Wayward Newsletter #12
Welcome the 12th iteration of the Wayward newsletter, featuring future plans, dissecting current issues, showcasing mods/media, and more!
[h2]Beacon’s Call Postmortem[/h2]
The last major update and the patches thereafter were a big step in improving player experience and smoothing out the starting of the game. Whether it was the addition of dripstones, adding freshwater rivers to the starting island, reputation tweaks, spawning location improvements, or additions to the Starter Quest - there was tons done to refine the early game. While there’s still lots of work to be done here, the feedback has been pretty positive there.
That’s not to say mid-late game players also didn’t get some goodies here either. Ports and shippers offer up a way to transport items across islands. Gems and golems provide a late-game milestone to search out and create. Creature cages add an easy method of transporting creatures, especially across islands. Creature commands provide incentives for making long-time friends with your tamed companions. Bookcases adds bonuses for keeping all the lore and text in the game. These are just a few of the features added in the last major update if you haven’t had a chance to check it out yet.
[h2]New Beginner’s Guide Video[/h2]
Speaking of new players, I recently put out a new updated beginner’s guide video going through the Starter Quest and handing out a few additional tips and tricks while doing so.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbReL-OzoFM
[h2]Upcoming Reputation Changes[/h2]
You may have already seen a hint of this change with the renaming of “Reputation” to “Ferocity” which better explains its effects. This is just the beginning of it though. To explain, reputation in Wayward has always been a "difficulty slider", but one done through in-game mechanics and lore. The whole purpose of it has not been one of ecological commentary, but rather, to provide players a way to modify the game to their liking and playstyle. The issues with it are many but include:
Deities to save the day! As paying homage to its roguelike roots, Wayward will be introducing deities, invoking, and sacrifice; a common staple of the genre. While this has been planned for years now, it was always meant to augment reputation, but now it will be replacing it. This system will solve every point above as actions no longer impact the difficulty of the game. You are free to do whatever you want. As you play, the difficulty of the game will increase naturally, but, the player has direct control over this. They can devote themselves to the deities of the island to offset this. Later on, they can even sacrifice collectable runes (dropped to the player when performing actions) to swing difficulty in either direction with a single action.
We would consider adding an in-game difficulty slider to be a failure. We would rather continue to iterate on the concept of dynamic difficulty and I really think we got it feeling really good this time around.
[h2]Upcoming Inventory/Container Overhaul[/h2]
The next piece of the old UI is on the chopping block!
If you are not familiar with the backstory here; we slowly have been redoing pieces of UI to modernize it (maintenance-wise) and provide new features/improvements all of which eventually will allow us to do full controller support. This is something we have to work on over time as it is a huge undertaking and a lot of it is near-invisible to most players. After this one, the next and final one to port over is the crafting dialog.
As an added bonus this time around, we will be adding a much-requested feature that is very much visible to players. Item stacking! Simply CTRL+click an item to stack it together. Hold CTRL to preview the stack, and CTRL+click it again to unstack it.
[h2]Development Branch[/h2]
The development branch where you can test all these changes should be live soon. We are planning by the end of this week to reenable it for all the eager testers out there. Stay tuned for the development branch announcement!
[h2]Feature Voting[/h2]
Something that we always like to mention in these newsletters is that our feature voting page works as an impromptu roadmap for the game - but one where players get to pick what they see as most important. Check it out and cast your vote for upcoming features:
https://www.waywardgame.com/vote
[h2]Media Showcase[/h2]
As has become a yearly-ish tradition, Splattercat has recently released a new video on Wayward. Funnily enough, he mentions the reputation issues mentioned above, leading to the impetus for us to focus on that system.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pftFxUBjpM
If you have been keeping up on the updates during this lull in updates, you probably have already seen these teaser videos, but if not, check out a preview of armor stands and wheelbarrows, two highly requested features coming up in the next release:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQgZ-98dq_Y
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LzoCh_1ETs
[h2]Mod Showcase[/h2]
Check out some of the recent modifications the community has created!
Player-Owned Areas by HDJam
Adds the ability to claim areas, protecting them from other players. A great utility for dedicated servers to prevent griefing or setting up custom scenarios/challenges.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2992525255
Quality Tile Colours by Kitsune
Quickly becoming the most popular Wayward Workshop submission, this mod displays small colorized sparkles on tiles and doodads with quality.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2990505230
Jeeves - Unofficial Update by Dark Helix
An unofficial port/update of the once-popular mod, Jeeves by Cringe which allows management of items on the ground - showing them in a container dialog.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2964370715
Fantasy Customizations by Sensakuma
Adds a ton of custom hairstyles (some fantasy-based), exotic skin tones, and more.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2978026244
Quick Stack by FluffyWuffletonTheFierce
A tool for automatically moving and sorting items based on filtered item types and groups.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2854879083
[h2]Autumn Sale[/h2]
If you are reading this before the 28th of November, you still have a chance to grab Wayward for -25% off as part of the Steam Autumn sale.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/379210/Wayward/
[h2]Leave A Review![/h2]
If you have a few moments to spare after reading this, we would love it if you shared your feedback on the game with us in the form of a Steam review. It helps us a lot!
Thanks for reading and stay tuned!
[h2]Beacon’s Call Postmortem[/h2]
The last major update and the patches thereafter were a big step in improving player experience and smoothing out the starting of the game. Whether it was the addition of dripstones, adding freshwater rivers to the starting island, reputation tweaks, spawning location improvements, or additions to the Starter Quest - there was tons done to refine the early game. While there’s still lots of work to be done here, the feedback has been pretty positive there.
