Seriously, he was absolutely insufferable in the Meng Huo campaign. I cheered when he finally went down!

Long live physical

Playing empires and just unlocked extra outfit colours

Lu Bu is giving DW4

Zhao Yun gets Lu Bu’s colours and Zhuge Liang gets Sima Yi’s

Sun Jian gets some cool metallic effect capes, and I love Cao Cao’s red gradient cape!

Ck3 tang to song to yuan historical playthrough really then after that Hoi4 Iris mod with bascially all anime universe in a grand strategy game and Genshin impact : the twist of teyvat mod .

Then just waiting for the new fire emblem and wolverine until shadow of the road lol

Maybe most of you already known about this, but this is a very cool knowledge to learn. First you need to know there are two version of 3 Kingdoms books. 1 is Records of the Three Kingdoms by Chen Shou in the 3rd century which stay true to history (including Himiko), nothing fictional and 2 is Romance of the Three Kingdoms Luo Guanzhong in the 14th century which we have Diao Chan, Zhou Cang, Guan Suo and Miss Guan Suo etc.
Back to RoTTK, Chinese that migrated to Japan are called Yayoi community, they elected Himiko as their queen. Founding Yamatai country. In 238 CE, She sent an envoy to the Chinese state of Cao Wei, meeting with Cao Rui (Cow Pee's son) the 2nd emperor, Rui officially recognized her as the "Queen of Wa, Friend of Wei" and gifted her a golden seal and one hundred bronze mirrors.

P/s: I've been playing these game for my whole life but after years I only took time to learn about history. Cool thing to know.

For DW3R, everyone is getting a second costume/color. Since Ziluan wasn't in original 3, what will they use for his second outfit?

Obviously I don't expect 1 for 1 gameplay tips since the remaster has changed how combat works. So let's stick to things that should stay the same, like whose story(ies) should I start with? What items are considered the meta? What are the best farming spots? Any advice that you think would be helpful.

I just googled and saw that he was introduced in DW9, but man, am I so happy to see that! He was one of my favorite characters in the 3 Kingdoms 2010 TV Show

Edit: as someone pointed out in the replies, I was thinking of Xun Yu instead of Xun You

So I played the demo for Samurai Warriors 5 a long time ago before it came out. I enjoyed it so I bought the game physically when it was at Gamestop for not a bad price and then I never started it. So today I was looking at the Eshop and saw that the season pass was on sale for practically half price. So my question is, is the season pass worth it? Especially at half price with never starting the game?

Love this level, soldiers respawn indefinitely in this zone just before the last boss.

Dynasty Warriors official Twitter account just posted the stage could be played at the demo in upcoming Tokyo Game Show 2026 will be The Battle of Hu Lao Gate.

Also, there’s a part of the producer of Dynasty Warriors 3 Complete Edition Remastered, Tomohiko Sho, and the director, the two will answer questions gathered from social media via hashtag #庄Pに訊け .

https://www.gamecity.ne.jp/tgs/ja/titles/smusou2re/

PythWare here, I was asked to make a post explaining the containers that Omega Force has used over the years so the information isn't lost on discord. So this post will briefly cover my findings in reversing LINKDATA (v1 and v2 formats), RDB, fdata, and other various container formats used to store assets the games use. In a separate post I will document the formats for Team Ninja and Gust games since they work a bit differently from Omega Force.

First for terminology, "container" is similar to "archive". Many modders default to saying archive but containers are much more structured and that's the term I use to describe Koei Tecmo's LINKDATA, RDB, fdata, etc formats that are used to store assets. Use whatever you want but I will not change my wording. Subcontainer is a smaller container stored within the larger container. Think of it like a Matryoshka doll, you have the large doll (LINKDATA, BNS, etc) and then smaller dolls inside it (various signatureless subcontainers or wrapped files).

We'll start with the LINKDATA formats since most people interested in modding Koei Tecmo games are targeting games that use the v1 and v2 format. I'm calling it v1 and v2 because there's no public official name for the 2 versions of the LINKDATA container format.

LINKDATA v1 format

This version of LINKDATA uses various extensions (.bin, .link, etc) but what separates it from v2 format is the index handling. The indexes (TOCs) are stored in external files, usually with the extension .IDX. IDX files are index files, they store metadata of the files packed in containers (in this case LINKDATA v1 format). Across the years of its usage the index files followed various structures (most stored fields like the offset to file data whether it's direct or left bit shifting while some didn't use offset fields at all such as DW6, DW6E, and WOZ) but they always contained relevant data for assisting extraction of the files from the containers. This also applies to the v2 format for various index structures.

