of a trainwreck, and not just moderately troubled, at least at the present. It could still run better on PC, but this seems like the sort of title that wouldn't run well even on a high end PC.
That being said, these are technical issues (and could be corrected, potentially) and not reflective of the game at large. These really seem to be the sort of issues you run into when a game with a history of mixed performance makes the transition to open-world (Koei Tecmo has had some extremely well optimized PC ports, on the other hand). This is somewhat separate from gameplay design itself, but everything I've seen isn't encouraging, personally. I'll stick with Warriors Orochi 3 Ultimate, which was free with GwG.
The different characters used to feel unique from each other. The button inputs are largely the same, but the animations and combo attacks play out differently. Now the different characters just feel like reskins of the same person.
Not trying to change your mind on it or anything, that's just my take on why I'm disappointed with DW9. I went into it with a positive outlook and didn't look at any videos beforehand. I checked out stuff like Sterling's videos after I put my own time into the game, and he basically hit all the complaints I had after spending time with it.
Everyone has a price. Throw enough gold around and someone will risk disintegration.
Yeah I'll probably try it from Gamefly before anything else. I've heard lots of negative things about DW9. Heck even Jim Sterling, who LOVES the DW series, said it was a bad game.
Actually, Jim is on his second video on why it's a bad game and is now complaining about how Koei has functioned the past few decades. Emotionally compromised critiques abound there. I posted the DF video about the game in the Xbox thread earlier, where they say that it's the worst performing game on the enhanced consoles. To some extent it is true too. They are working on it.
But the things that the game has done as far as the franchise goes are phenomenal. It's definitely a DW6 situation, except here the potential and infrastructure for growth are there.
tastydonuts on
“I used to draw, hard to admit that I used to draw...”
Jim made that second video because he was "doing it wrong" by not playing the game on hard. So he made a video of him playing it on hard, and it still doesn't fix the problems DW9 has.
I don't think going open-world adds any value to the series. If anything, it's taken away from one of the core elements of Dynasty Warriors. It's no longer one person against giant armies, but rather one person against small to medium sized groups. IMO, it's just a really bland game with no justification for the change to open-world. They added the crafting system and brain dead animals to hunt, but those are pretty pointless.
Everyone has a price. Throw enough gold around and someone will risk disintegration.
Jim made that second video because he was "doing it wrong" by not playing the game on hard. So he made a video of him playing it on hard, and it still doesn't fix the problems DW9 has.
I don't think going open-world adds any value to the series. If anything, it's taken away from one of the core elements of Dynasty Warriors. It's no longer one person against giant armies, but rather one person against small to medium sized groups. IMO, it's just a really bland game with no justification for the change to open-world. They added the crafting system and brain dead animals to hunt, but those are pretty pointless.
Hmm... the majority of the second video I was referring to is of Jim discussing all the spin-offs, re-releases and the like has little to do with him playing the game on hard. The first video was the initial impressions afaik. Unless there is another video that is out there, that is not called "Degradation of Dynasty Warriors," wherein he proceeds to "complain" about Koei and the franchise? I guess there is, but the only time I even watch/skim his videos is when they are inflicted upon me in a conversation, so I don't know, tbh. Not really sure what/how people would expect Jim playing the game on hard vs playing it on normal would prove though, but eh. People.
As for the size of battles, there's a range of them in the game... that's an odd observation. Tertiary and optional battles don't have large armies, but the big fights do. The pacing of stages in the previous games followed a similar pattern. The moment a boss or mission objective spawns you can pretty much outright kill it to advance, another core thing about the games that remains unchanged. I remember farming officers in a loop one of the games to grind levels and it actually took more time for the event tracker (the thing that announces boss KOs and other dialogue to clear its stack in order to finish the level off). I bring this up because it's one of the things people have complained about in the game. The verticality/grappling hook making it easier to do so. Though this is an evolution of earlier stage structure where you would be able to vault into a camp should the script and stage structure allow it. Earlier games also had random pockets of dumb animals to kill.
When you're not rushing, the secondary missions mechanically contribute to the mission flow. EG: infinite reinforcements spawn at a gate if you don't capture another base during a main mission. Reinforcements don't spawn if you do certain sub objectives, etc.* The difference now is that objective is further away. The massive codex/encylopedia that's in the game also has a meaningful tie-in to what you can actually play and experience. It's the most fleshed out mainline Dynasty Warriors title in that respect.
Putting aside the technical issues, with the exception of the DW6, this is the first time in a while that they've taken purposeful steps to break away from what would have otherwise been the same story reiterated again with minimal changes. At the end of the day, to me, it's an okay game. No better or worse than the previous previous iterations that I also own and played through to completion.
