The Waylanders Announced, Mike Laidlaw on Board

What do you get if you combine Dragon Age: Origins, Neverwinter Nights 2, and Zelda with Celtic themes and time travel elements? Apparently you get The Waylanders, Gato Salvaje Studio’s upcoming real-time with pause RPG that’s coming our way in early 2020. This curious project will let you hop between the Celtic and Medieval eras, encounter the reincarnated alter-egos of your companions, and engage in plenty of tactical combat with a strong emphasis on formations.

And in order to ensure that the upcoming game reaches a certain level of quality, Mike Laidlaw, the creative director of the Dragon Age series, has joined the development team as a narrative and creative consultant.

You can check out a bit of neat-looking pre-alpha gameplay below:

And if you head on over to PC Gamer, you’ll find a video where Mike Laidlaw describes the game and its features.

Finally, here are the relevant parts of the announcement press release:

A Coruña, Spain – August 21, 2018 — Gato Salvaje Studio is immensely proud and excited to announce The Waylanders, their new RPG aiming to hit Windows PC in Q1 2020. Featuring the talents of the one and only Mike Laidlaw (formerly of Bioware — Dragon Age: Origins, Jade Empire, Mass Effect) as a high level Narrative and Creative Consultant, The Waylanders will provide players an engaging narrative featuring impactful character development, unique companion romance options, and a deeply technical combat system.

A fantasy RPG inspired by beloved classics such as Dragon Age: Origins, Neverwinter Nights 2, and even a smidge of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (time travelling!), The Waylanders is a party-based experience set in the Celtic and Medieval eras featuring innovative and technical combat to make it stand out all on its own. Real-time combat with a tactical pause option, The Waylanders can be played from the classic isometric, top-down view but can also be shifted into third person perspective. Featuring unique character creation and a massive 36 character classes based on six basic classes and 30 more advanced ones means every play style imaginable can be accommodated. Its most innovative offering, is the introduction of formations whereby characters will combine into offensive formations allowing for deep combat tactics and enabling players to play the game their own way.

KEY FEATURES

• Real time combat with tactical pause, character creation and 36 classes (6 basic and 30 advanced)
• Played from top-down isometric perspective that can be shifted to third person perspective
• Inspired by RPG classics Dragon Age and Neverwinter Nights 2
• 12 different combat formations (2 per class) where players fuse characters to provide varied and technical combat options