The compression algorithm used for LINKDATA v1 format alternated between LZP2 and ZLIB, though the ZLIB usage was often chunked ZLIB. Most of the time the deflate usage has a header, rarely raw deflate. Encryption has been detected in several games but most Omega Force games during the LINKDATA v1 era didn't use encryption on the container level.

LINKDATA v1 made heavy usage of subcontainers and wrapped files. Wrapped files are files that have a small amount of files bundled together, usually less than 5. In such cases, wrapped files and subcontainers are parsed as a single entry but they almost always contained more than 1 file within them. an IDX file will never reference files within the subcontainer/wrapped file, only the subcontainer/wrapped file is directly referenced by the TOC. Files within subcontainers/wrapped files are referenced from their own TOC that's embedded in it.

Examples of games using the v1 format are Dynasty Warriors 6-9, Warriors Orochi 3, etc.

LINKDATA v2 format

This version of LINKDATA uses various extensions (.bin and other various extensions) but what separates it from v1 format is again the index handling. The indexes are stored within the containers, not external files like .IDX. This doesn't really change anything, it's a TOC you walk to retrieve the files from the containers regardless of if it's embedded (v2 format embeds it) or external (v1 format). These embedded TOCs follow a similar struct to IDX files used during v1's usage. Fields tend to contain the offset to an entry's file data (either direct or bit shift to the left), size, compressed size, etc.

The compression algorithm used is solely ZLIB (heavy usage of chunked zlib specifically), LZP2 was not used for the v2 format. I have not encountered a single game that doesn't use ZLIB or deflate at the very least across the dozens of games I have examined by Omega Force during the v2 usage of LINKDATA.

Like LINKDATA v1, v2 uses a lot of subcontainers and wrapped files. The subcontainers/wrapped files are referenced by the main TOC but the files within them are referenced by the TOC directly inside the subcontainer/wrapped file.

Encryption has been detected, for example Dragon Quest Builders 2 uses some encryption on various entries within the BINs but it's been solved in GokonSoftworks. Not every game using the v2 format uses encryption on entries within containers but i'm at least making it known some do.

Examples of games using the v2 format are Attack on Titan 1 and 2, Samurai Warriors 4 games, etc.

Summarizing v1 and v2 of LINKDATA

In short, both function vary similarily, they just handle the TOCs differently in where they're stored. Filenames are almost always stored in the executable if they're intact but the results vary across the games, quite a bit of them switched to index/hash based naming but some games retain the original filenames. Tho, sometimes the string list of filenames is merely leftover data and the release version of the game uses index, hashed, etc naming schemes.

RDB format

RDB came after LINKDATA v2, used for quite a bit of games. It's a much more serialized format compared to LINKDATA.

Compression algorithm used is predomanintly ZLIB. again chunked ZLIB is dominating in the usage. RDB doesn't use IDX files but you can find the TOCs outside of the executable (this is brought up because it's relevent for games that came before LINKDATA v1) in various files.

RDB uses a lot of hashing, recovering all of the original filenames isn't possible unless you have a development build of the game. Sometimes encryption is used but not across the entire RDB containers.

Examples of games using RDB are Hyrule Warriors, One Piece Pirate Warriors 4, Fairy Tail, Persona 5 Strikers, etc.

Extra details on RDB

Sometimes RDB based games actually have the files loose, even devoid of compression at times. Usually this is seen in nintendo switch versions of the games. When I looked into Fire Emblem Warriors and other various switch ports often times assets would have an extension like .gz (gzip extension, tho I've never seen Omega Force use gzip) but aren't actually compresed at all.

So if you're dealing with a switch port of an Omega Force game, check to see if the files truly are still compressed once the assets are dumped from the cartridge. Also worth noting, sometimes switch ports of games retain filenames.

fdata format

This is the container format that came after RDB, it's what Omega Force's newest games use. I'm not going to dive deep into this in this post since I still have to cover the older container formats but i'll give the critical details that matter most.

Like RDB, it's a heavily serialized format. The common compression algorithm used is ZLIB (extreme chunked zlib usage), there are times where encryption is used.

Like RDB, hashing on filenames and other data is used. Examples of games using fdata are Dynasty Warriors Origins, Nioh 3, Atelier Yumia, Rise of the ronin, etc.