If you don't like it, that's fine too... but the reactions that I've observed are just... odd*.
edit: *should also note that nobody who said they've liked the changes in the game has not also bemoaned either the voiceovers or frame rate stuff from what I've seen.
edit2: *better example would be the yellow turban shadow warriors and other "magic." The like vases and things that weaken his defenses are now sufficiently located away from their effects, whereas the instanced/stage nature of hte previous games meant everything was closely clustered.
tastydonuts on
“I used to draw, hard to admit that I used to draw...”
I would assume playing on hard is to fix the problem where you can just climb the wall, make a beeline to the main person you have to beat, and simply beat them.
Which... I don't know. Saying that out loud and then thinking about it, that's exactly what I did in Hyrule Warriors. Just run to the guy to beat and beat them. And loved every second of it. But seeing it in action in DW9, it looked egregiously boring. Like there's no reason to actually fight through the front gate through all the smaller enemies, or do the optional battles to make things "easier". And I would assume hard mode is intended to force you to actually do those actions. But I guess not, according to Jim.
"The sausage of Green Earth explodes with flavor like the cannon of culinary delight."
I would assume playing on hard is to fix the problem where you can just climb the wall, make a beeline to the main person you have to beat, and simply beat them.
Which... I don't know. Saying that out loud and then thinking about it, that's exactly what I did in Hyrule Warriors. Just run to the guy to beat and beat them. And loved every second of it. But seeing it in action in DW9, it looked egregiously boring. Like there's no reason to actually fight through the front gate through all the smaller enemies, or do the optional battles to make things "easier". And I would assume hard mode is intended to force you to actually do those actions. But I guess not, according to Jim.
Really? That was the thing that they chose to refute? Bypassing the armies and killing the main guy is a quick solution on every map where it's possible in every Musou game... o_o
Completing the side objectives both lowers the level (difficulty) of the primary mission and stops certain triggers from happening, or maybe spawns a guy/army on your side. But I don't think any of that has ever mattered in a Musou game save for the Naman campaigns in the PS2 era where morale actually mattered a ton, esp. on Chaos.
“I used to draw, hard to admit that I used to draw...”
I don't know about DW9, but me and a friend picked up a different KOEI game during the Lunar sale on Steam. We've played through the story mode of Arslan, and it was pretty fun. Not enough super wacky weapons for my liking (one guy uses a paintbrush, another a lute, the rest are all swords, spears and bows pretty much), but you can play online coop with a friend which is fun, even if the game doesn't do a super great job of syncing between the clients (mostly enemy position, enemy health seems pretty solidly linked).
Oh, it's based off an anime/novel series (Arslan Senki / The Legend of Arslan) and so the weapons are what the characters used, more or less.
Presumably, yes. I don't really know much about the anime/novel series, but then I have never read Romance of the Three Kingdoms either. It's fun and has online coop, which is enough for me.
DW9 manages to somehow be less interesting to play than 6 was, and in this they don't even have the bonus of giving muh boy Sima Yi piano wire fingers of doom.
It's a shame but it's not like it's the first time Koei have bungled things and they managed to come back from it, so hopefully things get better again.
DW9 manages to somehow be less interesting to play than 6 was, and in this they don't even have the bonus of giving muh boy Sima Yi piano wire fingers of doom.
It's a shame but it's not like it's the first time Koei have bungled things and they managed to come back from it, so hopefully things get better again.
Hopefully this isn't Ninja Gaiden after Itagaki left.
DW9 manages to somehow be less interesting to play than 6 was, and in this they don't even have the bonus of giving muh boy Sima Yi piano wire fingers of doom.
It's a shame but it's not like it's the first time Koei have bungled things and they managed to come back from it, so hopefully things get better again.
Hopefully this isn't Ninja Gaiden after Itagaki left.
I think that technical issues aside, it's a member berry situation. But eh, kind of don't think there's much else to say about it at this point.
“I used to draw, hard to admit that I used to draw...”
I would assume playing on hard is to fix the problem where you can just climb the wall, make a beeline to the main person you have to beat, and simply beat them.
Which... I don't know. Saying that out loud and then thinking about it, that's exactly what I did in Hyrule Warriors. Just run to the guy to beat and beat them. And loved every second of it. But seeing it in action in DW9, it looked egregiously boring. Like there's no reason to actually fight through the front gate through all the smaller enemies, or do the optional battles to make things "easier". And I would assume hard mode is intended to force you to actually do those actions. But I guess not, according to Jim.
Nah, the difficulty level doesn't matter. There's no reason to do anything but head straight to your main target and take them out. Though to be fair, you have to choose to do that. You can still beat up the tiny groups of enemies if you want.
Jim has three DW videos currently, Tasty. The first one was his initial Impressions/review. He got a bunch of comments telling him he was playing it wrong (never mind that Jim is basically a lifelong DW fanboy) and he's supposed to play it on hard. He made a second gameplay video where he upped the difficulty, but the only thing it changed about the game was the amount of damage you had to inflict on the officers. Yesterday's video was a planned airing of grievances towards TK.
