“When we started this studio, we didn’t think we would ever make a game of this scale again,” said Airship Syndicate’s Joe Madureria. wayfinderthe studio’s free-to-play action MMO, just launched on Game AwardsThis is the first milestone for a game looking to gain a foothold in a competitive ecosystem full of games that buy you time.
Wayfinder is the product of a four-year partnership with Digital Extremes, the publisher of the game and the source of experience for the Airship Syndicate team. Joe Madureira has been around for a while now, responsible for the Darksiders series and a steady stream of high-quality minigames like Lord of Destruction: A League of Legends Story and The Chaser. With Wayfinders, Madureira Studios is returning to the genre he thinks they’re good at, and the games they’ve always wanted to make.
But what exactly can you expect from Wayfinder? As a third-person action MMO, you’ll find your home in Skylight, a safe hub where players can take quests from NPCs, craft weapons and pathfinders (characters), and Crash in the apartment. From here they can venture into the Highlands, an open-world area with a range of daily and public activities, or into the instanced Lost Sectors, which act as moddable dungeons that players can modify for different experiences.
The main game loop has you go out with a fully voiced, unique Wayfinder and weapon of your choice to collect treasure and resources from the world to overcome what awaits and return with useful loot. You’ll then move on to crafting new characters and gear, customizing your home, taking on more quests, and advancing an account level, which will serve as an overall indicator of game progress.
According to Madureira, the game is built around four pillars: “exploration, adventure, combat, and collection,” which clearly interpenetrate. Lost Lands; seemingly simple instance quests that you and your friends can take on at first glance, but these full dungeons can span anywhere between eight and twenty rooms and are heavily modified by mutants, craftable Items that toggle the rewards of monsters, traps, bosses, and lost people when used.
“You might need to run something 20 times to get the Jailer’s key, but I have all the right mutators to spawn the Jailer. Let’s form a team and get this done!” Madureira said, offering an example of the mutation How the body can bring rich experience. The reason for such a mission is for something new, and it expands to customizable player housing, which the team hopes to expand to entire neighborhoods beyond the apartment system available at launch. “We hope all of this will allow players to customize their gaming experience.”
Player housing, non-linear gameplay experiences, collection-focused progression, and an emphasis on catching new and unique pathfinders… omg, this sounds a lot like Warframe! Madureira and team admit this, but are adamant that this isn’t a fantasy punk Warframe. “From the beginning of the project, the idea was our own, but a lot of the Warframe DNA and experience was shared. They were very careful not just to make this Warframe, but there was some overlap in terms of systems. This partnership is about leveraging their experience .”
It’s clear that Digital Extremes is more than just the five form wallets behind Wayfinder, although the resources they provide clearly allow Airship Syndicate to broadly expand Wayfinder’s reach.
“We thought we’d be this independent little rags-to-riches studio in Austin. But we’re ambitious people, and when we have partners like DE supporting our dream of creating a new online world. It’s not existing IP, we’re creating it from the ground up. As a big MMO player and a fan of the social aspect of these games. If you’d asked me 5 or 6 years ago if we would have made a game like this, I would have been very skeptical.
“I think creating an online world – you definitely need the right partners, funding and resources, and it’s hard for smaller studios to get that. Also free to play, it’s an arena that’s hard to get into without experience. No DE As partners … they’ve basically been mentoring us and teaching based on their past experience. Without it, I don’t think we would even try.”
With Wayfinder’s PC technical beta registration now live, a console beta launching in June, and a full Early Access release planned for later, Madureira has big ambitions for Wayfinder, which he hopes will inspire those decisions Players jump into their worlds to recreate them.
“It’s always a lot of fun building new IP. Creating new worlds…that’s something I really enjoy. Every project is a little bit different. For this one, we definitely went with ‘how can this world exist outside of the game? “The idea of approaching it. Shows, movies, whatever. We’re really trying to make the characters really interesting and create a world where we can tell a lot of exciting stories.”
As for how he’s going to hook players in the first place, winning them over from the concrete boulders that litter the field service environment, he’s only focused on what the team is good at. “We’re going to have a really deep combat system, cool characters that look great, great creatures…
“We can only do whatever we want and hope for the best, but there are no guarantees. If you liked our past games and liked our aesthetic, it’s a 10x. We’re going to give it our all.”
