Exclusive Gaming Interviews Wyldheart Is a Cozy-Looking “Multiplayer Skyrim” with a Heavy Dose of Tabletop Inspiration Alessio Palumbo • at EDT Add on Google We spoke with Wayfinder Studios about Wyldheart, a fantasy co-op action roleplaying game with tabletop inspiration. Early Access is out soon. Last week, I received an invite to check out Wyldheart, a soon-to-be-announced co-op fantasy action RPG in development by Wayfinder Studios. The team is small and independent, but also filled with industry veterans, like co-founders Dennis Brännvall (formerly Creative Director of Star Wars Battlefront II) and Fia Tjernberg (formerly Studio Director of Technical Design at EA DICE). In this article: First Impressions: Dungeons, Hexes, and a Legendary Mace Under the Hood: Unreal Engine 5, AngelScript, and a Lean 10-Person Team Gameplay Systems: Time, Hope, and the Hex Crawl Vision and Roadmap: Tabletop Roots, Mod Support, and Early Access First Impressions: Dungeons, Hexes, and a Legendary Mace I was introduced to Wyldheart by Brännvall himself, then played a brief multiplayer session with him and the studio's Marketing Director, Erin Bower, and finally asked Brännvall several questions to learn even more about this intriguing title. Related Story Hunter: The Reckoning – Deathwish Is a Semi Open World RPG Inspired by Bloodlines, BG3, and Deus ExThe studio's tabletop RPG inspiration was immediately clear. Even in character creation, players can pick between various non-standard fantastical races (like the proud Freefolk, the little Mossling, and the towering Grimhorn) and then choose one of 19 backgrounds, such as Exiled Noble, Butcher, Baker, Squire, Gardener, and many more, each providing different starting items and skills. On that note, Wyldheart also has an entirely classless system, allowing players to assign points to Adventuring, Survival, Dungeoneering, Weaponry, and Magic. Once you're done with character creation, you have to start a new campaign or continue an existing one. This time, we were dropped into the so-called "Trial of the Slime Lord" right away and had to face various skeletons and slimes, up to a final boss, in a dimly lit dungeon-like location. The interaction with the environment seemed to be one of the game's strengths: removing hastily placed planks allowed us to use a rope to climb down and retrieve the loot of an unfortunate traveler who presumably fell prey to the dungeon's perils. Lockpicks can be used to open various locks, though you'll need to be skilled enough in lockpicking to have a high chance of success; sometimes, though, you can also try simply kicking the door down. Crouching is not only helpful for a stealth approach, but it also makes your character more observant, allowing you to spot potential traps. The loot can be anything from forks to satchels to torn journal pages, as well as, of course, potions, equipment, and weapons. It was after we courageously defeated the aforementioned Slime Lord that I found Marasoda, a powerful two-handed mace that dealt fire damage in addition to its regular crushing damage. As it goes in these games, everything was a little more fun when wielding that. The combat itself is fun enough, although perhaps still a bit rough around the edges. You can kick enemies as they get close to make some space, and a basic parry/riposte system already seems to be in place. You also need to manage stamina during melee combat. In another nod to tabletop roleplaying games, performing actions like clearing blocked paths will advance time (as any self-respecting dungeon master would do). Eventually, your character gets tired, and traveling in the middle of the night drains Hope, a finite resource. Once your Hope is entirely gone, it's game over, though there are ways to replenish it before that happens, as you'd expect. After clearing the dungeon, we traveled outdoors, made a campfire, cooked a meal (which gives you a nice bonus to max health), and slept. That's where they showed me that the world is connected in a grid-like fashion made of smaller maps. We traveled through them to reach the village of Elderlight; nothing happened, but we might have been ambushed if we had been unlucky. It's here that I was able to properly appreciate the game's unique art style, which vaguely reminded me of classic Fable. In the village, players can speak to local villagers, who have lives, stories, and schedules of their own. I was told that it's even possible to uncover quests by eavesdropping, deciphering rumors, and merely through exploration. One of the studio's goals is to make "Game Night" easier on everyone. You can play Wyldheart solo or up to 4 players in co-op with seamless drop-in/drop-out. Moreover, cloud-shared saves, group XP, and scaling difficulty mean the party can continue with someone offline without anyone getting left behind. It's designed for busy gamers, and its campaigns are expected to last around 10 hours of story and 15 hours of optional content. Overall, this first taste of Wyldheart (which is now on Kickstarter seeking a minimum of €150K in funding and will come soon to PC early access via Steam and the Epic Games Store, with a full launch slated before the end of 2027 on PC and consoles) was quite juicy. I really enjoy this kind of game, so I was eager to speak with Brännvall about it and learn more about its feature set. Under the Hood: Unreal Engine 5, AngelScript, and a Lean 10-Person Team Dennis, do you want to start by introducing yourself? Dennis Brännvall: Sure. My name is Dennis, and I'm one of the founders of Wayfinder Studios. I work as the designer and director for our first game, Wyldheart. We've been working on it for the past four years, ever since we started the studio. We said it was going to be a five-year project to get everything up and running for an online RPG, and now we're finally ready to come out of stealth and start showing it to the world. Before starting Wayfinder Studios, I worked as the creative director for Star Wars Battlefront at DICE, together with my wife and a good friend of ours, who both worked in technical leadership positions at DICE, at Funcom making Anarchy Online, and at Star Stable making Star Stable Online. We're a small studio. Are you all working remote? Dennis Brännvall: Yes. Forever remote, across the world. How long have you been working on this? Dennis Brännvall: We're now in our fourth year of development, though some of that time also went into starting the company and studio. We're ten developers in total. You previously worked at DICE, which uses Frostbite. How was the switch to Unreal technology? Dennis Brännvall: There are still similarities with the online multiplayer handling, ranged attacks with crosshairs, melee combat. We used to do a lot of lightsabers; now we use normal steel sabers. Unreal isn't radically different from Frostbite in terms of principles. But the biggest advantage has been the ecosystem. Every partner we work with already knows Unreal. If we need assets, there's a full marketplace. None of that was available in Frostbite. A lot has been very positive. Are you on the latest version of Unreal 5? Dennis Brännvall: We just did an engine upgrade a week ago, which is part of why we're slightly late with the current patch. There are always a few bugs that pop up after an upgrade. We're working through those and plan to ship the patch very soon. The new version has procedural workflow improvements for things like spawning vegetation, and there are several features we're excited about. Have you made any custom modifications to the engine? Dennis Brännvall: We use a plugin called AngelScript for most of our scripting, developed by Hazelight Studios in Sweden. They're good friends of ours. Using AngelScript means we don't have to go into the C++ layer as frequently, which makes things more stable and less crash-prone. Beyond that, we use plugins for procedural dungeon technology,...
