The devs shed a little more light on the project.
Griftlands, the new project from Klei Entertainment – the studio behind Don’t Starve, will be an RPG mixed with a “pirate/mercenary sandbox” as designer Kevin Forbes explained in an talk with RockPaperShotgun.
“It’s more of a pirate/mercenary sandbox than a sequence of story battles. You are put into a simulated economy and set loose to make your fortune.”
The player will have control over a group of mercenaries with quests to do, but other than that the world should be procedurally unexpected.
“There is a small cast of written player-characters/companions who have their own quest lines, but these take place in a dynamic world with procedurally-generated NPCs. The land and the factions that inhabit it are fixed, but their state and the front-line NPCs that populate the world are systems-driven…”
Hopefully, Klei can deliver on those promises and keep the quality of their previous titles.