The Wayward Realms - Daggerfall successor in development by the minds behind said game

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Helping Friendly Book

Helping Friendly Book

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There's this game that I've been interested in for a while called The Wayward Realms, a massive and ambitious RPG being developed by OnceLost Games, led by Ted Peterson & Julian LeFay, both being majorly involved behind 1996's The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall. It originally used UE5, but the devs have switched off it to utilize their own engine. The game will feature a procedurally generated world, supposedly 5000x bigger than Skyrim. The game has a Kickstarter, where it has raised over $850,000 dollars, above its original $500,000 dollar goal. What are y'all's thoughts on this game? Is it the next step in RPGs or does it sound to good to be true? Discuss.

Gameplay trailer:
Youtube: https://youtube.com/@oncelostgames
Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/oncelostgames/the-wayward-realms/
Xitter: https://x.com/OnceLostGames
Steam page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1685310/The_Wayward_Realms/
 
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>developed by people who have not put out a game in more than two decades
>one of the big names on the project(Lefay) passed away last year
>kickstarted for 500k yet they claimed they wanted to get a publisher to shell out 12M for it, which probably means it'll show up in Early Access if it ever releases and it'll take years to reach 1.0
>we'll totally be 6 million times larger than skyrim
>procedural generation(Yes I'm aware what Daggerfall was)
>UE5
Not trying to be a Negative Nancy but everything about this sounds like a complete and utter dud and that's not getting into the gameplay trailer which putting aside obvious 'early footage' quality heavily reminds me of Underworld Ascendant which is a huge red flag.
 
BiggestKai dijo:
>developed by people who have not put out a game in more than two decades
>one of the big names on the project(Lefay) passed away last year
>kickstarted for 500k yet they claimed they wanted to get a publisher to shell out 12M for it, which probably means it'll show up in Early Access if it ever releases and it'll take years to reach 1.0
>we'll totally be 6 million times larger than skyrim
>procedural generation(Yes I'm aware what Daggerfall was)
>UE5
Not trying to be a Negative Nancy but everything about this sounds like a complete and utter dud and that's not getting into the gameplay trailer which putting aside obvious 'early footage' quality heavily reminds me of Underworld Ascendant which is a huge red flag.
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Yeah, I'm not too hopeful for this game either, but it piqued my interest, and that's more than I can say for other games.
 
When will people understand that giving money to game dev boomers is just helping them to taint their legacies? It's not that they scam the players, but that they have a complete misunderstanding of what constitutes good gameplay as opposed to gimmicks that were already tried and deemed not worth the effort.
 
For projects like this, I just set my expectations to zero. This looks interesting though I guess.
 
My expectations for something tend to fall the longer it stagnates after its announcement. I struggle to think of a case where a Kickstarter game came out (or even just released something playable) fully 10 years after its announcement and ended up halfway decent. Figures like those tend to suggest troubled development hampered by scope bloat and mismanagement.

Plus, I get extra cynical anytime one of these projects is "brought to you by the people behind X", especially if their period of last relevance was more than a decade ago. Also, Julian LeFay isn't even alive anymore, and it looks very generic.

I liked Daggerfall a lot, it's one of my favorite games, but with all of the above, I just don't have any particular hope or expectations for this. Further, the "X amount larger than Y" line is snake oil, completely and utterly - a multiplicatively-large game world suggests that less of it was handcrafted, and there's no real value in a huge world full of recitation/procedural generation when compared to one that's smaller, yet denser and more handcrafted. In order to facilitate a world that's large by sheer square footage, you must necessarily think in terms of templates and reiterative work, which means that everything you find will be a permutation of something you've seen before. That means that even if there's a lot of things you haven't literally laid eyes on, the game world ultimately feels very small because you already know the box that every single game concept needs to be able to fit within.
 
They did switch away from UE5 a few months ago.
Transitioning Away From Unreal
We want to extend a sincere thank you for the overwhelmingly positive reception to our last Devlog. Your feedback made one thing absolutely clear, this community is here because you care about deep systems, meaningful choices, and solid, uncompromised gameplay. That clarity has guided our next big step.