I don't agree with everything he said, but I think we can all agree that skimping on localizing the voice acting is shit. Aint nobody got time to read when you're playing DW... Even if it's hilariously bad, at least the voice acting in DW9 is in english. That's something, I guess.
Everyone has a price. Throw enough gold around and someone will risk disintegration.
DW9 manages to somehow be less interesting to play than 6 was, and in this they don't even have the bonus of giving muh boy Sima Yi piano wire fingers of doom.
It's a shame but it's not like it's the first time Koei have bungled things and they managed to come back from it, so hopefully things get better again.
Hopefully this isn't Ninja Gaiden after Itagaki left.
I think that technical issues aside, it's a member berry situation. But eh, kind of don't think there's much else to say about it at this point.
I agree in part--really, a lot of the changes in design seem somewhat inevitable if you consider moving to an open world combined with the motivation to leave a lot of "space" to expand from this soft reboot of sorts. Of course you get things like crafting, etc., because all open world games have them (and you better hope people like them). But that assumed a game that wasn't a technically trainwreck, which this seems to be.
(By contrast, NG3 was fundamentally the same game, and really not reinventing anything--it just was bad by the very high standards left by the first and second titles. Indeed, the original release was actually more limited than NG/NG2.)
I would assume playing on hard is to fix the problem where you can just climb the wall, make a beeline to the main person you have to beat, and simply beat them.
Which... I don't know. Saying that out loud and then thinking about it, that's exactly what I did in Hyrule Warriors. Just run to the guy to beat and beat them. And loved every second of it. But seeing it in action in DW9, it looked egregiously boring. Like there's no reason to actually fight through the front gate through all the smaller enemies, or do the optional battles to make things "easier". And I would assume hard mode is intended to force you to actually do those actions. But I guess not, according to Jim.
Nah, the difficulty level doesn't matter. There's no reason to do anything but head straight to your main target and take them out. Though to be fair, you have to choose to do that. You can still beat up the tiny groups of enemies if you want.
Jim has three DW videos currently, Tasty. The first one was his initial Impressions/review. He got a bunch of comments telling him he was playing it wrong (never mind that Jim is basically a lifelong DW fanboy) and he's supposed to play it on hard. He made a second gameplay video where he upped the difficulty, but the only thing it changed about the game was the amount of damage you had to inflict on the officers. Yesterday's video was a planned airing of grievances towards TK.
I don't agree with everything he said, but I think we can all agree that skimping on localizing the voice acting is shit. Aint nobody got time to read when you're playing DW... Even if it's hilariously bad, at least the voice acting in DW9 is in english. That's something, I guess.
We can partially agree. I prefer to play these games in Japanese, and I have the subtitles on no matter what. :P
Reading is a free action.
edit: I imagine they'll release the language pack as free DLC again.
tastydonuts on
“I used to draw, hard to admit that I used to draw...”
I would assume playing on hard is to fix the problem where you can just climb the wall, make a beeline to the main person you have to beat, and simply beat them.
Which... I don't know. Saying that out loud and then thinking about it, that's exactly what I did in Hyrule Warriors. Just run to the guy to beat and beat them. And loved every second of it. But seeing it in action in DW9, it looked egregiously boring. Like there's no reason to actually fight through the front gate through all the smaller enemies, or do the optional battles to make things "easier". And I would assume hard mode is intended to force you to actually do those actions. But I guess not, according to Jim.
Nah, the difficulty level doesn't matter. There's no reason to do anything but head straight to your main target and take them out. Though to be fair, you have to choose to do that. You can still beat up the tiny groups of enemies if you want.
Jim has three DW videos currently, Tasty. The first one was his initial Impressions/review. He got a bunch of comments telling him he was playing it wrong (never mind that Jim is basically a lifelong DW fanboy) and he's supposed to play it on hard. He made a second gameplay video where he upped the difficulty, but the only thing it changed about the game was the amount of damage you had to inflict on the officers. Yesterday's video was a planned airing of grievances towards TK.
I don't agree with everything he said, but I think we can all agree that skimping on localizing the voice acting is shit. Aint nobody got time to read when you're playing DW... Even if it's hilariously bad, at least the voice acting in DW9 is in english. That's something, I guess.
We can partially agree. I prefer to play these games in Japanese, and I have the subtitles on no matter what. :P
Reading is a free action.
Seriously, how many Dynasty Warriors games actually get English soundtrack? I don't think I've ever played one that did, or was aware if it did.
Don't get me wrong, the English audio for Dynasty Warriors Gundam 3 is a treat (excluding the fact that the voice actors for Unicorn and some of the other series simply don't match up with their famous dub performances), but that seems rather exceptional. I always assumed when you played DW, you were either listening to the Japanese audio (and reading subtitles) or ignoring the audio entirely and just following the broadest strokes of the "performance". If you don't have time to read subtitles, you don't have time for what qualifies as a "story" in these games.
