Worldwalker Games has announced they will add villains to a future update of randomly generated RPG Wildermyth, and want fans to create them.
Speaking in a news post via their official website on May 14th, the developers explained how feedback indicating a lack of a story was an issue:
“Something we’ve had a lot of trouble with, ever since the beginning, was an overarching story.
At first we had this vague sense that you were sortof “settling” the land, making it safe from monsters, that sort of thing. And once we went down the procedural heroes and fights path, we didn’t want to marry ourselves to a particular overall storyline either. Here’s why.
Right now, if you play the game 5 times, you’ll get a different cast of heroes each time, and you’ll (hopefully!) see new and different events each time. That’s cool! But if we had a set plot with scripted events, then those would quickly become boring. That’s why our “overarching” plot is as thin as possible. There are monsters. Stop them. It’s enough to point you in a direction, and that’s all it does. It’s intended to melt into the background after that.
This isn’t a story. It’s not pretending to be.
But ok, it’s not super satisfying. One of the big goals for our game is to be a kind of storytelling tool, so that players can play out their own unique epic stories. But, so far we’ve simply ignored or handwaved the whole main motivation for being heroes in the first place. Why are you here? What do you want? We just rely on genre tropes and it’s not satisfying.”
The post continues, discussing how attempts to implement villains earlier on in development but did not work. “The story we were creating was brittle, it couldn’t handle a hero dying partway through a plot arc, etc.. It took a long time to write and it wouldn’t take very long to play, and once you had played it, you wouldn’t want to play it again.” The developers instead focused on other random event elements.
On July 22nd, another news post explains the concept of villains is moving forward, and they want fans to contribute.
“We call Wildermyth a “mythmaking RPG” because or philosophy is to put as much storytelling power into your hands as possible. Part of that is exposing our tools so that players can craft their own stories inside the game. Right now, we’re in the middle of adding a rather large feature to the game, that we call “Villains.” It’s still a work in progress, but when it’s complete, each time you start a new story, you’ll select a “villain,” which really just means a “main story” for that playthrough.
This means that on top of the regular procedural content, there will be a single story that connects the whole campaign together, that gives it meaning, that ties all the action together and punctuates it with stories and designed fights.”
The post continues, explaining that once you are part of the Beta, you can create story lines, events, and turn it all into a functioning mod. While there is no word if fans will be able to submit their mods to the developers, they have welcomed and added fan-submitted events into the game before.
Wildermyth‘s beta is out now on Windows PC, Linux, and Mac, with a full release Coming Soon. In case you missed it, you can read our preview here. Editor’s Note: This preview was based on the game’s March 11th 2019 build.
