Wartorn is a top-down fantasy tactics game co-created by BioShock's lead designer, inspired by a forgotten Bungie title where you command dwarves to blow up zombies
When was the first time you noticed physics in a video game? For me, it wasn't bifurcating a headcrab-zombie with a saw blade in Half-Life 2, or seeing a Cleaner goon collapse into a stack of shelves in Max Payne 2. It was watching a bunch of zombie limbs roll down a hillside in Myth 2: Soulblighter.
Bungie's fantasy tactics game was best known for the chaos created by its bomb-throwing dwarves, and I distinctly recall being mesmerised by how their ordnance would scatter undead body parts across the game's undulating pastoral landscapes.
The Myth series has long been eclipsed by Halo's stratospheric success, but the Dallas-based Stray Kite Studios remembers it well enough. The developer's newly announced game Wartorn channels the frantic decision-making and kinetic combat of Myth and its sequel, and as one of the three other people who remember Bungie's fantasy series, I am very excited indeed.
Wartorn sees players assuming control of two elven sisters travelling across a conflict-ravaged landscape on a personal quest to find their family. That's according to Stray Kite's press release, which also explains that along the way, they'll have to "confront moral dilemmas and battle external and internal threats". Given there's only two of them, I'm not sure how internal threats will work exactly, unless the sisters have a big falling out, or catch a stomach bug from drinking improperly purified water.
The trailer released alongside the announcement doesn't provide much insight into Wartorn's narrative side, but it reveals plenty about the combat. The bits that struck me as particularly Myth were the arrow-barrage ability around 30 seconds in and the moment an ogre slams its club into the ground just before the minute mark, triggering a shockwave that scatters several unfortunate gobbos across a field like hayseed.
Yet there's plenty here that diverges from Bungie's template, too, such as a strong emphasis on elemental abilities, like fireballs and a nifty-looking tidal-wave spell that bowls over a group of fiery demons halfway through the trailer. These elements will apparently interact with each other in familiar ways (water quenches fire, lightning electrifies water, etc) while also wreaking havoc within what Stray Kite claims are highly destructible environments.
As someone who loves messing with the elements to make things explode (I must have been an alchemist in a past life), Wartorn's trailer whispers all the right words in my ear. It also has some notable talent behind it. The project is led by Paul Hellquist, whose credits include lead designer on SWAT 4 and BioShock at Irrational, and later game design director of the original Borderlands. Meanwhile, Stray Kite's cofounder Shovaen Patel worked on the Orcs Must Die series before establishing the studio, which is likewise evident in Wartorn's DNA.
In an interview with YouTuber CohhCarnage, Hellquist discussed Wartorn's connection to the Myth series. "We were putting up different ideas of the kinds of games we wanted to make. And I brought up, 'Hey, have any of you guys ever played this game Myth. And Shovaen immediately was like, oh, yeah, I loved Myth back in the day,'" Hellquist says. "That's what got the ball rolling and us thinking about 'Man, it'd be really cool to kind of revive some of the things that were in that product, but modernize it.'"
No specific release date has been announced for Wartorn yet, but Stray Kite says Wartorn will launch later this year into Steam early access. If you want to know more about the games that inspired Wartorn, Myth and its sequel aren't available to buy anywhere, sadly, but they're also not too difficult to find if you know where to look.