Wandering Sword announces major quality of life updates

Wandering Sword, a martial arts RPG from developer The Swordman Studio and Spiral Up Games, has just revealed plans for future quality of life updates. This response follows all of the fan feedback on the recent demo, which ran throughout February and concluded just yesterday.

Wandering Sword doesn’t have a release window yet, but it’s expected to launch on PC in 2023. Here’s the announcement and full blog post from Wandering Sword’s Twitter feed:

Wandering Sword borrows from the niche martial arts “wuxia” genre, which is gradually reaching more mainstream audiences. There were elements in the MCU’s hit movie Shang-Chi. The gaming industry has upcoming titles like Code: To Jin Yong and Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty, which launches this week and recently featured its final demo playthrough.

The genre features beautiful settings inspired by ancient China, and graceful martial arts action. Wandering Sword embraces that world with an action-packed style and retro art design, namely Octopath Traveler’s signature HD-2D. The gameplay has received some solid praise, but there have also been more than a few technical hiccups.

Fortunately, the devs released new plans today for some helpful quality of life changes. Wandering Sword is officially going to support controllers, smooth out its translations and UI, and adjust some overall mechanics. Notably, they also plan to update the characters and plot.

Anything they can do to create a more immersive experience would be helpful, because more than a few things seem to have been lost in translation. Today’s revealed plans should generally make Wandering Sword more accessible, which is crucial for the genre.

Finally, the devs acknowledged issues with the combat and meridian system, but they haven’t been prioritized just yet. Either way, Wandering Sword has enormous potential, and feels like a proper love letter to the wuxia genre. Martial arts fans should definitely have a look.

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