Ahead of the weekend, we touched on the reveal of Wayfinder Studios' Wyldheart, a cooperative RPG that is coming from ex-Star Wars: Battlefront developers and is looking to make game nights easier than ever before. We covered the reveal and even shared a dedicated preview, but we also had the chance to speak with creative director and studio co-founder Dennis Brännvall and marketing director Erin Bower to learn more about the project, including how its multiplayer elements function.
On this topic, we inquired about the cooperative nature and how the gameplay functions with parties of four individuals but does actually support up to 20 players in one campaign through the implementation of a West March-style shared save state.
Brännvall explained to us: "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 West March'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 busy 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."
Bower then continued with: "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."
So perhaps Wyldheart is one to watch, especially if you have a group of friends who love to play tabletop RPGs but struggle to frequently meet up in-person, due to time constraints or the distance between various players.
You can see our dedicated interview with Wayfinder Studios below for more on Wyldheart.
