Wyldheart Preview: A promising adventure for all TTRPG lovers

If you're a fan of shooters and particularly EA and DICE's recent effort to reboot Star Wars: Battlefront, you are probably somewhat familiar with the names Dennis Brännvall and Fia Tjernberg. These two were crucial to both Star Wars: Battlefront and Star Wars: Battlefront II, with Brännvall serving as the creative director of the latter game and Tjernberg being the former studio director of technical design at DICE too. The reason I'm highlighting this is because following EA deciding to move on from all things Battlefront, at least for the foreseeable future, the pair left DICE to create their own studio known as Wayfinder Studios, a developer that has just properly lifted the curtain on its debut title.

Known as Wyldheart, this game is a far-cry from Battlefront as it trades large-scale multiplayer sci-fi warfare for that of a rustic RPG world with an inherent focus on cooperative gameplay. Essentially, imagine going from making Call of Duty to Baldur's Gate. That's the sort of leap we're talking about here. I would also know as recently I had the wonderful opportunity to try an early portion of Wyldheart, a brief demo that was led by Brännvall and Wayfinder's marketing director, Erin Bower. You can even see an interview that I conducted with this pair below that features snippets of our own gameplay from Wyldheart.

For those looking for a more comprehensive preview, we can get into that business now. It should be said that the part of Wyldheart I was able to test was only a snippet of the wider game, which promises a persistent multiplayer world and multiple campaigns that last around 10 hours each. So it's hardly a firm taste of what the end product could look like, even if I am eager to see more.

The long and short of Wyldheart is that this is a cooperative game heavily inspired by TTRPGs and Dungeons & Dragons. The premise is all about taking basic narrative anchors and then using this to make a story that is your own. For example, you create a character out of three race options (Freefolk, Mossling, Grimhorn) and then build them out further with defined jobs that sets the precedent for how a character plays and also by tweaking the model with a variety of customisation elements to give the character a personal touch. From here, you can then load into a world where you steadily complete tasks and missions that tie into a wider story. And again, the cooperative nature allows a play session to support up to four users at a time but the persistent world, without one player serving as the host, means far more players can partake by hopping in at differing times and helping advance the story and aid in progression in other ways. The press release mentions that this game intends to make the nature of scheduling a game night easier than ever and it's hard to dispute that claim from my experience so far.

Anyway, the actual gameplay, the portion I experienced included a dungeon and then a brief foray into the wider world. For the dungeon, it's much of what you would expect in that you wander around dark and tight corridors, defeating enemies, avoiding traps, and looting everything you can in a bid to amass helpful resources and also discover some of the secrets that are otherwise hidden. The gameplay functions from a third-person perspective and has a quite basic, MMO-like combat system, where you swing melee weapons, block attacks, manually dodge and avoid deadly strikes, and can even switch to magical or ranged options if you have the right tools or class types. With this in mind, you steadily walk through the dungeon while clobbering skeletons and gooey slimes with swords, hammers, and other weapons, earning experience and finding more powerful gear that makes combat easier and your hero much tougher.

Dungeons do have minor puzzles to solve, which will no doubt become more complex and demanding as the story advances. For the sake of this build, the idea was to find different coloured items, mostly in the piles of goo dripping from the walls, and then using these in the right place to open a door to a boss enemy with an enormous health bar. This is where teamwork and having a variety of weapons and skills comes into effect, as the boss I faced with Brännvall and Bowers was particularly weak to fire damage, meaning the explosive barrel that Bowers heaved at this threat proved to be insanely effective, eliminating the opponent in one swift action.

From here, we picked up the next stage of the quest and exited to the main world. After a brief stop at a camp fire to dine and rest until morning, we travelled to the nearest town, a quaint collection of buildings that features all of the amenities adventurers could possibly want. Whether it's an inn with a comfortable bed, a blacksmith to improve your gear, additional and lovely homes that have been decorated by hand, or even the next quest giver, there's enough here to fill your time. There are even rumours to eavesdrop upon that could take you on exciting adventures and lead you to powerful gear, assuming the rumours were accurate in the first place...

In a very TTRPG-like manner, Wyldheart also doesn't hold your hand in the traditional sense. It's not a complex game that will have you tearing your hair out, but the sense of adventure is preserved by eliminating a compass/mini-map that never fails to give you direction and by having quest steps that are open to interpretation instead of serving as an instruction manual. It may take a moment to adjust to for the uninitiated, but for those who have friends to play with, this design choice should work to simply enhance the thrill of adventure and retain a sense of agency and mystery.

As this is the first look at Wyldheart and since the game is still early in its development, with the search for Kickstarter backers now beginning, we'll skip over talking about performance and visuals, as these areas will undoubtedly change a lot in the months and years that follow. What likely will remain more solid is the game direction and intention behind Wyldheart and it's here that I find myself most confident in what's being cooked up. The developers are very passionate about all things TTRPGs and that can be seen very clearly throughout this game. There's character and charm, passion and pride, and often with debut indie games like this we can raise questions about the ultimate and ambitious multiplayer and technical goals. Considering the DICE heritage (plus other staff from Embark Studios and Mojang) at Wayfinder, this shouldn't be a problem for Wyldheart.

So a strong start for a promising video game. We'll be keeping a keen eye on Wyldheart as it continues to progress, but the key final thing to note today is that the game will be launching on PC sometime in the future.