Wednesday, December 4, 2013

Dynasty Warriors 8: Xtreme Legends - List of What's New + Changes


I've been observing a lot of interesting things that are different or new while playing, so I decided to develop this unofficial list to help others learn more about this game. These are likely not all of everything, but almost all of them I have confirmed myself.

NEW ADDITIONS AND FEATURES


‣ New characters are added: Yu Jin, Zhu Ran, Fa Zheng, Chen Gong and Lu Lingqi.
‣ Lu Kingdom is now available through Story Mode and follows the story of Lu Bu and his army. The story is full length with an IF branch and cutscenes.
‣ A supplementary IF story scenario is available for the kingdoms of Wei, Wu, Shu and Jin. Features short, segmented stories following various events and characters.
‣ A challenge mode has been added with challenges very similar to the ones in Dynasty Warriors 7: Xtreme Legends. Completing each challenge mode will grant you a weapon with a unique weapon element every time.
‣ A new, harder difficulty called "Ultimate" is added, likely to be translated to Nightmare in English localization. Difficulty is similar to the one in Dynasty Warriors 7: Xtreme Legends, including enemy officers having the ability to boost their attack and defense. Enemies can deal significantly more damage compared to Chaos, even at max defense. Enemy aggressiveness is not as harsh however.
‣ Bodyguards can now be equipped in Free Mode and Ambition Mode. It allows up to three bodyguards simultaneously on the field with options to control their actions. Bodyguards can leveled up and be both generics and unique officers.
‣ Free Mode has been revamped with an improved interface with many more options. For one, you can now have a lot of the features of Ambition Mode in Free Mode, including entire access to the blacksmith, equipping bodyguards and others. There are additionally new optional missions that you can complete, loosely based upon ones found in the game's original Story Mode. You are also ranked (e.g. A) after completion of a stage, gaining bonus experience points for higher ranks.
‣ Ambition Mode has a whole new quasi-war simulation feature after completion of the original goal of constructing the Tongquetai Palace. The goal is unite Han China by building relations with the characters they have earned in their ranks and claiming five enemy territories. A large bulk of the gameplay style is very similar to Empires, with being able to capture flags by defeating enemies around it.
‣ A second EX attack is added to every character. 
‣ Second treasure weapons are added for every character. These weapons are symbolized with 6 gold stars.
‣ 10 new weapon elements have been added. These can be obtained by winning in the challenge mode and in the new Ambition Mode. The most remarkable being "Thunderclap", which allows you to essentially have the Combat Resistance weapon seal of Dynasty Warriors 7.
‣ An additional weapon temper option has been added that works virtually identical to Warriors Orochi. It however uses newly introduced gems instead of weapon materials.  

CHARACTER STATS AND LIMITATIONS


‣ Maximum character level is raised from 99 to 150. It is NOT 999 like everyone is suggesting!
‣ Maximum attack and defense stats are raised from 1,000 to 1,500. Additionally equipping level 20 attack and defense boost skills raises this to 1,800. Health remains capped at 1,000.
‣ The limit of weapons you can carry has been raised from 1,000 to 1,200. Current number of weapons you posses and limit are now conveniently shown in menus. 

GAMEPLAY CHANGES 


‣ Cyclone now deals proportional damage only on block (chip). It also can no longer break an enemy's guard.
‣ Morass element will now cause enemies to glow blue when its in effect.
‣ Enemy officers' frequency of affinity switching both on ground and in the air when attacked has been increased significantly. 
‣ Breaking an enemy officer's affinity shield for Storm Rush is seemingly much harder—more notable on higher difficulties.
‣ Attacks can no longer spin the enemy upwards (e.g. C5 of Double Edge Trident, switch attack of Boomerang). Hence, enemy officers recover more quickly from such attacks, rendering certain combos significantly more difficult.
‣ There is now a slight delay after landing with a jump before any movement. This causes double jumping with a speed weapon for faster movement a lot less effective. This can also make combos that rely on jumping/landing less practical.
‣ Unit Commanders now have the same recovery percentage as named officers, or nearly 100% all the time.
‣ Unit Commanders affinity is now displayed as gray instead of colored.
‣ It is now possible to jump cancel a variable switch counter with a speed character.
‣ Horse animations have been improved. When you turn your horse in the right or left direction, the horse will subtly lean in that direction. This is purely aesthetic.
‣ Equipping and changing support animals during battle is now possible.
‣ Loading times between events have been reduced.
‣ Resetting the stage is now possible during play—it will bring you back to the beginning of the stage without having to go back through the main menu again.

NEW OPTIONS


‣ Storm Rush can be assigned to be manually activated with the □ + △ buttons. This allows freedom for instance to start the Storm Rush only after a full charge attack.
‣ Events can be set to not occur in Free Mode.
‣ BGM can be automatically set to play a random song every battle, disregarding default BGM.
‣ Display brightness can be individually set.
‣ Health bars can be set to show only enemy officers exclusively.

If you have seen something different or new about this game that hasn't been listed above, please let me and everybody know!

8 comments:

about this section here "Equipping and changing support animals during battle is now possible"... I guess this one was possible on DW8, unless if you meant the Story Mode.

Hey, how did you achieve such high level for Lu Lingqi???

‣ Elemental damage like Slash Lv10, and Thunder Lv10 reduced from 30% to 20% max health
‣ Cyclone is still broken
‣ Velocity attack speed reduced. Max Lv10 equal to Lv8 vanilla DW8
‣. Lu Bu Unpararrel Might is modified.
*If doesn't Connect
- vanilla: 150% damage, hyper armor, 10 second
- XL: 180% damage, hyper armor, increase defense (you can notice from his green body), 13 second
*If connect
- Vanilla DW8: damage is around 180% of Armageddon Strike.
- XL: damage Increase to 235% of Armageddon Strike. ( I used scimitar to measured)


Hi, I have some questions. First I want to ask when u play jp and us version of dw 8, when u go to the online mode (either story or free), do you see anyone hosting any stage? I am playing chinese version and i see no one is hosting at all and if i host i needed to wait about 30 mins to have someone to join, does this occur to you in jp and us verison?
I saw ur blog about the save data thing. Can I just send you my save data to you and you help me to make ur save able to play in my account?
And about dw8 XL, I saw in koei wiki mention about cross-platforming for multiplayer purpose, do u know what does that mean?

HI Have you ever try to hex this game save with brute force save data? cause I cant do it! It seems that the APP.BIN is double decrypted now!

It means people from PS3, PS4 and Vita can play with each other.

can you create your own characters in this game, or in the ps4 version? any insight on this?

No, there's no CAW in this game.

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