Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty looks to be off to an amazing start thanks to Game Pass, reaching a first-week TrueAchievements player count 15% up on Elden Ring and over double the top-performing Dark Souls game.
Many thousands of brave souls have set their sights on the Wo Long achievements since it launched as one of the best games on Game Pass earlier this month, with our Wo Long review praising the game’s “fantastic fundamentals and rewarding combat.” Looking at TA player counts from the first full week, we see that Team Ninja’s fantastic new Three Kingdoms-flavoured action-RPG has given the genre’s very best a run for their money, with the Game Pass effect leading to week-one numbers considerably ahead of 2022 hit Elden Ring, and only just shy of matching the first-week TA player counts of every Dark Souls game combined… and that’s including Scholar of the First Sin and Dark Souls Remastered.
Wo Long invades FromSoftware’s battlefield with strong first-week numbers
In its first full week, Wo Long pulled in well over 85,000 tracked players on TrueAchievements, a great debut for a game that starts out tricky enough that most Xbox players haven’t beaten Wo Long’s first boss. Elden Ring, for comparison, hit 76,000 week one, without the power of Game Pass backing it up, of course, but it was still one of 2022’s biggest games so it’s an impressive feat for Team Ninja’s title all the same. Looking at the Dark Souls games, none even come close to Wo Long’s flying start — Dark Souls 3 managed 35k, with most of the others around the teens, so as mentioned, it would take the combined week-one TA player counts of the entire Dark Souls series to rival Wo Long’s opening week.
If we look at the wider player base with a little help from our historical Xbox Gameplay Chart numbers, we see that Elden Ring was played by just under 9% of the two million-odd accounts scanned in its first-week data, with Wo Long not too far behind at over 8% in its opening week. While that paints a slightly less rosy picture than the TA player data, it’s still impressive for a brand-new IP to come in so close to one of the biggest games of last year. Sadly, our chart data doesn’t go back far enough to reach the Souls games, but with Elden Ring being From’s most successful game to date and Wo Long having such a comfortable lead over them based on the TA member sample, it’s probably safe to assume we’d see a win for Team Ninja there if we did have the numbers.
Wondering how Wo Long might have done without Game Pass backing it up? We don’t need to deal in hypotheticals here, since sister site TrueTrophies also runs its own PlayStation Gameplay Chart we can look at. Our chart saw Wo Long come in just outside the top five in its first full week at 6th, but over on PlayStation, it only managed 25th. Quite the difference.
Impressed with Wo Long’s strong start? How are you getting on with the game so far? Let us know!
