Post Script
When slowing down becomes its own reward
Elden Ring showed the risks involved in allowing players to race past enemies and skip large expanses of virtual territory to engage in a boss battle for which you are not, perhaps, fully prepared. Yes, there is a sense of illicit excitement involved in sidestepping a game designer’s meticulously crafted play arc. As the people behind a thousand successful YouTube channels know, everyone loves to break apart a videogame and gain a forbidden advantage. But there are dangers to designing in ways that allow for players to skip significant portions of the work: they might miss key information, overlook useful items, or simply lose out on experience that is essential to prepare them for the forthcoming fight.
Wo Long is a faster, more agile game than its Nioh forebears, with a dedicated button for double-jumping that makes it easier to dart around enemies, take to higher ground, and race to the area boss. To compensate and encourage players to slow down, Koei Tecmo modifies a system borrowed from the arcades. Each stage in the game is affected by ‘morale’, a numerical value which affects the power of both player and enemy characters. When you arrive at a new level, enemy morale is high, while you and your NPC compatriots are impeded by low morale. This rating, based on ‘rank’ in arcade shoot-’em-ups, is represented by a number clearly displayed on screen. Felling foes will increase your ‘Fortitude Rank’, a world change that gradually evens the odds, then slowly begins to tilt them in your favour.
While this morale rank resets each time you die, it can be permanently improved by raising flags around the area at a rate of one unit of morale per flag. Some of these markers are unmissable, but multiple checkpoints are also located off the beaten path in each level. Presented with this arrangement, players are encouraged to check every nook and cranny in search of an advantage before the fight with the area boss. The system ensures that, as you familiarise yourself with a locale, your increased confidence is reflected in your character’s attributes.
To further encourage exploration, the mission-select screen lists not only the rewards available for completing a stage, but also the number of flags that remain to be discovered. If a boss battle is proving especially irksome, heading back into the level to search for flags provides a tangibly useful distraction. It’s an ingenious system, developed and refined in arcade games (albeit there reversed, where a higher rank makes enemies more powerful), deployed here to reward players for careful exploration, and gently punish those who race toward the area’s boss.
It helps, too, that stealth takedowns, either from behind or above an enemy, are immensely powerful; players are encouraged to plan their approach to enemies and can even upgrade a stat that makes them even harder to detect by the already near-sighted enemies. Wo Long’s Diablo-style loot system provides another point of difference to From Software’s output and presents a design that further encourages players to slow down. All enemies drop items with careless regularity, and the enormous range of weapons and armour – each item of varying quality with a dizzying range of potential buffs – further encourages players to pause to take down every respawning enemy. Later, you unlock the capacity to mix and match weapon buffs, removing them from one item to install in another, another reason to ensure you collect and examine every piece of loot.
The system is a little untidy, but not without its merits. You might be lucky and acquire Lieutenant-grade armour that makes the next boss fight a breeze; equally, you can soon become overburdened with useless tat that leaves you woefully under-protected for the next major encounter. In which case, you will need to study your opponent’s attack patterns especially carefully – one more way in which it pays to take things slowly. ■