The unusual story role-playing game Broken Roads is reminiscent of Disco Elysium and the old Fallouts, but with its very own ideas. What has changed in the last year?
What is actually “good” and what is “evil “? How do people behave when all the rules of civilisation are thrown out the window and it”s just a matter of naked survival? Do they become bloodthirsty, selfish monsters – or is there an inextinguishable spark of humanity that they retain even under the most adverse circumstances?
Not only philosophers have been dealing with such questions for thousands of years. The role-playing game Broken Roads does not shy away from them either, on the contrary. It even makes profound philosophical themes the central feature, because your character”s personal moral compass determines, for example, which weapons you can use in the brutal post-apocalypse and which dialogues are open to you. So far, what”s been shown looks like they threw the classic Fallouts and the story masterpiece Disco Elysium into a blender and shipped this appetising RPG smoothie to the Australian outback.
Okay, we already knew that much last year in our preview of Broken Roads. But we have received some exciting new information from the developers, because important things have changed in the past months: The combat system has been reworked, possible DLCs are on the horizon and the release date has been pushed back. You can find out everything you need to know about the big story hope here with us – but feel free to take a look at the latest gamescom trailer, which is bursting with end-time atmosphere:
With moral compass through the post-apocalypse
Broken Roads was clearly born out of a love of classic iso role-playing games. You control your characters from an iso perspective through a feral Australia made even more hostile by an unknown catastrophe. Your squad can have up to five members, all with different morals and skills, of course. Important conversations and serious decisions await you at every turn. Sounds like exciting conflicts!
You assemble your own main character at the beginning of the game and give him or her a few inner attitudes by answering moral questions. You also choose one of four possible playable prologues, such as mercenary or scout. These backgrounds also give you unique dialogue options later on, but we don”t yet know how much this really affects the course of the story. In any case, our decisions are much more important in the course of the game.
The story revolves around a convoy with which you travel through Western Australia and fight for your survival. However, you are not only on the road on dusty roads, but also visit settlements. This is where game director Craig Ritchie”s favourite location is, the Hotel Ardath, where a lot of shady characters hang out.
Maybe more exciting places will be added after the release. After all, not everything the developers would have liked to include in their game fit in, says Ritchie:
“The game is set up in such a way that you could put in DLC content or new characters quite easily. Some of the stories we had thought about didn”t fit in but would make very good expansions. In any case, we”ll continue to patch the game after launch and fix the inevitable bugs that creep in, no matter how much you test beforehand!”
Of course, before the team gets to work on any DLCs, the game itself has to be released. And until then, it will take a little longer than expected.
Broken Roads is coming later, but there are good reasons for that
The role-playing game was supposed to be released in 2022. But this release date cannot be kept, but had to move backwards. Now Broken Roads is supposed to come out sometime in 2023. Although Ritchie hopes for a release in the first half of the year, he explicitly does not want to commit to that:
“We hope it”s in the first half of 2023, but we”d rather not commit to anything further than 2023 yet. Hey, it”s game development, unforeseen things happen, so right now we”re confident that the release window will give us enough time to get Broken Roads out at a quality that makes us happy”
The fact that the role-playing game is being delayed isn”t really all that surprising. After all, an experienced publisher has come on board in the meantime with Versus Evil, which was already involved in Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire, among other things. With the additional support, Broken Roads was able to rebuild its combat system, for example. Yes, in contrast to Disco Elysium, here you can more often use your weapons and fists in turn-based combat if you can”t get anywhere with quick-witted sayings.
Actually, your characters would have just moved to pre-made squares in the process, similar to a chess board. Now you move them freely in the combat area instead, and all maps have been completely converted to real 3D environments for this purpose. The trailer embedded above gives you a (very brief) impression of firefights. But the developers promise that we will soon get deeper insights into how conflicts take place with a gun in hand.
And a lot of other things have been polished too: The skill system is no longer skill tree-based, all animations have been reworked, so no more characters sliding across the floor like they”re on a soap trail. Environments and character models are now much more detailed. But there is still a lot to do, as the developers tell us. For example, most of the voice recordings are still pending, as well as localisations for seven different languages (including German, but only subtitles). And a redesign of the user interface is to take place in the next few months. So Broken Roads could end up looking different from the screenshots shown so far:
Broken Roads is one of many hopefuls that won”t be released in 2022, you can find a big overview of the postponements here with us. But as long as the game ends up being close to the developers” ambitious vision for it and hopefully keeps us waiting until a possible Disco Elysium 2, most story fans will be happy to wait a little longer.
Editor”s verdict
As I may have mentioned once or at most twice in passing: When someone whispers the words “Disco Elysium”, I come trotting along 0.2 seconds later, eyes blazing. And when a game packs into its description that it”s inspired by the best story game ever, I immediately get curious.
But Broken Roads pulls a second ace out of its cowboy sleeve to capture my attention: the unusual Australia setting. Stalking through dry eucalyptus forests, marching through dangerous corrugated iron settlements, tracking down kangaroos – where can I buy my ticket straight to this post-apocalypse, please?
Now I just hope that the moral compass will really be a cool system that has a lot of influence on the story but doesn”t restrict me too much. Sometimes, after all, even the most radiant hero has to take a good hit.
