Wayfinder Early Access - Amid Tremendous Progress, Wayfinder Still Needs to Find Itself

17.08.2023 - 18:45 / mmorpg.com

As Wayfinder heads into Early Access today after a few delays, the servers will likely see an influx of players, as new Wayfinders join the fight to push back the Gloom. Last weekend press were invited to take part in testing out the game ahead of the Early Access release. We were given access to every character that will be available at the launch of Early Access, alongside each of the craftable weapons, and a smattering of Echoes and Artifacts to choose from to test out the game at “max level”. What transpired after being given max level characters left me both excited and concerned for the Early Access launch. Let’s get into why.

From the moment I saw the trailer for Wayfinder I was intrigued by the game. The art style was appealing, the mix of open world and dungeon-crawling content was right up my alley, and as a fan of character collector games, it seemed that everything was lining up perfectly. After a fairly positive experience during the Beta tests, I was ready to finally work towards building out my cast of characters properly in Early Access. However, when given the chance to test out every character at max level, it was clear that some cracks started to show.

For starters, it seems as though Airship Syndicate has been working on several quality of life features to assist in understanding how to build your characters through their Echo system. Echoes are now clearly marked as offensive, defensive, and so on, and while you can choose not to follow those aspects at the risk of slotting higher cost Echoes, it’s far easier to understand what the intention of those Echoes are.

I was also very happy to finally try out all of the characters. In previous tests, I was salivating to get my hands on Kyros, and once I swapped to him, I really enjoyed his damage focused playstyle. Kyros has also been blessed with a really cool character model that lends itself to some unique costume variants that will undoubtedly become some of the most popular models available during the Early Access launch. In fact, the team provided some ample visual customization options for all of the characters, and while those options are sure to grow over time, I had a great time toying around with the Persona's and outfit options.

Alternatively, I spent far less time with the newest character Venomess, primarily because her third-person-shooter style of gameplay didn’t mesh as well with my preferred playstyle. While I could (and did) change several weapons around, some characters do just lend themselves to ranged weaponry and team play more than others. Due to the limited nature of journalists in the play test, I actually only saw one other player for the entirety of my time in game, which was arguably far too short to coordinate