It's not so much the story. It's being ass deep in mooks and officers and having someone say "get the fuck over here before we all die." but you're ass deep in mooks and officers so you take them out, only to realize, "shit I need to get across the map pronto!" because you were busy dealing with enemies and didn't read whatever text came up at the time.
Everyone has a price. Throw enough gold around and someone will risk disintegration.
I thought that was why instructions always come up in their usual "subtle-as-a-gunshot-in-the-face" kind of way, with accompanying sound effect.
But that might honestly be self-training. In DW, and Warriors Orochi, audio seems like it's never mission critical, but always flourishes, flavor dialogue, etc. It's definitely not a 3D fighter or your typical shooter where audio cues can make or break a close competition--ironic, given where the series started, to be sure.
I think my issue with DW9 is that it's open world just for the sake of being open world. There were large stretches of NOTHING in the video I watched. So basically you just run around to the next skirmish or battle with nothing in between.
That's absurd. I'd rather just have the menu system where you select the level, get thrown immediately into the fray and start hacking/slashing everything under the sun.
I loved these games so much back when I wasn't very good at them. But once I got good at them, they stopped hooking me for very long, Hyrule Warriors excepted.
In my DW3 and DW4 days, I had to manipulate morale and rescue allies in order to get their help to defeat enemy armies, because I couldn't solo-charge officers and win by myself. I'd lose, or at least take tons of damage and have to waste time trying to find healing items and hoping my leader doesn't die while I was at it.
Bumping the difficulty only modestly helps with that due to how the difficulty tends to work in the games.
Basically, once you learn the tricks and master the combat, the tactical side of things goes out the window. And it seems like the tactical side has been continuously de-emphasized anyway; lately it's been more about just responding to events as they happen instead of looking at the starting map and planning out a route to rescue as many ally armies as possible in the opening minutes.
Going open world sounds like exactly the wrong way to solve this problem. I guess I'll wait and see if they fix up the technical glitches and maybe check it out later?
Hyrule Warriors struck me as definitely a "me too" title in the series, more so than Dynasty Warriors Gundam--the scope of everything is smaller, the character list is wayyy smaller, and everything on the whole is less impressive.
It's good looking (for the Wii U anyway) and the controls are completely competent, and it's not a technical disaster (it certainly didn't seem like it). Maybe it's just not that impressive if you're not heavily invested in the Zelda mythos.
If you've got a Switch, Fire Emblem Warriors is really good. I liked it more than Hyrule Warriors personally.
I like FE Warriors a lot, but I'm salivating in anticipation for Hyrule Warriors on Switch. It'll be my third time buying it, I don't even care :rotate:
Everyone has a price. Throw enough gold around and someone will risk disintegration.
Just getting to play as Zelda and kick lots of ass did a whole lot for me, I'll admit. But I also liked all the details with how the combat worked against enemy officers, the items and giant bosses, the challenge variety. Making everything smaller scale seemed to help refine the focus and the experience. Forts functioned quite well as an excuse to stop and pay some degree of attention to the mook hordes.
I just wish Adventure Mode wasn't such a grind.
Triptycho: A card-and-dice tabletop indie RPG currently in development and playtesting
Just getting to play as Zelda and kick lots of ass did a whole lot for me, I'll admit. But I also liked all the details with how the combat worked against enemy officers, the items and giant bosses, the challenge variety. Making everything smaller scale seemed to help refine the focus and the experience. Forts functioned quite well as an excuse to stop and pay some degree of attention to the mook hordes.
I just wish Adventure Mode wasn't such a grind.
This is why I like FE Warriors better. The History Mode (adventure mode equiv) is far less grindy, and getting a character to a fully powered weapon & skills is far more direct and way less RNG based. Getting everyone to that level will take time, but you can focus on at least one or two per weapon type and get them set up no problem. And still faster than Hyrule Warriors.
I loved these games so much back when I wasn't very good at them. But once I got good at them, they stopped hooking me for very long, Hyrule Warriors excepted.
In my DW3 and DW4 days, I had to manipulate morale and rescue allies in order to get their help to defeat enemy armies, because I couldn't solo-charge officers and win by myself. I'd lose, or at least take tons of damage and have to waste time trying to find healing items and hoping my leader doesn't die while I was at it.
Bumping the difficulty only modestly helps with that due to how the difficulty tends to work in the games.
Basically, once you learn the tricks and master the combat, the tactical side of things goes out the window. And it seems like the tactical side has been continuously de-emphasized anyway; lately it's been more about just responding to events as they happen instead of looking at the starting map and planning out a route to rescue as many ally armies as possible in the opening minutes.
