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Almost three years after I first discovered a new and ambitious RPG called The Wayward Realms from ex-Elder Scrolls developers, it's resurfaced as a full-blown Daggerfall spiritual successor with a Kickstarter and Early Access launch on the way.
To be totally frank, I was worried for a while there that The Wayward Realms had become too big for its britches and faded into vaporware, but developer OnceLost Games - led by Elder Scrolls veterans Ted Peterson and Julian Lefay - has broken its years-long silence with some exciting news about the self-styled "Grand RPG."
As far as I know, it wasn't until now that it was explicitly billed as an Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall spiritual successor, but it totally makes sense. Daggerfall was the first Elder Scrolls game Lefay took the lead on, with Peterson serving as designer. Likewise, Daggerfall is generally considered a big improvement over the first Elder Scrolls game, Arena, with lots of meaningful innovations, a greatly expanded map, and RPG mechanics that formed the foundation for the series as we know it today.
Similarly, OnceLost Games is selling The Wayward Realms as a step forward for the RPG genre, and it's even coined "a whole new class of game: The Grand RPG." To get an idea of what this means, the studio says the map is made up of "over one hundred, realistically scaled, islands known collectively as the Archipelago, where scores of factions vie for influence and power."
It's apparently "way bigger than most other games you can think of," with "big cities with hundreds or thousands of NPCs, deep, dark, dangerous forests, gigantic mountain ranges, sprawling swamps and marshlands, vast oceans, and more, brought to life through dynamic, procedural generation."
In a new video offering some behind-the-scenes looks at the work-in-progress title, OnceLost Games says it's trying to "restore scope, choice, consequences, and roleplaying to RPGs."
As for what The Wayward Realms is actually about, it's not entirely clear. It can't be set in the same universe as Daggerfall considering Xbox owns the Elder Scrolls IP through Zenimax. We do know it's set in a place "where scores of factions vie for influence and power. Kingdoms strive to maintain their dominance, upstarts seek to earn a place at the top, and dynasties set generational plots into motion."
Curiously, the game will feature a virtual Game Master that reacts dynamically to player choices and guides NPCs and factions to react and "plot their next move based on your actions, resulting in no two players having the exact same game experience." Although this feature sounds very exciting, it also makes me wary of the scope that AI's seemingly playing in what seems like a staggeringly large game for anyone to make, let alone a smaller studio. On that front, in the Kickstarter tease, Peterson mentions turning the studio's "volunteer team" into "paid, full-time members."
It's all very vague at the moment, but the game's said to test your resolve to become rich and famous by putting you up against rivals, mercenaries, monsters, spirits, and demons. "On their quest for fame and fortune, players will venture through strange lands, delve into foreboding dungeons, and traverse kingdoms full of humans, elves, orks [sic], dwarves and a few other unusual races," the devs say.
The Wayward Realms is listed on Steam but doesn't have a release date yet, or even a vague window, but OnceLost says the Kickstarter will launch this Spring "with the goal of bringing you an Early Access release." The Early Access will consist of a prologue quest taking you through a single area of the game, and if you contribute enough to the Kickstarter to get in, you'll get a copy of the game when it fully launches.
In the meantime, here are the best RPGs you can play today.
