The Waylanders Interview

Fernando and Sergio Prieto, the founders of Gato Salvaje Studio recently had a chat with OnlySP where they got a chance to talk about their studio’s upcoming time-travel RPG The Waylanders, the game’s journey from a simple idea to a crowdfunding success, its fairly unique concept, and more. Here are a few sample paragraphs and you take it from there:

WHAT IS THE WAYLANDERS?

So what is the game? It is clearly an RPG on an epic scale, and one that will be crammed with rich lore and a plethora of options for the player. Sergio explained that the story is based on the brothers’ homeland, Galicia. “Waylanders was born because we travelled around Galicia, as well as a good part of England and Ireland,” explained Sergio. “There is a very good background and history. It’s a very beautiful environment. Our land is very special because it is known as Celtic, but it is not one of the Celtic nations, yet we still have a lot of Celtic legends here. There is a lot of magic and mystery in the legends, so we thought a lot about what we can discuss in an RPG. Obviously it’s a very fresh mythology.”

Fernando expanded upon that basis with some more historical context about the medieval setting. “We knew about the story, where it was going to be set and that it was going to use Lebor Gabála Érenn, an Irish book that talks about how the kingdom of Ireland was created in around 500 BCE. It’s a story that tells us about how people from Galicia went to Ireland, so we thought it would be cool to look at that. It is a story that certainly hasn’t been told in video games before, and even hasn’t been touched by cinema, and it involved a lot of magic, a lot of mythology, a lot of fantastical creatures. We thought it was something that would be good to explore be in an RPG, and that’s when we began to grow our idea that could be the perfect idea. The perfect story for the game.”

“The main thing I wanted to talk about in the story was magic and its relationship with religion as two major forces in the game, will be two forces that can’t be together, there is a conflict” added Sergio.

This conflict between magic and religion extends through more than one time period, and as such the game will also explore other relationships and track how they progress through multiple ages, using a take on Celtic legend to allow players to travel through time, Fernando explained. “We wanted to introduce something that makes the narrative very interesting, which is the idea of reincarnation: a major concept for the Celts. They can be reincarnated, and your main character will have to wake them up in the future, in the medieval ages. They can be completely different from what they were in the Celtic period but they will remember who they were so you could be a big warrior in the Celtic period and a housekeeper in the middle ages, for example. This is something we wanted to explore so we can look at all contradictions inside the character in the different periods. We wanted to dive deep into that aspect, and I think it’s going to be quite enjoyable to discover that part of the game as a player.”