Ex-DICE Devs From Wayfinder Games Tease New Small-Scale Co-op Online RPG

A few years ago, several DICE developers and executives have decided to break off from the EA subsidiary to form their own studio called Wayfinder Games. The fully-remote video game development studio was founded in 2020 by former DICE Studio Director Fia Tjernberg, who now serves as the new studio’s CEO, and former Star Wars Battlefront Creative Director and now-Game Director Dennis Brännvall.

The ex-DICE developers have moved away from its first-person shooter roots to focus on creating original roleplaying games that draw inspiration from tabletop games like Dungeons & Dragons. Their flagship game is a co-op online RPG for smaller groups of players similar to Minecraft of Valheim and will be based on an original IP.

“There's a lot of games that take inspiration from tabletop RPGs and D&D, but they try to translate either the ruleset or almost the exact feeling of putting a D20 animation into a video game because in D&D you'd resolve something with a D20 dice roll,” said Brännvall. “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. [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.”

“We are interested in persistent worlds and MMOs, but with private servers, where it's just you and your community enjoying this. It's not a massive thing with 10,000 people on a shard,” he added.

The team confirms that the game will be launching into PC early access first and possibly on consoles later with cross-platform support. It seems that it’s still in the very early stages of development so it’s probably going to be a while before we hear more about it. Wayfinder Games, however, is confident that their shared love of tabletop RPG’s and their previous development experience will allow them to deliver a whole new experience to players.