I'll start with 2 games: Broken Roads by Drop Bear Bytes and Weird West by WolfEye Studios.
Broken Roads (Release Date 2022)
It's an upcoming isometric RPG set in post-apocalyptic Australia. The immediate comparison is the earlier Fallout games: the isometric style, the turn-based combat, the post-apocalyptic theme, and the promise of big, difficult decisions.
Authentic Australian locations and environments, and hand-drawn artwork already make the game stand out from others.
According to the interview with Craig Ritchie, game director of Broken Roads and founder of Drop Bear Bytes (
Escapist Magazine), Broken Roads basks in its philosophical occupation and distinctive setting, and one of its major mechanics is the “Moral Compass” system. Morality systems aren’t new in video games, but the one in Broken Roads is a reaction to the binary delineations that underpin so many games. “I was thinking, ‘How can we do something that is more organic?’” said Ritchie. “We wanted to have a thing that limits but adapts at the same time.”
As a result, the Moral Compass is a circle with 36,000 positions, broken into quadrants that reflect ways of being in the real world: humanism, utilitarianism, Machiavellianism, and nihilism. Even then, though, one challenge was avoiding the perception that the quadrants on either side of the compass are opposites, though “they do have opposing premises on which they’re built and then opposing ways that, if you see the world this way, you’re going to have a totally different value system.”
In that interview, Ritchie name-dropped and drew comparisons to RPGs as thematically and temporally disparate as Disco Elysium, Jagged Alliance, and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.
Weird West (Release Date Jan 11, 2022)
It's an upcoming isometric action RPG / immersive sim. According to
PC Gamer, Raphaël Colantonio, Weird West’s creative director, previously led Arkane's admirable effort to keep the immersive sim genre alive with Dishonored and Prey. In 2017, Colantonio left the studio he founded, and in 2019 he formed a new studio called WolfEye. Arkane went on to release Deathloop, a slick, modernized take on the genre, whereas WolfEye's Weird West travels back in time and plucks from classic RPGs like Fallout, arguing for an immersive sim that doesn't revolve around you.
In an interview by
Screen Rant, Raphaël says the weird west "is a very, very niche genre. It’s not like a specific product, [where] I look at it like, what is "medieval fantasy" to "medieval?" If you look at those worlds – whether it’s the medieval worlds or the wild west – they both have something in common, in that it’s a one-to-one kind of world. If you think “medieval,” everybody imagines the same thing, like a knight coming on a horse is going to save this princess or whatever it is that would make this world, and there’s a troll on the way.
Of course, it’s inspired by old legends, but there’s something else. They all have these clichés, and those simple worlds allow for actually very accessible stories, that can [yet] be extremely deep and interesting and relatable, as opposed to some more modern politics or complicated conflicts with conspiracies. So I think that’s why these worlds are so easy to be drawn into. They usually go with simple stories of revenge or control of land, things that many people can grasp.
Now, if you add the mystery layer to that, you know, sorcery, magic, occult, weird horror, whatever it is, and get inspired by things like Lovecraft or Edgar Allan Poe, then you have, I think, a very interesting world. And some of us were …So it just felt…We did not look at it like a marketing opportunity. It’s interesting because it is, I think, a market opportunity. Because there aren’t that many, it’s a weird like, small niche that hasn’t been exploited at all. But that’s not how we looked at it, we just looked at it like, what is that we want to do? And it felt compelling to all of us."
The game's features include Bespoke Experience (each playthrough is unique as the game tailors the story to the player's actions and past choices for an ideal dramatic arc) and Immersive Sim (Weird West supports different styles of play in a simulated sandbox world where characters, factions, and even places react to a player's decisions.
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