If you want to play Team Ninja’s upcoming action game Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty in “easy” mode, that’s not an option, as the game only has one difficulty setting, and Team Ninja explains why.
This was revealed by Producer Masaaki Yamagiwa in an interview with MP1st (via NextGen Player who conducted the interview on TGS 2022).
MP1st: Many fans of Souls-like experiences enjoy it for its high difficulty – they love the challenge and satisfaction we get from beating a difficult stage or boss. But there are also gamers who want to play, but find that these games are too difficult. Are there things the team looks at that don’t necessarily make the game easier, but do make it more accessible? For example, the way FromSoftware approached Elden Ring – it’s a very difficult game, but they added new mechanics like summoning spirit helpers, making it more ‘approachable’ to new players.
Yamagiwa-san: We think it’s “good” to have one level of difficulty so that everyone has the same experience of overcoming a really intense obstacle and they all have that sense of achievement, like I did. But the caveat there is to give players all the different ways they can do that. So you could talk to your friends and say, “Hey, I beat this boss and this is how I did it, you want to talk to people and go online because you really want to interact with them. It’s very important to take up the challenge.” to keep the same and give players different ways to overcome it. Wo Long is certainly not an easy game, but we are working to give players as much freedom and choice to play it as they want, and overcome obstacles in their own way One thing that comes to mind is the moral system you have a morale rank and as you keep increasing it you get stronger and you can use that to choose which enemies you want to fight or you can raise it to give you a tougher enemy and maybe they’ll be a little easier now you’re stronger.You can also level up your character like a traditional action RPG and get stronger that way.There’s multiplayer too, so you can go online with your friends, two other people so a total of three online and then take on the bosses as a group. We really give players their own ways to handle all of these things, which is very important to Wo Long’s game design.
If you’re interested in how hard Wo Long is, you can – provided you have a PS5 or Xbox Series X|S – since a demo has been released.
Wo Long Fallen Dynasty is slated for release in 2023 for the PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.