Chalk up another delay for the 2020/2021 leader board: Dynasty Warriors 9’s big expansion, Empires, will no longer release on time. Koei Tecmo announced the delay on Twitter on behalf of developers Omega Force, who said the game wasn’t going to make its early 2021 launch window. As for when it’s going to come out, we don’t yet know, but Koei Tecmo assured gamers that it would update when it had a more definite release window.
In the same tweet where it revealed the delay, Koei Tecmo also revealed a still image from the new expansion’s opening movie, though we have no context for it. Empires 9 was first revealed last September. Like all Dynasty Warriors: Empires expansions, it promised a more strategy-focused gameplay approach; in 9’s case, it shrunk the open world down to smaller individual maps.
The description of what kind of gameplay we’re going to get when the game is finally released reads: “Powerful Siege Battles enable commanders to deploy units to capture strategic points on the map like castles. Experiencing high-stakes fights at every turn, players can now take control of these central points on the battlefield through the use of fire attacks or other stratagem, siege weapons, and, at times, simply by force as commanders execute their strategies and attack enemy troops by issuing vital commands to units throughout the skirmish.”
There’s no exact reason given for this delay, though one might reasonably speculate it’s due to the same thing that’s been causing so many game delays lately: The COVID-19 pandemic. Koei Tecmo didn’t confirm either way, simply saying that, “the team is still working hard on delivering the best game possible.” We’ll have to wait and see when the new release window is . . . hopefully it’s not been delayed by more than a few months.
Source: Koei Tecmo/Twitter
