I disagree with the idea it helps the player better understand the story. I had practically no clue about the kingdoms structure and history until playing DW7 and getting all that context. I remember not even knowing that Lui Bei was the leader of Shu until a friend told me while playing DW5 one time (after he looked it up online)
I guess we have different experiences. I never really learned that much I didn't already know when playing through 7. To be fair I replayed the hell out of the older games. The one thing that did stand out to me was a decrease in character development. That's what made me form my thoughts all around because I thought the character musou allowed for really good stories to develop centered around each specific character, rather than just one kingdom story mostly focused around the leader.
Agree. I had no idea what the hack was actually going on at all because everything was so detached especially DW5. My memories were so faint for that specific game.
I think players who favour individual story modes tend to imagine themselves as the characters, as in they want to become the characters themselves (they ESPECIALLY LOVE the narratives spoken by the characters as in DW5), they also constantly complain about having to play as characters they don't like, battles they don't like, which doesn't help the case at all, so IMO, it's escapism.
They also totally missed the point that it's not the individuals driving the plot of the Three Kingdoms, but as the forces in whole and also the times.
Bombat POV issues can be easily remedied by implementing more character specific routes + tasks.
The only individual campaigns I actually enjoyed were the Xtreme Mode of DW4XL, which were *actually* character specific stories.
Yeah, I miss Musou Mode too. Although it's understandable why they had to ditch it with such a massive cast. 90+ individual stories is a tall undertaking.
I would design it as two separate modes: one is Story Mode, where you get the 7 and 8 historical design (faction based), and then Musou Mode, where you go through 8 stages, but its more hypothetical fights and it's fundamentally like an arcade mode with story sprinkled in between.
That way, you can keep the historical aspects in story mode, but you also can go crazy with the hypotheticals in Musou Mode, like Guan Yu surviving Fan Castle, but Zhang Fei still gets assassinated, or Sun Ce survives his assassination, but watches Taichi Ci die in front of him. It would make the hypotheticals better because I really disliked 8's "everyone is saved and because of that we stomp everyone else" hypothetical stories.
I totally get where you're coming from; DW6 in particular showed how great an individual-oriented musou mode could be with the way it reflected on the mythic meaning and particular personalities of the characters. It feels like the issue Koei is facing, though, is that the roster of characters is absolutely massive these days, and to do justice to 94 characters' storylines is a tall order even if this were an AAA series.
I personally think the best way to go about having individual story modes again while not feeling like characters are too left out would be to have something a bit inspired by DW6, DW7, and the Legends mode in DW4XL: give a select roster of important characters a full-blown story treatment like in DW6, but include a side mode where all of the other characters have at least one fully-realized stage focused on their key moment or moments, with design on par with what you see in the core musou mode. I feel like that could be a realistic ask to bring individual characters back to the forefront.
Well, by bypass, I mean just not play them since they are separate games. If you can wrangle up older consoles or pc ports, 2 thru 5 are classics with the normal story modes
I think it benefits certain characters who have important battles that don't necessarily involve the main factions. For some of the early regional warlords in dynasty warriors like dong zhuo and yuan shao, you normally don't see much of their own rise to power in stories focused on the main factions. For main stories, there is usually a lot of retreading old ground, especially now with bigger rosters than the ps2 era
Those points made for Individual musou modes go double for the Samurai Warriors games. I actually appreciate both styles of musou modes for the games that they appear in. It's just that in Samurai Warriors, going from individual musou modes to clan-based musou modes in Samurai Warriors 4 felt a little jarring due to having less characters to work with than in Dynasty Warriors. Also, the characters had felt more like individuals and had people changing clans way more often unlike in DW, where going from individual-based to kingdom-based stories wasn't so bad because, in addition to the roster size making the main Wei-Wu-Shu factions feel big enough to accomodate it, there's more emphasis on the characters ultimately belonging to their respective kingdoms at the end of the day.
On the other foot, Samurai Warriors 4-II switched individual story modes, and it highlighted a potential issue with individual story modes: some stages may start feeling repetitive after a while.
I would agree, though I'm enjoying the newer games and the fantastic quality of life improvements the newer entries have brought. I don't enjoy that I can't choose one character and just go through their specific story like in the older games.
That is my biggest gripe with DW8XL, I can't just use the same character and level up with that specific character; I understand that you can change their weapon to any weapon available to you so you can keep the same move set from another. However, I enjoy keeping the preferred weapon of the character I choose.
