Wayfinder’s journey from free to play to RPG with a collaboration with Joaquim Dos Santos of Spider-Verse

Wayfinder is finally approaching its final launch next week, but it has had a long and difficult journey to reach the form it is taking now as a fantasy ARPG. Developed by Airship Syndicate, the company behind titles like Darksiders GenesisThe game was originally planned to be published by Digital Extremes as a free-to-play online experience. However, after Digital Extreme shuttered its publishing wing, the developer regrouped, leading to a huge overhaul of the design that took Wayfinder From MMORPG to what it is today.

Wayfinder is now a three-player co-op title with no free-to-play elements, Evolving into a premium, one-time-purchase game. In the world of Evenor, players can choose from several different characters to take on adventures with as they battle the Gloom, a dark chaos spreading across the land that the titular Wayfinders have special abilities to combat. As part of the game’s character rollout, The company partnered with animator Joaquim Dos Santos, a co-director of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse and its upcoming sequelTo showcase the character Grendel in a special anime-style short.

Over two sessions, Screen Rant Interview CEO and creative director Joe Mandureira along with animator Joaquim Dos Santos about the collaboration that brought Grendel to life, and again with Airship Syndicate president and game director Ryan Stefanelli to discuss the challenges of self-publishing, the issues with the free-to – Play. game model, and the great evolution of the title into an ARPG.

Madureira & Dos Santos have been trying to collaborate for years

How the duo finally came together and their creative process

Screen Rating: To begin, I’m curious to learn a little more about how the collaboration first came about, and what the overall back-and-forth process was like for you.

Joe Madureira: There was one Comic-Con where you [Joaquim] Came by the booth, and we chatted, and I was a huge fan of Korra, so I was a fan of his. I just didn’t know he had worked on this stuff. We watched the whole show, I feel like, and we were like, “We have to work on something sometime.” That was probably 10 years ago.

Joaquim Dos Santos: It was just a long-standing general rule that we set for ourselves, “We have to work on something, something will come.”

Joe Madureira: Every once in a while, we would just touch base when something exciting came out or if there was an opportunity for us to work together, and it just didn’t line up every time. But finally, we are working on the animated character vignettes that We will not feel like a commercial or a marketing piece, but more like a piece of the world outside the game.

We touch on a lot of lore and places that you can’t visit yet, but as the world expands, you’ll meet all these cool new races and cool locations, and so we thought, “Let’s use these little animated pieces to tell more of the history as we can in the game.” So far, everyone who’s seen them is like, “Whoa, when do I get a whole season of this? I want this show.” This is what we are going for. Joachim was like, “Well, you know, I have some time and a team of badasses that I can throw together.” It was too good to be true, but we finally got it. We stuck the landing.

Joaquim Dos Santos: Yeah, it was like, what does the Wayfinder show look like? what is this We only have a little over four minutes to say this thing, but imagine it’s a bigger piece. How does this small puzzle fit into a much larger piece? We just utilized all the tools we do for every other show we’ve worked on.

Did you play the game a lot in the process of making the short to get a better feel for the world and that sort of thing?

Joaquim Dos Santos: Yeah, you guys gave me some early access to the game and sent me a flood of dev footage, which was awesome.

Joe Madureira: All concept art folders and stuff.

Joaquim Dos Santos: It was kid-in-a-candy-shop, I was totally geeked. I don’t know if you can tell [gesturing to collectibles behind him]But a long-standing fan of a lot of things, video games included. I was a kid in a candy store, it was awesome.

Joe Madureira: Yes, Joaquim is also a great player, so we definitely combine it; We talk about retro games and stuff that we grew up playing and stuff like that. I’m excited to step foot into animation and film eventually, and Joachim’s like, “Hey, how do I get into games?”

It was really interesting, and we hope to make more, We want to do more for the Wayfinders than we haveMore for just the world in general, the villains. We want to start working on the world, and in the end we will have enough for it to be able to sustain itself. Because we always thought from the beginning, Wayfinder felt like just a cool world that you could hold so many stories in different media.

We are just lucky to have someone like Joaquim on board. I do not blow smoke, but I personally have not worked on something where every time the revisions came in or updates, it was so easy for me. I just wanted more. I was just like, “Oh my God.” I don’t think I made a single edit or suggestion.

Joaquim Dos Santos: I think we initially started talking about this thing is a minute and a half long, and then we just kept going, “Yeah, and what about this?”

