One of 2023's best games is already being forgotten – even though it’s on Game Pass

It’s been a really good start to the year, huh? For a while now, the first quarter of the calendar year has been as packed out and quality-filled as the holiday period, but in the age of service games and evolving titles, even the biggest and best games are at risk of releasing directly into consumer quicksand. We’ve had Metacritic-topping titles like Dead Space remake, Octopath Traveler 2, Like a Dragon: Ishin, and Wild Hearts (that everyone else seemed to like except me, apparently).

But there’s one game, perhaps my favourite of the year so far, that’s already starting to be forgotten about. I suppose, when you have a new Destiny expansion and one of the biggest beta tests the industry has seen in years drop around the same time, that’s bound to happen, isn’t it? But this game came to Game Pass and everything, so you’d think it’d have more staying power – alas, that’s the curse of having so much choice: people will often just go pick other things.

I’m talking, of course, about Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty. The latest hardcore action game from the sadists behind Nioh and Ninja Gaiden, the game found much love amongst early adopters and critics, quickly rising to the top of the gameplay charts on Xbox and becoming something of a talking point amongst people on social media. At launch, the internet was abuzz with chatter about this game – and as a long-time Nioh diehard, I loved it! Finally, because of Game Pass, people were giving this odd little ‘masocore’ series a go; the Nioh series was no longer locked behind a £30+ collection on the PS4/PS5!

But, as soon as that swell came, it went away. Not even a week later, the conversation died down, and I’m seeing fewer real player graves populating the Wo Long levels as there were at launch. Such is the curse of the Game Pass monster of the week; kick down the doors, draw the attention of everyone in the Xbox and PC saloon… and then find your spot at the bar alongside Unpacking, Tunic, High on Life, A Plague Tale: Requiem, and Vampire Survivors.

This isn’t a criticism. Far from it. Looking at data from our friends over at TrueAchievements, you can see that (in its first week on Game Pass) the playercount for Wo Long was “considerably ahead of 2022 hit Elden Ring”, and “only just shy of matching the first-week TA player counts of every Dark Souls game combined”. No mean feat, and that’s the power of being able to draw people in at no extra cost, right?

It also means that the game has a very solid playerbase for its eventual (paid) DLC. And Team Ninja knows how to do DLC well, let me tell you. Nioh had a wonderful, wintery expansion with its ‘Dragon of the North’ add-on, and Nioh 2’s ‘The Tengu’s Disciple’ and ‘Darkness in the Capital’ both added some depth and meat to the whole experience with some killer new weapon types, amazing new locales to explore, and some killer bosses that put even base-game behemoths in their place… the less said about Nioh 2’s damp finale, The First Samurai, the better, though. Eurgh.

Taking the track record as a whole, Team Ninja has promise. Knowing that it has to provide something really special to draw in its 100,000+ Game Pass players back to the game, I would hope that the developer pulls out all the stops and really delivers on the best ideas in its cart. It’s not like there aren’t any options: we end very early on in the story of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and we have plenty of narrative threads to pull on. As well as the diverting paths of Cao Cao, the Sun family, and the Liu Bei brothers, there’s a whole subset of stories still tied up in the remaining Yellow Turban empathisers, and Zhao Yun.

I believe in Team Ninja, and its admittedly old-school approach to DLC expansions. Give me a whole new map, cram a few bosses in it, give me a new weapon, and make me bleed a little bit more. Please. I’m begging you. We all thought Wo Long was quite simple, really, so upping the ante and making the post-game challenge something really special will likely go down really well with everyone after a real Souls-like experience.

People may have stopped going off about Wo Long merely a week after its launch, but well-timed and well-executed DLC will prove that there’s plenty of life – and appeal – in Game Pass games that have had their five minutes in the sun. Just ask Dead Cells; an evergreen example of how to keep player count up, and people coming back.