After reviewing the many thoughtful comments we received, we’ve made a major but exciting decision, we are fully transitioning away from Unreal Engine and building our own proprietary engine. This move gives us the control and flexibility needed to deliver the experience you’ve told us you want. Over the past few weeks, our entire focus has been on developing this new engine, and we’re thrilled to say that we’ll have something to show you soon, with a new Devlog showcase planned for early in the new year.
Shifting to our own engine is a major step, and while it positions us to deliver a far better game, it also means we won’t be able to meet the end-of-year goal we previously set. Our new target is to release to our Kickstarter backers in June of next year, with a public Early Access release following a few months later.
We also want to remind you that we’ll be hosting our Live AMA on Wednesday, December 3rd, and we invite all of you to join us and ask any questions you have about the new engine and the road ahead.
Thank you again for the trust, enthusiasm, and insight you continue to share with us. Stay tuned, big things are coming.
The new engine allows us to:
  • Achieve 30+ FPS on decade-old laptops without dedicated GPUs, giving us excellent performance even on very low-end hardware.
  • Run the game at nearly 30 FPS on a first-generation Nintendo Switch, ensuring smooth performance on all major consoles, with full Linux support included.
  • Load Eyjar, a static map four times the size of Manhattan, in under one second, providing an almost instant start.
  • Load the entire engine in roughly 300 milliseconds, which allows extremely fast iteration and has already more than doubled our development speed.
  • Offer full community modding support for everything outside the core systems, using a public scripting language inspired by C# as a tribute to the Daggerfall Unity community.
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ETA: this is the AMA they mentioned. I haven't watched it.
 
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BiggestKai dijo:
Not trying to be a Negative Nancy but everything about this sounds like a complete and utter dud and that's not getting into the gameplay trailer which putting aside obvious 'early footage' quality heavily reminds me of Underworld Ascendant which is a huge red flag.
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I'm expecting the game to not be that good at gameplay but to have superb algorithms and random generation, they have shown some of their systems and they look very interesting.
They talk more about this in their October DevBlog,

If you need the short and sweet of the interesting stuff, they concede that generating towns makes them really hard to navigate and to try and balance this they talk about how they're trying to model different houses and different buildings and locking them behind the NPCs profession, which should be basic stuff but is harder if youre doing all of this proccedurally generated, basically the house should reflect that the person inside is a farmer or a fabric merchant, or a armoursmith etc. etc.
They talk about their crowd system that tries to keep in memory NPCs schedules, based around their work and their status as well as their disposition and immediate goals, basically a more robust version of Oblivion NPCs, this shouldn't be that exciting except that aside from Oblivion, nobody else really does it, even Bethesda killed their NPC schedules in the later games. They also talk about how NPCs exist outside of Towns and how those are still kept in the world.
After this they talk about the conversation system, and how the NPC characteristics directly affect their manner or speech, their current place in the world and their disposition. This is the bit that has me a lot more interested and shows how deep they are taking their RNG as they show the table of possible traits NPCs can have and it's quite expansive, with their conversation system being expansive. The only problem for me in all of this, is that the NPCs talk like retards trying to cosplay old timey Middle Ages stooges, it's really silly.
Here is that said chart.
1777382408460.png
After all this they talk about the Combat but thats all for random generation, they also have another Dev Blog from two months ago that talks about the arquitecture and lore of the world, and modeling. It's pretty interesting but I won't talk about that.
 
We talk about this game a bit now and then in the Elder Scrolls threads.
Its been in development or at least planning for a verrrry long time. I wanna say around 2022?
I heard they swapped to a new engine recently but I also noticed they're bleeding staff after the switch.

Not sure how its going to end up, but really glad I didn't kickstart it at this point.
 
Problematic User Forever dijo:
Honestly, I'm surprised. I thought I was following this game but hadn't even heard about an early access or seen any of this footage. Is this another case of everything being on a gay discord server or something?
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They are really weird about their discord server, for example, they refuse to make separate channels for backers because "we don't want people to feel superior" was one of their thing's, it doesn't suprise me development is a shitdown, it's actually exactly what I expected.
 
Problematic User Forever dijo:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=6WO3q8m1UT4
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Ho wow, this has some meat to bite on.
Basically, the Senior Dev behind the Graphics of their new Engine left the studio, they released gameplay videos that were in the old engine. A week after Kai left the narrative and worldbuilding designer, Blake, also left, doing a vague post on discord about how he want's to be transparent and clear, and that it wasn't all roses and sunshine. He claims he did a ton of work on mechanics and that handwritten quests have been axed, basically, Kai and this guy felt that it would be weird to have simple randomly generated quests surronding a single handcrafted quest and rulled that out of the system a long time ago, but Ted Peterson wasn't aware because he's not very involved, and he said it was a thing. It appears that all handcrafted missions there possibly were in development were axed and put as setdressing for the world, and all the missions there are now are fuelled by the world simulation, and he goes further saying quests function closely to how they would in Caves of Qud.
After all of this is said, the guy making the video shows a moderator saying that the plan was always going to be to have open ended handcrafted quests, and a Community Manager elaborates that this is true, it's just that for Early Access they won't be there.