Joe Maduroira: [Laughs] Then it went to five or six minutes. We actually had to cut some awesomeness and some violence that wouldn’t be approved And so trash. It was much more fierce and violent originally, which once we should show the early boards of. It’s spectacular and I can’t believe it’s only the first. I think we can only get better from there, so I’m excited for more.

In terms of your future plans, do you see yourself branching out stylistically as you show other characters, with a different aesthetic than this first short? Or is this sort of realm that you feel fits best Wayfinder On this way?

Joe Madureira: We talked about each character is very experimental with the style, and maybe one is more super high contrast, silhouette-y, inky splattery, watercolor style, maybe one a little more rendered, maybe even 3D elements. I feel like whatever plays to the character’s personality and history, it would be so fun to experiment with, and I know Joaquim is also excited about the concept.

Joaquim Dos Santos: That’s the great thing about animation, is that you can really take it in so many different directions, and the joy of doing short form is seeing the characters with the hand of a different artist creating the world, but all Still feel cohesive.

Joaquim, in your career you’ve experimented with a lot of different animation styles and aesthetics. I’m curious to hear a little bit about how you feel that artistic history and experience maybe helped you on this project in any way.

Joaquim Dos Santos: It’s weird, because when I first started on my journey, my original goal was to be a comic book artist. I loved animation, but I was standing in portfolio review lines at Comic-Cons when Joe was already a comic pro, hoping to get my stuff seen, and I was looking at his artwork.

I took that stuff once I got into animation, the stuff in anime and video games. I think it was the real sweet spot of the late nineties when we were doing video games and JRPGs and anime. These things are really pretty pop-culture touchstones. I took all the stuff in animation with me, so to me, arriving here, It’s like the culmination of all that stuff.

But if you look at anime, a lot of times people can sort of group it into this one thing, but it has a huge breadth of styles and tones. The other side of that is that both Joe and I, as we didn’t know originally, we’re both Portuguese fellows, so I had a huge European comics influence growing up because I spent all my summers there. It was Tintin, Lucky Lou, Phantom, and all the things that were really popular in Europe at the time, and all of that goes in the hopper as well.

Joe Madureira: It’s funny that you mentioned being in the comic lines, because in my alternate reality, I was playing so many video games, JRPGs specifically, and watching anime. Like Battle Chasers, my creator-owned series, it even has a campy name like Battle Chasers, which I really regret now. When you try to be taken seriously as a film franchise, it sounds goofy.

Even when I pitched it, it was like, “Oh, fancy like Conan?” And I was like, “No. Don’t you know Dragon Ball Z and Final Fantasy VI?” [Laughs] I was like, “I’m going to put wizards, and assassins, and chicks with guns, and robots all together, and it’s going to blow people’s minds,” because that was common in manga up until then, but manga wasn’t really . Available here. I had to go to these Japanese bookstores in Chinatown; I grew up in New York and there were a few bootleg places in Chinatown.

Joaquim Dos Santos: I think that’s the crazy thing – we’re going to sound like old farts saying that, but There was a time when it was hard to get this stuff. You have to go out of your way. DBZ was not in Barnes and Noble. Which was impossible to even think of. But Wayfinder seems like a baby of that, it seems like the sort of culmination of all these influences and all these things. That’s why I was so geeked, it’s seeing all these influences play out right in front of you.

Joe Madurira: Funny also – again, not to blow smoke – before Joaquim even came on for the Grendel thing, I think when Spider-Verse came out, everybody was just chasing that style. It was like, “How do we put chromatic aberration on everything and make it look like Spider-Verse?” When we started Wayfinder, it was very grounded, almost survivalist, like dark fantasy, more like The Witcher or something like that, Game of Thrones.

Then we’re like, “Ah, it feels kind of boring. We need more fantastic elements. Let’s hit it with Spider-Verse stuff,” and it suddenly felt fresh. We were like, “It’s fantasy, but this glowing gun doesn’t look weird next to the castle ruins.” Then Joachim got involved, and it was like, “Oh, thank God,” because Honestly, even the short Grendel piece really helped our world build and refine the look of some of the characters.

The world of Wayfinder goes beyond what players see in the game

The freedom of expanding on the title’s characters and story in atypical ways

You talked a little bit about how you really wanted this piece to not feel like an ad and to better showcase the overall world and know what you’re creating. How do you feel the short better captures that essence of Wayfinder More than a typical rollout for a game maybe?

