Wayfinder is finally approaching its final launch next week, but it's had a long and arduous journey to reach the form it's taken now as a fantasy ARPG. Developed by Airship Syndicate, the company behind titles like Darksiders Genesis, the game was originally slated 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 , one-time-purchase game. Set in the world of Evenor, players can choose between several different characters to take on adventures with as they fight against 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 sequel, to showcase the character Grendel in a special anime-style short.

Across two paired sessions, Screen Rant interviewed CEO and creative director Joe Mandureira alongside 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 title's big evolution into an ARPG.

Madureira & Dos Santos Had Been Trying To Collaborate For Years

How The Duo Finally Came Together & Their Creative Process

Screen Rant: To start off, I'm curious to learn a little bit more about how this collaboration first came about, and what that overall back-and-forth process was like for you guys.

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 geeked out that entire show, I feel like, and we were like, "We got to work on something someday." That was probably 10 years ago.

Joaquim Dos Santos: That was just a long-standing general rule that we had sort of set for ourselves, "We've got to work on something, something's going to 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 kind of just didn't line up every time. But finally, we were working on these animated character vignettes that we wanted to not feel like a commercial or a marketing piece, but more like a snippet of the world outside the game.

We touch on a lot of lore and places you can't visit yet, but as the world expands, you are going to 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 story than we can in the game." So far, everyone that's seen them is like, "Whoa, when do I get a whole season of this? I want this show." That's what we were going for. Joaquim happened to be like, "Well, you know, I have some time and a team of badasses that I could throw together." It just seemed too good to be true, but we finally did it. We stuck the landing.

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

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

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

Joe Madureira: All the concept art folders and stuff.

Joaquim Dos Santos: It was kid-in-a-candy-store stuff, 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: Yeah, Joaquim's a big gamer too, so we definitely connect on that; we talk about retro games and stuff that we grew up playing and things like that. I'm excited to step a foot into animation and film eventually, and Joaquim's like, "Hey, how do I get in games?”

It's been really interesting, and we hope to make more, we want to make more for the Wayfinders than we have, more for just the world in general, the villains. We want to start fleshing out the world, and eventually we'll have enough that it can sort of sustain itself. Because we always thought from the beginning, Wayfinder felt like just a cool world that you could hold so many stories in, in different media.

We're just lucky to have someone like Joaquim on board. I'm not blowing smoke, but I personally haven't worked on something where every single 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 off talking about this thing being a minute and a half long, and then we just kept going, "Yes, and what about this?”

Joe Madureira: [Laughs] Then it went to five or six minutes. We actually had to cut some awesomeness out and some violence that was not going to get approved and junk like that. It was way more fierce and violent originally, which someday we should show the early boards of. It's spectacular and I can't believe it's just the first one. I think we can only get better from there, so I'm excited for more.

In of your future plans, do you see yourself branching out stylistically when you're showcasing other characters, going with a different aesthetic than this first short? Or is this sort of the realm that you feel best fits Wayfinder in that way?

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

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 these characters with a hand of a different artist creating the world, but all still feeling cohesive.

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

Joaquim Dos Santos: It's weirdly circular, 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 was taking that stuff once I got into animation, that stuff in anime and video games. I think it was this real late-nineties sweet spot of when we were giving rise to video games and JRPGs and anime. Those things are really becoming pop-cultural touchstones. I took all that stuff into 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's got a huge breadth of styles and tones. The other side of it is that both Joe and I, as we didn't know originally, we're both Portuguese fellows, so I did have a huge European comics influence growing up because I'd spent all my summers there. It was Tintin, Lucky Lou, Phantom, and all these things that were really popular in Europe at the time, and that all goes into 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 kind of regret now. When you're trying to be taken seriously as a film franchise, it sounds goofy.

Even when I pitched it, it was like, "Oh, fantasy 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 by 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 some bootleg places in Chinatown.

Joaquim Dos Santos: I think that's the crazy thing - we're going to sound like totally old farts saying this, but there was a time when it was hard to come by this stuff. You had to go out of your way. DBZ wasn't in Barnes and Noble. That was impossible to even think of. But Wayfinder seems like a baby of that, it seems like the sort of culmination of all those influences and all those things. That's why I was so geeked, it's seeing all those influences play out right in front of you.