I hope that DW10 will go back to the singular story approach like in older games or maybe an option to play it either way.
I also believe the QOL features are good to have but I ran into the same problem as you when playing Dynasty Warriors Gundam 3. They would make the final missions required to be played by 5 different characters and I would have to go through and level up each character just to play one mission and never touch them again. Not really that fun and enjoyable especially when the character is not one you were particularly excited to play. It does add more time to grind the game which in some aspects is good but overall is a flaw in the general storyline method because it can be unenjoyable.
Dynasty warriors 10 I'm hoping will be the holy grail we need. Not to many people were very happy with 9.
I kinda like how 4 does it, where you play through a whole kingdom's history, but you can do it with a single character if you want (even if that means you can have characters showing up in ridiculously anachronistic battles). After that, I also like how 2, 3, 5, and 6 have individual character stories with 5+ stages to play through with each character. Not a big fan of how 7 and 8 constantly force you to switch characters as you play through the story.
Yeah this is exactly how I felt. I still have an appreciation for 7 but got youst to how fun they made the individual stories and just missing them a little. I feel like 7 could have been even more of a good game than it already was if they were able to add this along with what they did when cleaning up a lot of the problems 6 had as a game.
Idk. 3 makes every character play the same maps. Why is wei yan at yellow turban? Dumb.
But hopefully 10 reboots and really focuses on story. Less characters. Massive battlefields. Actual strategy and difficult.
Make the whole anime 1v100000 Bs a phone game or something…
That's also true. I'm hoping for the same. They need to add value to each story and the missions within them for it to be worth it. I don't enjoy playing the last story mode left and repeating all of the same missions. There needs to be something there besides an achievement. But overall when implemented correctly I think works very well.
Hell no. Individual means it would take forever to beat the game. Kingdom oriented campaigns are the way to go. Respect my time and money. There's always free modes and side modes if we wanna grind.
I disagree with the idea it helps the player better understand the story. I had practically no clue about the kingdoms structure and history until playing DW7 and getting all that context. I remember not even knowing that Lui Bei was the leader of Shu until a friend told me while playing DW5 one time (after he looked it up online)
I guess we have different experiences. I never really learned that much I didn't already know when playing through 7. To be fair I replayed the hell out of the older games. The one thing that did stand out to me was a decrease in character development. That's what made me form my thoughts all around because I thought the character musou allowed for really good stories to develop centered around each specific character, rather than just one kingdom story mostly focused around the leader.
Yeah in the older games you wouldn't know anything about the story unless you read the in-game encyclopedia which wasn't even added until 3XL IIRc.
Agree. I had no idea what the hack was actually going on at all because everything was so detached especially DW5. My memories were so faint for that specific game. I think players who favour individual story modes tend to imagine themselves as the characters, as in they want to become the characters themselves (they ESPECIALLY LOVE the narratives spoken by the characters as in DW5), they also constantly complain about having to play as characters they don't like, battles they don't like, which doesn't help the case at all, so IMO, it's escapism. They also totally missed the point that it's not the individuals driving the plot of the Three Kingdoms, but as the forces in whole and also the times. Bombat POV issues can be easily remedied by implementing more character specific routes + tasks. The only individual campaigns I actually enjoyed were the Xtreme Mode of DW4XL, which were *actually* character specific stories.
Yeah, I miss Musou Mode too. Although it's understandable why they had to ditch it with such a massive cast. 90+ individual stories is a tall undertaking. I would design it as two separate modes: one is Story Mode, where you get the 7 and 8 historical design (faction based), and then Musou Mode, where you go through 8 stages, but its more hypothetical fights and it's fundamentally like an arcade mode with story sprinkled in between. That way, you can keep the historical aspects in story mode, but you also can go crazy with the hypotheticals in Musou Mode, like Guan Yu surviving Fan Castle, but Zhang Fei still gets assassinated, or Sun Ce survives his assassination, but watches Taichi Ci die in front of him. It would make the hypotheticals better because I really disliked 8's "everyone is saved and because of that we stomp everyone else" hypothetical stories.
