For those who want to make Fire Emblem: Three Houses more like XCOM, Nintendo is on the case.
On July 25, just hours before the game was scheduled to launওch, Nintendo, publisher of Fire Emblem: Three Houses, announced on that there is an extra difficulty setting coming to the game later this year.💃 There are currently two difficul❀ty settings in Fire Emblem: Three Houses, including Normal and Hard. The Nintendo announcement hints at an even tougher⛄ difficulty setting above and beyond Hard.
It’s not clear which of th𝓰e four waves of DLC for Fire Emblem: Three Houses the new difficulty settꦏing will be a part of except that it will be available in 2019. According to the the DLC schedule includes four separate waꦛves:
- Wave 1: Officers Academy Uniform for female and male Byleth available Day 1♕ (July 26th).
- Wave 2: Additional Auxiliary battle maps, helpful in-gameꦬ support items, and more will be released by 10/31/2019.
- Wave 💞3: Additional quests and costumes will be re💝leased by 12/31/2019.
- Wave 4: Discover new story content, with additional 📖playable cღharacters, locations and more will be released by 4/30/2020.
In case some are unfamiliar with the franchise, Fire Emblem is a long-running turn-based strategy game franchise that is exclusiveജ to Nintendo consoles and handhelds. The series is set in a shared fantasy universe, but few games in the franchise are true sequels and prequels to each other. Individual Fire Emblem games tell their own stories with a conventional narrative structure without any hint of a direct continuation at the end 𒉰of the game. The series is also known for having big casts of side characters which plays into the difficu🐎lty in these games because they contain the permadeath mechanic.
Permadeath is a gameplay mechanic which prevents characters that die in a game from being revived. So i🐟f a player makes a mistake in a game like Fire Emblem: Three Houses and a character loseꦏs a fight, they might just die and not come b꧒ack in that playthrough. Permadeath is probably best known from the XCOM gameᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚs where the playable characters are basically faceless, disposable grunts. In Fire Emblem, permadeath stings a bit more than in other games because the side characters players are risking usually have some degree o♌f characterization and feel more like actual people.
In comparison to other strategy serie🥃s, the difficult♔y in Fire Emblem games te🎉nds to be on the ea🔯sier side of things. If a player messes up, someone is going to die in Fire Emblem. This can be compared to XCOM, where a player can feasibly execute a mission perfectly and still lose characters. This new difficulty settin⛄g should do a lot to bring in the wider strategy community who often look down their noses at the Fire Emblem series as a strategy franchise for novice playe𓂃rs and nothing more.