Joe Madureira: Weirdly, too - again, not to blow smoke - before Joaquim even came on for the Grendel thing, I think when Spider-Verse came out, everyone 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 survivally, like dark fantasy, more like the Witcher or something like that, Game of Thrones.

Then we were like, "Ah, it feels kind of boring. We need more fantastic elements. Let's hit it with Spider-Verse stuff," and it felt fresh all of a sudden. We're like, "It's fantasy, but this glowing gun doesn't look weird next to these castle ruins." Then Joaquim did become involved, and it was like, "Oh, thank God," because honestly, even the short Grendel piece really helped our world building and refining the look of some of the characters.

Wayfinder's World Goes Way Beyond What Players See In-Game

The Freedom Of Expanding On The Title's Characters & Lore 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 lore that you're creating. How do you feel the short better captures that essence of Wayfinder more than a typical rollout for a game could?

Joaquim Dos Santos: Yeah, I will say that I think one of the exciting things about building the narrative is that it's sort of open and closed within that four minutes. You're introduced to this mysterious stranger, you recognize that like, "Oh boy, this guy's really, really ruthless.

I think we talked about it pretty early on when we were showing the viscount's suite up there, you were like, "Oh, what if he's got plans for this mechanical thing that's going to be in another part of the game?" You could plant these 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 this is.

Joe Madureira: Yeah, we give no context at all. If you've played the game or when you eventually play the game, that trailer that just felt awesome to you is going to mean so much more. We obviously can't devote that much time for moment-to-moment storytelling in the game, but our only hope is that you are intrigued by the world and want to see more. Up until now, the Wayfinders were kind of goody two-shoes, like, "We are heroes saving the world.”

That's not a bad thing, by the way, they're all cool, but I just thought when we're thinking about the next Wayfinder, can we have a guy that's just kind of out for himself? You can't really trust him; he'll do pretty much anything for money. He's kind of a villain if the mood strikes him, and he'll help them, but what's he getting out of it?

We thought we could have more fun with a gray character. People have reacted well to it. I think it emboldens us to try more and more crazy things with the future characters that aren't so straightforward.

You mentioned this experience - and playing in this aesthetic space where you had 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 you artistically.

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

We can only push the themes so far because we do have a teen rating, but I think we want to definitely step away from the "everyone's a hero" kind of thing and just give people more choices. You can customize your characters pretty extensively in the game now, and we're going to always keep adding more and more of that stuff, even for the existing Wayfinders. Even the new character we're introducing when the game launches on the 21st is pretty different; it's almost two characters. Unfortunately, she doesn't have a badass Joaquim trailer to go with, though.

Joaquim Dos Santos: I have to say it's really, really refreshing to work with artists and developers that are of like mind. You can push each other into these spaces, you can get each other hyped about ideas. I think we're really in this gilded era of animation and video games where these things can be approached; there was a time where everything had to fit into a safe box, and Wayfinder kind of represents this.

Yeah, it can be totally cute and funny at times with the little gizmos and the stuff - it can also get 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 remainder of my career is that kind of community where everything's on the table.

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

Joaquim Dos Santos: It's a case of editing, and that's sort of with narrative stuff all the time. When you're first at bat on trying to build an animatic or a storyboard for something, you build in these really robust, 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 instantly hate that guy, like, "Oh, he's just shooting random animals." Then Grendel shows up and starts doing all this crazy stuff, and that's all wonderful, but then it's a case of, "Hey, we got three minutes to tell this thing. What do we absolutely need to see?" It's an evolution by subtraction.

Joe Madureira: It's the opposite problem that I usually have of, "It needs more, what can we add?" We ended up with five or six minutes, and having to get it down close to three - we ended up at four, because we just could not do it.

Joaquim Dos Santos: Couldn't do it.

Joe Madureira: "We're not cutting that and we're not cutting that." Joaquim was very gracious, he's so easy to work with. He'd be like, "Hey man, I could cut this whole thing. It'll still be good." And I'm like, "No. No way." I'd rather have it go long - fast forward it if you can't watch the whole thing.

