Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes devs on providing greater depth in a Musou game
A deeper Musou experience
Musou, or Warriors games aren’t known for offering too much in the way of depth, but that’s been changing in recent years. Koei Tecmo and Nintendo have been teaming on a number of different Warriors spin-off titles for Nintendo properties, and each one expands a bit upon what a Warriors game can be.
The team’s latest effort is Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes, an in an interview with NTower, the devs opened up on their focus on bringing serious depth and variety to the experience. Mr. Genki Yokota (Nintendo Co., Ltd. / Supervisor) and Mr. Hayato Iwata (Koei Tecmo Games / Director) shared some thoughts on the depth in Three Hopes, which you can read below.
Warriors-type games do have a character-centric side to it, whereby many fans naturally come to find great pleasure just through their interactions with their favourite characters. This time, through the class change ability and such, we’ve expanded the range in which the players can grow a single character.
I believe we’ve managed to achieve a great degree of depth in the game as to also meet the expectations of players seeking to enjoy the full range of possibilities surrounding their favourite characters.
When we decided on introducing the ability to change classes, we immediately considered the potential risk that it could weaken the uniqueness of the respective characters. Each of these characters from Fire Emblem: Three Houses are well-loved by fans, and it was an immutable goal of ours to ensure that their uniqueness would be felt even in the dynamism of an action game. For this, we implemented Unique Abilities. Coming up with ideas to properly concretize these abilities required a lot of work, but we also had a lot of fun with it.
I believe we’ve managed to offer a wider range of options in terms of character growth even in comparison with Fire Emblem: Three Houses. Generally speaking, when there is a great degree of freedom, the characters tend to become fairly similar to one another as they grow stronger.
In order to avoid this type of scenario, KTG made sure that each character was imbued with a unique quality which would remain discernible in battle. Along with the staff members at Intelligent Systems, we really enjoyed reviewing the proposals which were submitted to us regarding the kind of characteristics which were tentatively attributed to this or that character. I think Bernadetta is a good example of a character with a very distinctive ability.
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