Hyrule Warriors Is Age of Calamity 'too safe'?

[Sheikah_Witch]

What we saw during today's livestream was 10-15 minutes of gameplay that looked like pretty standard Warrior's gameplay.

Not inherently a bad thing - don't fix what ain't broken, right?

But could it have been more? Do you think so? Would you be happier if we saw Age of Calamity take more risks and experimentation with the Warriors formula?

 

[Spirit]

I expected AoC to be largely the same as HW, but I was hoping that they'd expand on a few elements of the first game.

I keep bringing them up, but the Dragon Quest Heroes games used hubs and they helped solidify the world.

With AoC being based on BotW, a huge open world game, having hubs in AoC could have helped ground the world. Even if all they did was negate having to scroll through upgrade menus by talking to NPCs.

There isn't much you can do gameplay-wise in A Warriors game, so what I saw looked fine.

Still excited to play it. I wasn't expecting anything that wasn't a safe product, not when the marketing is so based on the story.

 

[Azure Sage]

I can't speak about Warriors as a whole series, but it already looks more involved than HW did. You've got keep bosses being actual enemy captains that take effort to defeat, you've got mobs forming coordinated groups to do special attacks lying in wait for you across the map, and you've got character actions and runes to spice up the combat far more than the items in its predecessor game. There's probably other stuff we haven't seen yet. I don't know if other Warriors games have these things, but this definitely feels more than just standard or safe when compared to HW.

 

[the8thark]

There isn't much you can do gameplay-wise in A Warriors game

You would actually be surprised.

Dynasty Warriors 9, as bad as it is, the one semi decent thing it has going for it, is the combat is quite refined and much improved over DW8.

Fate/Extella Link which I recently bought cheaply from Amazom US also does a few things.

• It combines the rage meter and musou attack. You get the increased damage during the rage but if you end the rage early, you get a true musou attack. Much better implimentation than the 1st Hyrule Warriors game has. However the stand alone musou attack is absent.
• To adds in a super attack. It's an air strike that does huge damage to the enemies in the sector of the map you are in. To use it you need to collect three pickups scattered across the entire map. Once collected it's there ready for you to use whenever you want to.
• The game also adds in three safety options. They can be used in two ways. Individually they can be used as a cheat death. So literally you need to die 4x to get a game over. However to get an Ex ranking on the stage you can't take too much overall damage meaning there is an incentive to get better to use less and less of the safety options.
  The second way to use the safety options is to use all 3 at once for a full heal and gain a full charge of the super attack. This does mean it can be your 2nd super attack in a stage if you (before or after) collect the 3 super attack items. This does make you choosebecause if you use even one safety option, you no longer have 3 and thus no second super attack for you. Though once you stop dying on a stage, easy to do on easy/normal difficulty then you'll be using the 2nd suepr attack more and more

Dragon Quest Heroes 1/2 added in Job classes so the main character can be anything you want. I like the idea however it makes him feel more like a jack of all trades as all of his classes bar one, are replicated by the other single class characters you can also play as.
Dragon Quest Heroes 1/2 are not 1 vs 1000 musou style of games. They focus more on stronger enemies but less of them. This change makes the gameplay feel very different. Also some of the enemies are champion varieties which are the same deal just they do way more damage and have way more health. Making them a kill later or kill now and use very different tactics. A welcome addition

You've got keep bosses being actual enemy captains that take effort to defeat
I don't know if other Warriors games have these things

That's exactly how other Musou games are. Hyrule Warriors was the exception with it's "wait for the mega boss to expose a weak point" thing. The enemy captain style of boss is way better. It avoids all the waiting and replaces that with skill to beat them.

Just three games/examples there.

I keep bringing them up, but the Dragon Quest Heroes games used hubs and they helped solidify the world.
With AoC being based on BotW, a huge open world game, having hubs in AoC could have helped ground the world.

Hub - in the singular. Both DQH games used a singular hub as the base of operations. It works well for those games, if you have a more adventure style of musou game which DQH is. However if the game is just a series of missions, like DW8 and HW1 then you don't need a hub because each level is it's own separate thing.

If AoC is more adventure based, then having a hub or three would be very useful indeed.

 

[A Link In Time]

I'm mostly interested in seeing the story unfold 100 years prior to BotW. Playing as the champions, Zelda, and Young Impa will also be fun. Both the original Hyrule Warriors and now Age of Calamity have great rosters. The gameplay is definitely standard fare, but I wasn't expecting much from a Warriors game. I just hope I don't get bored before I finish the story.

 

[Princess Niki]

I just can't wait to play as Urbosa and to see if we get any extra original characters to play as like Lana.

 

[Azure Sage]

That's exactly how other Musou games are. Hyrule Warriors was the exception with it's "wait for the mega boss to expose a weak point" thing. The enemy captain style of boss is way better. It avoids all the waiting and replaces that with skill to beat them.

I was talking about the keep boss, not boss monsters. The enemy that you need to defeat in order to capture the keep. In HW it was just a bigger mob enemy, but here it's an enemy captain with a weak point gauge and everything, which means you need effort to defeat it and you can't just mow down keeps the way you mow down mobs.

But I agree that HW's boss monsters were awful to deal with. Waiting for bosses to use specific attacks for you to exploit with items is the last thing fast-paced Warriors gameplay needs, even if it was very classic-Zelda-like. BotW was good to be rid of that, and so is AoC.

Some enemies still want you to use specific runes to expose their weak points as we saw in the stream, but they aren't required as you could still fight them normally alongside that. Which is good.