Hunt Corrupted Spirits – Giant corrupted spirits lurk in the woods.Discover the dark history of the island as you solve puzzles in ancient ruins and unearth long-forgotten secrets. Traverse misty forests, lush meadows and snowy tundras. Explore an Open World – Forge your own path through a beautiful open world packed with secrets to find.Perform fluid acrobatics and execute awesome trick shots with a unique archery system that allows effortless shooting while moving at high speeds. Forge a connection with your eagle companion and soar through the air. Archery and Falconry – Become the Hunter, a master of archery who travels to a mystical island to dispel a curse of darkness that grips the world.When you play, I hope you forget you are playing a game and are fully transported to a mythic world. We’ve spent years experimenting, designing, and crafting The Pathless, and I’m proud of the unique experience we have made. It creates real stakes and makes encounters tense and engaging- without resetting the timeline or breaking the atmosphere. If the cursed spirits get the better of you, they will knock your crystals out of you, hampering your progress towards future flap upgrades. So we changed the resource you risk to lose: instead of your time, you stand to lose the crystals you’ve collected. To make the cursed spirits feel powerful and scary, we needed to create stakes, but we wanted to avoid the immersion-breaking timeline resets of the standard game over design.
It works because it creates stakes- you are scared to get a game over because it will cost you your time as a player, a valuable resource. Spirit vision does away with a traditional map and makes navigating an immersive experience that ties into exploration and happens directly in the world itself.īut what about game over? How can you have a game with giant cursed spirit bosses that stalk you through the forest and not have it? A traditional game over design will reset your progress back to some checkpoint when you lose an enemy encounter. This creates an interesting loop in gameplay where you cycle between elevations: When you are up high, you get more navigation information and can fly further when you are on the ground you can explore the detailed ruins and forests to discover secrets. Getting up higher above the trees lets you see further, and therefore see more landmarks with spirit vision as well. Since it is in the world, how much navigation information you can gather from it depends on your vantage point and how much you can see. It overlays a “heatmap” that illustrates where you have been directly on the terrain, and highlights distant points of interest like a sonar ping. The Hunter has a magical mask that lets her see into the spirit world. So how do we get away without a map? The answer- which took us years of design iteration to discover- is the spirit mask. The cursed island that you explore in The Pathless is large- many kilometers across- and covered in dense forests. It’s a satisfying, moment to moment action that keeps you engaged with the space, and can even become meditative when you get in the rhythm. Chaining shots will let you keep your speed up, and each successful shot will give you a mini turbo boost, even in the air.
Shooting talismans- ethereal, floating targets scattered across the landscape- will fill your dash meter. The Hunter moves fast, bounding through the forest at high speeds. It launched us on a multi-year long journey to figure out new ways to address the issues those mechanics normally solve.įluid, dynamic movement is at the core of The Pathless. We made the choice early on to remove these elements to sharpen the sense of immersion and atmosphere. These common design elements work great in many games- but for ours, we didn’t like how they pull you out of the world and remind you that you are in a game. We wanted to encourage players to explore organically and develop an understanding of the space as they play, which led us to break convention with most open world games in a few key ways: There’s no fast travel, there’s no map, and there’s no game over. The Pathless is all about finding your own way forward, so an open world design fit the experience and themes perfectly.
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