The Wayward Realms - Daggerfall successor in development by the minds behind said game

  • Want to keep track of this thread?
    Accounts can bookmark posts, watch threads for updates, and jump back to where you stopped reading.
    Create account
Helping Friendly Book

Helping Friendly Book

Never post in USPG2
kiwifarms.net
Joined
Apr 19, 2025
There's this game that I've been interested in for a while called The Wayward Realms, a massive and ambitious RPG being developed by OnceLost Games, led by Ted Peterson & Julian LeFay, both being majorly involved behind 1996's The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall. It originally used UE5, but the devs have switched off it to utilize their own engine. The game will feature a procedurally generated world, supposedly 5000x bigger than Skyrim. The game has a Kickstarter, where it has raised over $850,000 dollars, above its original $500,000 dollar goal. What are y'all's thoughts on this game? Is it the next step in RPGs or does it sound to good to be true? Discuss.

Gameplay trailer:
Youtube: https://youtube.com/@oncelostgames
Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/oncelostgames/the-wayward-realms/
Xitter: https://x.com/OnceLostGames
Steam page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1685310/The_Wayward_Realms/
 
Last edited:
>developed by people who have not put out a game in more than two decades
>one of the big names on the project(Lefay) passed away last year
>kickstarted for 500k yet they claimed they wanted to get a publisher to shell out 12M for it, which probably means it'll show up in Early Access if it ever releases and it'll take years to reach 1.0
>we'll totally be 6 million times larger than skyrim
>procedural generation(Yes I'm aware what Daggerfall was)
>UE5
Not trying to be a Negative Nancy but everything about this sounds like a complete and utter dud and that's not getting into the gameplay trailer which putting aside obvious 'early footage' quality heavily reminds me of Underworld Ascendant which is a huge red flag.
 
BiggestKai said:
>developed by people who have not put out a game in more than two decades
>one of the big names on the project(Lefay) passed away last year
>kickstarted for 500k yet they claimed they wanted to get a publisher to shell out 12M for it, which probably means it'll show up in Early Access if it ever releases and it'll take years to reach 1.0
>we'll totally be 6 million times larger than skyrim
>procedural generation(Yes I'm aware what Daggerfall was)
>UE5
Not trying to be a Negative Nancy but everything about this sounds like a complete and utter dud and that's not getting into the gameplay trailer which putting aside obvious 'early footage' quality heavily reminds me of Underworld Ascendant which is a huge red flag.
Click to expand...
Yeah, I'm not too hopeful for this game either, but it piqued my interest, and that's more than I can say for other games.
 
When will people understand that giving money to game dev boomers is just helping them to taint their legacies? It's not that they scam the players, but that they have a complete misunderstanding of what constitutes good gameplay as opposed to gimmicks that were already tried and deemed not worth the effort.
 
For projects like this, I just set my expectations to zero. This looks interesting though I guess.
 
My expectations for something tend to fall the longer it stagnates after its announcement. I struggle to think of a case where a Kickstarter game came out (or even just released something playable) fully 10 years after its announcement and ended up halfway decent. Figures like those tend to suggest troubled development hampered by scope bloat and mismanagement.

Plus, I get extra cynical anytime one of these projects is "brought to you by the people behind X", especially if their period of last relevance was more than a decade ago. Also, Julian LeFay isn't even alive anymore, and it looks very generic.

I liked Daggerfall a lot, it's one of my favorite games, but with all of the above, I just don't have any particular hope or expectations for this. Further, the "X amount larger than Y" line is snake oil, completely and utterly - a multiplicatively-large game world suggests that less of it was handcrafted, and there's no real value in a huge world full of recitation/procedural generation when compared to one that's smaller, yet denser and more handcrafted. In order to facilitate a world that's large by sheer square footage, you must necessarily think in terms of templates and reiterative work, which means that everything you find will be a permutation of something you've seen before. That means that even if there's a lot of things you haven't literally laid eyes on, the game world ultimately feels very small because you already know the box that every single game concept needs to be able to fit within.
 
