Paul Hellquist is new developer Stray Kite’s creative director, but before helping co-found the studio, he was the lead designer on Bioshock and spent a lot of time at Gearbox working on the Borderlands series. Today, Hellquist and the Stray Kite team shared more about its upcoming debut project, Wartorn, which it describes as a fantasy, roguelike, real time tactics game. We got a chance to see the game in action and learn a bit about the team’s intentions and how it hopes its genre mash-up will appeal to roguelike fans, RTS fans, and players who have potentially been intimidated by the games that inspired it like StarCraft and Age of Empires.
Wartorn takes place in a fantasy world where a large family has come under attack and are forced to flee their home. Players control siblings Elani and Yara as they venture out to reunite their family and participate in bite-size RTS battles along the way. Hellquist and team showed off the hub world where Elani and Yara will restart between runs and explained how it will grow and expand over the course of the game. As you find your family members, they will expand your suite of abilities. You will also receive powerful heirlooms and find pages for spell books, giving you access to more spells, all while building a small army.
Elani and Yara flee their under-attack home through the Catacombs for each run, which places them in a moving caravan. The caravan moves along the roads and at the forks, players must make decisions about which path to take. Sometimes it might be a matter of meeting a merchant or other story moments, but often it will lead to combat.
Combat in Wartorn is heavily inspired by classic real-time strategy games, but Hellquist says the team is trying to specifically elevate their favorite parts of the genre and speed up the gameplay. Importantly, however, they also want to let players slow it down when they need to. Pressing the spacebar at any time will slow fighting to a crawl to help assist with decision-making and strategy. “I feel that the Starcraft games and stuff like that – they’re awesome, but they get really, really overwhelming, especially for me,” Hellquist says. “One of the things we were trying to design here is […] more digestible combats where you only have a handful of squads.” The idea is that the combat encounters will feel like a classic RTS game, but with more focused gameplay. It will give combat encounters a little bit of a MOBA feeling in that way.
When you’re in combat, you’re focused on managing your squads. “There is obviously no base building, which is a big part of your StarCrafts and your Age of Empires that split your attention,” technical director Shovaen Patel says. Those base building-like elements of classic RTS still exists in a different form in Wartorn, but it’s separated away from combat to help players focus on one thing at a time. “When you’re in combat mode, you’re just in combat mode. You don’t have to worry about that management stuff.” Patel cited another classic game as inspiration for this separation of mechanics, crediting Bungie’s pre-Halo work on the game Myth: The Fallen Lords.
Alongside the RTS inspirations, Hellquist also cites Oregon Trail as an inspiration to the decisions that must be made while in the caravan. And in the way we may have forgotten Oregon Trail is a surprisingly challenging game, Wartorn seeks to give players a worthwhile challenge. In fact, in our hands-off demo, they didn’t make it far and died during a combat encounter.
Stray Kite is targeting a Spring Early Access release for Wartorn on Steam, and was understandably vague on long-term plans. “We’re not exactly sure when 1.0 will be yet,” Hellquist says. Steam Deck support, however, is a priority, and Stray Kite is hoping to release for consoles, as well, for its eventual 1.0 release. When asked about a potential Switch 2 release with mouse support in the future, Stray Kite was not able to commit to anything, but it did say controller support is important. “We are actually working on controller support,” Hellquist says. “A lot of things in the game are controller supported, but not everything. We highly recommend playing with mouse and keyboard for this, especially on the overworld.”
