Charterstone designer working on open-world exploration game inspired by 7th Continent, TIME Stories and Breath of the Wild

Scythe creator Jamey Stegmaier's next game following legacy hit Charterstone is an ambitious open-world exploration game, the designer has revealed.

Speaking in his latest Sunday Sitdown video delving into the different types of exploration in games, Stegmaier said that the untitled project is one of two games he’s been designing “for quite some time”.

“It’s constantly on my mind what I can do to make this game as interesting and fun and vast an exploration game I can,” he said.

Elaborating on the experience of exploring in his game, Stegmaier said that the world is “pre-set”, but suggested that the things players might discover and that could take place in it would differ – an inspiration he took from sprawling adventure game The 7th Continent.

“I am trying to take that element from 7th Continent of having variable elements so […] each session feels unique whenever you play the game,” he said.

Stegmaier went on to reveal that another key inspiration on the game is scenario-based puzzler TIME Stories, with the designer saying he was particularly impressed by how players “start off with very little information about where you’re going and expand outwards from there”.

Speaking separately on the CoOp Cast podcast, Stegmaier confirmed that his exploration game is a co-op title and revealed another “major influence”: video game The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, last year’s instalment in the long-running adventure franchise that was critically lauded for its innovative approach to offering players a huge world to explore and use to experiment with its gameplay.

Stegmaier clarified that he hasn’t played Breath of the Wild himself, but has “watched hundreds of hours of videos” and was “fascinated by open-world elements of it”.

He added that the game has been designed “from scratch” and has spent a year in development so far, with an estimated year or so left of work before it’s finished – as you’d expect, aspects of it are still “very much in flux”.

“It’s all new, we’ll see how it turns out,” Stegmaier said.