Airship Syndicate opens up its world

Where there's a will, there's a Wayfinder: the devs discuss their ambitious quest-'em-up

An expansive free-to-play MMORPG, Wayfinder represents a lot of firsts for developer Airship Syndicate. The studio’s best known for creating Darksiders Genesis (a co-op prequel to the hack-and-slash Darksiders trilogy) and the single-player League Of Legends RPG Ruined King. This online interconnected open world is not only its first original IP but already shaping up to be its most ambitious game yet.

That said, even when working with other companies’ properties, Airship Syndicate’s staff enjoyed freedom to experiment with their past projects, to the point where some games felt very much their own. “Spiritually, Ruined King felt like the only title where we were working with somebody else’s IP” says Ryan Stefanelli, the company’s president. The studio was founded by staff from the defunct Vigil Games, the developer of Darksiders, and he goes on to explain that “THQ really trusted us to just do our thing with it [Genesis]. Ruined King was very different because it was clearly somebody else's IP, we had to learn a lot about it, we had to stay inside boundaries that they set." "Wayfinder is new and so we have a lot more freedom," adds Joe Madureira, the CEO and creative director, so “it’s been really fun.”

SCALING UP 

“All the games that we’ve worked on have essentially been a love letter to a genre,” says AJ LaSaracina, the marketing and engagement director, “and this is a love letter to those online games that you stay up late at night playing”. Even so, the vision for Wayfinder originally started small and grew over time.