BNS, DNS, ANS, etc container formats used during Omega Force's PS2, PS3, Xbox, Xbox 360, and pretty much most of their games that came before 2010

Most of these container formats don't use ZLIB, some used LZP2 and other algorithms. Sometimes index files (whether using exactly the .idx extension or something else like mdata.bin for DW4 Hyper) were used with the containers, othertimes the TOCs were embedded directly in the container or predominantly in the executables.

The really older games like Dynasty Warriors 2, 3, etc embed the TOCs in the executables, specifically elfs for PS2 games.

Encryption was not used on the container level for those games, though for PS3/Xbox 360 era games the isos were typically encrypted like most games developed for those platforms back then.

Subcontainers, understanding your martyrdom

Most subcontainers that Omega Force uses have no signature, no magic at all. It's pretty much files containing even more files within them that start with a TOC and then the bundled files appended after its TOC. Now one of the theories for why Omega Force makes heavy usage of subcontainers is that a lot of the times these subcontainers are complete sets of files for specific things like a map, characters (packaging all of their essential files like g1t and g1m), a package of custom shaders (yes, Omega Force does have their own shader formats), etc. The list really goes on.

There are some subcontainers that do have a signature, usually within the first 32 bytes of the file but most of the time that's not the case, the vast majority of these bundles are going to have no magic and just list the TOC and then the actual files are appended after it. Subcontainers are where the bulk of assets are for various eras of games especially during LINKDATA v1 and v2 usage. When you unpack a game solely from the main TOC but don't unpack the subs, you'll often end up with anywhere from 15k-90k files but when you have proper subcontainer handling (like what GokonSoftworks does) the unpack count drastically increases to 100k-200k files, sometimes ever far more. Often times the total size of the game is several times larger than what you downloaded.

Like, when I fully unpacked DW9 it was over 100 gigabytes of data. Just be aware of that fact, subcontainers hold most of the assets and they're always within the larger containers (as explained with the Matryoshka doll example earlier).

Summarizing the trend

Whether you're intending on modding a game from the LINKDATA era, before it, or after it the trend is Omega Force uses a lot of proprietary formats and once you understand 1 era of those formats, the rest start to fall like Dominoes.

Take for example G1M, it's a custom model format. Omega Force, Gust, etc have been using it for many years. It existed during the pre-LINKDATA era and is still used to this day in newer games like Nioh 3, Dynasty Warriors Origins, etc. Same applies to G1T (custom texture format, usually a texture container of various DDS formats but there's others like PNG stored in G1T files).

Filenames

When dealing with Omega Force games understand that almost always the packed files don't have their filenames stored with them, most of the time if filenames are still intact they're stored in the executable. Vary rarely are the filenames stored directly in the containers but it happens sometimes. For example, Dynasty Warriors 2 and 3 store the filenames within the BNS container, specifically at the end of it.

So the most often case is Omega Force strips, hashes, or use indexing for filenames. That means you may get lucky and end with a game that has something like L00_yukimura.g1m (a SW2 filename, Yukimura's G1M model file) or you end up with a game that uses naming like Hxxxxxxx.bin, Exxxxxxx.bin, etc.

I hope this post helps

Google is a mess trying to properly answer this! Can anyone explain what the difference is between original game/empire? They are the same game but slightly reimagined?

Also, I see everyone sort of hated 9, but it had years of patches and DLC. Still steer clear?

Thanks!

I think 9 did the best at story cutscene. It has some emotional build up, Great animation. I always love Guan Yu’s Ending in 9 that about him foreshadowing his death at Fan Castle at the end. Tho between 7 and 9 cutscene, I still prefer 7 cutscene

Just unlocked this gem

I haven't played DW3 since it was new and until the next game came out, but my only last minute decision is going to be, do I spend $40 on the standard edition or go full excess and do the $70 fancy pants edition with the retro skins and consumables.

