Koei Tecmo's Omega Force is hard at work developing Dynasty Warriors 9 Empires. Set to release sometime this 2021, the development team is persistent in releasing the usual expansion to DW9.

New details about the upcoming expansion game came out through the Japanese magazine Famitsu. The magazine had an interview with Omega Force Executive Officer Akihiro Suzuki who revealed new details about the game.

Dynasty Warriors 9 Empires will not have open-world battles; will reuse DW9 assets

According to Suzuki, DW9 Empires focuses more on city sieges. As usual, the game will have a strategy component where you set out to unify China. But the game's open-world system wouldn't have fitted well with this structure. Hence, Omega Force restricted the game's battles in city sieges only. These sieges will consist of two stages: the gate breaching stage and the battle with the commander stage.

Under each officer in the game are unit troops that fall under one of three categories: infantry, cavalry, and bowmen. According to Suzuki, the three unit types will have a rock-paper-scissors type of relationship in terms of strengths and weaknesses. The Strategem feature in DW8 Empires will also return to some capacity.

Suzuki says that open-world will still return as a sub-feature. The team originally didn't plan to include open-world in Empires in the first place, but Suzuki claims that there have been many requests to add new features on the open-world.

Finally, Suzuki confirmed that unlike in previous Empires games, DW9 will not introduce any new unique characters. Instead, the game will have a Nioh 2-inspired custom character creator.

Dynasty Warriors 9 came out in 2019 to mixed critic reviews. The game had the bold prerogative to bring the game to an open-world environment. However, the open-world nature of the game drastically affected its pacing, and the game's world felt barren and uninteresting. We're hoping that DW9 Empires will set the series back to the correct path.

Either way, you can have your Dynasty Warriors fix sooner than later with the Netflix live-action film adaptation.