Broken roads full#
Broken roads series#

Elsewhere, our time in Kokeby Station saw us dealing with an errant mercenary whose behaviour was becoming increasingly problematic for the small community. It’s a potent first taste of Broken Roads, a deliberate foreshadowing of the violent and sad nature of its world and the many ways you’ll be able to engage with it. Zach, my little shoulder devil, told me to shoot first, and while the option for an outright kill was present, I was also able to shoot him in the leg, effectively disarming him but likely condemning the broken family to a slow death in the wastes. Conscious of time we did the latter, and our brutish nihilism funnelled us toward some rather blunt words that resulted in the kid sinking further into his distress and threatening to kill himself.

In this mini-drama you can expand your options by taking the time to talk to the distraught mother, investigate the surroundings or simply take charge and approach the kid. He still had the gun and something needed to be done before things devolved even further. After some investigating it becomes apparent that the boy has shot his father for reasons we didn’t, or couldn’t discover in time. A woman is wailing, a man is dead, a boy is standing off to the side, despondent. We found ourselves with a small party, moving through the West Australian wastes toward Kokeby Station, one of the game’s settlements, but tragedy crossed our path. Our character creation process leaned further into Nihilism than expected, with just a dash of Machiavellian for good measure, and thus we set forth on the proverbial broken roads.

Broken roads full#

Given the morally dubious nature of post-apocalyptic worlds, this degree of flexibility in playstyles is a thrilling prospect and one that we can’t wait to see play out in the full release. Ritchie told us that the team understands that doing bad things doesn’t necessarily make an inherently or eternally bad person, and that Broken Roads will allow you to straddle the line with your choices at times, never truly blocked from a path if you decide it’s time to walk a different one. Within these quadrants are Active Moral Traits that grant boosts to gameplay, as well as a handy Moral History that tracks your actions and their impact on your compass alignment.ĭrop Bear Bytes is smarter than your average bear though, and as we spoke with game director Craig Ritchie it became clear that Broken Roads has no interest in arbitrarily moralised gameplay. Be an arse, you’re eventually going to be locked out of not-being-an-arse options in character interactions and so on. Your actions dictate your placement and your placement will in turn begin to dictate your actions.

Broken roads series#

Answering a series of questions designed to provoke your baser desires and impulses will eventually place your character on Broken Road’s impressive compass, a colourful and complex visualisation of your moral makeup.Įach section of the compass (Humanist, Utilitarian, Nihilist and Machiavellian) is drilled down into deeper layers of each alignment, allowing for a more nuanced moral system than say Paragon/Renegade. Crafting your character in Broken Roads is a detailed process, allowing for class choice as well as riffing on the psychological test approach a la Fallout: New Vegas. Our time with Broken Roads was tragically short, about half an hour of gameplay all told, but in that window we were given a taste of the game’s character creation tool set, narrative devices and even a touch of combat. Let’s rewind a little though and set the scene. Some unpleasantness had transpired in the game and our party had come up against a young man who had no business wielding a gun and, ever the diplomat, WellPlayed’s Zach Jackson leaned in and told me to fire. A true blue Aussie CRPG, Broken Roads is studio Drop Bear Bytes’ attempt to capture the charm, and depths, of classic isometric narrative-focused experiences. It was (excuse the term) pissing down that first Friday of the beloved event and instead of joining the rest of the rabble in the main hall, we had been summoned to a hotel nearby to go hands-on with one of our most anticipated new Australian titles, Broken Roads. “Shoot him,” my editor whispered over my shoulder like the tiny little devil man he is as we sat in a conference room not five minutes away from PAX Australia 2022.