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We spoke with creative director Dennis Brännvall and marketing director Erin Bower to learn all about the rustic TTRPG-inspired Wyldheart, which has just been revealed in full to the world.
"Hello everyone and welcome back to Gamereactor. Today we have a really exciting interview for you because I'm here with two members of the development team for a very exciting new game that has just really been revealed to the world. We're talking about Wyldheart and I'm here with both Dennis and Erin from Wayfinder Studios to talk a little bit about it and this interview is exciting as well because I've just come off of like almost 35 minutes of playing Wyldheart with both Dennis and Erin giving me a very good detailed exploration and exploration through this world and it's been a pleasure. So to kick things off, and I suppose this is probably best geared for you Dennis, obviously you have a history with shooters, with dice, working on the Battlefield franchise, Battlefront franchise sorry. That's quite a change to go from Battlefront to a cozy co-op action RPG, so what led you to wanting to head this direction and explore this sort of area?
It was quite a difference actually, so I think it started back like working at at dice making massive large-scale shooters. Obviously you hang out with your colleagues after work, some of us were playing tabletop games in one of the rooms upstairs, you know Warhammer or D&D and I think that's when like whenever we talked about like what if we weren't making shooters because let's face it this studio is going to make shooters for the foreseeable future, what would we do? And I think all of us, me in particular, but anyone that was sort of hanging out with like RPGs because RPGs is what we grew up with, that's kind of the reason why we came in, started in this industry and so that's what we wanted to do."
"At the same time we have done a lot of squad-based or like cooperative experiences online, so we knew how to do those things and like online melee combat with lightsabers or online shooting for you know like a bow and a gun, it's still like projectiles that need to go, so all of those things just came together in that let's make something that is multiplayer, that is cooperative, but maybe a little bit more towards the style and tone and type of genre that we really enjoyed playing ourselves. And obviously you mentioned there that D&D, those sort of tabletop experiences, are very key inspirations for what you're looking to achieve with Wildheart. After playing the game you can see those inspirations creep in in regards to how the gameplay is structured, how the cooperation element works, how the game doesn't hold your hand per se, you have to sort of understand the world and figure it out for yourself, so when you were going into making Wildheart how did you outline those sort of key areas that you wanted to sort of highlight and pay homage to both D&D and tabletop RPGs? Yeah, so many of us at Wayfinder have played tabletop RPGs for the longest time, many of us lean in terms of preference towards maybe a more older school approach to RPGs and that's not hating on fifth edition or anything, it's just different flavors, right? So our design philosophy sort of harkens back to 80s and 90s style of more old-school RPGs. It's probably a lot less focused on evil monsters in a dark fantasy environment, nor is it like you become a god and fight other gods kind of high fantasy approach, it's more grounded, we're calling it rustic fantasy but sort of an homage to some of our favorite sort of Indian old-school RPGs and many of them are quite ruthless in terms of there is punishment if you die, like there's consequences to your actions and also we're not always holding your hand throughout the different ways that you can approach certain things. So I think that's the inspiration, sort of indie old-school tabletop RPGs."
"And just as you mentioned it there, what does happen if you die? Because in some old-school D&D campaigns that's it, your characters are gone, so what happens when you ultimately mess things up in World Heart? So we are a little bit more forgiven just because it's an action RPG, it's not like a turn-based experience where you really can weigh each one of your actions, it's more fast-paced than that. So we have a system called hope, every time that you suffer for example a knockdown in combat, you lose a hope unless one of your teammates or friends sort of revive you before time runs out. And that's represented by like a Zelda-style heart bar, if you do run out of hope then that means you're hopeless and then when you're at zero hope or zero hearts, another knockdown is actually going to kill your character. However, so then it's permadeath but not really like in a tabletop RPG setting, death is just another state that prevents you from playing this character."
"So that means your friends can, if they have a revived scroll handy, then they can just use that to bring you back or maybe you have to go to a temple and get this, but it's going to cost a bit of gold to get that. On the other hand, maybe it was time for that character to pass into Beyond the Veil, so then you can just create a new character and we do have some catch-up mechanics in terms of if we're very far into the campaign, then your new character is actually going to have quite a bit of bonuses to catch up. So then you can just join the campaign as a new character instead, kind of tabletop-ish in that regard. Now obviously we've just come up playing the game as a trio, but Wildheart, it works solo, you can play it with one person, you play it with up to four people. Yes. With that being the case, how have you fundamentally sort of built the game so that it feels seamless for a solo player and also for groups of four? How does that impact your philosophy on difficulty? Well, one thing that's worth calling out is that even though you can play four characters or players at a time, it is possible we have 20 character slots in each campaign, which means that either you all share multiple characters and sort of do it that way, but it also means that you can invite up to 20 players to join in that campaign. You just can't all play at the same time. So that's very inspired by a slightly more recent development in the tabletop space called Westmarch's style of play, which means that scheduling can be difficult. Not everyone has the time to show up for game night, especially if game night is three nights a week. And so you don't have to join every single session."
