Wyldheart Impression
The game's focus on shorter campaigns and smaller communities should hold it in good stead as it looks to cater for those looking for fun adventures and gaining a sense of completion from them without having to schedule out months in advance.
Wayfinder Studios was founded by industry veterans previously known for their work with companies such as EA DICE, Embark Studios, and Mojang Studios on titles like Star Wars Battlefront II . Its first title, Wyldheart , builds upon a mixture of the recent popularity of co-op survival titles and tabletop-style adventuring. Ahead of its full reveal today, RPGamer was given the opportunity to try out an early build of the game alongside Creative Director and studio co-founder Dennis Brännvall and Marketing Director Erin Bower.
Players start out by creating a character, including choosing an ancestry, a background, and various appearance options. The game features a classless progression system, though the background choice offers a starting point that players can choose to follow or diverge from. The play session, which lasted around forty minutes, covered the starting point of a campaign, where players need to escape from an initial slime-focused dungeon. It should be noted that the build didn't have much of the narrative and certain presentational elements such as voice acting, largely focusing on introducing the gameplay basics.
[caption id="attachment_187501" align="aligncenter" width="640"] The initial dungeon features plenty of slime.[/caption]
Wyldheart is built around shorter individual campaigns that allow parties to get a good sense of accomplishment and progression, even if their sessions together are limited. Each individual campaign is planned to last around ten hours for its main story, with around fifteen hours of optional content. The game features drop-in/drop-out multiplayer for up to four players, including cloud-shared saves, group XP, and a scaling difficulty based on the number of players. It is designed to allow players to adventure through campaigns with different groups or take on multiple campaigns with the same group, with the catch-up mechanics ensuring that those who might miss a session aren't left behind.
Gameplay basics will be fairly familiar to those with experience of recent survival games. Players have five quickslots that they can swap between, two of which are devoted to weapons and the other three to utility items. Many of the rooms have things to interact with, with the initial dungeon including a hidden hole that players can jump into and use a rope to get back out of. The game intentionally eschews mini-maps for its dungeons to try to keep players immersed in the dungeons, with players encouraged to use way markers or create them by potentially lighting torches to note where they have previously explored.
[caption id="attachment_187503" align="aligncenter" width="640"] The game seems pretty forthcoming with loot, giving players plenty of choice.[/caption]
The dungeon featured a number of rooms and paths to explore, with plenty of enemies to grab the attention of, as well as a few traps to be wary of tripping. When players do encounter enemies, the game features straightforward attack and block controls combined with a stamina meter. Players can also kick enemies to stagger them, as well as potentially break down doors that might be blocking their path. Combat can be a bit chaotic, and it can be easy to swing and miss, particularly when armed with shorter weapons. However, it does impress the usefulness of teamwork and positioning with both the threat of friendly fire and clear efficacy of taking down foes faster when working together.
The demo build was quite forthcoming with loot, offering plenty of weapons and items in the environment and from enemies. Weapons have limited durability and will break after enough usage, so players will need to ensure they carry multiple. Even at the early stage, there looks to be a decent mixture of options available, including swords, shields, axes, maces, and bows, and even less conventional weapons like a large thighbone. After solving a fairly straightforward puzzle, the last part of the dungeon involved a traditional boss fight against a giant slime, which showcased how players can use the environment to help with encounters; here, the boss could be dealt with much more quickly by using its weakness to fire and some conveniently-placed braziers that could be picked up and thrown.
[caption id="attachment_187506" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Wyldheart's world map makes use of a hexagonal grid.[/caption]
The end of the dungeon kicked off the main adventure, with players being tasked with delivering a message to a nearby town. This allowed the game to demonstrate its world map, as well as its multiplayer dialogue, where players can vote on which response to give. The map draws inspiration from board games with its hex-based grid, with players able to explore each part of the grid. In addition to towns and dungeons, players can find a variety of other handcrafted events and scenes in the world map. Players can also camp, where they can cook, craft, repair items, and rest.
One notable element of Wyldheart is its hope mechanic, which adds a little bit of jeopardy while also adding a bit of a spin on tabletop RPG resurrection. Each character begins with five hearts, shown above their health bar. Whenever players get knocked out or travel during the middle of the night, they lose one heart, though hearts can be regained at town. When all the hearts are gone, the player is said to be in a hopeless state; getting knocked out again in this state causes the character to die. However, a dead character is not necessarily gone. The player's friends can go to a temple or use a revive scroll to bring them back to life, or the player can choose to create a new character to rejoin their friends with and potentially even use that new character to rescue their old one.
Wyldheart holds a lot of promise at this early stage. The game's focus on shorter campaigns and smaller communities should hold it in good stead as it looks to cater for those looking for fun adventures and gaining a sense of completion from them without having to schedule out months in advance. It's been built on a solid gameplay base, and if the adventures succeed in the way the team is planning, players should find plenty to enjoy with lots of flexibility about how they do so.
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