Game Rant spoke with Madureira as well as marketing and engagement director AJ LaSaracina aboutWayfinder’s unique systems, narrative, and how prior projects have influenced its development. Interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
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Q: Please introduce yourself and give us a brief overview aboutWayfinder.
Madureira: My name is Joe Madureira. I’m the creative director and CEO of Airship Syndicate.Wayfinderis our brand new, online,multiplayer action RPG. It is character-based, free-to-play, and we are very excited about it.
Q: What can you tell us aboutWayfinder’s combat? How does it differ from other action RPGs?
Madureira: It is a little more action-based. If you’ve playedgames likeDarksiders, which we were involved in back in the day at Vigil, and our ownDarksiders: Genesis, it has that sort of fluid combat with abilities layered in that you develop over time. We have a crafting system that is one of our biggest progression areas in the game. You’ll be building weapons that evolve with your character as you play the game.
Q: How many different playable characters or classes will be available at launch?
Madureira: There will be five free characters at launch.
LaSaracina: To expand on that slightly, five characters will be live on our website, and a sixth character teased out. And the intent is to add more characters over time, in subsequent seasons of the game.
Q: Can you tell us more about the evolving weapons?
Madureira: In the game you play as an “echo” of a fallen hero. What you are actually crafting, are heroes and weapons that have fallen to the Gloom, which is ourworld-destroying threat. Wayfinders can manipulate magic to create, or recreate, fallen heroes or weapons—anything that the Gloom has encountered before. You will be using an item called the Gloom Dagger to bring back these heroes and weapons. Each weapon changes the gameplay significantly, as every weapon has an ability attached to it, and finding synergies between heroes’ abilities and weapons is part of the fun.
Q: Beyond weapons, how will players be able to customize and build their characters?
Madureira: Each character has their own backstory and established look out of the gate.Visual customizationcomes in styles, which are visual character slots. Obviously, color customization and options like that are available. We’re also introducing ‘Personas,’ which are full cosmetic skins that alter characters’ looks more dramatically.
Beyond that, each Wayfinder falls into one of three Archetypes. Warmaster, Arcanist, and Survivalist. Basically, as you level up characters in one of those Archetypes, you’ll gain experience that branches out into other Wayfinders in that same Archetype, so even if you switch characters, you’ll have ranked up quite a bit in the same Archetype. Obviously, there are alsoskill treesand other places where you can evolve your abilities.
LaSaracina: It’s important also to note that any character can use any weapon. So if you pick a tankier character because you like their look, and want to transform them into more of a DPS, you can do that with weapons. And as Joe said, the Gloom is ournarrative devicethat explains why there are multiple versions of each character. We’ll have tons of customization both in playstyle and in looks, so even if you see another character named Wingrave running around, he may have completely distinct armor, and weapons. We really want players to embrace their character and make them their own. Customization is super important to us.
Q: Tell us about the characters that will debut with the game.
Madureira: First off, we have Wingrave. He’s the one narrating the piece at The Game Awards. He is basicallya paladin—a fallen warrior struggling to regain his memories. All of the Wayfinders are struggling to regain some of their memories and you will learn more tidbits about them as you play those characters and the game progresses. Wingrave has a sort of a crisis of faith as he learns more about the Architects, which are the gods of this world that he blindly followed. And he starts to question how much good he’s actually done in their service. He is basically your tank character.
We have Niss, who is Eldrin. They are actually an enemy faction introduced later in the game, but she is working for the good guys now. She has shadow magic and fights with daggers.
Silo uses a gun and is a tactician. Every character can use every weapon, but we do have a sort of signature weapon that is packaged with characters and has good synergy with their ability kit. His family were smugglers. And after the Gloom happened, some members of the crew have soiled the name of his family, so he’s trying to find out what happened to them.
Kyros is an ancient being who is kind of a mystery; he speaks in dialogue we can’t even understand, and he’s from another time. He’s an arcanist. A battle mage with quick attacks; both magic and melee.
Sanja is a gladiator. The Last of the iron sisters, who are basically amazons, and she doesn’t know what happened to her people as well. She is a Warmaster like Wingrave, but she leans more into damage than defense.
LaSaracina: It’s also worth noting that all the characters are fully voice acted. We will be telling their stories both inside and outside the game with marketing trailers. We really want players to feel like they are taking the reins of a character, and more will be coming with each update.
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Q: TheWayfindertrailer teases mission mutators. What sorts of variables can players expect to encounter?
Madureira: We have a lot of fun surprises there. We thought ‘randomly generated dungeons are fun, but allowing players to set their own goals is more fun.’ For instance, if you need an item from a specific boss, you can tweak mutators to increase or guarantee the chances that that creature will spawn.
You can createriskier scenarios that give you better rewards. There are variants where enemies are frenzied and do a ton more damage, but drop more loot; they may also explode into acid puddles that cover the ground. We have a long list of mutators we’re hoping to get into the game. There are all kinds of stuff we hope players discover and experiment with. Letting players create their own goal for any given run was the idea behind that. We have a long list of mutators that we are still hoping to get in the game before players get in there. Definitely one of the things we are trying to push.
The Gloom contains fragmented memories of echoes of places that may or may not have existed. When you put the mutators into your Gloom Dagger, you open a doorway to a specific time and place recreated by the Gloom. There are mutators that affect creatures and spawns, there are mutators that create hazards, and there are mutators that create rewards.
