PAX East 2023: Wayfinder Team Clarifies Reveals, Answers Questions, and Wants You to Avoid FOMO

mmorpg.com:

PAX East started with a bang on Thursday when I had the opportunity to play a new Wayfinder demo and interviewed Creative Director Joe Madureira, President Ryan Stefanelli, and Marketing and Engagement Director AJ LaSaracina. For this interview, I focused on clarifying some points that seemed to have left some room for confusion in our recent coverage and about their plans as they close in on early access release in May. If you haven’t seen our recent articles on Wayfinder’s gameplay, press event preview, and monetization I highly suggest you do as those articles set the foundation for a lot of what we discussed.

One of the most common comments I have seen relating to Wayfinder recently is that it’s another example of game design where roles are gender locked. This was a worry of mine as well because when it comes to multiplayer games I tend to like playing characters that match my gender because I view my characters as how I’m presenting myself to others. Since there are three main archetypes (warmaster, arcanist, and survivalist) that define a character’s role and five characters we knew about before the Saturday panel, it seemed obvious at least one archetype would only be available on one character. Now with the sixth character reveal, there is a hero of each gender for each archetype.

Additionally, rather than viewing the character I play the way I normally would in an MMO, it’s probably more useful to think of them more along the lines of games like Overwatch and League of Legends . In those games, you choose a specific character to play and that character has their own story and background, rather than creating a character to represent the player. Additionally, Stefanelli pointed out that although each