Just tried the PDZ demo and well, let’s just say I will not be joining you folks any time soon online.
There is a demo? is it on the marketplace? I’m all for try before buying.
Yeah, it went up today I think.
Just in time then! Cool, thanks for the heads up.
For those trying the demo, I don’t know what level it is, or whether you can play bots in multi or not, but the multi in that game is quite superior to the single-player experience.
Moore:
Try an elimination round, you versus 3-4 bots on Perfect Agent or higher setting. Then come back and tell me the AI sucks. They don’t even aim very well. It’s all about tactics.
I think Moore was responding to Bob and talking about DW5
Yeah in DW 5, from the hour or so I played, you have a 50/50 chance of the enemies not moving at all. I could even walk into them and shove 'em a tiny bit. Nothing until I start attacking. Patient guys.
Yeah but those are just the rank and file guys. Think of them as being so affected by your awesome presence that they are stunned into abject awe.
Actually, Bob’s quite right to a point. All the enemies in Dynasty Warriors are ranked and the lower the rank, the less dangerous they will be. This is absolutely crucial or else the game is going to be a horrible, unfun mess because no one wants good AI in all the soldiers. Dynasty Warriors isn’t descended Gauntlet, but rather from good ol’ beat-em-ups like Final Fight and Double Dragon and in those games some of the enemies would wait or walk around for a while, and one of the biggest parts that made them enjoyable was in anticipating your timing for crowd control. Who should you attack first? When you should stop your beating to intercept another attack? How can you use space to get more people down?
The most important concept in a beat-em-up is juggling and stunning people and so Koei and any competent beat-em-up designer designs some enemies to be fodder, but doesn’t make it predictable which will attack.
In Dynasty Warriors, however, since you are fighting way more enemies than in the older beat-em-ups, there is a new system in which how many enemies you can combo into (and you don’t seem like you know the battle system real well if you’re just mashing buttons, if you want to know about that you should check out the Dynasty Warriors: Empires thread) has an influence on if they drop or health restores. This is crucial because you cannot survive in later stages without planning a route to harder enemies that will let you use weaker enemies to combo into health restores so you can stay alive. It’s all part of the strategy of the game.
And you’ve probably noticed the commanders (the ones you get weapon experience from) are never very passive.
You’ll also notice that there are stars for morale and enemies have different ranks, going through and attacking important people (with bigger health bars, who are more likely to be lethal) will have an effect to lowering morale and making people’s attack less common and less effective. For instance, if you attack and kill the leader of a group of five first, you’ll notice that the remaining four don’t stay in formation as well and their attacks, if any, are more scattered.
At the beginning of the game, as any good game is, it starts out pretty easy. You’re supposed to be getting used to planning routes, who to attack, who to bring down first, so you can raise your morale and lower theirs, getting used to your character’s combo and musou possibilities, their movement speed and attack power, and getting better with them. Because later on, if you don’t learn how to block, you are dead, doomed, gone. And increasingly, enemies will jump into your attack strings and break them, or attack from the back, or archers will back up and shoot you, or bombadiers will throw a light into your plans, or you will run into groups of captains and commanders who will block and counterattack unless you’ve learned system intimately from the easier battles. And that’s just on the normal difficulty. Try anything above that and welcome to slaughterville.
For all these reasons and the addition of double musou attacks, co-op in Dynasty Warriors is incredibly satisfying and thrilling.
The gameplay in Dynasty Warriors is the reason why its got all those sequels and spin-offs, none of its knock-offs yet can compare to its elegant depth. Ninety Nine Nights is alright, but its pretty shoddy compared to Dynasty Warriors and if you think the AI is dumb in Warriors, and that you all do is mash buttons, wait till you play N3! It is hokey and amusing in its own way, but not even close to licking DW’s boots.
It is easy to intuit all this just from playing the game and working it out for yourself, without a sneer on your face.
-Kitsune
I don’t know- I’ve played one of the DW (4? I think?) games, and I’ve played the Kingdom Under Fire series on the Xbox, and while the AI in KUF isn’t really that bright, it’s frikken Einstien compared to DW, and it makes the games much, much more fun. I’ve heard bad things about N3, though. Too bad- I’ll probably still pick it up when I get a 360, though, I’m a sucker that way.
And to tie this into another perennial discussion, they need to get the KUF games Backwards Compatible, and soon. They’d be so pretty in hi-def.
Kingdom Under Fire was going for something a little more like Kessen than Dynasty Warriors though, it was going more for an action game crossed with a real time strategy game. Dynasty Warriors is going for a beat-em-up crossed with a strategy game, that is, there’s more of the Romance strategy in its strategy mechanics than real-time strategy, even in Empires.
The difference between a beat-em-up and straight out action game is borne out in the way they play. In Kingdom, you’re manuevering a lot of units and tactics, and the ability set is based around more RPG/Devil May Cry style abilities than the crowd control/juggling/stun tactics of Dynasty Warriors. You often found yourself in more manageable situations, acting out common action game ideas to the background of the larger battle. If you were to compare them as beat-em-ups than Dynasty Warriors wins handily: it has a much better engine for that. But even if you compare Kingdom to a huge battlefield action game, like The Lord of the Rings EA ones, it kind of compares badly: the chains are clunky and ill-thought out, the impact when you strike enemies isn’t well-done and the battle design areas themselves lack some the same flair. Take Drag-On Dragoon (which, confusingly is more of a beat-em-up, but whatever) where all those various weapons had striking power, distance and magic attacks that you really had to work tactically to exploit well.
Certainly, we can compare them, because Kingdom definitely follows the DW model of huge 3D army masses in a strategic shell, but its chasing more after the Lord of the Rings or Devil May Cry 3D action than Dynasty Warriors is. Both of those games emphasize specific attacks and abilities that help in a very general action game way (basic attack chains or heal options, etc.), whereas Dynasty Warriors only gives you various beat-em-up style attacks and utilizes those to the utmost.
Among the DW knock-offs, Kingdom Under Fire stands with Sengoku Basara, Drag-on Dragoon and The Lord of the Rings games as some of the best to try and steal the throne (Sengoku is the closest if you ask me). It looks like we’re going to have a lot more of them this generation.
Also, Kingdom loses out in that it’s setting isn’t as good (though I’d admit, Three Kingdoms is rather hard to compete with) and its character differences aren’t as pronounced, nor is it as vast and varied in the amount of tactics you can use and its just more banal than Dynasty Warriors, which has a definite flair and personality that sets it apart from those nipping at its heels.
-Kitsune
Not an RPG but the co-op mode in Kameo is quite good. The Outfit allows co-op but not sure if it can be same console. Ghost Recon has a ton of co-op options available on the same console.
– Xaroc
From what I remember the COop mode in Kameo required you to have completed up to that part in singleplayer already, + you could only coop in a few of the areas… as in = its not a full coop campaign but just a few levels.
But … Maybe they patched it or I did something wrong.
You are right, I wasn’t sure if he meant play co-op from the beginning or just co-op included in the game.
– Xaroc
I meant co-op from the beginning, actually.
Thanks for the pointers! Unfortunately, it mostly confirms my belief that there ain’t that much co-op play to be found on the 360 so far. :-(
Just wait for Crackdown.
Gears of War is supposed to be fully online coop for 2 players too. It also is supposedly live aware so you can have a friend jump in and take control of the 2nd character at any time while playing. ( I put this high on the list of features that will get cut to ship this fall)
On the future front Mercenaries 2 is also going to support coop throughout.
– Xaroc
I like DW3 just fine.
dw5 for 360 is pants.