It’s easy to think of online games as having the ability to live forever, but this is the exception rather than the rule. For every RuneScape or World of WarCraft, there are likely hundreds of online games and MMOs – or live service games in the modern parlance – that fade away into the digital aether after a few years. Then again, with fanbases often clamouring for ‘Classic’ rereleases, perhaps the better path is to craft a sequel and start afresh? That’s the approach we see in Waven, following on from Wakfu and Dofus.
Ankama Games seems to be settling into a pattern of launching a brand new free-to-play tactical MMORPG roughly once a decade – Dofus first launched in 2004, Wakfu in 2012, and Waven is aiming for an Early Access launch this summer. There’s a shared universe with the whole Krozmoz transmedia project, a shared sensibility to the visual style, but Waven tells a new story and can be built for much more modern tech and gaming habits.
So, what’s new in the Krozmos? Well, the world ended. The lands of the World of Twelve have been washed away in a great flood and just a handful of islands now survive to act as nations and kingdoms. It’s a narrative turn that could be seen as either biblical or Legend of Zelda-like, but for Waven it provides a structure for how the narrative unfolds. There’s four main clans surviving – of Order, Nature, Business and Science – but before you’ll be allowed to visit their main nation islands, you’ll have to prove yourself and earn their trust by completing quests and dungeons on their nearby smaller islands.
Just because it’s a veritable Waterworld out there doesn’t mean that Waven has lost any of the Krozmos’ pun-laden sense of humour. You see it most easily within the character names of NPCs you meet, such as a piratical cat being called Long John Rascal, a butcher named Cordon Bleusay (a cross between Gordon Ramsay and Cordon Bleu, I think?), and even more cheesy puns throughout.
You, of course, are just another hero going through this world and adventuring. Creating your character you choose from one of the world’s races that denotes a main class – Iop is a warrior type, Cra (which is the French for bow backwards) is an elf-like DPS archer, Sram are rogues and Xelor are masters of time (and named after a certain watch brand). From there, you can choose a main weapon and that feeds into the class builds.
As you land on the various islands, each one is themed and inhabited by a different race. You can pretty much guess that you’ll be encountering pigmen and pig warriors when on Pig Island, though the darkly humorous twist to their survival is that, having been hunted and eaten by other nearby kingdoms, they’ve now turned the tables, rebelled, and are eating their neighbouring peoples!
From the surface of each island where you can meet characters and pick up quests, the real meat and potatoes of the game is in heading into dungeons and the tactical RPG battles. You can play solo or in groups of up to three, hopping from one tactical battle to another. These all take place on a compact 7×7 grid with your hero having a single move-attack in this space, but then being aided by a deck of ability cards and the ability to summon allies from that.
Oh yes, it’s yet another game that leans on deck building for customising your character’s abilities – though there are some item slots to equip as well – and each turn will see you drawing random cards that can then be played using a small pool of action points. Where things will get really interesting is that these attacks and abilities then award you with with elemental points depending on the type of card you’ve played and, once you’ve built up enough of the requisite elements – air, fire, earth, water and aether – you can spend it on summoning a companion to fight alongside you.
The elemental rewards from cards will be a huge factor in how you go about building your deck, taking a concept that’s so familiar from Magic: The Gathering and flipping it round to work in reverse, in a way. With more than 90 companions in the game, you’ll have to pick your favourites and then select cards that can feed through to let you summon them quickly.
While that’s sure to be a factor in the regular PvE modes, where you follow the main story and take on smaller quests and one-shot mini-games that give you specific deck and battle challenges, really nailing your build will be key in PvP against other players.
There’s also an Island Defence mode, where you create a deck and then hand it over to an AI to defend your island from attackers while you’re away. That ties in with the game’s cross-platform release on PC and mobile, with Ankama Games building the game to let you hop between platforms and pick up right where you left off, which should enable short, sharp bursts of play.
There’s some intriguing ideas running through Waven, even if it’s leaning on some all-too familiar modern gameplay tropes. From the pun and humour-filled world, to the constrained scope of the tactical battles and the potential depth in the deck-building systems, this is one to keep an eye on for its release into early access this summer.