Joaquim Dos Santos: Yeah, I will say that I think one of the exciting things about building the story is that it’s open and closed in those four minutes. You’re introduced to this mysterious stranger, you recognize that as, “Oh boy, this guy is really, really cruel.

I think we talked about it pretty early on when we showed the Viscount’s suite there, you were like, “Oh, what if he has plans for this mechanical thing that’s going to be in another part of the game?” You could plant the little seeds for world building That people can discover on their own. That to me seems like more fun to explore and look through, versus telling you what it is.

Joe Madureira: Yes, we give no context. If you have played the game or when you eventually play the game, the trailer that is just awesome will mean so much more to you. We obviously can’t devote that much time to moment-to-moment storytelling in the game, but our only hope is that you’re intrigued by the world and want to see more. So far, the Wayfinders have been kind of goody two-shoes, like, “We’re heroes saving the world.”

That’s not a bad thing, by the way, they’re all cool, but I just thought when we were thinking about the next Wayfinder, Can we have a guy who is just for himself? You really can’t trust him; He will do almost anything for money. He is kind of evil if the mood strikes him, and he will help them, but what does he do about it?

We thought we could have more fun with a gray character. People responded well to it. I think it emboldens us to try more and more crazy things with the future characters that are not so simple.

You mention this experience – and playing in this aesthetic space where you have a lot of freedom – has inspired you to want to push the envelope even more in the future. I would love to hear more about how this has inspired your art.

Joe Madureira: For me, it’s how can we add something that doesn’t feel like it’s just a remake of someone else? For example, one of the planned future ones is more of a construct, like basically an inhuman magical robot, and also plays with some character’s backstories that are a little darker and more traumatic.

We can only push these topics so far because we have a teen rating, however I think we definitely want to step away from this kind of “everyone is a hero”. And just give people more choices. You can now customize your characters quite extensively in the game, and we’ll be adding more and more of this stuff all the time, even for the existing Wayfinders. Even the new character we’re introducing when the game launches on the 21st is quite different; It’s almost two letters. Unfortunately, she doesn’t have a bad Joaquim trailer to go with it, though.

Joaquim Dos Santos: I have to say that it’s really, really refreshing to work with like-minded artists and developers. You can push each other into these spaces, you can get each other ideas. I think We’re really in this gilded era of animation and video games where things can be approached; There was a time when everything had to fit into a certain box, and Wayfinder kind of represents that.

Yes, it can be totally cute and funny with the little gizmos and stuff – it can also be really heavy and dramatic at times. Having that place to play, it’s a dream come true. I know that’s what I’m chasing for the rest of my career is that kind of community where everything is on the table.

You mentioned a little bit about how things got a little toned down with the rating, can you talk a little bit more about the biggest evolutions that happened to the piece during development?

Joaquim Dos Santos: It’s a case of editing, and it’s kind of narrative stuff all the time. When you’re first at bat building an anoma or a storyboard for something, you build in these really strong, long pauses because you’re like, “Hey, we’re just putting it all down right now.”

We had a whole opening sequence where two of the shrikes were having a conversation before Grendel even showed up, and there was a little rat that showed up and one of them shot the rat, which makes you hate him right away. The guy, like “Oh, he just shoots random animals.” Then Grendel shows up and starts doing all these crazy things, and it’s all wonderful, but then it’s a case of “Hey, we’ve got three minutes to tell the story. What do we absolutely need to see?” It is an evolution by subtraction.

Joe Maduroira: It’s the opposite problem that I usually have From, “It needs more, what can we add?” We ended up with five or six minutes, and we had to get it down close to three – we ended up at four, because we just couldn’t do it.

Joaquim Dos Santos: Can’t do it.

Joe Maduroira: “We don’t cut it and we don’t cut it.” Joaquim was very gracious, he is so easy to work with. He’d be like, “Hey man, I can cut the whole thing, it’ll still be fine.” And I’m like, “No. No way.” I’d prefer it to go long-fast forward if you can’t watch the whole thing.

Joaquim Dos Santos: Honestly, usually I have to be the guy, though I was so lucky to have Joe that I got to be the guy that’s like, “I’ll make something work.”