Going open world sounds like exactly the wrong way to solve this problem. I guess I'll wait and see if they fix up the technical glitches and maybe check it out later?
The combat in Dynasty Warriors 9 is much different from the combat in the other games. While if you stack enough attack power to outright kill everything in a single swing or combo chain you will never notice it (no need). With the crafting system and a fair bit of farming to get to that point can be done in the first chapter... but that's a general disadvantage of open world/crafting games. Have I broken it already? Yep. But at the same time I also generally play within the constraints of what the games have set before me. Otherwise it's just a chore, the same as pretty much all games.
Anyway, I don't see the point of spoiling this so—as it is Dynasty Warriors and the umpteenth time this particular story has been told—so I'm not. That said, in DW 9 you can do whatever you want, with the exception of rescue type missions, where it actually became a race against the clock for failure. The other missions also have failure standards for losing officers but the morale system is pretty generous so it's safe to say that you can dick around unless urgency is implied. I'm playing on Hard difficulty, though I'm probably going to Chaos soon as I think I have the mats to baseline chaos difficulty gear. Gracefully, failure doesn't mean you have to start the entire chapter over, as chapters are more collections of stages from the past games. That said, one of the keystones of open worlds is the persistent state and involvement in it. The shift to the open world allows for more tactical play, because instead of being caged in a fixed area with the objectives closely stacked, they have room to breathe, and you have more choice. You can go from town to town killing all the lumberjacks and blacksmiths that have decided to revolt too. because... open world side missions.
A good example of its tactical attempts is a mission like Rescuing Dian Wei from Wan Castle. You have the option of boss rushing to clear it, always... but spaced in the area are the side objectives. Of course in this mission, Jia Xu sets the castle on fire, and they rush the base and reinforce it. In the past you would just escape the castle and Dian Wei dies from his injuries. In DW9, you escape the castle but now it expounds on that by allowing you to push back into the castle to Rescue Dian Wei.
To that end, in DW9, you have the side objective of firstly pressing his feint to draw some of the soldiers inside the castle. The soldiers see you wreck the force and that draws some out/lowers morale. Doing another side mission reveals that there's a fire attack that is set up to happen from bases to the north and south. Popping those will obviously prevent that. There's also another base where his forces are supplied. When finally you enter the castle, they of course try to trigger those events and they are surprised that these things are not happening. Because of how the morale/off combat system works—it's still RNG heartbeats for off-screen combat—Dian Wei can be defeated in the time it takes you to fill these so you have to be fast. This actually happened to me when I decided to clear every sub-base along the way to each objective, so I just focused on the main ones and used fast travel to get closer to the other sub-missions to clear them too. Similar things happen in other missions as well, like the Yellow Turban Rebellion with all its tricks and stuff.
But in any case, the open world structure allows for more tactical/decision driven play. Should you decide to engage it vs simply charging the main objective. It's a choice. DW 9 allows you to play it the same way as the other older titles (boss rush!), or play within the structure it offers. Travel between the fighting spaces also becomes trivial once you get a horse. Or boost your speed to run as fast as a horse, another thing you can easily do.
Really wish their release didn't hit with such bad technical issues given they also were presenting so many changes to the formula too, but such is life.
“I used to draw, hard to admit that I used to draw...”
Zelda and Impa are two of my favorites in HW. They're so dang badass. Ganon's pretty cool too.
Actually, I don't think there's anyone I don't like playing as in HW. I never got around to trying out that one lady from Link's Awakening, though.
I really disliked playing as Fi. Her robot ballet was pretty, but hard to control. I never felt like I was doing what I wanted to be doing when using her.
Had the same problem with Ruto, though a bit less so.
Zelda and Impa are two of my favorites in HW. They're so dang badass. Ganon's pretty cool too.
Actually, I don't think there's anyone I don't like playing as in HW. I never got around to trying out that one lady from Link's Awakening, though.
I really disliked playing as Fi. Her robot ballet was pretty, but hard to control. I never felt like I was doing what I wanted to be doing when using her.
Had the same problem with Ruto, though a bit less so.
You had to play Fi exactly how she looked: dance and move around the battlefield, always staying mobile and fluid. It's definitely different to say Ganondorf, whose playstyle is "pick a direction, plant your feet, unleash hell".
"The sausage of Green Earth explodes with flavor like the cannon of culinary delight."
In the middle of a raging war, deep behind enemy lines, I just did a side mission to find and return someone's cat for them, in exchange for their sabotaging the siege weapons of their own lord.
They've truly embraced open world quest logic.
“I used to draw, hard to admit that I used to draw...”
Another mission just had me track down the mother of an enemy general's strategist in order to bring her with me into combat against him to demoralize him.
They were also able to fit in some more details about why Cao Cao goes after Liu Bei so hard in the famous chase Liu Bei stages of old. They're definitely able to hit more beats in the source material with this game.
