Waven brings deckbuilding and floods to the world of Wakfu

thesixthaxis.com:

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