Joe Maduroira: Edits kill my soul. It’s always my favorite stuff too, that I get really latched onto it. I think we hit the sweet spot. It’s the length it needs to be, tells a cool story, Grendel’s badass and scary.

Joaquim Dos Santos: It lets you know that the world is morally gray. Even the Viscount is like “Oh, what’s this guy doing? Oh, he’s a wreck, we’re saving a shock here.”

Joe Madureira: Even on the violence thing, there was a part where there was just blood splattering everywhere. It’s actually your idea to be like, “Hey, what’s in the glowing canisters that they have on the weapons? We could just leak that all over the place and you kind of get the same idea.”

Joaquim Dos Santos: It becomes your blood surrogate.

Joe Madureira: It totally looks like he massacred them even though it’s green, so that was cool.

Madureira & Stefanelli “could not find a precedent” for their unique problem

The shift to self-publishing and away from free to play

What was the decision process about the switch from free-to-play to RPG? What were the conversations behind the scenes around this?

Joe Madureira: Well, we couldn’t afford free-to-play, for one.

Ryan Stefanelli: We have to do some experimentation to realize that, though. We’ve been working on Wayfinder for so long, we knew the industry was going through a tough time, obviously. You can see that from projects failing and studios laying people off, it’s already in full swing. But when de [Digital Extreme] Basically canceled the project, which is more or less what happened, we tried to find a partner that would allow it to continue as a free-to-play title.

Between the perception of the game, but I think more importantly just the general risk aversion that spread as the industry bubble burst, it became clear that we could not follow this path. We certainly couldn’t do it alone – no chance we could afford to. A lot of its user acquisition costs, run the service, transition the service. Indeed, when we looked at our various options, we came down to two that we saw outside of finding someone who would dress up the game as a free-to-play title.

One is to just cancel it, shut it down and move on to something else entirely, but that just felt rude for a number of reasons. First, for players, because it was barely operational. We weren’t able to offer refunds because we didn’t collect any of the money, so it would have just been really, really bad. But also, selfishly, from a developer’s standpoint, The idea that you worked on a game for four or five years and then it’s just gone forever is not something we’re willing to let happen..

It was a wild idea when it was first thrown out that we would just completely convert it from a service game to what it is now, which is basically an ARPG. We could not find any precedent. We tried to look for examples of other games that did this, and we couldn’t find it, but the more we researched it, we thought, “Gee, we’re really going to be able to pull this off.”

Joe Madureira: It also fixed a lot of issues with the game because of the way it was monetized originally; A lot of it was to try to mirror Warframe. DE had stuff that worked for them, and so it was a lot of times, and we heard There is no meaningful loot at the end of the dungeons and everything. You have to buy every cool thing or time forever, and once we switched to this model, suddenly we can put loot drops and chests, and you were constantly getting new stuff. It made every 30 minutes or an hour you put in, you got a bunch of cool stuff for it.

It just got a lot more fun. Even internally, when we were playing it, we were like, “Oh my God, this is such a better game,” and you could see through the Steam sentiment players agreed. We hope we got it right and maybe this is the way it was meant to be from the beginning.

Ryan Stefanelli: I think the moment to moment completely changed when we put real loot in the game – weapon dropping, a piece of armor dropping. Armor drops were something we basically had to invent from scratch for Wayfinder, because armor didn’t have stats, there were no armor pieces that did things for your character.

We have to take all the cosmetic armor through a system now where the armor pieces have stats that are in a slot. All this, the team had to create from scratch in a very short time, and trying to balance it all. Because what we ended up with was a game that really had no loot outside of crafting ingredients – which are of dubious importance, Getting a crafting ingredient isn’t fun compared to getting a cool weapon or a piece of armor – Suddenly we have too much stuff, especially on the housing side.

One of the funniest examples is when we’re like, “How do we give all the housing items to players?” We started hiding little slides all over the world, and you could interact with them, and the funniest example was when Joe was playing, and he jumped into a fountain and saw a little slide, and when he interacted with it , he got an armoury. [Laughs] We’re like, “What the hell is an armoire doing in a skylight fountain?” But it didn’t matter, because getting loot is so much fun.

Joe Madureira: Look everywhere, click every slip – you never know. That really felt good to have the game reward the player in a meaningful way, for the first time it felt like. We knew there would be some quirks, because it’s a big world that was meant to be MMO-lite. If you’re playing single player, or even if you’re playing in co-op with friends, it’s a big world, so trying to fill it out and make it feel alive was a challenge. I think we’re most of the way there, but it’s going to be impossible for the game to escape its roots. I think we found a way to embrace them and actually make it a strength of the game.

