Wartorn is a top-down fantasy tactics game co-created by BioShock’s lead designer and inspired by the forgotten Bungie game where you command dwarves to blow up zombies.
When did you first notice physics in a video game? For me, it wasn’t bifurcating a zombie headcrab with a saw in Half-Life 2 or watching a Purifier goon collapse onto a stack of shelves in Max Payne 2. It was watching a pile of zombie limbs roll down a hillside. in Myth 2: The Soul Destroyer.
Bungie’s fantasy tactics game was best known for the chaos created by its bomb-throwing dwarves, and I distinctly remember being mesmerized by the way their ammunition scattered undead body parts across the game’s hilly, pastoral landscapes.
The Myth series has long eclipsed the stratospheric success of Halo, but Dallas-based Stray Kite Studios remembers it well enough. Developer Wartorn’s recently announced game captures the frantic decision-making and kinetic combat of Myth and its sequels, and as one of only three other people who remember Bungie’s fantasy series, I’m actually pretty excited.
In Wartorn, players take control of two elven sisters as they travel across a conflict-ravaged landscape on a personal quest to find their family. So says Stray Kite’s press release, which also explains that along the way they will have to “face moral dilemmas and deal with external and internal threats.” Considering there are only two of them, I’m not sure how exactly the insider threats would work unless the sisters had a big fight or got a stomach bug from drinking improperly purified water.
The trailer released alongside the announcement doesn’t give much insight into the narrative side of Wartorn, but does reveal a lot about the combat. The bits that particularly struck me as Myth were the ability to shoot arrows around 30 seconds in, and the moment when the ogre slams his club into the ground just before the minute mark, causing a shockwave that scatters several hapless gobbos across the field like a seed of hay.
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However, there’s also a lot here that deviates from Bungie’s template, such as the heavy emphasis on elemental abilities like fireballs and the slick-looking tidal wave spell that rains down on a group of fire demons in the middle of the trailer. These elements will presumably interact with each other in familiar ways (water extinguishes fire, lightning electrifies water, etc.) while also wreaking havoc in what Stray Kite claims is a highly destructible environment.
As someone who loves to tinker with elements to make things explode (I must have been an alchemist in a past life), the Wartorn trailer whispers all the right words in my ear. There’s also some outstanding 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 on the original Borderlands. Meanwhile, Stray Kite co-founder Shovaen Patel worked on the Orcs Must Die series before founding the studio, which is also evident in Wartorn’s DNA.
In an interview with YouTuber CohhCarnage, Hellquist discussed Wartorn’s connection to the Myth series. “We came up with different ideas about what kind of games we wanted to make. And I asked, “Hey guys, have any of you ever played this Myth game.” And Shovain immediately said, “Oh yeah, I loved Myth back.” during the day,” Hellquist says. “That’s what got the ball rolling and we thought, ‘Man, it would be really cool to revive some of the things that were in this product but modernize it.’
A specific release date for Wartorn has not yet been announced, but Stray Kite reports that Wartorn will release later this year on Steam Early Access. If you want to know more about the games that inspired Wartorn, Myth and its sequel are unfortunately not available for purchase anywhere, but they’re also not too hard to find if you know where to look.