A disasterous launch for a Predatory Game - Wayfinder Quick Review

SHOULD YOU PLAY WAYFINDER?

I went into this game as a fair of Airship Syndicates' prior titles, Battle Chasers: Nightwar & Darksiders Genesis. They are great games, and I sunk a lot of time into both of them in order to see everything they had to offer. Suffice it to say, when I found out they were the developers behind Wayfinder, well, I was excited. Enough that I stayed up several nights in a row, so I could give the new game a go. At this point, The disillusionment has hit so hard. Now, I wasn't bothered by the delayed release. In fact, I could respect bumping it back a few days in order to try and make sure it's up to snuff. That's not what I got. Let's break it down, shall we? The exact reason why I don't think Wayfinder is currently worth your time.

Day 1

Myself and thousands of others couldn't login. It wasn't that we even got the error message above. The game would simply... stall on an attempt to enter the game, and that was that. Now this doesn't really bode well, given they had already delayed the release to 'iron things out'. It -especially- doesn't bode well, since they already have monetization elements that can put someone back -150$-. Imagine dropping that much, and being unable to play? Day 2 The servers are finally...sort of up.

30-45 minute queue times. The game's also unstable enough that you can expect it to punt you out in around the same time frame - thus obliging you to do it all over again. Neat. Worse, some people who had bought those -extremely- expensive supporter packs? They didn't actually get what they paid for. Neat. As for the content itself? It doesn't even take 30 minutes to begin seeing the insidious tendrils of monetization permeating every single aspect of the game, whether it's the act of unlocking the other starting characters, gaining access to new weapons, or even the existence of a season pass. Which, I should note, is all contained in a game that's asking people to pay to play it, despite intentions of going F2P later. We're -paying- a company to be their bug testers - while they blatantly try to reach into our wallets. Day 3

Which brings us to now. The game sits unplayable, likely waiting for some form of press statement from Airship Syndicate and Digital Extremes, even as thousands of players leave angry reviews about the way things are handled & horrible monetization baked into the game. I'm going to keep trying, but the fact that it sits at Mostly Negative on Steam is not due to some malicious act of review bombing, but a genuine reflection of the problems the game has.

TIME PLAYED

Now, my current playtime on Steam sits a bit over 6 hours. This is an incredibly deceptive number, because a vast majority of it has been spent on queue times, or waiting for error messages to properly crop up on the login screen. In fact, the first time I was kicked out, was at the end of the game's Tutorial- because I was warned that once I picked a character, I would be locked into my choice. I decided I wanted to explore my other options and see their story bits, picked the option to do so - and was promptly kicked out of the game.

That's not to say I haven't managed to do anything. I cleared the first dungeon, and its hard Variant, beat up a boss, and even spent a fair amount of time exploring the map and getting all the waypoints in it. But- that was squeezed into the middle of a disproportionate amount of wait time. To give a really depressing comparison? I had an easier time making progress in FF14's Endwalker Expansion. On day 1.

THE BEST BITS OF WAYFINDER

*Aesthetics. The game does look nice. I found that the overall designs felt like a weird hybrid between League of Legends designs, and their Battlechasers works. (Which, makes sense since they did work on Ruined King.) On the whole though, still appealing. *The echo system. While the rest of what I'm going to talk about is flawed, or outright bad- I will say I enjoyed this system. It's essentially a set of skill/stat orbs you can slot into your character and weapon, allowing you to better flesh them out. What's more, certain orbs correspond to certain echo types, making it cheaper to slot them in. The tactical consideration of, do I want to crank certain stats, or make this cost-efficient, is a nice balancing act.

THE WORST BITS OF WAYFINDER

*Co-op. Having an MMO where Co-op is one of the worst elements of the game is pretty impressive, but Wayfinders somehow manages to excel here, by making it nigh impossible to co-ordinate with others due to the server issues, and overall massive queue times. I bought this game for a friend, and my girlfriend in the hopes that I'd be able to go through it, and be able to write about how characters all clicked together or synergized. No dice.

*Combat. While the combat might initially feel fun- it won't take long for you to realize that not only are their movesets rather limited,  you're starved for accessible options, too. On the free side of things, you can readily access 4 different types of weapons. Beyond that, if you want to try the other 4 weapon types, or fiddle around with the 3 legendary variants that exist for each one, you'll need to-

*Grind. There is just an incredible amount of grind involved in this game to engage with any sort of customization, whether it's farming enemies over and over again for higher-level variants of their echoes - or blindly searching for the materials needed to unlock an alternate weapon. Weapons, I should note, that require you to forage materials for several different parts, in order to create the final product.

*Monetization. That is unless you simply want to spend 10 dollars to buy one outright. This is the sort of game that dangles the best items in the game directly in front of you, gatekeeps it behind an excessive grind (in an unstable server), and then dangles a 10-dollar fee to unlock it.  (Which used to be 11.50, obliging you to spend 20 dollars to have enough cash shop currency to acquire it.) Gross. But it doesn't stop there, either.

*Characters. That whole decision to lock you into a single character at the start of the game? Well, it's so they can once again offer you the choice of shelling out 15 dollars -or- engaging in a nebulous grind to unlock an alternate Wayfinder. There are people who have somehow already dedicated 40 hours to Wayfinder, who are -nowhere- near unlocking one. This means you'll have a lot of time to get familiar with the relatively shallow movesets and customization options that exist for each character.

*Stability. You know, if the server would stop killing itself and kicking you out.

But that's it. That's been my experience with this game. But what about you? Are you going to risk forging ahead in Wayfinder, or let others take the role of Trailblazer? Comment, and let me know.

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