Joaquim Dos Santos: Honestly, usually I have to be that guy, but I was so lucky to have Joe that I got to be the guy that's like, "I'll make anything work.”

Joe Madureira: 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's morally gray. Even the Viscount, it's like, "Oh, what is this guy doing? Oh, he's a jerk. We're rescuing a jerk here.”

Joe Madureira: Even on the violence thing, there was a part where there was just blood splattering everywhere. It was actually your idea to 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 "Couldn't Find A Precedent" For Their Unique Predicament

The Shift To Self-Publishing & Away From Free To Play

What was the decision process like regarding the switch from free-to-play to RPG? What were the conversations like behind the scenes surrounding that?

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

Ryan Stefanelli: We had to do some experimentation to realize that, though. We've been working on Wayfinder for so long, we knew that the industry was going through a rough time, obviously. You could see that from projects failing and studios laying people off, that was already in full swing. But when DE [Digital Extreme] basically canceled the project, which is more or less what happened, we did try to find a partner that would let it 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 was bursting, it became clear that we couldn't pursue that path. We certainly couldn't do it on our own - no chance that we could afford to. A lot of its acquisition costs, running the service, transitioning the service. Really, when we were looking at our various options, we came down to two that we saw outside of finding somebody who would prop the game up as a free-to-play title.

One was just cancel it, shut it down and move on to something else completely, but that just felt gross for a number of reasons. First, for players, because it had barely been operational. We weren't in a position to be able to offer refunds because we hadn't collected any of the money, so it just would've 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 was just gone forever was not something we were willing to let happen.

It was a wild idea when it was first thrown out that we would just convert it completely from a service game to what it is now, which is basically an ARPG. We couldn't find any precedent for it. We tried to look for examples of other games that had done it, and we couldn't find it, but the more we investigated it, we thought, "Geez, we might actually 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 had worked for them, and so there was a lot of grind, and we were hearing there isn't meaningful loot at the end of the dungeons and everything. You had to buy every cool thing or grind forever, and once we switched to this model, all of a sudden we could 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 became way 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 by the Steam sentiment players agreed. We're hoping that we got it right and maybe this is the way it was meant to be from the start.

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

We had to take all the cosmetic armor through a system now where the armor pieces had stats that went in a slot. All of that, the team had to create from scratch in a very short timeframe, then trying to balance it all. Because what we ended up with was a game that had really no loot outside crafting ingredients - which are of dubious importance, it's not fun to get a crafting ingredient compared to getting a cool weapon or a piece of armor - to suddenly now we have way too much stuff, especially on the housing side.

One of the funniest examples is when we were like, "How do we give all these housing items to players?" We started hiding little glints around the world, and you could interact them, and the funniest example was Joe was playing, and he jumped into a fountain and saw a little glint and when he interacted with it, he got an armoire. [Laughs] We were like, "What the hell is an armoire doing in a fountain in Skylight?" But it didn't matter, because getting loot is so much fun.

Joe Madureira: Look everywhere, click every glint - 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 is 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 got most of the way there, but it's going to be impossible for the game to avoid its roots. I think we found a way to embrace them and actually make it a strength of the game.

Besides the obvious fiscal element of it that 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's pretty easy because they're the newest player, it's all pretty straightforward and it's one ecosystem. But Sony has been around doing consoles forever, and so their system was a lot more complicated. There are just things you don't realize you have to do until you try to do them, and it can be death 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 really is amazing just how much the process can get in the way of progress. Once you know it, then it's pretty quick and easy, but you have to get to know it first. There's a lot of little detailed steps we had to encounter and then solve. It's probably been the biggest challenge outside the money - just getting stuff out there and getting in front of people is really difficult.

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 as well. I'd love to hear a little bit more about the freedoms that you guys were allowed after making that shift from one genre to the other.

Joe Madureira: Once the game was officially canceled, we were free to do whatever we wanted within scope. We already had a character that was really far along, we had a big area that was the next overland exploration area. Basically, we were just figuring out what can we actually do in the time we have, because we had started a whole bunch 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 within reason to make the game better, we did. We've posted patch notes over the last several months of just massive improvements to the game, hundreds and hundreds aside from major content; combat feels better. Pretty much every part of the game got tweaked, performance especially, because that was one thing we kept getting dinged for.

