Wildaria: a lasso, a mount, and a choice between civilisation and nature

There are two ways to read Wildaria's store page.

The first is to count the ticked boxes: infinite procedural world, character creation, skill tree, combat with dodging and a mana bar, ridable companions, quests, trading. We have all read that list a hundred times this year.

The second is to stop on one line in the middle, and that is the one that made me write this.

The game enters early access today. No score.

The line in question

"The main quest depicts the struggle between civilization and nature through choices that lead to different boss fights and allegiances. Eventually, these choices will impact the World of Wildaria."

In a procedural survival and exploration game, that is unexpected.

The genre nearly always works the same way: the world is neutral scenery, you are the only actor, and you scrape it until it is empty. There is no side to take, because there is nobody else.

Announcing a tension between civilisation and nature, with allegiances and different bosses depending on your side, is saying the world has an opinion about what you are doing to it. And in a game where you spend your time chopping, mining and taming, that is a subject rather than dressing.

Whether the game follows through is another matter. It is very easy to write on a store page and very hard to sustain in a generated world, where scripted content is expensive and the temptation is to reduce the choice to two lines of dialogue and a different boss at the end.

The lasso

The other thing that stands out is how you get your companions.

You tame any animal through a lasso mini-game. Then you level it, ride it into battle, and it fights alongside you. With elemental abilities on top.

I like that choice a great deal, for one specific reason: taming requires a gesture. In most games of this kind, you feed a creature and watch a bar. Here there is an action to execute, therefore a skill, therefore a possible failure.

And it changes your relationship with the animal. You do not pick it up, you catch it.

The rest

Five fantasy species at creation, with faces, hair and body shapes, then levelling and class specialisation through a skill tree.

Combat announced as fast and dynamic, with several weapon types, dash-dodging, and a charged mana ability system. Enemies have their own behaviours and elemental abilities.

Endlessly generated biomes, populated with creatures, villagers and natural features, with secrets to find. Villages and bandit camps.

That is a lot. It may even be too much for a studio this size, and that is the main reservation.

What worries me

Procedural infinity is a trap. An endless world is a world with no places. When everything is generated, nothing is memorable, and the games that survive that choice are the ones that drop hand-made locations into the noise. We do not yet know whether Wildaria has any.

The combination is ambitious. Character creation, classes, twitchy combat, taming, mounts, branching quests, trading, an infinite world. Each of those systems is a game in itself. Making them hold together, and hold together well, is several years of work.

And this is early access. With everything that implies: judge what is there, not the roadmap.

What stays with me is the lasso and the question of which side to take. Those are two ideas giving personality to a project that, without them, would be one more.

If the studio delivers on the allegiances, there is something here the genre's big names do not offer: an open world that asks you to decide what you want from it.

Ever tamed a ridiculous mount in a game? We want the photo on the InsertCoins Discord.