Several months back, Airship Syndicate teased a new game codenamed Project Skylight. Tonight at The Game Awards, Airship Syndicate – known for Darksiders Genesis and the recent Ruined King: A League of Legends Story alongside Warframe developer Digital Extremes – has revealed the project’s final name: Wayfinder.
Wayfinder is Digital Extremes’ newest character-based online action RPG led by creative director Joe Madureira. Madureira has had a hand in Darksiders, Battle Chasers, Ruined King: A League of Legends Story, and is the concept artist behind Voruna, Warframe’s newest 51st Warframe.
We got an exclusive opportunity to speak with Joe Madureira, Ryan Stefanelli, the president and game director of Airship Syndicate, and AJ LaSaracina, the marketing and engagement director of Airship Syndicate on Wayfinder.
Wayfinder is set in Evenor, a cel shaded world infused with color, but run rampant by a destructive force called the Gloom. With your fellow Wayfinders, you will be tasked to bring about light to stop the Gloom from outright consuming everything. By using Gloom Daggers, players can traverse into Lost Zones, which are dungeons tainted by the Gloom with their ever-shifting trials and challenges. Equipping mutators to your Gloom Dagger allows you to shift your adventures, and their outcomes, to your own whim.
“We’ve always wanted to make an online game – one that had a world we could build the game around, one that could grow,” Steffanelli explains. “Even though the game is really a character-based free-to-play online action game, we definitely have MMO-like aspirations for it. [It is a] culmination of our past experiences on working on action games like the Darksiders franchise both back at Vigil [Games], and then on [Darksiders] Genesis at Airship, which was our first multiplayer game. But then also some of the RPGs we worked on, Battle Chasers and Ruined King, and bringing it all together in an online world. That is really what Wayfinder is all about. All of our games have had adventure as a common element, and Wayfinder takes that to the next level for us by letting people do it online.”.
With Wayfinder as an all-new live-service IP, the developers want to make sure it is a uniquely different experience from the already ever-expanding Warframe and Soulframe games that are also being developed at Digital Extremes. With a few live-service games being developed under the same publisher, the team wanted to be careful to not impose pre-existing ideas in the other IPs of the company.
“As far as how it’s different, when we started this, there was a lot of synergy or similarities withs some of the concepts games like Warframe, and I think Digital Extremes was initially very excited about that, but we have also been very careful not to retread the same ground,” Maduiera says. “It is a very different game. Obviously, it looks completely different. The world is a synth fantasy, arcane pumped world. The art style is completely different. We have a lot of touchpoints, and a lot of learning we can do from Digital Extremes’ experience with Warframe, and why we were so excited to have them as a partner.
“We’re definitely pushing it in a different direction, and as far as Soulframe, we know as little about that as anyone else. We’re relying on Digital Extremes to make sure there’s no overlap there. The artstyle of the game is pretty much an evolution of everything we have ever done before. We’ve done handpainted games. We’ve done games in Unreal [Engine]. This merges the two. We try to get very illustrated concept art-ish. When someone says, ‘That screenshot looks like concept art,’ we get excited by that. Hopefully, we can keep pushing that and as the years go, make it look better and better.”.
Each of the characters shown in the reveal trailer tonight all have their own relationships, background stories, and character dynamics in place.
“I think one other differentiator for us is that we are a character-based game,” LaSaracina adds. “The characters are fully voice acted, they have relationships, they have personalities, you learn about their stories inside the game, and outside the game. That’s something these other games do not bring to the table. Warframe obviously has set characters, but they don’t speak. Whereas we really want to lean into that and tell the story of who they are across multiple game updates.”
Unlocking characters in character-based games can be daunting for many players through the means of either random loot boxes or an in-game Gacha system. Fortunately, that’s not the case here. “We have no loot boxes, and no Gacha system,” LaSaracina confirms. “It will be very akin to the Warframe model of work towards the character you want. [We] fully believe in a free and fair environment or being able to purchase the character to save time. We are taking Warframe’s free and fair approach, and modernizing it for a game that is being built now from the ground up. A super player-friendly system.”
Each character will also have their own stories further explored in “animated shorts, or story vignettes,” outside of the game’s narrative itself – much like how Apex Legends and Overwatch deal with expanding upon established lore.
It’s more Apex Legends than Overwatch in how it treats weapons, however, with every unique character able to wield whatever weapons you like. . Stefanelli said it can create an interesting meta-game for the more competitive players to mess around to try many different types of combinations.
Even if each player uses the same character to adventure with, you’ll still be able to stand out, thanks to in-depth customization options. “When you first acquire a character, they have their splash art look, their signature look. You can definitely customize them. We have styles, which are switching out different parts of your outfit, and then we have personas which are a full skin swap that really change the look of the character dramatically,” said Maduiera.
According to the developers, anyone who’s played the “Darksiders series are going to feel at home playing Wayfinder”. There’s a focus on fighting groups over massive battles with enemies who have large health bars, and you’re able to use speedy dagger strikes or big hammer blows, depending on your playstyle. It’s not just about gameplay variety either.
The reveal trailer places marginalized characters of different races at the forefront. High fantasy games are generally bad at including people of color, and this lack of inclusion is often handwaved away by creators as having something to do with realism or authenticity, despite having fantastical elements such as magic, monsters, and summons. Or that the game is “focusing on European aesthetics” alongside other reasons both superfluous to dwindling and derailing rants about how people of color never existed in those similar time periods.
“It’s something you need to be mindful of. Something you want to do,” Madureira said says. “For us, as a studio, we definitely want to. It’s always interesting in a fantasy universe because we don’t have the same nations as we do in our own actual world, but still representing everyone is something we are going to try to do. I’m glad that you noticed, and there’s a couple more we haven’t shown yet that keep adding to that [level of diversity,] and trend. We have some concepts of some characters wearing a turban. I just think it is boring to see the same old group lineups of the same old white guys. We are very mindful of it. It’s important to us at the studio, and something we are going to keep pushing – genders, age ranges, everything.”.
The word that stands out there is “mindful”. That the team is being mindful, and conscious of these characters to make them both “organic” and “cool”, rather than including them and calling it job done.
Wayfinder will have a Closed Playtest beginning on Dec. 13, 2022, that players can apply for, and the game will be set to release Early Access in Spring 2023 on PlayStation and PC. Be sure to check out the Wayfinder trailer, if you missed it at The Game Awards.
Written by Veerender Singh Jubbal on behalf of GLHF.
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