Anyone playing Wayward?

[taptap]

Anyone playing wayward?

Apparently not that many people on this forum... so I edit this a bit.

Wayward is a cute, light-hearted roguelike, fantasy-island-survival game in beta. It looks good (retro sprites), it sounds good (retro-ish as well). I am, however, of mixed feelings regarding gameplay in the long term.

I do not like the rapid crafting w/ rapid decay mechanism - of course it is turn-based and if you add serious time consuming crafting, you end with a completely different game (Unreal World). With many items in the 2,3,4 dozen uses range you are constantly repairing and fixing things or making replacements. That gets kind of tedious very rapidly at least when you approach "endgame" where you can take on most monsters and suddenly this steady repairing makes up most of your gameplay (gathering items for replacement arrows, make replacement arrows, repair the bow, reinforce the bow ...).

The combat system is quite opaque. You get a lot of numbers in the game, but nobody tells you what is done with them. It is hp-based, with quite limited damage per round and an abundance of healing items. And so far I could disengage sooner or later when fighting a single opponent. The most galling part is that you can only shoot orthogonally. There is no reason for a roguelike to do this - some kind of target selection should be in place.

The opponents seem to spawn constantly and are not very clever - mainly just running towards you or fleeing. They are somewhat different from each other, but given the low damage, high heal / hp, disengagement possibility setup, this isn't really that tactically interesting after the first week (am I playing this right to stay that long?), the sharks are surrounding your island in large numbers, you are killing and processing fresh spawns ...

Personally I could imagine the game going for more of beleaguered feeling if the combat gets more tactically interesting. Conceptually, like common roguelike gameplay with increasing difficulty just that you are defending in place and can prepare somewhat. Or toning down this aspect and making more out of the survival aspect, which is very easy as is - apart from the darkness.

[PaulBlay]

I played Wayward a lot, got kinda onto other games since. It can be frustrating, but I think that counts for pretty much all roguelikes.

[Runic86]

It's part of my favourite roguelike sub-genre, the survival-exploration one, but the relative little quantity of recipes and weakness of monsters really shortens gameplay...

Add to this the fact that there is no real replayability value (since all characters are the same) and yo uget a RL that you can play for a week, 2 at most... A real pity, because that project has a LOT of potential... We'll see in the next releases
(they added the "monstrosity" of the island, so that stronger monsters appear when you reach milestones, and that's good; but not yet enough)

[Vaughn]

Hey there,

I think a lot of the issues with the end-game is that there is still a lot to be done. Although reaching that state takes most blind players around 10-15 hours to get to, here in the roguelike community, we expect much more re-playability. I think some of these issues can be fixed with more content, more strategy in combat, overall more variety and of course balancing changes so the game doesn't become tedious as it does currently. I would say Wayward is still in "early" beta, even though it's been years in the making at this point, as a side project.

I will say that both combat and survival will be expanded upon. You will see things like nutrition, temperature but also more diverse creatures to face. With the new armor (beta 1.9.2) vulnerabilities and resistances system we are start to get there, but will take a few more versions for what you are looking for fully.

Wayward is a fantasy game, but I'm also more interested in simulation. My goal is to further that concept with constant feedback from players.

I appreciate your feedback and have noted them for future improvements.

[koiwai]

Vaughn: Wayward was very addicting when I played it ~ 2(?) years ago. I got bored eventually, but it was fun nevertheless. At the time, I remember a friend of mine calling me asking "How to make a campfire?" I was scared for a moment, thinking that she is going to make a campfire in her own apartment.. No, she was playing Wayward.
Maybe, it's time to try the game again 

[Vaughn]

My job is complete 

[Bear]

When I was a kid, our family actually had a specific rule about not making campfires inside the house.  I never asked my older brothers about it, but I think maybe I missed some history there.