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Dynasty Warriors Online Review: The Official Review - Edit
6.5
| Pros |
 Action-based temporary buff system Can run on many low-end systems Free to play Instanced, solo and team PvP Makes grinding fun Solid, fast-paced martial arts action Wins/losses affect the overall server war |
| Cons |
 Annoying tutorial Limited MMO and true RPG elements Outdated graphics |
If you're looking for some online martial arts action that drops you right in the middle of a crowded battlefield you have to hack your way out of, then Dynasty Warriors Online just might be for you. If you want all that and to play for free, too, then DWO is definitely your friend!
Dynasty Warriors originally began as a spin off of Koei Japan's turn-based strategy game, Romance of the Three Kingdoms. The title was a Tekken-style fighting game released on the Playstation in 1997, and there have since been a host of other titles and spin-offs that appear on hand-held and next-generation consoles. Most of these games also focus on the Three Kingdoms period of Chinese history, where three powerful kingdoms vie for control of all of China. Dynasty Warriors Online first appeared in Japan in 2006, and the free-to-play MMO was picked up by Aeria Games and released to the western world in November of 2010.
Dynasty Warriors Online, while free-to-play, is not a browser-based MMO. The game plays fairly well on even some lower-end PC's though, and the PC download is relatively small. The install will take up about 4.6 GB on your hard drive, however. In Japan, the game is also available on PS3, so a Playstation 3 release may not be far off. In the meantime, get out your PC gamepad, if you have one, because the interface and gaming style is much better suited to it over keyboard and mouse. Don't get me wrong, keyboard and mouse work well enough, but are somewhat cumbersome when playing action martial arts titles like this. In fact, I recommend avoiding the mouse altogether and going straight keyboard, if you don't have a gamepad. Using the mouse is both limited and awkward.
In the offline Dynasty Warriors games, the player is generally presented with a list of important characters to choose, usually from the Three Kingdoms era. The online version of Dynasty Warriors embraces some role playing elements in allowing you to create and customize your own character. It's not as involved as a traditional RPG, but definitely gives more of a feel for that kind of game than any other DW title I've come across.
The first thing a player encounters in the character creation process is the origin location. Here, you must select from a grid of regions across medieval China. Each section displays a bit of historical info about the region, usually involving its battles or the great warriors or generals who hail from that area. It's a decent beginning to character creation, but I haven't noticed any major or practical differences in gameplay when choosing different regions.
Your next step is to design your character, first by selecting from four body-types, eight face-types with nine styles, ten hair styles, gender, and a palette for hair, skin and eye color. There are no classes to speak of, or even game levels, as characters start off as a soldier and progress in rank by gaining experience, and passing promotion quests. You can, however,increase a weapon's stats as you use it, and can gain new weapons and armor from fallen NPCs. There are also no skills, per se, but there is a combo system that has about a dozen attacks using different attack/special attack button sequences. The musou is the most powerful and visually impressive of the attacks, and requires the gauge below your health bar to be full.
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While the above flirt with RPG elements, they are, unsurprisingly, more easily compared to action games. However, if you are looking for some RPG stylings, you can achieve further character differentiation and development (at least in character creation) by choosing one of five personality types: Fighter, Intellectual, Passionate, Skilled, and Individual. These personality types have subsets like Cunning, Selfish, Wild, etc. While these are no replacement for the more practical attribute and skill systems in RPGs, they can, at least, give roleplayers a bit of a base for character development.
In the final step of character creation, you must also choose a faction from the Three Kingdoms era to align yourself with: Wei, Wu, or Shu. This choice, as you will see a bit later in the article, has an effect on the overall state of the war and plot of the game.
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Graphics options (at least on my machines) are limited in Dynasty Warriors Online, especially the resolution which I could only get as a maximum of 1280x1024 or x720, depending on the aspect ratio of the screen used. There is also no windowed mode, you are able to set the detail settings for the battle and town areas of the game, which will help out with lower-end systems. Overall, the visual quality of the game is actually pretty good, and I was even able to get it to run effectively on my Toshiba laptop with a shared Intel chip on board. To be fair, that chip shouldn't be able to run Dragon Age or Mass Effect, either, but it seems to handle them just fine, as well. Some may find that, on larger screens, the imagery will look minorly distorted, but remember, this game is originally from 2006 -- and it's free...
