Wild Bastards from Blue Manchu is a novel take on the roguelike genre. Traditionally, roguelikes have the player control a singular character who stays entirely consistent between runs or becomes progressively stronger, in the case of roguelites. Wild Bastards changes this formula, having the player in charge of 13 different outlaws during a run.
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Each of these outlaws has their own abilities, strengths and weaknesses, deepening the strategic elements of Wild Bastards. If you know you’re going to encounter a certain enemy before you arrive planetside, you should be thinking about which of your outlaws is best equipped to combat these threats.
The Cosmic Wild West
In an interview withGame Rant, Wild Bastards’ design director Jonathan Chey talked about how progression is going to work with thirteen different characters at the player’s disposal.
“The main axis of persistent progression in the game is your gang: any Outlaws you have added remain in the gang each time you reset your progress,” Chey explains. “Any ‘aces’ (power-ups) you’ve found for these characters remain across runs. But, in a roguelike, you need to lose some progress. We support that via your progression through each sector of the galaxy and through the loss of transient resources like mods, tonics, beans and cramm (money).”
It was a balancing act for Blue Manchu to reward players for each run but without having them feel too overpowered at the beginning of each new run. Aces drop infrequently, so there won’t be an excessive amount of opportunities to mass-upgrade your outlaws. The loss of resources is also going to hamper the player’s power at the beginning of every new run.
In the game’s first-person combat mode, ‘The Showdown’, each outlaw has unique abilities and you may swap between the outlaws you’ve brought with you mid-combat.
Wild Bastards is scheduled to release sometime in 2024, a specific release date has not yet been announced.
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