Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty will be available at launch on Xbox Game Pass, but this hasn't influenced the development of the game in any significant way.
Speaking with VGC during Gamescom 2022, director Fumihiko Yasuda confirmed that the game's release on Game Pass, and thus the potentially bigger audience, hasn't impacted development in any major way. The big positive of having Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty on Game Pass at launch is that the online community will be much bigger than before, something that will positively impact the game's multiplayer features.
We’re very happy that so many players are going to have the chance to try out a Team Ninja title potentially for the first time with Wo Long. But just because it’s on Game Pass, we haven’t gone and changed ‘XYZ’… That’s not really something that we’ve done on the dev team side. We just want to make Wo Long the best game it can be, and we hope that fans can play it or new users can play that and enjoy it. We don’t want to change it for a specific audience or something along those lines.
But what we do think is a really big positive for having the game on Game Pass is that with so many new players trying it out, that will help the online community grow potentially, and then there’ll be a lot more players for people to play with online or play together in the multiplayer aspects of the game. So we’re really hoping that that’ll keep the community in a really good spot, and thriving.
With Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty releasing on Xbox Game Pass at launch, Team Ninja has a closer relationship to Xbox compared to the previous console generation, but this is not going to lead to a release of the Nioh games on Microsoft's consoles, as there's not much of a possibility of this happening at the time, according to Fumihiko Yasuda.
There’s nothing really to note about that. Currently, there’s not really too much of a possibility of having Nioh on Xbox platforms, but we do hope Xbox fans enjoy Wo Long and look forward to that game coming out. That’s probably all we can say on that at the moment.
While Team Ninja has been focusing on new properties, with the Nioh series, Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty and Rise of the Ronin, the Japanese studio has tons of classic IPs that have been left dormant for a while. According to Yasuda, a new entry in the Ninja Gaiden or any other of the studio's IPs could be outsourced, but Team Ninja would need to make sure it would be a quality title. A younger internal team Team would also be an option.
We’re not announcing anything, but both of those ideas sound like great plans and are both possibilities in a sense. Those are both very, very reasonable ideas for potentially a sequel in any series, not just Ninja Gaiden. But what I want to say is, if we were to theoretically work with another company on a new Ninja Gaiden title, we would need to make sure that it would be a title that the fans would really enjoy and exceed their expectations.
It’s not just a matter of, ‘hey, let’s just go do this’: all the pieces would need to fit, and it would need to be the right team… either a younger team internally or another company that would really need to fit the Ninja Gaiden pedigree.
Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty launches on PC, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, and Xbox One in early 2023. You can learn more about Team Ninja's upcoming game by checking out my preview.