It appears a lot of this comes from their gay ass discord channel and their podcast style dev blogs which I dont watch nor care about because I know it'll annoy me how much time is wasted when they could've just put it all in a blog style post. TLDR:
  • 2 big honchos quit, one being the lead senior dev behind the graphical part of the new Engine, and the other being a lead Narrative and Worldbuilding Designer, and they say that hand crafted quests arent on the table.
  • In a podcast last year, october, they said that they ran out of money and they are all basically volunteers, and that any money is now going towards PR.
  • There isn't a lot of cohesion on the team.
  • There isn't a lot of transparency.
All in all, it doesn't seem to be as bad as I thought, I thought Kai and Blake would reveal that the tech is way way behind what they promise but it appears the opposite, and you can say that the disagreement beetween Handcrafted Quests was borne from a misunderstanding, most people on the team wanted these but thought only after EA, and these 2 guys didn't want these. What is really fucking messed up, and just, gets brushed away is that they ran out of money and aren't paying people, and no only that, they use all their money now for PR instead of paying employees, that's fucking stupid!
 
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My money would be that this never sees the light of day. There's too much janky bullshit going on in its development; I've seen games with far fewer issues sink forever beneath the dark waves, to say nothing of the complexity they're trying to achieve with this. It's a shame, I'd love a modern Daggerfall, but everything I've seen is making me pretty convinced that this is doomed.
 
Frightened Rabbit dijo:
2 big honchos quit, one being the lead senior dev behind the graphical part of the new Engine, and the other being a lead Narrative and Worldbuilding Designer,
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I don't think that guy was the graphic parts. I think he was the everything. He was talking about how the world would work and shift depending on things you did. He seemed to be their go to expert on the Wicked engine.

Let me put it this way from what I understand. They jumped ship from Unreal to another Engine called Wicked that probably only this guy was familiar with.

They had to rebuild probably EVERYTHING from scratch for the new engine.
I'd imagine most people have no idea how the engine works and I'd wager its not like Unreal so there's a lot to get used to and language is different.
And then after he built just enough that they had what they needed to get things kind of working?
He left.

I can't stress how bad that is. Its like your pilot flies you halfway across the earth then quits and you have no one who can fly you back. Maybe not as bad. But if they were to jump ship back to Unreal again, they'd be in the same place they were before.

Now their narrative guy left too. I think this project is sadly dead.


Problematic User Forever dijo:
That's what is making me laugh so much

I *thought* I was following this game, and I got the most info about it in the last two years from a random video from The Old Knight on Youtube.

Where is this PR/Marketing money going towards?
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What is there even to PR Market? You need a game for that first or at least something people can put their hands on to get a feel for. Waste of money. I can't even begin to imagine what they spent it on. My guess because a lot of the senior staff is old. They put it towards video game magazines / websites thinking that was what you do to get attention.


Kharash dijo:
Here's a brief look at what a mess it was behind the scenes 6 years ago even before they lost their big names.
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I thought I remembered something about this. They've had trouble before in the past. I think something got really political in the office too that made some of the people uncomfortable around.
 
TrainWreckWatcher dijo:
Now their narrative guy left too. I think this project is sadly dead.
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The narrative guy leaving comes more across as a disagreement behind the scenes that made him leave because he wasn't getting paid, no reason to stay and suffer the headache, if I had to guess it's most likely a disagreement about Handcrafted quests.
The narrative guy announced his departure while vague posting about wanting to be "transparent" and then procceded to talk about how "Handcrafted quests were never planned" and that "Ted the Big Guy didnt check with us to know they were already axed".
My impression is that, with the deadline on Early Access closing in and them trying to extend it, Ted started discussing with the Narrative team about making handcrafted quests, which soured the Narrative guy, because in his words "me and Kai (the engineer) already had agreed that having them beetween generic randomly generated quests would be jarring and ugly".

I agree them losing their main engineer is really bad, I wouldn't say it's over, Kai isn't the only engineer on the team I'm betting but the problem is, the guy making the mechanics is also a large part in balancing the game and the new game needs to be in tune with what Kai wanted or he'll make changes to the stuff. But I'm still baffled that they're skipping paying their engineers to pay their PR guys, when the game has free PR from being a Daggerfall "successor" and everything is riding on those engineers.
 
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