That’s not to say mid-late game players also didn’t get some goodies here either. Ports and shippers offer up a way to transport items across islands. Gems and golems provide a late-game milestone to search out and create. Creature cages add an easy method of transporting creatures, especially across islands. Creature commands provide incentives for making long-time friends with your tamed companions. Bookcases adds bonuses for keeping all the lore and text in the game. These are just a few of the features added in the last major update if you haven’t had a chance to check it out yet.
[h2]New Beginner’s Guide Video[/h2]
Speaking of new players, I recently put out a new updated beginner’s guide video going through the Starter Quest and handing out a few additional tips and tricks while doing so.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbReL-OzoFM
[h2]Upcoming Reputation Changes[/h2]
You may have already seen a hint of this change with the renaming of “Reputation” to “Ferocity” which better explains its effects. This is just the beginning of it though. To explain, reputation in Wayward has always been a "difficulty slider", but one done through in-game mechanics and lore. The whole purpose of it has not been one of ecological commentary, but rather, to provide players a way to modify the game to their liking and playstyle. The issues with it are many but include:
- What increases/decreases reputation is unknown to the player natively and must be discovered.
- Actions can sometimes increase and decrease reputation at the same time, leading to net-neutral changes.
- Some actions can be exploited to gain or lower reputation, leading to a lot of tedious gameplay like using the same action/mechanic over and over again.
- It forces some actions/playstyles that a player may not want to do just because they want to keep a certain difficulty.
- It's confusing to new players, but new players have to be aware of it so they can tweak their difficulty.
- It's balanced in a way that over time, the game is supposed to get harder; however, depending on the player's playstyle this intent can be lost.
Deities to save the day! As paying homage to its roguelike roots, Wayward will be introducing deities, invoking, and sacrifice; a common staple of the genre. While this has been planned for years now, it was always meant to augment reputation, but now it will be replacing it. This system will solve every point above as actions no longer impact the difficulty of the game. You are free to do whatever you want. As you play, the difficulty of the game will increase naturally, but, the player has direct control over this. They can devote themselves to the deities of the island to offset this. Later on, they can even sacrifice collectable runes (dropped to the player when performing actions) to swing difficulty in either direction with a single action.
We would consider adding an in-game difficulty slider to be a failure. We would rather continue to iterate on the concept of dynamic difficulty and I really think we got it feeling really good this time around.
[h2]Upcoming Inventory/Container Overhaul[/h2]
The next piece of the old UI is on the chopping block!
If you are not familiar with the backstory here; we slowly have been redoing pieces of UI to modernize it (maintenance-wise) and provide new features/improvements all of which eventually will allow us to do full controller support. This is something we have to work on over time as it is a huge undertaking and a lot of it is near-invisible to most players. After this one, the next and final one to port over is the crafting dialog.
As an added bonus this time around, we will be adding a much-requested feature that is very much visible to players. Item stacking! Simply CTRL+click an item to stack it together. Hold CTRL to preview the stack, and CTRL+click it again to unstack it.
[h2]Development Branch[/h2]
The development branch where you can test all these changes should be live soon. We are planning by the end of this week to reenable it for all the eager testers out there. Stay tuned for the development branch announcement!
[h2]Feature Voting[/h2]
Something that we always like to mention in these newsletters is that our feature voting page works as an impromptu roadmap for the game - but one where players get to pick what they see as most important. Check it out and cast your vote for upcoming features:
https://www.waywardgame.com/vote
[h2]Media Showcase[/h2]
As has become a yearly-ish tradition, Splattercat has recently released a new video on Wayward. Funnily enough, he mentions the reputation issues mentioned above, leading to the impetus for us to focus on that system.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pftFxUBjpM
If you have been keeping up on the updates during this lull in updates, you probably have already seen these teaser videos, but if not, check out a preview of armor stands and wheelbarrows, two highly requested features coming up in the next release:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQgZ-98dq_Y
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LzoCh_1ETs
[h2]Mod Showcase[/h2]
Check out some of the recent modifications the community has created!
Player-Owned Areas by HDJam
Adds the ability to claim areas, protecting them from other players. A great utility for dedicated servers to prevent griefing or setting up custom scenarios/challenges.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2992525255
Quality Tile Colours by Kitsune
Quickly becoming the most popular Wayward Workshop submission, this mod displays small colorized sparkles on tiles and doodads with quality.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2990505230
Jeeves - Unofficial Update by Dark Helix
An unofficial port/update of the once-popular mod, Jeeves by Cringe which allows management of items on the ground - showing them in a container dialog.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2964370715
Fantasy Customizations by Sensakuma
Adds a ton of custom hairstyles (some fantasy-based), exotic skin tones, and more.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2978026244
Quick Stack by FluffyWuffletonTheFierce
A tool for automatically moving and sorting items based on filtered item types and groups.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2854879083
[h2]Autumn Sale[/h2]
If you are reading this before the 28th of November, you still have a chance to grab Wayward for -25% off as part of the Steam Autumn sale.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/379210/Wayward/
[h2]Leave A Review![/h2]
If you have a few moments to spare after reading this, we would love it if you shared your feedback on the game with us in the form of a Steam review. It helps us a lot!
Thanks for reading and stay tuned!