Stumbled upon this interview today:
A few years ago, after a long day of working on Star Wars Battlefront or Battlefield, a group of EA DICE developers wou…
www.gamesindustry.biz
That's the first time I learned about Wayfinder Games, a studio founded in 2020 by Dennis Brännvall, previously creative director at DICE, and his partner Fia Tjernberg, previously studio director at DICE - as well as their joint friends Manne Ederyd and Adam Clark, who were also DICE alumni.
"We felt there are really good RPGs [made] in Eastern Europe and some are now popping up in the UK, but no one really in Northern Europe or Scandinavia [are making them]. We want to build the next great RPG studio in Northern Europe."
After years of working on shooters, the Wayfinder Games team veering into RPG territory seems more jarring, but Tjernberg emphasises the opportunity they see in this space.
"We have chosen to go into a genre that hasn't maybe seen as much innovation as we would hope," she says. "Pretty much all of us have worked at AAA, where the fanbase doesn't really want innovation. They want familiar, they want what they are used to from other games.
"Innovation is difficult because it's slow. It means we will test things and we will fail a lot and we need to learn from those failures and build something that's great out of that. Getting everyone into a mental state where failing is fun and part of the job, part of our success, I think, is the biggest challenge. But it's really fun."
Brännvall adds: "It's hard to look at our track record and know what to expect. It feels like a fresh canvas. I love playing isometric RPGs like Baldur's Gate and what have you, but I'm not sure whether loving a specific piece of a subgenre is enough to say 'I want to make something that's better than that.' They're already making Baldur's Gate 3. There isn't [a case] where I want to make more of the thing that I love."
"There's a lot of games that take inspiration from tabletop RPGs and D&D, but they try to translate either the ruleset or almost the exact feeling of putting a D20 animation into a video game because in D&D you'd resolve something with a D20 dice roll," Brännvall explains. "We want to make games where you feel that within your small community, you have your own version of our fictional universe that you are enjoying playing. [Two groups] might buy the same D&D adventure, but the nature of one group versus the other means that experience is going to be different.
"We are interested in persistent worlds and MMOs, but with private servers, where it's just you and your community enjoying this. It's not a massive thing with 10,000 people on a shard; it's your own personal Minecraft or Valheim server, game-structure wise."
This sounds like a new NWN-like product, but not strictly DnD-based.