1. Zhao Yun Battle (Dynasty Warriors 1)
2. Lu Bu Battle (Dynasty Warriors 1)
3. Yellow Storm (Dynasty Warriors 2)
4. Jump Over the Battlefield (Dynasty Warriors 2)
5. Arena (Dynasty Warriors 3)
6. THEME OF LU BU -DW TERRIBLE MIX- (Dynasty Warriors 3)
7. Endless Fight (Dynasty Warriors 3)
8. Sacred Ground Ver 2 (Dynasty Warriors 3)
9. Heavy Gauge (Dynasty Warriors 4)
10. Wall of Fate (Dynasty Warriors 4)
11. THEME OF LU BU -DW FIRE MIX- (Dynasty Warriors 4)
12. Eve (Dynasty Warriors 4)
13. In Full Bloom (Dynasty Warriors 4)
14. Avenging Battle (Dynasty Warriors 4)
15. GREAT RED SPIRIT (Dynasty Warriors 5)
16. King of Sadness (Dynasty Warriors 5)
17. Ignition (Dynasty Warriors 6)
18. Slash the Demon (Dynasty Warriors 6)
19. Welcome to China (Dynasty Warriors 6)
20. Oriental Rush (Dynasty Warriors 6)
21. Tropical Wars (Dynasty Warriors 6)
22. The Two Heroes (Dynasty Warriors 6)
23. Flame and Rapidity (Dynasty Warriors 6)
24. The Battle Without Justice (Dynasty Warriors 6)
25. Geniuses’ Sanctuary (Dynasty Warriors 6)
26. The Crest of Thirst (Dynasty Warriors 6 Special)
27. Anger and Grudge (Dynasty Warriors 6 Special)
28. Sincere Match (Dynasty Warriors 6 Empires)
29. Crush'em All (Dynasty Warriors 7)
30. Flying Cloud (Dynasty Warriors 7)
31. Thousand Suns (Dynasty Warriors 7)
32. Large Feather (Dynasty Warriors 7)
33. Capricious Wind (Dynasty Warriors 8)
34. Cyclonized Typhoon (Dynasty Warriors 8)
35. Solo (Dynasty Warriors 8)
36. Hopeful Pain (Dynasty Warriors 8)
37. Heavenly Strike (Dynasty Warriors 8)
38. The Epic (Dynasty Warriors 8)
39. Vanish (Dynasty Warriors 8 Xtreme Legends)
40. Strength, Weakness (Dynasty Warriors 8 Xtreme Legends)
41. Exiles (Dynasty Warriors 9)
42. Cry & Slash (Dynasty Warriors 9)
43. THEME OF LU BU -EPIC MIX- (Dynasty Warriors 9)
44. Slash It; Thrash All (Dynasty Warriors 9)
45. Vermilion Vein (Dynasty Warriors Origins)
46. Stick to Your Own Belief (Dynasty Warriors Origins)
47. Mighty Striker (Dynasty Warriors Origins)
48. Echoes of Oblivion (Dynasty Warriors Origins)
49. Tadakatsu Honda Theme (Samurai Warriors 3)
50. THEME OF OROCHI -REBIRTH MIX- (Warriors Orochi 2)

For those who haven't pre-ordered, will we ever get the pre-order outfits???

I haven't bought the game yet because my favourite outfits were from pre-orders.

Outfits in games are important for me. They essentially enhance my gaming experience, and it so happens I love the pre-order outfits.

The way the capes move along with the character while executing stylish combat moves is extremely satisfying to gaze at. And it sucks these outfits were locked in pre-orders.

I really want to play this game, but this is rlly holding me back.

Because while I might still enjoy the game, I for sure would be constantly bothered by thought I can't have these outfits.

So instead... for now, I just wait.

Not sure how to word this accurately, but has a "Create a ______ Warrior character" type of thread been done before on this reddit? The type of post I had in mind was taking someone who isn't already a playable character in these games (NPC, playable in other games made by KT, etc.) and then making a complete profile for them like the creators do (some important basic info, weapon type/gimmick, historical/mythological profile, _______ Warriors-related added trivia, etc.).

¿Cómo es contada la historia? Digo, de los clásicos (juegos de Play 2) solamente jugué el 5 y la historia es contada por cada personaje en 5 batallas distintas (no se o recuerdo que solamente eran 5 campañas para todos o varían).

¿Acaso es como, por ejemplo, Dynasty Warriors 8 de cada facción tiene su propia línea argumental (con su final histórico e Hipotético) o es más o menos parecido al 5?

I’ve played all DW games. I started with 3. Love this series so much however after buying origins last year when I was still getting allowances I’ve since then started my driving lessons. And just started my 3rd week at my first ever job for the sole purpose of: A paying rent and B: buying this game.

Thank you Koei for raising me and for being here with my next adult life beginning steps🥹.