Besides the obvious financial element you mentioned, what kind of challenges came with the switch to self-publishing for Airship Syndicate?

Ryan Stefanelli: The self-publishing thing presents problems that you don’t necessarily know you’re going to encounter until you try, logistical things with each of the first parties. Steam is quite easy because they are the newest player, everything is quite simple and there is one ecosystem. But Sony has been around consoles forever, and so their system was much more complex. There are just things you don’t realize you have to do until you try to do themAnd it could be dead by a thousand paper cuts as you’re trying to just get the game into submission yourself as a publisher on Sony. A lot of you learn by doing it. That definitely took a lot of time to adjust to.

Also, marketing in this day and age is so different than when we were marketing Darksiders 1 almost 15 years ago. Now it’s all content creator outreach and just trying to go viral, and that’s a challenge. It’s really amazing how much the process can get in the way of progress. Once you know it, it’s pretty quick and easy, but you have to get to know it first. There are a lot of small detailed steps that we have to guess and then solve. It was probably the biggest challenge outside of the money – just getting stuff out there and getting in front of people was really hard.

Joe, you mentioned how the switch from free-to-play to an action RPG game has now made things a lot more fun on the development side. I would like to hear a little more about the freedom you are allowed after making the shift from one genre to another.

Joe Madureira: Once the game was officially cancelled, we were free to do whatever we wanted in scope. We already had a character that was really far along, we had a large area that was the next overland exploration area. Basically, we just figured out what we could really do in the time that we had, because we started a lot of stuff, and luckily we had a couple things that were very close that we were able to add in.

But freedom wise, anything and everything in reason to make the game better, we did. We’ve posted patch notes over the past few months of just massive improvements to the game, hundreds and hundreds of major content aside; Combat feels better. Almost every part of the game has been tweaked, especially performance, because that was one thing we had patience for.

Ryan Stefanelli: Yeah, I think the biggest element of freedom was Now we are able to make bold decisions quickly and conciselyAnd it is the developer’s dream in a way, the reason you want to own your product, be self-published, self-funded things. Of course we are there in a very strange and unexpected way, but now if we see something we want to change, we change it – that’s it. The conversation could be a 30 minute meeting, and 30 minutes later, someone is working on it. It can happen that quickly.

Joe Madureira: The agility is shocking, because when you work with any publisher, even if they’re small, it’s like, “Our group has to meet on Thursday, let’s give them the idea.” They have to give it to someone above them, but they’re gone this week, so the following week, two or three weeks later, we move. But here, it’s like, “We should do this, right?”

Ryan Stefanelli: Even big decisions, it’s so fast. Because small decisions, sure, there are small things like, “Should we tweak the stat on this item?” We’re always able to do that at our discretion, but the idea of ​​”we should just give armor stats, let’s do that.”

Same thing with player sentiment — if our player base tells us something sucks and we need to fix it, we can just go, “Yeah, let’s really fix that.” The creative freedom, it’s empoweringEspecially when you have significant problems in the game that you need to overcome and you have the ability to do so. I think the only way we could have possibly done this in such a short time is by being forced to do it ourselves.

Joe Madureira: I think we probably could have shipped Wayfinder as a service-based game with the game exactly as it is today and found a more creative way to monetize it. I don’t think we were creative enough in how we approached a free-to-play title. It was this idea like, “Oh, you can’t drop weapons and armor loot. That’s what we have to have players pay for,” or, “That’s what we have to have players painfully grind for, to incentivize them to Spend money to make it faster or more accessible.” We might say, “Screw that, we’re going to drop it all.”

Now we can do that, obviously, because it’s a premium game, but I think we could have done it as a free-to-play title as well, and found another way to introduce monetization. I wish we could do that, but that is, of course, the power of hindsight. Now we can make these kinds of decisions, do them, feel them in the game, say, “Yeah, they’re awesome.”

Same thing with the UI, we just completely redid the UI. One day, our UI director was like, “Hey, I have this idea for how I want the UI to look. Should we do this instead?” I simplify, he spent a lot of time on it, but still, The only views he had to advance were in the building. It gives you a level of agility that I think players today demand from the developer. You need that agility, or you’re going to struggle.

