Wartales is back

I very much liked Wartales when I played a very early access version of it for 77 hours end of 2021. So I am very happy that it finally reached its release version this week, and I started playing again. The tactical combat gameplay is as excellent as it was back then, and much of the rough edges has been polished. If you don't know what Wartales is, the closest similar game is Battle Brothers. But while Battle Brothers has a procedurally generated map and quests, Wartales has a hand-crafted map, and a mix of pre-written story quests and generated quests and encounters. Obvious advantage is that the stories are a lot more interesting, and you actually need to make tough moral choices: For example in the first region the story quests are mostly about a conflict between the local farmers and refugees. Are the farmers the bad guys, because they don't want to share their land and their food with the refugees? Or are the refugees the bad guys, because they have turned to banditry to feed themselves? You decide!

The early access version was rather hardcore. The release version has optional difficulty levels, where the medium one is already a lot more mainstream than early access. Furthermore the difficulty settings can now be set independently between combat difficulty and survival difficulty. So if in the early access version you didn't like how you never had any money and eating corpses for food was sometimes necessary, you can make the money/food part of the game easier without making combat less challenging. There are also different options on how to handle save games, although I would advise you to check those closely before selecting one. The easiest one, Free, is actually displayed in the middle, while the one that looks the easiest, Limited, is a bit like Ironman works in some other games, with a lot of autosaves. The Ironman option to the right has absolutely no autosaves, which is potentially annoying.

Another great option at the start of the game is that you can choose whether the enemies have a fixed difficulty, or whether the enemy level adjusts automatically to yours. I prefer the first option, where there are easier and harder places on the map, and you have to navigate accordingly. To me it is more fun if I know of a difficult encounter, but can level up elsewhere and come back later. But if you personally prefer a constant level of challenge, you have that option too. I wished more games would give you that choice. I stopped playing Phantom Brigade because character progression seemed so pointless, when it never actually changed your chance of winning an encounter.

And Wartales has a lot of options for character progression. You gain xp, which give you levels, and that allows you to increase your stats. But at certain levels you can also make choices in what I would describe as a sort of talent tree. In addition to your character class, you can also have one of now 10 different professions, like mining or smithing. And there is a new "paths" system, that tracks your progress in different areas of the game, and converts achievements into points you can spend for bonuses. There is still a level cap, but while that was level 5 when I played it last, it is now 12 with version 1.0. Which also means that there are more regions now and and more content to explore, even if I am currently playing through the same starting region as before.

Overall, Wartales is a much rounder, more complete game now, while still keeping its strong parts. At currently around $25 on Steam with a 25% release discount, I can only recommend the game.