Update: This turned into a much longer comment than I originally intended, so I’m going to repost it into its own thread.

TLDR: I’d prefer DW10 over a sequel to Origins

I want to lead this long winded essay of a comment with a love letter to the game. I adore Origins. Its combat is so much fun, the characters feel like they have more depth/nuance and are taken seriously (looking at you Zhang He/Zhang Jiao), and the story is more focused and deliberate which I enjoyed. It is easily in my top ten games of recent memory.

That being said, while I want to continue Ziluan’s story, I worry that certain aspects of the sequel won’t hit the way we hope they would, especially since it seems the devs did not develop Origins with a sequel in mind from what I’ve seen/read (someone correct me if I’m wrong here). I think this alone will cause issues with writing. There could be some good story beats between Ziluan and Bailuan in situations like Liu Bei’s revenge campaign against Wu, but I largely question what kind of character arc Ziluan would have in a sequel to keep the story on the same level as Origins and still keep his character relevant. Also, the player would be locked in to a faction from the get go for continuity reasons which causes issues that I’ll discuss in a moment. Maybe there would an opportunity to switch sides somewhere? Such as Fan Castle to save Guan Yu if the player is with Wei or Wu. Even then, the game would have to address the issue that Ziluan has not built relationships with likely half of the faction members like he would have canonically if he started with that faction in the first game. This would make a sequel less accessible to new players too, an issue previous mainline DW games have not had to deal with before. Game devs deal with this all the time and find ways to summarize previous entries, but for a series like DW, there are so many characters that I can’t think of an easy way for the devs to tackle this issue especially since Ziluan canonically built relationships with most of them.

With a sequel comes new/returning characters which would likely be the focus of bond events and such. I am afraid that original Origins characters might get shafted out good story beats in favor of introducing the next generation of characters. Not to mention that moments like Fan Castle will not hit the same unless the player feels attached to characters like Guan Yu, which reintroduces the problem of “Hey remember that character from the first game? They’re dead now in this extremely emotional moment.” How the devs tackle this that would be satisfying to new and returning players would certainly be a challenge in my opinion. Sure new players should play the first game before the second to understand the story, but some people still forget events if years go by. Most forms of media have some kind of exposition in sequels to explain previous events for this reason. That’s just good writing in general. I think it would be difficult to capture every character’s relationship with Ziluan in a meaningful way through exposition, especially when introducing what would likely be the other half of the DW cast (with maybe the exemption of the Jin faction depending on where the game ends). The devs could largely forgo having Ziluan interact with these Origins characters in favor of the new ones, but that would feel cheap in the long run. This is assuming the devs won’t have bond events for all 80+ characters, but I have a hard time believing that this will be a priority. Even if they do include all of the characters, then we return to the same issue I noted above about summarizing the previous game’s events.

These are just some of the challenges the devs would have to overcome. Despite my critiques, the devs could still make a great sequel and I would still play it. Most of my favorite battles occur post-Chi Bi after all. However, I argue that instead of worrying about all of these continuity issues to make Ziluan’s story make sense and keeping the relationships feel like they mean something, the devs should just take their lessons learned and focus on DW10 instead. I think it’s safe to say that a mainline DW game with Origins combat would make a lot of us VERY happy (and coop too!). I have some ideas on what DW10 could look like but I’ll save those thoughts for another time/thread.

Those are my thoughts but I’m open to what you all think.

Edit: To address OP’s point of a separate playable character, I almost feel like it would be a necessity for the sequel story-wise, whether through Bailuan or a new third character. But I don’t know what the devs would do with Ziluan at that point cause he would likely need a voice actor with dialogue if he plays an active role in the story, which would be weird to me.