The Waylanders is an upcoming tactical RPG that sends you traveling through time between the Celtic and Medieval periods.
The game takes inspiration from classic RPGs like Dragon Age: Origins, Neverwinter Nights 2, and Baldur’s Gate. As a huge fan of those games and others like them (Knights of the Old Republic 2 is my favorite game of all time), I became utterly obsessed with The Waylanders the moment I heard about the Kickstarter campaign.
Consulting on the project is Mike Laidlaw, who worked on at BioWare on some great RPGs games including Dragon Age: Origins, Jade Empire and Mass Effect. Joining him is Josue Monchan who worked on adventure games such as Runaway and Yesterday.
If the Kickstarter campaign reaches the first stretch goal of $200,000, Emily Grace Buck, best known for her work as Narrative Designer on The Walking Dead and Batman: The Telltale Series games, will join the team as well.
Time and Time Again
The Waylanders relies on two key features which differentiate it from other fantasy RPGs; the first of which is time travel.
You will travel through time between the Celtic and Medieval eras, each with its own locations, quests, and companions.
The choices you make in the Celtic era will affect what happens in Medieval times – not only the story but your immortal companions as well. Once you travel back to the Medieval period, you can meet your companions after they dealt with the results of your actions.
These two eras will also shine a light on Celtic mythology, which not a lot of games tend to focus on for some reason.
Get in Formation
The Waylanders gives you control over a party of fighters, as is the case with plenty of RPGs. During combat, you will be able to assemble some characters into a combat formation.
We can see three different combat formations in The Waylanders Kickstarter campaign: Orb, which is a defensive and near-impenetrable formation that allows you to defend your ranged characters as they target enemies from afar; Phalanx, which lets you line your characters as a defensive wall and slowly approach your enemies; and Arrowhead, which the familiar arrow-shaped offensive formation.
There will be two different formations for every class. With six classes, that’s a total of twelve different combat formations.
Each of these six classes will have 30 different subclasses to advance into later in the game. There’s also a choice of four races and over 800 different skills to use, all of which are animated using modern motion-capture technology.
The Waylanders looks very promising, with elements from many classic and successful RPGs. I backed it the moment the Kickstarter campaign launched, and if you’re another fan of the genre, consider joining me in doing so.
Should the campaign succeed, The Waylanders will launch in June 2020.