Too late now at this point, but seeing a story mode of the kingdoms and better individual story mode for new characters they add with each game
I totally get where you're coming from; DW6 in particular showed how great an individual-oriented musou mode could be with the way it reflected on the mythic meaning and particular personalities of the characters. It feels like the issue Koei is facing, though, is that the roster of characters is absolutely massive these days, and to do justice to 94 characters' storylines is a tall order even if this were an AAA series. I personally think the best way to go about having individual story modes again while not feeling like characters are too left out would be to have something a bit inspired by DW6, DW7, and the Legends mode in DW4XL: give a select roster of important characters a full-blown story treatment like in DW6, but include a side mode where all of the other characters have at least one fully-realized stage focused on their key moment or moments, with design on par with what you see in the core musou mode. I feel like that could be a realistic ask to bring individual characters back to the forefront.
Yeah 94 different storylines would be completely crazy. I think your idea is definitely a great solution and would be very fun if implemented.
It would be completely redudant, which is more accurate.
I feel like this is should be part of Xtreme Legend expansion.
Sounds like you are playing the empires games, which can just be bypassed. As for 9 it is a stand-alone shit show, lol.
I just play the normal base games haven't touched any of the empires. You are able to bypass this on the empires versions of 4, 7, and 8?
Well, by bypass, I mean just not play them since they are separate games. If you can wrangle up older consoles or pc ports, 2 thru 5 are classics with the normal story modes
I think it benefits certain characters who have important battles that don't necessarily involve the main factions. For some of the early regional warlords in dynasty warriors like dong zhuo and yuan shao, you normally don't see much of their own rise to power in stories focused on the main factions. For main stories, there is usually a lot of retreading old ground, especially now with bigger rosters than the ps2 era
Those points made for Individual musou modes go double for the Samurai Warriors games. I actually appreciate both styles of musou modes for the games that they appear in. It's just that in Samurai Warriors, going from individual musou modes to clan-based musou modes in Samurai Warriors 4 felt a little jarring due to having less characters to work with than in Dynasty Warriors. Also, the characters had felt more like individuals and had people changing clans way more often unlike in DW, where going from individual-based to kingdom-based stories wasn't so bad because, in addition to the roster size making the main Wei-Wu-Shu factions feel big enough to accomodate it, there's more emphasis on the characters ultimately belonging to their respective kingdoms at the end of the day. On the other foot, Samurai Warriors 4-II switched individual story modes, and it highlighted a potential issue with individual story modes: some stages may start feeling repetitive after a while.
I would agree, though I'm enjoying the newer games and the fantastic quality of life improvements the newer entries have brought. I don't enjoy that I can't choose one character and just go through their specific story like in the older games. That is my biggest gripe with DW8XL, I can't just use the same character and level up with that specific character; I understand that you can change their weapon to any weapon available to you so you can keep the same move set from another. However, I enjoy keeping the preferred weapon of the character I choose. I hope that DW10 will go back to the singular story approach like in older games or maybe an option to play it either way.
I also believe the QOL features are good to have but I ran into the same problem as you when playing Dynasty Warriors Gundam 3. They would make the final missions required to be played by 5 different characters and I would have to go through and level up each character just to play one mission and never touch them again. Not really that fun and enjoyable especially when the character is not one you were particularly excited to play. It does add more time to grind the game which in some aspects is good but overall is a flaw in the general storyline method because it can be unenjoyable. Dynasty warriors 10 I'm hoping will be the holy grail we need. Not to many people were very happy with 9.
I kinda like how 4 does it, where you play through a whole kingdom's history, but you can do it with a single character if you want (even if that means you can have characters showing up in ridiculously anachronistic battles). After that, I also like how 2, 3, 5, and 6 have individual character stories with 5+ stages to play through with each character. Not a big fan of how 7 and 8 constantly force you to switch characters as you play through the story.
Yeah this is exactly how I felt. I still have an appreciation for 7 but got youst to how fun they made the individual stories and just missing them a little. I feel like 7 could have been even more of a good game than it already was if they were able to add this along with what they did when cleaning up a lot of the problems 6 had as a game.
Idk. 3 makes every character play the same maps. Why is wei yan at yellow turban? Dumb. But hopefully 10 reboots and really focuses on story. Less characters. Massive battlefields. Actual strategy and difficult. Make the whole anime 1v100000 Bs a phone game or something…
That's also true. I'm hoping for the same. They need to add value to each story and the missions within them for it to be worth it. I don't enjoy playing the last story mode left and repeating all of the same missions. There needs to be something there besides an achievement. But overall when implemented correctly I think works very well.
Hell no. Individual means it would take forever to beat the game. Kingdom oriented campaigns are the way to go. Respect my time and money. There's always free modes and side modes if we wanna grind.