Wyldheart came from a place of passion. The debut title comes from Wayfinder Studios, a team made up of ex-AAA veterans, many of them from the Battlefield studio DICE.
Wyldheart takes the dungeon crawler to the rustic west, an online action RPG that has a heavy emphasis on co-op. It’s a big shift away from the developers’ past work on games like Battlefield 1 and Star Wars Battlefront, but one that has revitalized the team and left them excited about what comes next. Wyldheart takes familiar fantasy systems and makes them more rustic, striding away from dark high fantasy towards a more rural, lived-in world.
Wyldheart Aims For That Tabletop Feel
Wyldheart, at least in early access, will have one campaign, with more being added through the run to 1.0. Each campaign brings the player and their crew to a new part of the world, with potential for character crossover. It’s an experience that’s heavily inspired by TTRPGs like Dungeons & Dragons, and that starts with character creation. After a player starts a campaign, they can invite friends to join them. Once a friend joins, they can access the campaign at any time, even if the host isn’t there.
Once you and your friends are together, you can actually see each other’s character creation happen live. It’s meant to emulate the feeling of episode zero of a new TTRPG campaign, where you and your friends sit around a table and make your characters together. It’s really cool to see these changes happen in real time, and while Wyldheart doesn’t have a class system, it’s funny to think about how things can go sideways. Maybe you spend 5 minutes working on a great-looking character, only to see a monstrosity your friend made and decide that the whole party should be some mix of weird.
No Classes, No Problems
Wyldheart doesn’t lock you into a playstyle from the jump, instead letting players build their characters out over the campaign. There are multiple skill trees that will let you make a character entirely your own, being able to mix abilities, attacks, and spells at will. This also opens up co-op more, where a new player doesn’t have to backfill a role if they join partway through a campaign.
After your characters are made, it’s dungeon crawling time. Wyldheart features action combat, with different enemies being weak to various types of damage. Slimes may not take a ton of physical damage, but fire damage will waste them much faster. Combat scales with the number of players, so if you have a full party, expect lots of fights. There’s a good mix of puzzle solving, where in one instance, our party had to loot specifically coloured items off enemies and slot them in the right spots to move on.
The dungeon we played through had a final slime boss fight. Our party quickly divided roles: one member took on the smaller slime mobs, another picked up the caskets of fire that could deal huge damage, and our last member protected the fire bomber. We could’ve just all teamed up on the boss, but that would’ve taken much longer, the fire bombs doing a much bigger chunk of damage. I’m curious to see how other boss mechanics come into play, as it was nice to see an encounter that relied on some outside-the-box thinking rather than just dodges and attacks.
Explore The World, One Space At A Time
Once you clear a dungeon, the overworld opens up. Wyldheart uses a grid system, something similar to the board game Settlers of Catan. You need to spend time moving between spaces, with each new one offering different encounters and places to explore. We didn’t get to delve too deeply into exploration, but I am curious to see how varied the objectives and loot are across these spaces. These areas will change if you run another campaign, making each playthrough varied in its map design.
Time continues to pass as you move through the spaces, aiming to give players a sense of real adventure. You can’t just cross the map in a handful of minutes; instead, days and nights pass by as your party treks. You’ll also have to watch out for the weather and exhaustion, and take breaks at campfires to rest. The campfires also offer time to cook, repair weapons, craft, and more. It’s not just about the mechanical reasoning behind stops; the developers hope you use the travel and rest segments to actually talk and hang out with your friends.
Don’t Get Married To One Weapon
Wyldheart does feature weapon degradation, with the intention of making the player actually use the host of weapons found in the dungeons. It doesn’t want you to just hunker down on one sword and not use anything else. How this will feel mid-dungeon remains to be seen, especially if your weapons break in boss encounters and potentially end in death.
As much focus as Wyldheart puts on co-op, it’s also aiming to be a great single-player experience. If you and your friends can’t log on at the same time often, you can still go out and journey alone. This goes to your party as well, as you’re all able to log on when you can and improve your characters, with the goal being to group back up together for tougher dungeons and fights. It’ll still totally function as a solo player if you’re the only one playing the game, where the world becomes your own entirely.
More To Come
After spending a few hours in the world of Wyldheart, there’s a lot to look forward to. We hit a town that ended the preview section, where you can interact with townsfolk, take a bath, pick up side quests, and more. The combat feels quick and has good weight, and I’m curious to see how the story plays out throughout the first campaign. There’s potential here, and I’m curious to see how the full campaign feels during its early-access launch on PC later this year.
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Author: 360 Technology Group
