Wo Long development producer Masaaki Yamagiwa has commented on the difficulty level of Team Ninja’s new Soulslike, revealed at the Xbox and Bethesda Showcase.
Yamagiwa previously worked at Sony’s Japan Studio when it published Bloodborne, so understands the importance of balanced difficulty.
“Difficult games shouldn’t be difficult just for the sake of it,” Yamagiwa told IGN. “I think it’s really important that this difficulty exists for the purpose of delivering a sense of accomplishment to the players once they have overcome it. That’s why I think players should always be able to blame themselves when they die. The game has to be fair and its difficulty should never be unreasonable. In that regard, it works in my favour that I’m not very good at games myself. I’ll always naturally be judging the fairness of games.”
Wo Long is a Soulslike set in China’s Three Kingdoms period and is a collaboration between Team Ninja and Koei Tecmo, famous for its Dynasty Warriors series.
The game began development following Team Ninja’s Nioh, so shares much of its Soulslike DNA.
“Making it a challenging game was something we had decided from the beginning,” said producer Fumihiko Yasuda. “With all the legendary heroes of the Three Kingdoms period, it can come across as somewhat campy, but in reality it was a time of war and devastation. It was a dark period in which people were constantly fighting, which is a great match for a Soulslike game. Being set in China, Wo Long is more massive in scale compared to our previous games set in Japan, which allowed us to show a more severe and dark world.