Warriors Abyss: Out the Box Thinking Is Vital For This Industry

Warriors Abyss is fantastic. A review will be coming in the next week or so, but the shadow dropped spin-off is well worth your time and money. Ultimately it’s a small budget affair but I can’t exaggerate what a breath of fresh air it is.

I don’t know how successful it has been or how much money it needs to make back. But what I know is that after the far too wordy tutorial, this game just clicked. In a way that a game from a major publisher hasn’t in a good while. This wasn’t about story, big budget cutscenes or on-rails action scenes. This is a game. A fun game.

Players of indie games won’t be surprised at this revelation. Fun games exist in their multitudes when you get away from the big publishers. And besides, Warriors Abyss isn’t shy in the way it borrows from other titans of its genre, such as Hades. It’s different, but not so different.

This has been a big year for Koei’s Dynasty Warriors series. Dynasty Warriors: Origins took the long-running series in a brand new direction, focussing on a single character and shaking up the way battles work. And, about a month later, we have a new spin-off game. Both these titles have been well-recieved and the former has sold especially well. And yet neither are exactly what you might expect from a series that has, arguably, grown a bit stale. Dynasty Warriors 8 wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t a million miles from the PS2 games. There was just more style, bigger battles, more characters, new objectives. The less said about Dynasty Warriors 9 – lazily slapping an unwanted and unnecessary open world into the mix – the better.

Beyond the Abyss

Elsewhere, studios are shutting. NetEase reportedly plans to get rid of its non-Chinese studios, meaning the potential cancellations, redundancies and closures. This is just the latest in a long, long line of similar reports made over the last two years.

And I’m not so naive as to suggest that what is needed in this situation is a return to a mountain of mid-budget games that don’t sell enough to maintain the companies that release them. Getting the blockbuster budgets under control would be a far more important shortterm goal (and unfortunately, that seems to be what a lot of this is about).

But what’s clear from these last two Koei releases is that there is demand for fresh experiences, for interesting takes on established ideas. Publishers don’t have to play it safe just because every variation on a theme comes with risk.

Warriors Abyss doesn’t need to exist. It’s not going to sell 15m units and it probably doesn’t pose much threat to Grand Theft Auto VI at the Game of the Year awards. Koei won’t be getting any clout from it, although I can say from experience that people have been asking me about the history of the characters as a result of playing it.

All Warriors Abyss needed was to be good, to be fun, and to be a decent price. And reaction has been extremely positive. It was an outside the box pitch that instantly made sense to anybody who loves this franchise. At a time when things seem so stagnant, so safe, it’s the kind of game we need to support.