Broken Roads, from Australian developer Drop Bear Bytes has been quietly accumulating a large following of CRPG fans eager for more of the upcoming 2023 title. The isometric RPG, set in Western Australia begins by asking players the hard questions, ‘what would you do if you learned that a man being taken for execution was quite likely innocent of the crime he was convicted of?’ what about, ‘how would you treat a bandit you captured trying to loot things that you had already found and claimed?’ Decision-making is at the forefront of everything in Broken Roads, but there’s also a wide world to explore and immerse yourself in. Recently at PAX Australia, Player2‘s Shaun Nicholls had the chance to chat with a pair of Drop Bear Bytes most senior members, Game Director Craig Ritchie and Narrative Director Leanne Taylor-Giles, as the pair shared insight into the world design and the ways with which players can immerse themselves in it.
Nicholls posed the question about the world design and how you can explore it. Is it a linear or more open experience. According to the pair though, it’s a little bit of both, Taylor-Giles responding with
At some point, the world opens up and it’s a full free-roaming world map. You can go wherever you want. You will unlock some places after you have done quests or you have talked to someone. There will be random encounters between towns, so those will be created experiences but randomly placed and they won’t all happen in the same sequence so you might not get them all in one playthrough. So we want to make it feel as much like a living open world as possible.
Ritchie then followed up from Taylor-Giles’ response explaining that while there’s a free-roaming world to explore, there’s also a chapter-based structure to guide the player somewhat, saying,
There are defined chapters, so we have a defined path until the pub that you experienced (in the hands-on demo), and then a couple more storytelling sequences and then the world opens up. So everyone will be funnelled to the pub and soon after that, you can do anything.
Only it August it was revealed that Broken Roads was coming to consoles, as well as PC, in 2023, with the game getting a new publisher in the form of Versus Evil.
Broken Roads is “A love letter to traditional isometric cRPG that brings exploration, strategic turn-based combat and meaningful philosophical choices to a densely-crafted post-apocalyptic future version of Western Australia. Broken Roads skillfully blends traditional and all-new role-playing elements on top of a classless system offering near-unlimited character development options built around four philosophies: Humanist, Utilitarian, Machiavellian, and Nihilist. Furthermore, the game presents players with an original morality system: the Moral Compass which sees dialogue options and questing decisions influence, and be influenced by, a character’s philosophical leaning and the tough decisions they make along the way.”
