Fans of classic RPGs like Planescape Torment and the modern games which are inspired by them, like Wasteland 3, may want to put Broken Roads on their map. The game's dev blog reads like a wishlist fulfilled for genre fans. The indie project from Australia's Drop Bear Bytes is due out this year on consoles and PC.
In Broken Roads, players embark on a journey across a new post-apocalyptic setting in Australia and will guide the story with a novel Moral Compass gameplay feature. Images of the feature indicate players can land somewhere among a four-cornered spectrum encompassing Machiavellian, Utilitarian, Humanist, and Nihilist ideals. Choices made by players will begin to lean characters in certain directions, opening up or removing future options in dialogue or the story.
On the team's blog, Drop Bear Bytes explains this decision while incidentally teasing the exact sort of thing fans of these games want to experience. "We believe this will enhance the game’s roleplaying realism - you can not take an evil option and then immediately follow up with the most noble option. Decisions will not be clear cut good and bad – we want to present real moral dilemmas that players will have to carefully consider." One example shown is where the player comes upon a character who might die of radiation poisoning. Do you help them by providing iodine, elect to save the medicine for someone else, put him out of his misery, or find another way to address the issue?
The game's development team is something of a who's-who in the CRPG space. Leanne Taylor-Giles recently joined the team as the Narrative Lead after previously having worked on Torment: Tides of Numenera with fellow CRPG veteran Colin McComb. McComb also worked on Planescape Torment, Fallout 2, and Wasteland 2, among many other projects in that vein.
Combat will be turn-based and gameplay allows for up to six party members to make the trek together. You can see the game's handdrawn artwork and get a greater sense of the mood in this previously released reveal trailer.
The team invites players to follow along with its development blog as well as wishlist it on Steam. Broken Roads is planned for a 2021 launch on PC, Xbox One, and PS4, with presumed backward compatibility on new-gen Xbox and PlayStation consoles.
