Multiple Elder Scrolls veterans are making their own procedurally-generated RPG game in the style of Daggerfall, and the project has just had a big update with the promise of a Kickstarter. Called The Wayward Realms, over 100 islands will be procedurally generated in the game, with a virtual DnD-like Game Master guiding the world and characters as they respond to your actions. The team at OnceLost Games is shooting for an entirely new kind of experience: the Grand RPG.
The Wayward Realms is spearheaded by Elder Scrolls Arena and Daggerfall veterans Ted Peterson and Julian LeFay – as well as Daggerfall, Peterson’s credits include contracted writing and quest design on Morrowind and Oblivion. Set across 100 realistically scaled islands, The Wayward Realms is currently in early development with a group of volunteers, and a Kickstarter is now on the way for the RPG game.
“Choice, consequence, scope, and role-playing will be experienced like never before, with in-depth class and combat systems, a myriad of complex and dynamic faction relations, and a realistically-scaled open world where players will experience a new class of game: the Grand RPG,” OnceLost Games writes.
OnceLost Games adds that you’ll be able to create classes with your own skills, custom spells, and enchantments, with even more ways to be in full control of how you play. There’s also going to be a “virtual Game Master” that will help other characters and factions react to your actions in wildly different ways. “World events have very different effects in the life of a socializing aristocrat, a thief entrenched in underworld conspiracies, a scholar collecting ancient artifacts, or whatever role you craft for yourself,” the developer says.
The Game Master will act in tandem with The Wayward Realms’ Daggerfall-like procedurally generated world, where handwritten lore will combine with the world space, as PCGamesN was told by LeFay in an interview in 2022.
“You don’t want to just have a bunch of houses, rotate them, change colors and slap them in there. That’s boring,” LeFay says. “Our algorithm will go further. Cities should be shaped by things like climate, the history of the area, war, conflict, disease, commerce, and – very importantly – poverty level.”
OnceLost Games is planning on giving The Wayward Realms a lot of moving procedural parts to try and make the world as reactive as possible. LeFay explained that the team is trying to make the system behave with person-like intentions.
“Systems and procedural generation are not hard, but the trick is to make them do the kind of thing a person would do,” LeFay adds. “It has to have meaning, it has to have consequences.”
OnceLost Games was looking for investors back in 2022 and initially dismissed crowdfunding, but in the years since that’s clearly changed.
You can wishlist The Wayward Realms on Steam right now, with the Kickstarter campaign starting in spring 2024.
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