Audio is decent, with good mood music for the most part, and traditional Dynasty Warriors rockin' guitar licks popping as necessary. The game also has some good martial arts and full battle sound effects.
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Customizing the controls in Dynasty Warriors is a bit inconvenient. Both keyboard and gamepad buttons are fully mappable, but the button list and configuration can only be accessed the loader tool that appears when you click to launch the game. Because of this, and the fact that game tutorials do not update to reflect them, if you do any extensive key-mapping, you will want to have a very good memory, or a handwritten list nearby. Otherwise, you will have to exit the game entirely and open up the loader again just to get a reminder or to change something that isn't working. Default keys are the traditional right-handed control scheme, with WASD for movement, and JKL for attack keys. U is for Guard, and N allows the character to jump.
The title was a Tekken-style fighting game
Tekken was a Street fighter style game or if you never played SF in the mid 80's, a Mortal Kombat style game.
Dynasty Warriors has more similarities to Zelda than Tekken :P)
I didn't think this was a bad game when I Beta'd, but it had some serious issues. The silly way you change controls was a big part of that, and disabling window mode is unforgivable in this day and age, in my opinion, when your max resolution is so low. I run 1920x1080, if you're going to force me to a lower resolution let me at least put the game in a window so I can access other things while I play.
The gameplay wasn't bad, very difficult in the early levels because nearly everything is stronger than you and everything is attacking you at once. That changes pretty quickly, but I found the stages limiting because they're all TIMED. I don't know if this has improved since I lasted played, but they don't give you freedom to run amok like in the console games. There was a timer in those stages too, but more often than not they were so outrageously long you could ignore them completely. Here, I was forced to complete stages in 10 minutes usually, sometimes as low as 5. That took from the joy of it for me. I liked being able to explore, get my kil count up and hunt down every officer on the field in the console games, but the MMO didn't let me do that.
Actually, the original Dynasty Warriors, way back in the ancient times of 1997, was a one on one fighter a lot like Tekken and Virtua Fighter, both of which were popular at the time. :)
When I played the game for the review (chilyn = Bobby, by the way :D ), I found that everything was timed as well. I agree that some free-for-all would have been fantastic, especially if more RPG elements were included. Add on some better MMO infrastructure and some graphic increases and Dynasty Warriors might have hit an 8 over a 6.5. The downside of that, of course, is that it probably wouldn't have been free.
correction... the very 1st dynasty warriors was in fact a tekken/virtua fighter style fighting game.
http://www.gamespot.com/ps/action/dynastywarriors/index.html?tag=result%3Btitle%3B6
no similarities to zelda...
Owned.
Obviously missed the part about Dynasty Warriors original concept was a fighting game, and has no similarities to Zelda whatso ever....
owned?!?
Dynasty Warriors has been using the same game play and engine for over a decade it really needs to be put six feet under at this point
Great ideas, crappy controls. DW plays much better on a console. But the UI for this game requires a mouse and keyboard and can't be replaced with a controller.
There seem to be far to many Pro's as oppossed to Cons for something that scores a 6.5.
It seems a reasonable person gave the score and then a DW fanboy wrote the review. Grats mmorpg.com I love your reviews.
The Timed aspect is straight from the preceding video games. However the time is very short and doesn't allow for any detours during the game. You have to rush through the missions alot faster than in other titles and it makes for very uninteresting gameplay. That was basically what turned me off from the game and I haven't been back since.
With this I agree.
It seems as if a guy was writing a review and once getting down to the score section, got jumped by his editor who carefully explained to him that anything apart from tera, vindictus or TOR does not have the right to get past 7, especially if its f2p.
Ina big sense this reminds me of IGN's fabulous and famous Castlevania:Lords of Shadow review, Where reviewer(famous for his bad reviews) wrote 5 paragraphs on how this is a good game, almost praising stuff and then in the very last paragraphs ranted on the game and gave it 6/10.
Of course IGN since long time ago can no longer be trusted in reviews or opinions, but I would expect more in-review justification of the score.The only bad sides written seemingly are tutorial, game being instanced and outdated(read:not crysis engine, thus ooold) graphics. Now excuse me fornitpicking, but unless reviewer went indepth on just how major and bad these things were, I see huge dissonance between review and review summary.
First off NONE of these so called f2p games are free. The intent of all these developers is to make money and they eventually force you to make choices, stop playing or pay.
Highly instanced games like this barely meet the MMO standard. This game is more like a Diablo than anything else.
Have fun if you enjoy this type of game.
Aiight so i downloaded and took a look at this game myself and i can say this game has a lot more cons then pros.
graphics 4/10 it doesnt even support my monitor's widscreen settings so everything looks so jammed together and sometimes very blurry even with the highest settings selected.
sound 5/10 i like the tracks but they get old withing the first 4 hours or playing the game.
gameplay 3/10 i know its a low score but after putting about 28 hours into the game i can deffinatly say that there is no time to upgrade your weapon to its limit before you start to pvp or do your quest. If your sword is like 18/18 then its impossible to. from the moment you start out your toon starts off with his arms spread like hes morphing into a power ranger. no matter which clothes you put on his arms never change hes powering up dbz style.
online performance 2/10 now this is where it gets messy aeria net is supposed to be usa based but youll soon find your the only person in the us in your party. with the crazy lag of fighting somone from anywhere between japan and brazil youll most likely also be the only one speaking english. this is the most major issue with usa aimed ftp we have today.
fun 5/10 since it starts off very fun then builds up into a huge dissapointment in the end. I will give this game a 5 out of fun.
So all in all i would have to say that the reviewers need to put in over 24 hours into a game before he reviews it but I believe this review was very fair to dynasty warriors online. all the really have to do is give it a update to support higher resolution, block out of country ips to reduce major lag issues, and finally take off time limits on quests and you will have a good game imo.
not true, I used a controller almost exclusively.
sure you still need the keyboard to type, but talking to other players is largely unrequired. All of the menu short cuts have some very intuitive button assignments in town and the controller works better during batles than a mouse and keyboard. This is to date the only pc game I recommend using a controller for.
did you ever check the xbox 360 version of dynasty warriors? its revamped graphics and its not the same Playstation 2 graphics that has been used forever ago...
they did not update this version for the fact that most computer players today aren't in the money to upgrade to the latest graphics cards to run certain games at optimum specifications (look at freaking crysis when it came out)
anyways, 6.5 isnt a bad score but it could have been better, the game was great and the series itself was something... now i only expect an update where it is open battlefields later on that all connect xD (but that would probably ruin the whole game since its based around isntances now wont it lol)
I find it funny that people seem to think the editors tell people to only rank certain games well. That makes zero sense if you understand business, but so few who post on the internet work let alone have any business sense.
The review was about the same as i would write if I wrote from my playing of the game and the score about what I would give it. The review does not read like a fanboy review.
Who cares what he rated the game? Do we care that much seriously? We know how skewed things can be when dealing with opinions. (just take a look at MMOSite's Award voting). The game is Dynasty Warriors.. Point blank.. If you didn't like Dynasty Warriors on the consoles, you will not like it here, and I seriously doubt many of you were Dynasty Warrior fans before trying it on the PC..
Most of the people who are enjoying this game and can look past the minor nuances are the fans of the series.. They basically kept the gameplay the same so I seriously doubt it was created for anyone else to enjoy but people who are familiar with Dynasty Warriors and its gameplay, they even kept the weapon combos the exact same as their console counterparts.. its not new, its not refreshing, it can be tedious to some and very repetitive.. but this is what it is and has been for a very long time..
I have always enjoyed the concept of Dynasty Warriors. I burned out on it after 4 and did not play another one until they started using the Gundam Universe (which produced some excellent results).. My only gripe with this game is the usage of the three kingdoms era (TOO many MMO's based on this), which is vintage Dynasty Warriors, but given that they have already applied the formula to Gundam and Fist of the North Star I would have preferred them to use a different universe for their online game..
It was a okay game, although mindless at best but once you get used to the awkward control and interface it's actually a pretty fun fast paced hack and slash game, it's something I had on my computer for awhile, after the initial couple hours I thought I would hop back on it when I get bored with the other games but I still haven't. To me this game offer nothing special or lasting comparing to all the other MMORPG I played, so there's really no incentive to play again, in fact this review remind me of delete this game off my computer.
I have to agree with those who say the writing and the rating in this review do not seem to coincide.
The game is not martial arts. What are you saying?