Broken Roads (video game)

Broken Roads is a role-playing game in which players accompany a party of up to five characters and participate in a "blend of turn-based tactical combat (and) traditional and original" role-playing mechanics.^[2] The game features a 'Moral Compass' system in which player actions, including choices made in dialogue and quests, are represented on a map between four quadrants, 'utilitarian', 'humanist', 'machiavellian' and 'nihilist' positions. The player's position on the Moral Compass provides the player with traits affecting gameplay mechanics.^[6] The player's companions and key characters feature their own compass, which affects their reaction to the player's statements and choices.^[7]

Broken Roads was developed by Drop Bear Bytes, an independent Australian developer based in Torquay founded by director Craig Ritchie in 2019.^[8] Development began in January 2019,^[8] with a reveal trailer released to the public in October of that year.^[9] Broken Roads received support from several Australian state government arts programs, including funding from the Victorian Government's Assigned Production Investment Games program in 2020 and 2021,^[10] and from the Queensland Government's Digital Games Incentive in August 2022.^[11] A demo of the game was released on Steam in June 2023.^[7] In December 2023, Versus Evil, the project's publisher, became defunct.^[12][13][14]

The Australian setting and identity became a major component of the design of Broken Roads over time. Originally conceived to take place within a generic setting, Ritchie found Australia's "conflicted culture", including its legacies of colonialism and genocide, provided an effective balance between "humor, fun and levity" with "serious, adult themes (and) tough questions".^[15] During development, the scope of the game was narrowed from across the Australian continent to a setting in the Wheatbelt region of Western Australia.^[15] The developers visited the region several times during pre-production to capture reference images to depict several of the area's landmarks and landscapes in-game.^[16]

The development team engaged the input of Indigenous elders to capture the "respectful and authentic" representation of Indigenous Australians in the setting of the game.^[16] In 2019, Drop Bear Bytes hired Yorta Yorta and Ngarrindjeri writer Cienan Muir as a 'narrative consultant' for the game. Cienan stated that his role was to provide a "critical eye" in and provide a chance to "get creative and let (his) own stories have some influence" in the game's narrative.^[17] In 2022, Karla Hart was brought on board to write a significant portion of the game.^[18] Australian stage and screen actor Uncle Jack Charles was originally cast as a narrator in the game, featuring in a release trailer,^[19] but died in September 2022 before his participation in the game could be finalised.^[16]

The game was strongly influenced by earlier non-traditional role-playing games with an emphasis on dialogue. Narrative lead Leanne Taylor-Giles stated that, like in Fallout, the game was designed to provide players with "all kinds of different ways to approach each problem", including pacifistic approaches with dialogue.^[20] Drop Bear Bytes enlisted several industry veterans, including creative lead Colin McComb, who had worked on Fallout 2 and Planescape: Torment, cited by Ritchie as "big influences" on Broken Roads,^[21] and Leanne Taylor-Giles, who had worked with McComb on Torment: Tides of Numenera.^[22] Pre-release reception of Broken Roads identified similar comparisons, with IGN writing that the game "has the potential to be the next game in the Planescape: Torment lineage of deeply introspective, talky RPGs",^[23] and PC Gamer describing the game as having the "potential to become the next Disco Elysium", citing its "philosophical" approach.^[22]