Ryan Stefanelli: Yeah, I think the biggest element of freedom was now we're able to make bold decisions quickly and concisely, and it's the developer's dream in a way, the reason you want to own your product, be self-published, self-fund things. Of course we got there in a very weird and unexpected way, but now if we see something we want to change, we change it - that's it. The conversation can be a thirty-minute meeting, and then 30 minutes later, somebody's 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, there's like, "Our group has to meet on Thursday, let's pitch them that idea." They've got to pitch it to someone above them, but they're gone that 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 that quick. Because small decisions, sure, there are little things like, "Should we tweak this stat on this item?" We were always able to do that at our own discretion, but the idea of, "We should just give armor stats, let's do it.”

Same thing with player sentiment - if our player base is telling us something sucks and we need to fix it, we can just go, "Yeah, let's actually fix that." The creative freedom, it's empowering, especially when you have significant problems in the game that you need to overcome and you're given the ability to do that. I think the only way we could have possibly done this in such a short timeframe is by being forced to do it alone.

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. There 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 grind painfully for, to incentivize them to spend money to make it quicker or more accessible." We could say, "Screw that, we're going to drop it all.”

Now we can do that, obviously, because it's a game, but I think we could have done it as a free-to-play title too, and found another way to introduce monetization. I wish we had done that, but that's, of course, the power of hindsight. Now we can make those kinds of decisions, do them, feel them in the game, say, "Yes, 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'm simplifying, he spent a lot of time on it, but still, the only opinions he needed to move forward were in this building. That 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 Start Of A Better Game

Introducing Wayfinder's New Design & Looking To The Future

I'm curious what things were like leading up to the release of the first big update that introduced this shift, the Echoes update, and what the biggest things you wanted to be sure to establish were in that 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 major goals other than: it cannot fall over this time. That was the main thing.

Ryan Stefanelli: I think the big thing that we wanted, and this is nuanced, but we hoped players would understand that we did it for two reasons, and probably in this order: one, it's a better game for being presented this way, and two, there really weren't many other options, right? Because I think, justifiably so, a lot of players were upset, because they wanted refunds because it wasn't the MMO that they had asked for, and obviously we weren't in a position as 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've 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're doing; they're in it to try and achieve something and build something remarkable. Whether they succeed or not, that's always the attempt. To see it go away, that would've been the worst feeling.

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

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

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

You could feel the energy, and people just busted their ass to make it what it is today, and it's still being improved as we speak. I think even after launch, we'll continue making improvements that we can to the game. I'm biased, but I hope people will try it. I think our biggest fear is that people will be like, "Wayfinder, I heard something about that, that people couldn't get on the server," and they won't look at, "Wait, this is a completely different game." There's 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 really is what it is.

Ryan Stefanelli: As a developer, I don't think what players understand is how impactful Steam reviews and the Steam score is to 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 to the game at all, and that of course quickly put us at I think 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 mixed forever unless the game really, really, really blows up, which would be awesome. We focus so much on the recent scores, and since Echoes, it's been very positive, pushing 90% like Joe said. Of course, we look every hour and right now it's 88%, which it feels so good.

Joe Madureira: 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 has been one of the biggest challenges, just visibility, and then now we have an added complexity of overcoming perception that it's the game it was. Of course, that's going to color the game; it's a part of its long and weird history, though, and even though seeing that mixed number is painful, we don't necessarily hide from it anymore.

I think it tells it's a scarred game, but it's one that's stronger for it. We just hope that people pay attention to it, because when we see 90% of the people who are playing it now enjoy it - if only people could just try it for what it is, we think it could be something that really does well. But even if it doesn't, I think we rest easy at night knowing that we did make a good game in the end. It took a winding road to get there, but we did make a good game, so as developers, I think we're proud of it. It's to be seen though, whether players will, in a very crowded market, take the time to check it out.

Wayfinder will leave early access on October 21.

Source: Wayfinder/YouTube (1,2)