'Wayfinder' is an enjoyable, but highly flawed experience, with very obvious inspirations from Warframe & WoW. I'll go into detail below, but the TLDR is that it's worth playing, but go into the game knowing that adapting the game from the desired MMO experience to the Co-Op AARPG the game ended up as, doesn't really do the game any favours. That being said, the devs made the best of a bad hand, so they deserve kudos for that.
Art & Sound:
The way the world is visually designed is a high point in the game. The art style works well, and the sound design compliments it. The zones are visually distinct, and the monster designs are interesting overall. The character customization is alright- it's better than it needed to be, but won't impress people looking for true customization.
The battle affects also match the style, HOWEVER, they can be overused, and make readability in battle more difficult. There is also a massive overuse of purple, which also hinders battle readability (eg: enemy tells and AOD looking the same as character abilities in terms of FX and color, so you end up avoiding buffs and heals by accident).
If you're a person that wants dark, gritty ARPGs, like early Diablo, this isn't for you. Color explodes everywhere.
Story:
The story overall is reasonably good. The ideas were decent, and the character dialogue that delivers it was well written. However, overall it can be hard to get into it, due to the overuse of some terms, and poor pacing. It's very clear that this wasn't meant to be an ARPG, as the overarching story is inconsistent, and is written in a way to try to tie up lose ends that were clearly meant to be handled separately, over a longer period of time. If you're a person that is into Lore, 'Wayfinder' offers a decent amount of opportunities to learn about the world- there is flavour text for a variety of objects, landmarks, and zones etc.
Menus, QoL & Bugs
The menu flows and QoL systems in 'Wayfinder' are lacking. While you do get used to the menus after some time, they're not very efficient in their click throughs, and some information seems misplaced. There are also obvious things that seem to be missing, such as "loadouts" for your Echoes/Equipment etc. It's annoying to want to try different builds, but to have to manually redo everything, every time you change your equipment, or respec.
In terms of QoL things:
- The accessory limit is insanely low- only 200 accessories can be stored, which is lower than the number of housing decorations you can have, even though one is cosmetic, and one directly affects gameplay.
- There is a bit of jank when it comes to some of the programming and instancing. Every boss encounter has an interactable wall you have to move through in order to enter the fight. This wall can be incredibly finnicky, and there were dozens of times where it took a couple minutes, just to enter the boss arena properly. This seems like something that would have been easily fixed- the boss activates once the first person is in the arena anyways, so just put the wall up after all players are in the arena, instead of making everyone manually jump through.
- Multiple characters can't use the zip lines at the same time, and you can't go outside the zone that the host is in, if you're a guest- this limits quest time, unless you want to leave the group, and rejoin. TBF, you don't lose any progress if you do this, but it's a time sink.
- You don't get persistent map markers, and you can only have 4 per person, which makes it difficult to track chests, memories or events that party members may have missed.
(these are just a few examples, there will be more in the quest section)
In terms of Bugs..... there are a fair few. Nothing game-breaking, but lots of little bugs that diminish the experience. Visual errors in terms of weapons disappearing, or "styles" disappearing. Enemies getting bugged, Collision errors and disappearing geometry etc. The game also seems somewhat poorly optimized, so while not technically a "Bug", the constant lag and stuttering in combat is very disruptive.
Battle & Experience Progression:
The battle system is fun, but somewhat shallow. While it's more deep than some Action Adventure games, it's not going to satisfy people that are looking for big systems like POE or Grim Dawn. It's hampered by the lack of build loadouts, and poor drop tables- you get a huge amount of mediocre weapons, and you can be further restricted if those weapons have poor echo slot loadouts.
Boss fights in general are pretty good, although like any game, these vary.
The character sets are pretty good, but nothing special. Most of the time, the characters feel good to play and control well.
The character progression system is pretty accommodating, allowing players to gain transferable experience to characters that you aren't currently playing. There are also other systems tied to character progression and gearing that are good, such as echoes, but once you're done the main quest chain, there is little real incentive to min/max your characters.
Quests:
This is probably the roughest part of the game. The pacing for the quests is very front heavy, and there are way too many quests where the requirement is "do one small thing, go back to quest giver, repeat 7 times". Many of these quests needed to be streamlined into larger chunks. For example, there is a quest chain where you are required to do 14+ runs of "lost zones" to collect and return, book pages. After almost every single pair of pages, you go back to the quest giver, and then you're told to go out and gather 2 more pages. It's tedious in the extreme. The 7 "distinct" quests could have been done in half that. There is also a quest chain where you're trying to fix a marriage that requires an excessive amount of small jobs, followed by going back and forth between 2 NPCs.
And then those types of quests taper off fairly rapidly as you progress; it makes it obvious that they were either trying to milk early content, or that they lost direction as the game goes on. Overall, they just needed a couple passes to make sure people would progress at a reasonable rate, between the main quest, and side quests, and to balance rewards around that.
Misc:
There's not a great place to put this, but the game definitely dabbles in "woke", even though it's not overly preachy.
- There is an abundance of "diversity" (read: black characters- as there are basically no asians in the game), which doesn't really help to sell their world or their distinct regions. ( Clearly made for the "modern audience")
- The marriage quest chain mentioned above is for a gay couple, and is the longest quest chain in the game.
- Two of the playable female characters are implied to be lesbians.
- The black character is the easiest to upgrade, which gives the impression that the devs were trying to encourage people to play him more.
- As a funny side note though, he's also a walking stereotype, with a typical AA speech
pattern, and a missing father figure.
- The playable male characters are half taken up by weird/animal characters, while the female characters are all more "normal" (it's a pattern that reduces the number of noticeable "male" characters in games).
- Character customization for the female characters are very a-sexual. The hair styles are very "modern", and are usually associated visually with girl-bosses and activists.
All-in-all, 'Wayfinder' is rough, but good for some co-op play sessions. Hopefully the devs learn from the experience and apply it to their future games, so some of the errors can be avoided.
