After years working on the Star Wars Battlefront and Battlefied games, a small team headed by former DICE directors and featuring several ex-DICE employees have decided to break off on their own and form an indie studio that is trying its hand at creating an online RPG focused on small communities of players having their own shared experiences.
Wayfinder Studios, formed in 2020 by Dennis Brännvall and his partner Fia Tjernberg, are doing a full 180-degree shift away from AAA FPS development into RPG territory, tapping in to their shared time together playing tabletop games during their days off.
Gameplay for this new persistent online RPG involves small groups of friends no larger than a Minecraft or Valheim server experiencing a co-op RPG adventure in their own distinct way, without parroting tabletop rules, mechanics, and dice rolls. The studio founders also confirm their game will be an original IP, presume that it will likely arrive to PC early access first, and offer hopes for a later console and PC release, with possible cross-play between both platforms.
“We want to make games where you feel that within your small community, you have your own version of our fictional universe that you are enjoying playing,” Brännvall says. “[Two groups] might buy the same D&D adventure, but the nature of one group versus the other means that experience is going to be different.”
It should be noted that this online title reads like it’s in very early prototyping and brainstorming – it doesn’t even have a working title yet – but the heads of this new indie studio feel confident they can leverage their shared RPG gaming love, their experience with the passionate online communities of Battlefront and Battlefield, and a healthy work ethic into something new to our part of the gaming world.
