The cloned movesets bother me a good bit, but only for certain characters like Zhang He, Sun Ce, and Xu Shu who lost some really unique and fun weapons
Agreed on that
LiuBeiwasGreat wrote:I am one of the few who dislike the new open world. I agree that in the past we were getting more and more cramped maps that were very linear but I am worried with the open world that Koei will just copy and paste generic zones for the majority of the map. I am concerned that I will be assaulting the same castle over and over and over again.
That is a big concern.
With the story, I'm still a bit unsure about it too. I suspect each character will have some unique conversations in pre-battle(in the style shown in screenshots and the PV) and is confirmed to have their own ending. Outside of that I suspect the battles presented will be pretty uniform, as long as said character was alive while that battle took place. I hope there is a bit more variation, but I doubt it considering the size of the roster. While it may get redundant to play through the story that many times, at least every character will be given a fair shake. In all likelihood I, and most other players, will only play through our favorites from each kingdom and leave some alone. However, completionists should be happy at how much they have to see. I liked the focus of the kingdom storylines but they just felt so short and lacked replayability. Not to mentioned a ton of characters got shafted in order to create a more cohesive narrative with a select few primary protagonists.
I wasn't a fan of kingdom mode going into DW7 but the kingdom mode turned 7 into one of the strongest games of the series for me. I'm not not a hack and slash man (as I understand it, DW is not shining example of the genre) so the appeal has tended to be characters and story but pre 6, we had a major problem of too many stories and "how many times is Chi Bi already?" (Wu really suffered from this). So my worry is we will get light stories and that same "not Chi Bi again" though maybe with houses, careful use of dialogue for quests and a bit of tailoring, it could work here. My other issue I tend to have with open world or games with big expanses ala Dragon Age Inquistion, it can feel like centuries before the next story instalment

I do agree that the problem with kingdom modes is you play it once and your done, I would happily have had more time. Whoever isn't in roster for that story (I was always a fan of rotating them over the games to make up for it) got hit hard by kingdom mode. I felt the attempts to fix that in 8 satisfied oobdy, it didn't really adress the issues that kingdom mode brings and it sacrifices what makes it work: being able to concentrate on a few stories to make them cohesive and impactful.
I will get DW9 bar "oh gods, the horror, the horror" reviews and I am excited