The Waylanders released into early access on June 16th, 2020, and while I was interested in it, I was in the middle of moving when it first came out and didn’t have access to anything beyond a laptop and Switch. That may have been for the best, though, because its initial launch was reportedly quite rough. The Waylanders eventually settled into a “mixed” rating on Steam. I find games with lots of conflicting information the most fascinating to dig into, though, so I went into this one with an open mind, a willingness to forgive some bugs (since it’s still in early access), and the determination to figure out what its final release is likely to look like. Have patches turned things around? Are future patches likely to? The answer, as often tends to be the case with projects like this, is “kind of, depending on your perspective.”

Personally, I like the characters quite a bit

Let’s start with what The Waylanders is: a party-based wRPG that plays a bit like the lovechild of Dragon Age: Origins and Fable, borrowing its encounter style and tactics from the former and its more playful tone from the latter. If there’s one element that I feel succeeds beyond all others, it’s the tone; party members will barb each other occasionally in charming ways, and there are enough “wait, what?” moments of defied expectations to keep things interesting. The cast in the current version is quite large—though many of the characters join up toward the end and don’t have much opportunity to respond to the story content before it runs out—and I’d consider this area a big win for The Waylanders. That’s not to say that the story is fantastic, because there are huge gaps where things happen for non-obvious reasons, almost like you’re skipping to the middle of the story (which I suspect is the case), but there’s potential here for greatness.

Why make areas so large if they’re just going to be empty?

One of the things that I hate about Dragon Age: Origins is the emptiness of the world; areas are large, but NPCs aren’t there to interact with so much as they’re decorative. The Waylanders goes down the same road, and I don’t expect these large areas to be filled up with crowds or content in the final release. It’s far more likely that areas are made large (and with occasional dead ends) so that sidequest objects and triggers can be placed in different spots and not overlap. That’s speculation, of course. All I know for sure is that I found myself wishing for a run button whenever I had to look for something in one of these areas.

The Waylanders‘ combat has several highs and lows right now

Your first taste of combat in The Waylanders is bound to be fine. Playing at 4K, it becomes weirdly easy to lose track of the mouse pointer, but everything is otherwise adequate and well-suited to teaching you the ropes. That’s important, too, because the combat here plays just differently enough to throw you for a loop. While this may feel like a wRPG in the Dragon Age: Origins/Baldur’s Gate vein, its “formations” feature adds a strategic element that’s crucial to overcoming some of the more difficult fights. Basically, you can select a character, then choose party members and combine them into one of two class-specific formations that turn them all into one more powerful unit. Formations have their own health bars and attack patterns, so learning when to use them can make a huge difference and trivialize many fights.

The problem with The Waylanders‘ combat is the lack of feedback. You’re taught basics, but every time you hit a difficulty spike, it’ll be because you don’t understand what’s happening. You’ll have your tanky melee character keeping your mages safe, only for that tank to go from full health to dead in a split-second for no obvious reason. One dirty trick the difficulty pulls is to throw a healer into enemy mobs who can heal every enemy at any range (while your healing is weaker and limited to small spaces) while allowing them to spam projectiles or enemy summons to overwhelm you. During one such difficulty spike, I tried spamming wolf summon scrolls, only to realize that they’re used up and nothing is summoned if the encounter hasn’t started yet. Combine all of this with a lack of options early in the game and you have a recipe for frustration. I’d bet that most people simply gave up at the first cheap-feeling difficulty spike.

But the combat does get better once you start to reach the end of the current playable content. Once your units have unlocked several abilities and have options beyond “spam items or normal attacks,” the tactical depth starts to appear. There’s a werewolf character who loses health quickly but can use her strikes to refill her health. There are squishy mages who can do area damage and tough tanks who can throw enemies around to reposition them. There are rogue/assassin types who can combine party members into a long-range archery squad. All of the pieces are here. They just don’t all come together until later.

What needs to be fixed and what’s likely to be fixed

One thing that I suspect will be improved by the time The Waylanders launches is the balance. Large chunks of the early story appear to be missing, and giving players the chance to grind up a few levels against early-game enemies would go a long way toward mitigating later difficulty spikes. I don’t imagine that those difficulty spikes will be totally ironed out by release, but a large part of the current awkwardness seems to come from the developer trying to stay flexible about the events at the beginning of the game.

What I don’t expect to be improved are the bugs. I overlooked plenty of issues, from the near-constant flickering as light sources clipped in and out of existence to audio bugs that caused some audio to play significantly louder than everything else, chalking them up to early access, but that audio bug is something I saw mentioned in a review for one of their earlier games that released 7 years ago. Additionally, The Waylanders is scheduled to release out of early access in Spring 2021, and while that may be realistic since it’s hard to know how much work has been done on additional content that hasn’t yet been released, I don’t expect that hitting such a close target will leave much time to bugfix. I’d love to be proven wrong.

So… is The Waylanders good? Will it be good?

I don’t expect that The Waylanders will be the next Dragon’s Age: Origins, but I do anticipate it being a charming, if slightly janky experience once it finally releases out of early access. Its current trajectory very much reminds me of Rise of the Argonauts, which was similarly inspired by the old Bioware formula and ended up being a buggy, deeply flawed game that I absolutely adored. That’s the kind of energy that I’m getting from The Waylanders. It’s a big swing, and the odds are against it after its early access launch was marred by deflating problems, but I really do think that this could shape up to be something special.

The Waylanders (early access): is it good? Will its full release be good? first appeared on Killa Penguin