Wolcen Studios
Crafting Engaging AI for Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem
Wolcen Studios chose Kythera to power the AI for their highly successful debut game Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem. The fast-paced action RPG topped Steam’s best seller list for two weeks after release and went on to sell more than 1 million copies in the first month. Kythera empowered the indie team, one of our longest standing partners, to move faster and do more with less resources. They used core Kythera features including behaviour trees and dynamic navigation, as well as bespoke features like instant navmesh generation and formation AI, to bring their vision to life.
Portions of Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem are included under license © 2004-2019 Crytek GmbH. All rights reserved
An Endlessly Adaptive World
Before Kythera, something as simple as opening a gate presented a full-blown AI programming task. But Wolcen's developers pictured a truly interactive open world – and they wanted to deliver it without extensive, time-consuming scripting. With Kythera’s automatic behavior trees and dynamic navigation, they found the tool they needed to bring their vision to life.
Unleashing Creative Play
Freed from the constraints of canned scripting, Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem delivers a level of spontaneous gameplay previously unknown in its genre. Kythera’s adaptive AI offers the perfect channel for the player’s ingenuity – meaning in-game problems can have creative solutions that even the designers never dreamed of. With Kythera, a challenge need never have a single “right answer”.
Wolcen: Bloodtrail
Bloodtrail is the first free content patch for the base game and also the launch of Chronicles, Wolcen’s take on ladders, leagues and seasons from other ARPGs. Each Chronicle will introduce new gameplay mechanics and reset the economy and progress to give players a fresh start to explore the new content and compete against each other. For Chronicle 1, Kythera AI developed two new features.
Building the AI features for Wolcen: Bloodtrail
In this post we’ll share some behind-the-scenes of what it’s like to collaborate with our partners to build innovative AI-driven gameplay.
The Formations of Wolcen
Our partners Wolcen Studios wanted Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem to bring modern ARPG gameplay mechanics to a classic dungeon-crawl setting. In this article we’ll take an in-depth look at one particular AI feature that helped bridge the gap from classic RTS and RPG gameplay to a new ARPG experience: formations.