Game News The Wayward Realms formally revealed

[Infinitron]

Tags: OnceLost Games; The Wayward Realms

As you may recall, details of the mismanaged production of Daggerfall spiritual successor The Wayward Realms were revealed last year in a brutal postmortem by its former marketing director. Despite this public setback, development on the game seems to have continued. Just how much real progress has been made is unclear, but today the team at OnceLost Games unveiled the first proper teaser trailer for The Wayward Realms and launched its Steam page. The trailer is just mood-setting cinematic fluff, but the Steam page does include several purported in-engine screenshots.

Under the direction of Ted Peterson and Julian LeFay — lead developers of the team behind the Elder Scrolls Arena and Daggerfall—Once Lost Games is creating a new open-world fantasy RPG where choice, consequence, scope and role-playing will be experienced like never before in a realistically-scaled open world in a new class of game: The Grand RPG.

The Wayward Realms is set on a group of over one hundred, realistically scaled, islands, known collectively as the Archipelago, 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. Should the player earn a position of prominence, they may change the course of history. However, they must first prove their worth battling 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, dwarves and a few other unusual races.

Welcome To The Archipelago!

• A Massive World. No, really! Way bigger than most other games you can think of. 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.
  
• Constantly Evolving Experience and Story. A virtual Game Master keeps things interesting for you, making other characters and their factions react and plot their next move based on your actions, resulting in no two players having the exact same game experience. World events have very different effects in the life of a socializing aristocrat, a thief entrenched in underworld conspiracies, a scholar collecting ancient artifacts, or whatever role you craft for yourself.
  
• Real Role-Playing. You’re not playing some prebaked warrior or mage, but a character class of your design, with customized skills and abilities to craft your own spells, potions, and enchantments. Want to try playing a character who is really, really outside the box? We got you.
  
• A World Full of Lore. We call it Wayward Realms for a reason. On the surface, things may have that familiar, medieval fantasy look, but dig a bit deeper and there’s a lot to learn. From the multiple moons in the sky, to the libraries worth of books, to the multiple cultures of each race, there is always something new to discover.

According to OnceLost's Twitter account, The Wayward Realms is still "several more years" away from release. I still wouldn't bet on the game coming out ever, but at least this is something.

 

[Tyranicon]

I know devs want news of their project as early as possible, but instead of spending money on a "cinematic" teaser trailer, they could've just tweeted something like "Hey, we're making a game. For real this time."

Would probably have exactly the same effect. Actually, a tweet would've been better because that trailer dampened any hype I may have had.

 

[grimace]

Perhaps the brutal mostportem was enough of a course correction to steer this stinking ship back into port.

Let's look to history . . .

Spoiler

Remember this?
https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/?p=179

Spoiler

What is a Lord British “Ultimate” Role Playing Game?
March 8, 2013

Lord British here! Welcome to my vision of the “Ultimate” Role Playing Game. In this 4-part blog, I will share my insights into what makes a great role playing game by reflecting on the past and looking towards the future. So, without further delay, we will begin where many great stories do, in a Kingdom long ago.

It begins before personal computers
I was attempting to make the “Ultimate” Role Playing Game before they were called Ultima and will continue long after they have been called Ultima.

I began my pursuit of creating the “Ultimate” Role Playing Game (Ultimate RPG) around 1974 while in high school. It’s been 36 years but it feels like yesterday. 1974 was an auspicious year for me. In 1974 my sister in law gave me a copy of The Lord of the Rings, the first fantasy fiction I had ever read, and I was instantly hooked. Soon after, I was introduced to Dungeons & Dragons which had just been released. I quickly built one of the earliest and largest gaming groups which brought together 30-100 people most every Friday and Saturday for all night gaming sessions in many rooms throughout my parent’s home in Houston. My English reports in school became fictional fantasy writings about my first fantasy world Sosaria, the basis of my D&D campaigns, as well as many of my computer games. Finally, still years before the personal computer showed up on the scene; I discovered a lone computer teletype terminal, unused by any class at the time. I convinced the faculty to let me have my own class, with no teacher or plan, other than to teach myself how to program on it, and show them the results of my work for a grade and count it as my foreign language credit. Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code (BASIC) is a foreign language to most people! Right? When the school agreed, my quest for the Ultimate Role Playing Game began in earnest! My quest continues to this day.

