Game Rant recently spoke with Joe Madureira who had a lot to share about the fast-approaching release Wayfinder and what makes it unique among cooperative action games. A reoccurring theme throughout the conversation was an emphasis on empowering players to personalize their own gameplay experience.
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Player-Determined Goals in Wayfinder
The benchmark of a good looter shooter is how fun and challenging it is to acquire loot. Even if the loot itself is amazing, players will quickly lose interest if obtaining it is a bore or a chore. Madureira’s proposition with Wayfinder is to allow players to set their own objectives:
Few things are more frustrating than running through a raid or even a roguelite run, hoping for a crucial, randomized drop, only to come away disappointed. By allowing players to determine the spawn rates and drops of items, players can make the fatigue of gear grinding better. They can also tailor the goals of each individual game session to feel distinct from other runs, but players must pay a price in order to make those adjustments, in the form of mutators.
Choose Your Own Challenges
Wayfinder’s frame narrative revolves around a caustic presence known as the Gloom, which has fragmented reality into a multiverse, but the Wayfinders possess a tool known as the Gloom Dagger. This can both recover things claimed by the Gloom and distort its forces to affect Lost Zones, which are essentially pocket dimensions that act as dungeons. Those distortions of the Gloom manifest as mutators:
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Toggles like increased enemy health or encountering more hazards may not sound inherently compelling, but truly creative mutator systems have tremendous potential to enrich the gameplay. If the variables available to players resemble the best of Hades’ Pacts of Punishment or even the multiplayer options available in Halo, the same environments suddenly offer many more possibilities and distinct experiences.
Again, Madureira reiterated that allowing players to create their own goal for a given run was the guiding principle behind the Gloom dagger’s mechanics. In a sense, Wayfinder has as much in common with Deep Rock Galactic—a multiplayer game where players can select their mission type—as it does with Diablo, where loot features more prominently, but is left entirely to chance.
Skill Breadth and Character Depth
Another way players can customize their runs is by playing with different characters. But one of the drawbacks of character-driven games is the need to “build” new characters before they can become combat viable. One way that Wayfinder is mitigating those frustrations is through its Archetype system. Wayfinders of the same Archetype (class), like the Warmasters Sanja and Wingrave, share certain skills that will carry over between both characters as the player levels their Archetype.
Players will still want to individually customize and power up specific characters, which is a core part of the appeal of any title featuring a character collection. Making it easier for players to access a variety of different characters will ensure that parties are flexible, which is one of the hallmarks of excellent multiplayer games.
Wayfinder is currently scheduled to launch early in 2023 for PC, PlayStation 4, and PlayStation 5.
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