Wayfinder’s Echoes update represented the beginning of a better game

Introducing Wayfinder’s new design and looking to the future

I’m curious what things were leading up to the release of the first big update that introduced this shift, the Echoes Update, and what were the biggest things you wanted to be sure to establish in the first rollout of the concept?

Joe Madureira: I think we were just nervous of how it would be received. I feel like we’ve launched this game so many times. It was like another tense launch. I don’t know if we had any big goals other than: this can’t happen at this time. That was the main thing.

Ryan Stefanelli: I think the big thing that we wanted, and it’s nuanced, but we hoped that players would understand that we did it for two reasons, and probably in that order: one, It’s a better game to be presented this wayAnd two, there really weren’t many other options, right? Because I think, just like that, a lot of players were upset because they wanted refunds because it wasn’t the MMO they asked for, and obviously we’re not in a position like Airship to be able to issue refunds.

But also, it was basically this or the game was gone forever, which nobody wanted. We didn’t want that for players. We didn’t want it for ourselves creatively as people who poured years of – you really put your soul into a game if you care. Most people don’t work in the game industry unless they love what they do; They are in it to try to achieve something and build something remarkable. Whether they succeed or not, it’s always the attempt. To see it go away would be the worst feeling.

I feel very lucky that in my 20-year career, this is not something that we really experienced in an example when we were in Vigil and THQ went bankrupt with the title that we were working on. Because Vigil was shut down, we didn’t get to finish this. But otherwise, every game I’ve been on has shipped, and I didn’t want to see the streak end with Wayfinder, so selfishly, I’m very glad we pulled it off. But we wanted players to understand that not only is this a better game, but we really don’t have much — It was the only option, it was probably the best option for the game itself, Gameplay wise.

Can you talk a little bit about how the fan response has been since then, and how it’s helped the game’s journey since it first started?

Joe Madureira: Our score on Steam was very low when it first launched. Since then, it’s been steadily climbing, and I think we’ve been at 88%, we’ve broken 90 depending on the day. If you look at our recent Steam reviews, it’s pretty unanimous so far that it’s much better. Honestly, when it was a few months ago, It definitely has wind in people’s sails hereBecause morale definitely took a hit and it was devastating. We had layoffs for the first time, and I think it was the boost we needed because we were so uncertain. Just to see fans have our backs and want more of what we’re doing, I feel like everyone is reignited here.

You could feel the energy, and people just busted their asses to make it what it is today, and it’s still improving as we speak. I think even after launch, we’ll continue to make whatever improvements we can to the game. I’m biased, but I hope people will try it. I think our biggest fear is that people are going to be like, “Why, I heard something about people not being able to get on the server,” and they’re not going to look at, “Wait, this is a completely different game.” It There are no servers. Just please just try it – It’s not the same game. That’s why we keep pushing the ARPG side of it, because that’s really what it is.

Ryan Stefanelli: As a developer, I don’t think what players understand is how impactful Steam reviews and the Steam score are for your psyche. It really matters to people who make games. For the first week, because there was a period where, for 36 hours, players just couldn’t log into the game at all, and that of course quickly put us at 30% with 10,000 reviews or something like that, which is a hole You just really don’t dig out of.

Right now, I think this will probably be shuffled forever unless the game really, really, really blows up, which would be awesome. We focus so much on recent scores, and since echoes, it’s been very positive, pushing 90% as Joe said. Of course, we look every hour and right now it’s 88%, which feels so good.

Joe Maduroira: Once a day.

Ryan Stefanelli: Joe looks once a day, I look once an hour. He doesn’t have to look, because I look, and then I just tell him. [Laughs] But that was one of the biggest challenges, just visibility, and now we have an added complexity of overcoming perception that this is the game it was. Of course, this will color the game; It’s part of his long and strange history, though, and while seeing that mixed number is painful, we don’t necessarily hide from it anymore.

I think it tells it’s a scarred game, But there is one that is stronger for him. We just hope that people pay attention to it, because when we see 90% of the people who play it now enjoy it – if only people could just try it for what it is, we think it could be something that is really good. But even if it’s not, I think we rest easy at night knowing that we made a good game in the end. It took a winding road to get there, but we made a good game, so as developers, I think we’re proud of it. But it remains to be seen whether players will, in a very tight market, take the time to check it out.

Source: Wayfinder / YouTube