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You can always beat the wolves, right? They’re usually the next rung up from rats; even at their very hardest, they’re maybe the fourth distinct creature thing a trainee adventurer has to slash into giblets on their way to bigger and better things. These grey, hairy training wheels might do a bit of snarling, a few mild biteroonies, but they won’t ever kill you. That’s not what wolves do.
Wartales - Announcement TrailerWatch on YouTube
Wartales - Announcement Trailer
While Cannasse says your adventurers can become tangentially involved in the setting’s deeper goings-on, they are never going to be savers of worlds, or history-defining heroes. They’re just people looking to make a living in a shitty economy.
Your ramblings on this map can lead to a number of smaller subactivities - going into towns to trade with merchants or hire new brutes, for example, or investigating wooded camps for loot. You can also camp at any point, entering a camp screen where you can assign your various hires to tasks such as armour repair, resting, or potion brewing, depending on their skills. There’s a simple management element to this which reminded me of the campfire sections inDarkest Dungeon, complete with the perilously rapid depletion of food stocks. There’s also an added stressor in that your party members require regular pay, acquired either from trade or from earning bounties from towns, and will simply walk out on you if you can’t keep them coined up.
Mercs merking each other in the murk.
The second big slice of the game’s content, and the most frequent reason for leaving the map, is combat. Fights are turn-based, of the flavour where your individual fighters and their enemies take it in turns to move, but you get to choose what order your folks act in, within each round of the sequence. The field of battle is grid-based, but as the grid squares are much smaller than characters' footprints, the result feels more along the freeform lines ofDivinityorBaldur’s Gatethan the relative rigidity ofBanner Saga.
With that said, Cannasse did manage to coach me through my third wolfing with the calm wisdom of a more articulate Yoda, and all of my bruisers made it out just about intact. It was a close thing, still - but interestingly, this wasn’t entirely due to the difficulty of Wartales' combat system.
“I think it was the second horse, perhaps,” my mentor suggests tactfully, as my mercs lick their wounds in camp after the fight. He is right, of course. Revelling in the - very genuine - sense of freedom upon starting the game, I had, in all three of my runs to date, pooled all of my initial resources to buy a second horse. I hadn’t had an aim in mind for this extra hoofo, of course. I’d just decided it would be cool.
