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Impressions

Who is the Real Wukong?

Black Myth: Wukong #6

by Death

Sep 7, 2024

With the opening chapters of Black Myth Wukong (2024) behind me, I am starting to suspect something more profound is happening with this game concerning difficulty scaling and just who it is made for. BMWK only has one difficulty setting, meaning everyone will have a similar experience playing the game no matter who you are. As is typical with any video game, especially action games, many players will quit when the frustration outweighs the hype that brought them in.


Developers constantly grapple with the challenge of maintaining player engagement. The average player spends about ten hours on a game before calling it quits, with many never reaching the end. Some even purchase games they never play. The creators of BMWK have anticipated this trend and designed the game to accommodate such player falloff, ensuring that even those who may not finish the game can still enjoy the experience.


The first part of this game is nothing like the last in terms of difficulty and tempo; the button-mashing frenzy that was Chapter 1 has given way to a much more difficult experience in Chapters 4 and 5. A few bosses past the midway point, all the systems in the game become critical, and you start to entertain thoughts of selling a family member into servitude to obtain resources like celestial ribbons and fine gold thread.


As BMWK progresses, it initially presents itself as a more accessible experience that caters to a broader audience. However, as you delve deeper, it morphs into a challenging, souls-like beatdown for those with a penchant for punishment. This balance ensures that all players, casual and hardcore, can enjoy the game, making it a thrilling and rewarding experience for all, especially those who persevere to the conclusion.


Up to the halfway point in Chapter 3, I have been content to progress with my classic, tried and true, never-fail method of hitting my enemies as rapidly as possible while pumping up critical hit chance and critical hit damage. (This is the way I play all games, by the way. I believe in doing enormous damage upfront to kill my enemies before they even have a chance to launch some crazy mechanic my way. I don’t parry, and I spam dodge. I know who I am.) But this strategy has dramatically diminished in effectiveness, and I am constantly respecing my talent points to squeeze out some extra damage or resistance against my increasingly more challenging opponents. Balancing damage and damage mitigation have become essential.


My primary source of raw damage mitigation is the armor I find in chests or on defeated bosses. Each armor set comes with one or two special abilities and is activated depending on the number of pieces worn from the set. Players can mix and match pieces from different sets to suit their needs. At first, the armor in BMWK was not something I had to think about very much. In the early game, the armor with the highest rating is usually the best to wear, even if that means giving up a cool ability for more survivability.


At first, I thought my low-level armor sets were useless after their initial use, but later on, you meet a blacksmith who can upgrade past armor sets to keep pace with higher-level ones. This is subtle, but doing armor this way is the game’s way of making you explore the various abilities available through the armor and their associated skills in the skill tree. This system is a wonderfully subtle way of planting seeds for possible builds later in the game. It prepares the player for the late game without making them consciously realize that the developers are guiding them on the game’s systems.


There’s much more to say about gear and how it works with the combat systems in the game, both good and bad, but I will save that until after the credits roll. However, for now, I feel safe in saying that there is a strategy to the design in BMWK that is not initially apparent, and it’s unique for a game that is trying to seem approachable to everyone but is, in reality, concealing a massive difficulty spike shortly after the mid-game is over.

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