“I used to draw, hard to admit that I used to draw...”
Just a note too, as not all the missions feature combat and this one was a rather annoying word puzzle. For the mission "Forming Reinforcements", the solution is:
Cai Mao, Yuan Han, Wang Can, Wen Pin
Also, Not sure if I broke them when I rushed the boats, but fighting on boats in this game is a major low point for the game's AI.
“I used to draw, hard to admit that I used to draw...”
Swear to god every warriors game has fighting on boats and shitty ai. I swear one of them you had to literally drag an npc across a boat section otherwise they'd never do their objective.
I would like some money because these are artisanal nuggets of wisdom philistine.
Posts
While it has some moderate issues (framerate/performance), the open world and other things make it a fairly good addition and mix up to the franchise! Anyone else have it?
I think that as a Warriors game, it's pretty awful, and as a general open-world game it's barely mediocre.
Part of the reason I play these games is for the flashy, varied combat. The removal of unique weapons in favor of a handful of weapon types that anyone can use kind of hurts that. Also, the musou attacks are pretty dull now.
It's definitely not as flashy, but I would hardly call the combat any Musou game "varied." With the exception of Bladestorm and AoT they're all the same?
So, from a technical standpoint the game is kind of a trainwreck, and not just moderately troubled, at least at the present. It could still run better on PC, but this seems like the sort of title that wouldn't run well even on a high end PC.
That being said, these are technical issues (and could be corrected, potentially) and not reflective of the game at large. These really seem to be the sort of issues you run into when a game with a history of mixed performance makes the transition to open-world (Koei Tecmo has had some extremely well optimized PC ports, on the other hand). This is somewhat separate from gameplay design itself, but everything I've seen isn't encouraging, personally. I'll stick with Warriors Orochi 3 Ultimate, which was free with GwG.
Not trying to change your mind on it or anything, that's just my take on why I'm disappointed with DW9. I went into it with a positive outlook and didn't look at any videos beforehand. I checked out stuff like Sterling's videos after I put my own time into the game, and he basically hit all the complaints I had after spending time with it.
Actually, Jim is on his second video on why it's a bad game and is now complaining about how Koei has functioned the past few decades. Emotionally compromised critiques abound there. I posted the DF video about the game in the Xbox thread earlier, where they say that it's the worst performing game on the enhanced consoles. To some extent it is true too. They are working on it.
But the things that the game has done as far as the franchise goes are phenomenal. It's definitely a DW6 situation, except here the potential and infrastructure for growth are there.
I don't think going open-world adds any value to the series. If anything, it's taken away from one of the core elements of Dynasty Warriors. It's no longer one person against giant armies, but rather one person against small to medium sized groups. IMO, it's just a really bland game with no justification for the change to open-world. They added the crafting system and brain dead animals to hunt, but those are pretty pointless.
Hmm... the majority of the second video I was referring to is of Jim discussing all the spin-offs, re-releases and the like has little to do with him playing the game on hard. The first video was the initial impressions afaik. Unless there is another video that is out there, that is not called "Degradation of Dynasty Warriors," wherein he proceeds to "complain" about Koei and the franchise? I guess there is, but the only time I even watch/skim his videos is when they are inflicted upon me in a conversation, so I don't know, tbh. Not really sure what/how people would expect Jim playing the game on hard vs playing it on normal would prove though, but eh. People.
As for the size of battles, there's a range of them in the game... that's an odd observation. Tertiary and optional battles don't have large armies, but the big fights do. The pacing of stages in the previous games followed a similar pattern. The moment a boss or mission objective spawns you can pretty much outright kill it to advance, another core thing about the games that remains unchanged. I remember farming officers in a loop one of the games to grind levels and it actually took more time for the event tracker (the thing that announces boss KOs and other dialogue to clear its stack in order to finish the level off). I bring this up because it's one of the things people have complained about in the game. The verticality/grappling hook making it easier to do so. Though this is an evolution of earlier stage structure where you would be able to vault into a camp should the script and stage structure allow it. Earlier games also had random pockets of dumb animals to kill.
When you're not rushing, the secondary missions mechanically contribute to the mission flow. EG: infinite reinforcements spawn at a gate if you don't capture another base during a main mission. Reinforcements don't spawn if you do certain sub objectives, etc.* The difference now is that objective is further away. The massive codex/encylopedia that's in the game also has a meaningful tie-in to what you can actually play and experience. It's the most fleshed out mainline Dynasty Warriors title in that respect.
Putting aside the technical issues, with the exception of the DW6, this is the first time in a while that they've taken purposeful steps to break away from what would have otherwise been the same story reiterated again with minimal changes. At the end of the day, to me, it's an okay game. No better or worse than the previous previous iterations that I also own and played through to completion.
