Dynasty Warriors: Origins’ devs aimed to put “as many enemies as the PS5 could handle” on-screen 

Set to launch in January 2025, Dynasty Warriors: Origins is the latest entry in Koei Tecmo and Omega Force’s long-running historical hack-and-slash series. As is customary for musou games, the Dynasty Warriors series has never shied away from populating the game screen with ridiculous amounts of enemies, but it seems that Origins strives to leave past entries in the dust with a volume of soldiers that pushes even current-gen hardware to its limits. 

“Since the game’s planning stage, I knew I wanted to depict a multitude of soldiers never before seen in the series,” Dynasty Warriors: Origins’ producer Tomohiko Sho revealed in an interview with Inside Games at Tokyo Game Show 2024. “I told the director to put in as many as the PS5 could handle.” 

From there, Origins’s director instructed the development team to make an ambitious 1,000 people appear on the battlefield at a time. However, according to Sho, Omega Force’s programmers decided to tenfold the challenge – making their goal a whopping 10,000. 

“Unfortunately,” Sho comments, “we didn’t actually manage to get 10,000 people on-screen at a time, but we did make it to several thousand.” Unsurprisingly, it seems that the real hard part came afterwards – getting those swarms of people to exist on-screen was one thing, but making them behave in a realistic way on the battlefield took a significant amount of trial and error, Sho says. To overcome this challenge, Omega Force carefully configured the enemy AI to allow groups of soldiers to behave autonomously in response to what’s happening on the battlefield. 

Apart from outdoing past entries with the epic scale of its battles, Dynasty Warriors: Origins also strives to go back to the series’ roots and appeal to both veterans and newcomers, as Sho recently told AUTOMATON. 

Dynasty Warriors: Origins is scheduled to launch on January 17 for the PC (Steam), PS5 and Xbox Series X|S.