PAX East started with a bang on Thursday when I had the opportunity to play a new Wayfinder demo and interviewed Creative Director Joe Madureira, President Ryan Stefanelli, and Marketing and Engagement Director AJ LaSaracina. For this interview, I focused on clarifying some points that seemed to have left some room for confusion in our recent coverage and about their plans as they close in on early access release in May. If you haven’t seen our recent articles on Wayfinder’s gameplay, press event preview, and monetization I highly suggest you do as those articles set the foundation for a lot of what we discussed.
Gender Locked Roles?
One of the most common comments I have seen relating to Wayfinder recently is that it’s another example of game design where roles are gender locked. This was a worry of mine as well because when it comes to multiplayer games I tend to like playing characters that match my gender because I view my characters as how I’m presenting myself to others. Since there are three main archetypes (warmaster, arcanist, and survivalist) that define a character’s role and five characters we knew about before the Saturday panel, it seemed obvious at least one archetype would only be available on one character. Now with the sixth character reveal, there is a hero of each gender for each archetype.
Additionally, rather than viewing the character I play the way I normally would in an MMO, it’s probably more useful to think of them more along the lines of games like Overwatch and League of Legends. In those games, you choose a specific character to play and that character has their own story and background, rather than creating a character to represent the player. Additionally, Stefanelli pointed out that although each character starts with a specific weapon to use, every character can use every weapon. Equipping these different weapons will also allow characters to function differently than they normally can. This allows for more customization of playstyle on a single character than in the previously mentioned games.
One of the bonuses of having the player characters be specific characters in the lore is they can tell more specific stories regarding each and how they fit into the world. Also, more than playing a specific hero we are playing their echo, which only remembers a certain amount of their past life. This helps explain a bit about why while playing Wingrave you might see other Wingraves running around, as it’s a different echo of the same person. As much as I enjoyed the demo I was able to play, I wish I could have seen more of how recovering the echoes work and how that relates to the storyline. That’s something to look forward to in the future!
The last part which soothed my concerns about being forced to play certain characters to play a preferred archetype is that they plan to introduce new characters with every season and that will only continue to offer more and more options. Additionally, Stefanelli pointed out that once you level one character in an archetype to 30 it becomes easier to level other characters of that archetype because some benefits transfer over. This is amazing because it means that even if I don’t love playing a particular hero for an archetype right now if they release one I like more down the road, it’d be pretty easy to switch over. This is also a smart choice because the team very much views Wayfinder as a hero-collecting game, and wants to encourage players to try the other heroes instead of sticking to one.
FOMO in Wayfinder
I don’t know about anyone else, but I have reached a point where when I hear that a game will have seasons or a battle pass, I immediately get a bit of apprehension. Since I like to spread my time between many different games, feeling like I have to play a certain amount to unlock things or just miss out on them is a deterrent. In some games, you can miss entire story arcs if you don’t play them in the current season. To me, that’s the worst implementation. It’s bad enough to miss out on cosmetics, but to never get to see the story because I didn’t pay when it was current is something that has caused me to drop games completely.
So when I heard that they plan to introduce new characters and content for Wayfinder as part of a season system it set off red flags for me. Thankfully LaSaracina was quick to say that in their case seasons just refer to how they are putting out content and players wouldn’t lose access to things once the season is over, and players who come in after a season is over will still be able to play with those characters and experience any story added during these seasons. This is the best possible answer I could have heard, and is quite refreshing in an endless battle pass/seasonal content hellscape I often feel like many games try to trap me in.
Group Content and Playing with Others
We also had the chance to chat about party sizes and plans for larger-scale content. For now, when comes to instanced content dungeon parties are a group of three, but you can also do instanced content if you have less than three players. All the dungeons will scale with the number of players in them. Three is a bit of an odd group number, but it does work with there being three different archetypes that can be played. There are also world bosses which can spawn and so far, they have seen 9-12 people trying to take those on at one time, though no one has beaten those bosses yet.
You’ll also notice I haven’t mentioned anything about PvP, which is because there is no PvP in Wayfinder. According to Stefanelli one of their main goals for the Early Access phase is ensuring the content they have already is solid and the best experience for players. That said, they do have an interest in potentially developing instanced content for larger groups if that’s something the players would like. One of the things I found reassuring was that they are trying to keep their focus fairly narrow. Too many games have tried to do everything and end up doing nothing well.
Hopefully, they can hit their marks for quality and player retention well enough to give them time to build Wayfinder into the superstar it can be. There’s a lot of potential here for a long-running fun game, and I can’t wait to see where they go with it.