If you don't like it, that's fine too... but the reactions that I've observed are just... odd*.
edit: *should also note that nobody who said they've liked the changes in the game has not also bemoaned either the voiceovers or frame rate stuff from what I've seen.
edit2: *better example would be the yellow turban shadow warriors and other "magic." The like vases and things that weaken his defenses are now sufficiently located away from their effects, whereas the instanced/stage nature of hte previous games meant everything was closely clustered.
Which... I don't know. Saying that out loud and then thinking about it, that's exactly what I did in Hyrule Warriors. Just run to the guy to beat and beat them. And loved every second of it. But seeing it in action in DW9, it looked egregiously boring. Like there's no reason to actually fight through the front gate through all the smaller enemies, or do the optional battles to make things "easier". And I would assume hard mode is intended to force you to actually do those actions. But I guess not, according to Jim.
Really? That was the thing that they chose to refute? Bypassing the armies and killing the main guy is a quick solution on every map where it's possible in every Musou game... o_o
Completing the side objectives both lowers the level (difficulty) of the primary mission and stops certain triggers from happening, or maybe spawns a guy/army on your side. But I don't think any of that has ever mattered in a Musou game save for the Naman campaigns in the PS2 era where morale actually mattered a ton, esp. on Chaos.
Presumably, yes. I don't really know much about the anime/novel series, but then I have never read Romance of the Three Kingdoms either. It's fun and has online coop, which is enough for me.
It's a shame but it's not like it's the first time Koei have bungled things and they managed to come back from it, so hopefully things get better again.
Hopefully this isn't Ninja Gaiden after Itagaki left.
I think that technical issues aside, it's a member berry situation. But eh, kind of don't think there's much else to say about it at this point.
Nah, the difficulty level doesn't matter. There's no reason to do anything but head straight to your main target and take them out. Though to be fair, you have to choose to do that. You can still beat up the tiny groups of enemies if you want.
Jim has three DW videos currently, Tasty. The first one was his initial Impressions/review. He got a bunch of comments telling him he was playing it wrong (never mind that Jim is basically a lifelong DW fanboy) and he's supposed to play it on hard. He made a second gameplay video where he upped the difficulty, but the only thing it changed about the game was the amount of damage you had to inflict on the officers. Yesterday's video was a planned airing of grievances towards TK.
I don't agree with everything he said, but I think we can all agree that skimping on localizing the voice acting is shit. Aint nobody got time to read when you're playing DW... Even if it's hilariously bad, at least the voice acting in DW9 is in english. That's something, I guess.
I agree in part--really, a lot of the changes in design seem somewhat inevitable if you consider moving to an open world combined with the motivation to leave a lot of "space" to expand from this soft reboot of sorts. Of course you get things like crafting, etc., because all open world games have them (and you better hope people like them). But that assumed a game that wasn't a technically trainwreck, which this seems to be.
(By contrast, NG3 was fundamentally the same game, and really not reinventing anything--it just was bad by the very high standards left by the first and second titles. Indeed, the original release was actually more limited than NG/NG2.)
We can partially agree. I prefer to play these games in Japanese, and I have the subtitles on no matter what. :P
Reading is a free action.
edit: I imagine they'll release the language pack as free DLC again.
Seriously, how many Dynasty Warriors games actually get English soundtrack? I don't think I've ever played one that did, or was aware if it did.
Don't get me wrong, the English audio for Dynasty Warriors Gundam 3 is a treat (excluding the fact that the voice actors for Unicorn and some of the other series simply don't match up with their famous dub performances), but that seems rather exceptional. I always assumed when you played DW, you were either listening to the Japanese audio (and reading subtitles) or ignoring the audio entirely and just following the broadest strokes of the "performance". If you don't have time to read subtitles, you don't have time for what qualifies as a "story" in these games.
But that might honestly be self-training. In DW, and Warriors Orochi, audio seems like it's never mission critical, but always flourishes, flavor dialogue, etc. It's definitely not a 3D fighter or your typical shooter where audio cues can make or break a close competition--ironic, given where the series started, to be sure.
That's absurd. I'd rather just have the menu system where you select the level, get thrown immediately into the fray and start hacking/slashing everything under the sun.
In my DW3 and DW4 days, I had to manipulate morale and rescue allies in order to get their help to defeat enemy armies, because I couldn't solo-charge officers and win by myself. I'd lose, or at least take tons of damage and have to waste time trying to find healing items and hoping my leader doesn't die while I was at it.
Bumping the difficulty only modestly helps with that due to how the difficulty tends to work in the games.
Basically, once you learn the tricks and master the combat, the tactical side of things goes out the window. And it seems like the tactical side has been continuously de-emphasized anyway; lately it's been more about just responding to events as they happen instead of looking at the starting map and planning out a route to rescue as many ally armies as possible in the opening minutes.
