Wayfinder pumps the brakes, dropping online requirements and microtransactions

Airship Syndicate has announced that the troubled MMO Wayfinder will be course-correcting. The developer is dropping the online requirement for the game, and removing all microtransactions. It will now be a single, upfront fee to purchase.

Remember Wayfinder? I haven’t thought about it in quite a while. To say its launch was troubled is a bit of an understatement. On the day of its launch, it garnered nearly 8,000 negative use reviews on Steam, and things have not really improved. Looking at reviews from around the time it released, players complained primarily about bugs, server issues, and numerous other issues alongside.

Back in April, Airship Syndicate announced that they’d be going separate ways with publisher Digital Extremes and removed Wayfinder from sale temporarily. At the time, the developer hinted that there would be some change, but the language implied it was going to continue being a largely online game. 

After consideration, Airship Syndicate is shifting Wayfinder to a primarily single-player game. There will still be three-player co-op, but it will be entirely peer-to-peer.

A lot of new negative reviews are from players who purchased an MMO only to have it shift into single-player. I totally understand the frustration. It’s pretty terrible for anyone who already dropped money on in-game currency and items. Airship Syndicate has said that these things will be shifted into the offline version, but without the MMO part of the game, those items (and especially the currency) have lost their perceived value.

However, I think the alternative here would be for Wayfinder to shut down and disappear entirely. And then nobody gets anything. It would just be another dead MMO in a sea of corpses. The developer and publisher had the responsibility to deliver a game that survived and thrived, and failed to provide one that lasted even a year. That warrants anger, and the onus is on Airship Syndicate to smooth things over. As it stands, at least it’s not nothing.

The current plan is to soft-launch Wayfinder to all existing owners on May 31st, followed by a broader release into Early Access on June 11th on PC. For PlayStation people, the relaunch with the Echoes Update will be sometime in the Summer. They plan on having the full launch take place sometime in the Fall for all platforms.