I woke up this morning (dadah dadadah) to the announcement of Rift Wizard 3, which is notable because Rift Wizard 2 is an excellent little roguelike.
Given my fondness for the last game, developer Dylan White was kind enough to answer a few of my questions about what we can expect to see in the third entry in his spellbinding tactical series.
And so, without further ado, let’s get to the Q&A, which tells you everything you need to know about Rift Wizard 3 ahead of its Early Access launch this summer!
RL: Congratulations on the announcement!
DW: Thank you!
RL: For the uninitiated, what is Rift Wizard 3?
DW: I like to refer to Rift Wizard as a ‘traditional roguelike wizard combat simulator’. Meaning, it’s a turn-based grid game where you move a wizard around and tactically use magic to defeat your foes.
It’s all about combat, spellcasting, and character building, with very little to distract from these things.
The game’s basic rules are simple, but the magic system is designed in a way where things come together and synergize in really deep and interesting ways, and once you start reading the spells and equipment available, your mind just starts racing and seeing all the possibilities of how you can combine them to make new (and sometimes very weird) functionality.
Crucially, the enemies are very aggressive and challenging, so they really put your build to the test, make you play creatively, and reward you for being clever and creative.
RL: Do you need to have played the originals, or can you get stuck in straight away?
DW: Oh, not at all. The game is a procedural sandbox; it’s really all about fighting monsters and casting spells, and the story plays an extremely minor role, if any. Actually, I think Rift Wizard has less story than almost any game on Steam right now. The focus is on letting the player build a cool spellbook, and then putting the player into interesting combat situations where they have to pilot that spellbook in creative ways.
Fans of the previous game will be quite interested in the new content and systems and the depth they create, but we’re trying really hard to keep the game accessible to new players.
RL: What’s the biggest advancement from Rift Wizard 2?
DW: The most obvious advancement is probably the artstyle. KHoops has redrawn the entire game to have a much more hand-drawn, artistic style.
Obviously, everyone will judge for themselves, but I think it looks amazing. It keeps the crisp and jerky, almost board game-like feel of the previous game, while also adding lots of character to the monsters and levels.
RL: What cool new systems are there in the game?
DW: For sure, the coolest new system is the crafting system. In Rift Wizard 3, we folded passive skills and equipment into crafting- meaning that to get passive bonuses, you need to collect and fuse components you find throughout the world.
The system is open-ended like the spell system, in that there is a huge library of crafting recipes to choose from, but where the spells can all be purchased with a common and abundant currency (SP aka skillpoints aka memory orbs), items must be crafted from reagents, which are more unique and rare. So the random drops end up pushing more on the player’s build, but the player still has a great deal of agency in how to use them.
We also revamped the spell upgrades system a bit- you can buy two per spell now (out of, generally, four), so you can really customize your spellbook a great deal. The two systems really come together and make every run unique; you’re always getting pushed into trying new stuff, into seeing different sides of the game.
RL: I love finding good synergies, and that’s a big part of RW; tell me some fun things you can do!
DW: Hmm, well, the other night I was trying out a new spell, Rot Gaze, which deals dark damage and inflicts poison to all enemies in line of sight. Then I forged an item- Explosive Spore Manual- which automatically casts your Combust Poison spell each turn, consuming all the poison stacks to make explosions. Then I got an upgrade that caused Rot Gaze to also spawn flies on the enemies it hits… they were getting hit by the exploding poison, which was bad, but Combust Poison does have an upgrade that makes it heal your allies rather than hurt them, so I got that. I also later got an upgrade that makes Combust Poison inflict stun, which gave me some breathing room while casting Rot Gaze- a very low damage spell that doesn’t normally do a good job of stopping monsters from rushing you down. The cherry on top was Ashen Staff, which just buffs the duration of your nature and fire spells… including stun duration. By the end of the game, I could inflict something like 100 turns of stun on everything that wasn’t immune to poison. We’re still trying to decide if this was balanced or not. It was super powerful, but then again, the game kind of expects you to find something super powerful, and well, it throws some pretty powerful stuff right back at you near the end.
RL: As a game developer, how do you approach accessibility in a genre like ours?
I like to think of roguelikes as similar to musical instruments. What’s the tutorial for a guitar? Well, it’s just this really interesting thing that you can pick up and mess with. Maybe someone you know helps you out a bit, maybe you read a guide, or maybe you’re just curious and adventurous.
There shouldn’t be much friction to picking it up and messing around with it, no load times, no cutscenes, indeed, even the animations are quite fast. Crucially, the system is interesting enough that you’re driven to continue.
We also try to make sure the game has as little hidden information as possible, as much of the game as possible is easily visible and understandable, and the complexity comes from how various pieces of content come together, much more than the basic game mechanics.
So the player should be able to do their first few runs without being too confused just by reading the tooltips of the spells they buy and the enemies they face.
RL: Rift Wizard 3 is heading to Early Access this summer. What’s the plan, and how long do you expect to be in EA?
DW: The plan is to do one year of Early Access, focused on balance and new content. There’s already so much new content; the balance is going to take a while to get right. There’s some crazy stuff in the game, we’re really trying to push the limits of what can reasonably be fit- for instance, right now there’s an item you can craft that gives you a new spell each realm. Is this balanced? Is it workable? I think so. It’s an exciting idea, and it’s fun to use- but it might turn out to be super broken with one of the other 100s of items and spells.
It’s quite tough to test not just each piece of content, but each possible combination. At this point, we’re being pretty aggressive about what kind of stuff can go into the game, and if it turns out to be unworkable, it’ll get reworked or cut during EA.
We aren’t done adding new content either, right now, for instance, we have huge numbers of new spell upgrades and monsters, but we still wanna add a lot more new spells. So the Early Access period will probably see some really big changes, in the same way RW1 and RW2’s EA periods did.
RL: Finally, if you were a wizard, what magic power or specialism would you have?
For sure, I would have the power of words, of which of course, numbers and mathematics are the most crucial subspecialties. It’s amazing to me that human beings, with our frail bodies and tiny little fingers, can move mountains by observing the world and analyzing it with these powers- they are the closest thing to magic we have for sure. In a way, numbers are what grant us power over the physical world, while words are what grant us power over our social realities.
And on that profound note, you can head over to Steam and wishlist Rift Wizard 3 if you’d like to keep tabs on its progress.