Going open world sounds like exactly the wrong way to solve this problem. I guess I'll wait and see if they fix up the technical glitches and maybe check it out later?
I'm really digging RoTK13:FaS on PS4 though. It's great, borderline excellent.
It's good looking (for the Wii U anyway) and the controls are completely competent, and it's not a technical disaster (it certainly didn't seem like it). Maybe it's just not that impressive if you're not heavily invested in the Zelda mythos.
I like FE Warriors a lot, but I'm salivating in anticipation for Hyrule Warriors on Switch. It'll be my third time buying it, I don't even care :rotate:
I just wish Adventure Mode wasn't such a grind.
Actually, I don't think there's anyone I don't like playing as in HW. I never got around to trying out that one lady from Link's Awakening, though.
This is why I like FE Warriors better. The History Mode (adventure mode equiv) is far less grindy, and getting a character to a fully powered weapon & skills is far more direct and way less RNG based. Getting everyone to that level will take time, but you can focus on at least one or two per weapon type and get them set up no problem. And still faster than Hyrule Warriors.
The combat in Dynasty Warriors 9 is much different from the combat in the other games. While if you stack enough attack power to outright kill everything in a single swing or combo chain you will never notice it (no need). With the crafting system and a fair bit of farming to get to that point can be done in the first chapter... but that's a general disadvantage of open world/crafting games. Have I broken it already? Yep. But at the same time I also generally play within the constraints of what the games have set before me. Otherwise it's just a chore, the same as pretty much all games.
Anyway, I don't see the point of spoiling this so—as it is Dynasty Warriors and the umpteenth time this particular story has been told—so I'm not. That said, in DW 9 you can do whatever you want, with the exception of rescue type missions, where it actually became a race against the clock for failure. The other missions also have failure standards for losing officers but the morale system is pretty generous so it's safe to say that you can dick around unless urgency is implied. I'm playing on Hard difficulty, though I'm probably going to Chaos soon as I think I have the mats to baseline chaos difficulty gear. Gracefully, failure doesn't mean you have to start the entire chapter over, as chapters are more collections of stages from the past games. That said, one of the keystones of open worlds is the persistent state and involvement in it. The shift to the open world allows for more tactical play, because instead of being caged in a fixed area with the objectives closely stacked, they have room to breathe, and you have more choice. You can go from town to town killing all the lumberjacks and blacksmiths that have decided to revolt too. because... open world side missions.
A good example of its tactical attempts is a mission like Rescuing Dian Wei from Wan Castle. You have the option of boss rushing to clear it, always... but spaced in the area are the side objectives. Of course in this mission, Jia Xu sets the castle on fire, and they rush the base and reinforce it. In the past you would just escape the castle and Dian Wei dies from his injuries. In DW9, you escape the castle but now it expounds on that by allowing you to push back into the castle to Rescue Dian Wei.
To that end, in DW9, you have the side objective of firstly pressing his feint to draw some of the soldiers inside the castle. The soldiers see you wreck the force and that draws some out/lowers morale. Doing another side mission reveals that there's a fire attack that is set up to happen from bases to the north and south. Popping those will obviously prevent that. There's also another base where his forces are supplied. When finally you enter the castle, they of course try to trigger those events and they are surprised that these things are not happening. Because of how the morale/off combat system works—it's still RNG heartbeats for off-screen combat—Dian Wei can be defeated in the time it takes you to fill these so you have to be fast. This actually happened to me when I decided to clear every sub-base along the way to each objective, so I just focused on the main ones and used fast travel to get closer to the other sub-missions to clear them too. Similar things happen in other missions as well, like the Yellow Turban Rebellion with all its tricks and stuff.
But in any case, the open world structure allows for more tactical/decision driven play. Should you decide to engage it vs simply charging the main objective. It's a choice. DW 9 allows you to play it the same way as the other older titles (boss rush!), or play within the structure it offers. Travel between the fighting spaces also becomes trivial once you get a horse. Or boost your speed to run as fast as a horse, another thing you can easily do.
Really wish their release didn't hit with such bad technical issues given they also were presenting so many changes to the formula too, but such is life.
I really disliked playing as Fi. Her robot ballet was pretty, but hard to control. I never felt like I was doing what I wanted to be doing when using her.
Had the same problem with Ruto, though a bit less so.
You had to play Fi exactly how she looked: dance and move around the battlefield, always staying mobile and fluid. It's definitely different to say Ganondorf, whose playstyle is "pick a direction, plant your feet, unleash hell".
They've truly embraced open world quest logic.
They were also able to fit in some more details about why Cao Cao goes after Liu Bei so hard in the famous chase Liu Bei stages of old. They're definitely able to hit more beats in the source material with this game.
Also, Not sure if I broke them when I rushed the boats, but fighting on boats in this game is a major low point for the game's AI.
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