LaSaracina: To add to that, when Joe says you’re going to a specific time and place, no two instances of those are the same. They are all randomized in terms of the obstacles, the characters, the loot, but the Gloom Dagger allows you to fine tune what you are going after. Like Joe mentioned, you may say “Hey, I want to go after these specific enemies because I know they will drop this material, so I cancraft or upgradethis specific weapon.” It’s important to note that those Lost Zones will be unique each time.
Q: Was the idea to mitigate grind fatigue?
Madureira: It’s more about enabling player choice, and making things more fun. you may randomly generate different things if you don’t have a goal in mind, but letting players set their own goal seems like a more fun way to do things.
Q: How does multiplayer work inWayfinder? Is it an MMO? An open-world game with multiplayer instancing?
Madureira: We have player hubs—Skylight is the major city, the main one. We have the highlands, a large open area, I wouldn’t say open world, but a huge open area where you can run into other players and join their party. We will have match-making, of course, so people can group up easily even if they aren’t standing next to each other. But generally, in town is where you see other players and group up.
LaSaracina: The easiest way to describe it, is to describe it likegames likeDestiny. We have large open spaces with smaller instanced dungeons. There is no server select. It’s a modern take on MMO that really invokes the feeling of playing with friends in social situations. There will be people you run into and decide to kill a world boss together, and there will also be the group of friends you group up with every night at eight o’clock to go do a couple Lost Zones—which is what we call our dungeons. But the goal is to make an online world to share with people.
Q: Did any other titles influence the development ofWayfindercore mechanics?
Madureira: I don’t think directly, but at the studio, a bunch of us have always played MMOs together,dating back toEverQuestand even before that. Obviously,World of Warcraft. We never really thought we’d get the chance to build a full-fledged MMO, and that’s still not the case, but I think this scratches a lot of itches for creating a persistent world. We’ll have social elements like player housing. Stuff outside combat. As far as other games that influence the mechanics, I can’t speak to the gameplay systems, but we pretty much play everything. So we’re really trying to make it fresh and current, and not what people think of when they think of an MMO or MMO-lite.
Q: You’ve mentioned the Gloom. If you had to sum upWayfinderstory in a couple sentences, what would you share?
Madureira: You are introduced to the world of Evenor and there is a mysterious alien race that destroys the gods of this world, and uses the magic of their creation against them. And it creates the Gloom. Which bends reality and fragments the world, and basically creates our version ofa multiverse. There’s a mysterious character called Omen who knows how to use this magic to bring things back as they were. You start off by bringing back some of these heroes—Wayfinders. At first, you don’t know how much of the world has survived—if anything. You light beacons that push back the Gloom in different areas. By going on these missions, reviving these characters, you start to reconnect the world and expand it. And eventually, hopefully defeat the mysterious alien race.
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Q: What inspirations influencedWayfinder’s art and graphical aesthetic?
Madureira: For us, it’s really just an evolution of Airship’s style. A lot of us here are fromVigil, from theDarksidersdays. Each game we’ve done since then, we started very hand-painted with Battlechasers, and then moved into Unreal withDarksiders. This is really the culmination of all our learnings, using Unreal and hand-painted art style. I come from comics, so there’s a heavy comic book influence in there as well. We tried to maintain as much of that illustrated that we can. It’s trickier in Unreal. Games likeRuined Kinghave simpler lighting which helps the textures shine through. But we’re going all out this time, with all the bells and whistles.
Q: Can you describe some of the development challenges you’ve faced while creating Wayfinders?
Madureira: I think one of the most interesting things that is an ongoing challenge is working on a game as a service;a free-to-play game. We are perfectionists. We want to deliver the highest quality game we can, so we’ll kill ourselves, then it’s out the door, and we just sit around waiting for people’s response. But this is the first game we really are building alongside the community. A lot of it will come down to player feedback. Building a game that is achieving what we need it to, but knowing that we have time to add to it, or fix things that we are unhappy with. It’s something we’re trying to get used to as developers. I’m really excited for the floodgates to open, and see what our community is like, and how people react to it.
Beyond that, this is the biggest game we’ve ever attempted as a studio, so just the sheer amount of content is mind-boggling. But I think we’ve got a pretty good handle on it.
Q: When can players expect Wayfinders to launch?
Madureira: AJ? Are we talking about that?
LaSaracina: The firstWayfindertechnical test will start on December 13th, just so players can get their hands on things. We are shooting for a full-blown launch and early access later in 2023 for PlayStation consoles and PC.
Q: Is there anything else you would like our readers to know?
Madureira: Just that we are super excited about the game. It’s been a dream of ours for years and years. And if you are intoDestiny,Warframe, fantasy worlds in general, or any of the games we made in the past, please check it out, give us feedback, and let us know what you think of it. We really value the opinions of our community and we are excited to work alongside you guys to make things great.
LaSaracina: One of the things Digital Extremes brings to the table is the idea of building a game alongside the community. The reason we are giving the details on the technical test is that we want our players involved right off the bat. We want them in ourDiscord. We want them talking to us. These are not marketing tests, they are closed and NDA’d and it is scary to do that, but Digital Extremes gets that. They understand and we understand that building games together is a two-way street.
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Wayfinderis scheduled to release in 2023 for PC, PS4, and PS5.
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