Age of Calamity: Requested Sooga

The interview with the developers of Age of Calamity by Nintendo Dread continues, where there's again a translation provided by Nintendo Everything. This times it's all about the additions of new stages and fighters that came with the Expansion Pass.

The most interesting fact is probably that there was no intention of making Sooga playable, but there were so many requests from fans coming that they decided to go for him. Again, like with the Expansion Pass as whole, which only came to be because of fan requests, this feels somewhat weird. Sooga's fate was left ambiguous in the main game, but you can still see him alive and well in the bonus credits. And if there was one more playable character, he simply made the most sense. He was already in the game and he is very cool, so naturally fans were asking for him (including this blog).

It's absolutely great that Koei Tecmo focused on what the fans wanted. You rarely ever hear anything like this from Nintendo, where the developers usually just follow their own vision, often for good reasons. If you just focus on what the fans want, you won't be able to surprise them and you won't be able to innovate. Often the players want something that they don't even know about yet. But with a game like Hyrule Warriors, a game that's all about appealing to the fans, it simply makes sense to give the fans exactly what they want.

Still, it's perplexing how Koei Tecmo didn't see any of this coming... The fans wanted DLC? The fans wanted to play as the badass Yiga commander? Who would have thought...? No one could have ever guessed that...!

Also, they clearly state that they had other ideas instead of Sooga, but I don't think anyone would have been against getting whatever character(s) Koei Tecmo had in mind here in addition. The more, the merrier. So, why didn't they make more fighters? With Age of Calamity they had the chance to create a product that can be called very much "complete", where all suitable characters and locations are covered by the game. This is something that never would have been possible with the original Hyrule Warriors, because there were too many possibilities. And they were so close here.

At the same time you wouldn't expect that the fans are fully content either. Don't they ask for even more DLC? Don't they ask for Astor or Kass? You would think so... And with the narrative of this interview doing another season of DLC feels like a good call, unless the first Expansion Pass severely underperformed. But we're talking about the best-selling Warriors game as of yet.