The first generations of my games were called D&D 1-28. These were games written on the schools teletype, stored on paper tape spools and run via an acoustic modem running on a distant PDP 11. They used alpha numeric characters for graphics. “A” was a giant ant, “$” was a treasure chest yet it was unmistakably, an Ultima like Ultimate RPG attempt, with text characters instead of the later familiar tile graphics. Graphic style is not the essential element of an Ultimate RPG.

The First Grand Era of Games – Solo Player Games
My first commercial game, one of the first commercial computer games at all, was Akalabeth. When the Apple ][ arrived on the scene, finally I could create with real time graphics! Fully realized 3D dungeons joined the top down outdoor scenes. Deep down this game was clearly rooted in the history of the 28 previous “D&D” games I wrote. Akalabeth was not made to be published; I made it merely for myself and my friends. It was John Mayer the manager of the Computerland store where I had a summer job, who encouraged me to spend the vast $200 to “publish” it on the store wall.

Beyond being quickly picked up by a national distributor and the success that meant, my first distributor Al Remmers of California Pacific suggested we drop Richard Garriott as the author and leave Lord British my in game character) instead. This ended up being more than just a quirky use of a pen name on the package, Lord British, is me as both the creator and as a resident representing the creation to the player from within the game. I joined and shared the experience alongside the player, something which would prove more valuable over time. Participating in the world alongside you, is a valuable part of an Ultimate RPG

And a bit of Trivia – Softalk Magazine ran a contest “Who is the real Lord British” wondering if it might be a person who lived in Los Angeles, named Beth… Also-Known-As-LA-Beth -> Akalabeth!

Please return tomorrow for part 2 of What is a Lord British “Ultimate” Role Playing Game?

Lord British

a.k.a. Dr. Richard Garriott de Cayeux

In the meantime we have an actual game to play:

https://github.com/Interkarma/daggerfall-unity/releases

 

[LESS T_T]

I know devs want news of their project as early as possible, but instead of spending money on a "cinematic" teaser trailer, they could've just tweeted something like "Hey, we're making a game. For real this time."

Would probably have exactly the same effect. Actually, a tweet would've been better because that trailer dampened any hype I may have had.

I think this early teaser is not really about hype itself, but proving and quantifying the hype for potential investors. A teaser trailer with more than 100K views and coverages by major gaming websites will certainly help them get some attention from potential investors/publishers.

 

[Casual Hero]

I want to believe.

 

[Falksi]

Wank trailer.

 

[Tyranicon]

I know devs want news of their project as early as possible, but instead of spending money on a "cinematic" teaser trailer, they could've just tweeted something like "Hey, we're making a game. For real this time."

Would probably have exactly the same effect. Actually, a tweet would've been better because that trailer dampened any hype I may have had.

I think this early teaser is not really about hype itself, but proving and quantifying the hype for potential investors. A teaser trailer with more than 100K views and coverages by major gaming websites will certainly help them get some attention from potential investors/publishers.

You're right and I don't want to be cynical, but "old school devs that promise the moon with big-ass RPGs years ahead of launch" don't have a good track record and as an investor, I would stay far the fuck away.

Especially as this particular title already has a history...

 

[Mortmal]

Odd trailer, a fat orc on a donkey , bold choice.

 

[RNGsus]

Odd trailer, a fat orc on a donkey , bold choice.

They know their audience.

 

[Mortmal]

Odd trailer, a fat orc on a donkey , bold choice.

They know their audience.

Inded, but then the fat orc should be shouting "lighnting bolt ! lightning bolt!" like we do.

 

[m_s0]

Odd trailer, a fat orc on a donkey , bold choice.

They know their audience.

Stefan's replacement, an industry veteran named Vijay Lakshman, tanked an $8M publishing deal (with a company that sounds like it may have been Paradox Interactive) by demanding $12M to "compete with the upcoming releases of Cyberpunk 2077 and The Elder Scrolls VI".

Uh-huh, sure they do.

 

[ADL]

I have my doubts. Hopefully Hello Games' follow up to No Man's Sky that is supposedly fantasy comes out at least. It sucks that twenty five plus years later we only have Daggerfall, The Quest and that Frontiers game that died.

 

[Burning Bridges]

This genre has died because they dont have intellectual bandwidth to realize you'd need to work with a company that does simulations.

Nowadays your best bet for open world game would be to license the Arma 3 engine. It has a solution to almost everything you need. Except crafting, story, basebuilding, but all that could be added.

"Game" engines however cannot run country sized worlds and were never designed for that. In fact the technology has regressed since the early 2000s.