"The game always sort of like, once everyone is logged off, the save state is uploaded to the cloud, and then whenever you boot up the campaign again, the first one downloads it, and then you keep going. So that means that its supports really drop in and out. Maybe some of us play quite frequently, while our dear old friend over there who's too..."
"...every once in a while, but they can still join and have fun. And so there's no like, if you do find gear, obviously you can share that across, and our progression kind of leans heavily into gear progression. Character progression also plays a part in your power level, but you can just hand someone a really good sword, even though they might not be at the same XP as you are, they're still going to be useful, hopefully."
"The shared cloud save also is really great if you have friends who love to do crafting and gathering in games like these. You can have them log online, they can do that crafting and gathering when you're not available, and then that means that all of you can get together and just jump straight into a dungeon once you can get the whole squad online. So it creates a lot of that flexibility that you get in games like MMOs, without the kind of overwhelmingness of being on a server with thousands of people."
"Interesting. And with it having that inspiration from D&D and those tabletop RPGs, creation and having that sort of human creative element seeping through Wild Hearts is absolutely paramount. You can feel that when you play the game, everything feels very handcrafted.
And I bring that up because, as of recording this, it's the day after..."
"well, the day after DLSS 5 was announced, and it's brought that artificial intelligence debate once again. So talking about it, what is your stance about artificial intelligence at Wayfinder Studios? Do you have a current feeling about the way that this DLSS 5 AI filter thing is going to affect video game development?
I think this might be for you, Erin. I am so out of touch with this news. I'm sorry."
"Yeah, I just saw it yesterday. So at Wayfinder, we're really against generative AI. We don't use it in our games. We have a lot of really talented artists that are really working hard on hand crafting everything in our game. So yeah, we don't use gen AI in our games. We have to learn a little bit more about the DLSS 5 kind of developments to understand what that is. But I don't think there's any plans to use that or things like that in our game."
"Yeah, like our game, obviously, as you'll see, there's a huge overworld. And each one of those sort of hexagons, this is a hex crawl at the end, you can zoom in and then explore. Each one of them should hopefully contain something interesting for you to do. And then all of those scenes, every single one of them is handcrafted. All the rooms in the dungeons are handcrafted. All the villages are handcrafted by us. Then we use, we do love procedural tech. So we do some work in terms of we have set up the different types of stats on a weapon, but then we procedurally generate what stats they are. We do, like I said, the dungeon rooms are handcrafted, the rooms, but then we use procedural tech to stitch them together to create fresh new layouts. So I think we're more into this mixture between handcrafted and procedural. We don't have to place every single tree in our game, for example. So we're clever that way. And with a studio that we're 10 developers, we're a tiny startup, if you will, making quite a massive game. So then we're applying savvy 20 years in the industry tricks to get stuff out there. But they're probably a lot more traditional these days when in the world of AI in terms of how we get stuff done."
"No, it's good to hear because that's what you want. We like it when video games are handcrafted.
So it's always pleasant to hear that. Obviously, this is the official sort of reveal of Wildheart.
Everyone's first getting to meet the game. You sort of teased it and the website's been launched prior to this moment happening, but now people are starting to properly see Wildheart. So with that being the case, what's one thing that you're really excited for fans to experience for themselves in Wildheart? I'm so biased. I like so many things. But Erin, I've been around it for so many years now. Maybe your perspective would be fun to hear here."
"Yeah, I think one of the things that's really great about Wildheart is the classless progression system. From playing D&D for so many years, you start to kind of get stuck into little metas. And even if you end up doing cross-class builds, it's always a little bit limited. You have to put your points into a certain stat to be effective in combat. Whereas in this game, you can freely spread your points amongst a bunch of different role-playing abilities as well, things to do with crafting and gathering, cooking, being able to be a little bit more sneaky."
"But you can also then pair that with something really unexpected. You could be a heavy armor wearing, mace wielding character, but then have a bunch of points in trap detection, which is not what you would expect in a game like D&D. So I love that kind of creativity, and I'm super excited to see all the different builds that players are going to come up with."
"Lovely. Well, then one final question for you to wrap this up. Obviously, the game's just been presented to the world, so it's still very fresh. But what are we looking at in regards to launch plans, platforms, that sort of stuff?
Yeah, so Wildheart will be coming out on PC and early access, we're hoping later this year."
"And then eventually we'll be porting over to a couple different platforms, ideally PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo Switch. But all of that information will be confirmed in the future. Exciting, very exciting indeed. So yeah, this has been Wildheart. We'll have plenty more for you on this game in the coming future when we find us ready to share more. And otherwise, yeah, thank you for joining me both today, Dennis and Aaron. It's been an absolute pleasure getting to play the game and then getting to speak with you. And I'm sure no doubt we'll be speaking again at some point in the future. So thank you very much."