They did switch away from UE5 a few months ago.
Transitioning Away From Unreal
We want to extend a sincere thank you for the overwhelmingly positive reception to our last Devlog. Your feedback made one thing absolutely clear, this community is here because you care about deep systems, meaningful choices, and solid, uncompromised gameplay. That clarity has guided our next big step.

After reviewing the many thoughtful comments we received, we’ve made a major but exciting decision, we are fully transitioning away from Unreal Engine and building our own proprietary engine. This move gives us the control and flexibility needed to deliver the experience you’ve told us you want. Over the past few weeks, our entire focus has been on developing this new engine, and we’re thrilled to say that we’ll have something to show you soon, with a new Devlog showcase planned for early in the new year.
Shifting to our own engine is a major step, and while it positions us to deliver a far better game, it also means we won’t be able to meet the end-of-year goal we previously set. Our new target is to release to our Kickstarter backers in June of next year, with a public Early Access release following a few months later.
We also want to remind you that we’ll be hosting our Live AMA on Wednesday, December 3rd, and we invite all of you to join us and ask any questions you have about the new engine and the road ahead.
Thank you again for the trust, enthusiasm, and insight you continue to share with us. Stay tuned, big things are coming.
The new engine allows us to:
  • Achieve 30+ FPS on decade-old laptops without dedicated GPUs, giving us excellent performance even on very low-end hardware.
  • Run the game at nearly 30 FPS on a first-generation Nintendo Switch, ensuring smooth performance on all major consoles, with full Linux support included.
  • Load Eyjar, a static map four times the size of Manhattan, in under one second, providing an almost instant start.
  • Load the entire engine in roughly 300 milliseconds, which allows extremely fast iteration and has already more than doubled our development speed.
  • Offer full community modding support for everything outside the core systems, using a public scripting language inspired by C# as a tribute to the Daggerfall Unity community.
Click to expand...

ETA: this is the AMA they mentioned. I haven't watched it.
 
Last edited:
BiggestKai said:
Not trying to be a Negative Nancy but everything about this sounds like a complete and utter dud and that's not getting into the gameplay trailer which putting aside obvious 'early footage' quality heavily reminds me of Underworld Ascendant which is a huge red flag.
Click to expand...
I'm expecting the game to not be that good at gameplay but to have superb algorithms and random generation, they have shown some of their systems and they look very interesting.
They talk more about this in their October DevBlog,

If you need the short and sweet of the interesting stuff, they concede that generating towns makes them really hard to navigate and to try and balance this they talk about how they're trying to model different houses and different buildings and locking them behind the NPCs profession, which should be basic stuff but is harder if youre doing all of this proccedurally generated, basically the house should reflect that the person inside is a farmer or a fabric merchant, or a armoursmith etc. etc.
They talk about their crowd system that tries to keep in memory NPCs schedules, based around their work and their status as well as their disposition and immediate goals, basically a more robust version of Oblivion NPCs, this shouldn't be that exciting except that aside from Oblivion, nobody else really does it, even Bethesda killed their NPC schedules in the later games. They also talk about how NPCs exist outside of Towns and how those are still kept in the world.
After this they talk about the conversation system, and how the NPC characteristics directly affect their manner or speech, their current place in the world and their disposition. This is the bit that has me a lot more interested and shows how deep they are taking their RNG as they show the table of possible traits NPCs can have and it's quite expansive, with their conversation system being expansive. The only problem for me in all of this, is that the NPCs talk like retards trying to cosplay old timey Middle Ages stooges, it's really silly.
Here is that said chart.
1777382408460.png
After all this they talk about the Combat but thats all for random generation, they also have another Dev Blog from two months ago that talks about the arquitecture and lore of the world, and modeling. It's pretty interesting but I won't talk about that.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom