What started as a resource-managing road trip across a generic post-nuclear wasteland quickly became thepost-apocalyptic darling of Australia,Broken Roads. The upcoming CRPG is approaching its November 14th release, and like most games, its development had quite the volution.
Post-apocalyptic games are a fairly well-trodden narrative genre, and there have been some truly famous games applying that sort of setting to a roleplaying game, notably theFalloutandWastelandfranchises. And whileBroken Roadsacknowledges its influence from these long legacies, it strikes its own tone through both the depth of its roleplaying system and its very Australian sensibilities. Game Rant spoke to Craig Ritchie, co-founder ofBroken Roads’developer Drop Bear Bytes, after the game’s preview at PAX Australia, where crowds enjoyed the way the game had grown and changed to represent the land down under.The following interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Q: Can you introduce yourself?
A:I’m Craig Ritchie. I am the co-founder of Drop Bear Bytes and the game director on Broken Roads. I was a journalist and a freelance writer from the ‘90s until I moved into more of a marketing and brand management role for Nvidia and then started working with CCP Games in 2013. And, you know, kind of very summarized, but I ended up forming Drop Bear Bytes in January 2019. Close to five years working onBroken Roads.
Q: What inspiredBroken Roads?
A:It came out of a bunch of different things. My and my co-founder Jeff Rose’s favorite game of all time wasBaldur’s Gate 2. I loved all the Infinity Engine games likePillars of Eternity, just that style. I think the isometric RPG, obviouslyDivinity Original Sin 1and2,took the genre a leap forward as well. I just really love theoriginalFalloutgames, too.
It was originally going to be a road trip with tactical battles, random encounters, resource management, and stuff. We just kept realizing we were adding more and more story and depth to the characters in the world, and we just said, “Screw it, throw out the road trip, throw out the resource management, andmake this a traditional CRPG.”
Q: What sets it apart from games likeFalloutorWasteland?
A:Definitely the Australian angle. I think that’s obviously the big hook. BothFalloutandWastelandare North American.
There’s also just a different tone to it, and both of those games have seriousness and humor. We are also going for seriousness and humor, but we’re trying to go a little bit more realistic in terms of how the people in this world react to the world that makes sense. Like, we want people’s responses and reactions and so on to be quite realistic. We are having some fun with it.
But yeah, I think one of the main things is the Australian-ness and the other main thing is the depth we’re taking in the narrative. NeitherFalloutnorWasteland–great stories, great characters, and so on–but they’re notnarrative-driven roleplaying games. Ours is all about the story, the characters, the Moral Compass, and the depth of the choices. You know, all of your companions have real, real, real–as much as a computer game can have–personality values, responses, reactions, a journey of their own. Whereas inWasteland, you could make a character and then have generic companions or party characters. And while inFallout, your companionsdid have some personality, there wasn’t nearly as much party conversation as there is inBroken Roads.
Q: The Australian-ness is a major draw. I read that originally you were going for a more generic setting, though, so what made you decide to double down on Australia?
A:It was a couple of things. Firstly, the original design was for that of a road trip. The original road trip idea was a generic post-apoc setting that allows for this kind of combat, this kind of resource management, and this kind of motivation to get across, you know, from A to B. Just weeks later, it didn’t take long before we went, why not just have it a journey across the whole of Australia? Like,let’s set it in Australia, it’s a massive country. People overseas don’t always appreciate just how massive Australia is and that it’s got really, really cold places in the south, it’s got desert, it’s got complete tropical heat, you know, almost like rainforest vibes in the northeast. There’s so much going on here that you can have this really varied post-apocalyptic world.
That decision was made before the “Okay, it’s going to be a traditional narrative-driven RPG,” and when we settled on that, we then started to dig deeper into Western Australia where the game began. There’s so much we could set this whole game just in Western Australia. We actually zoomed in further, there’s an area called the Wheatbelt, which is like farming and mining country for the most part. We could do this whole game just in the Wheatbelt and have more content than we knew what to do with.
In the space of the first four to six weeks, it went from a generic post-apoc road trip across somewhere to a generic road trip across post-apoc Australia to a very, very narrowly focused narrative-driven RPG in one portion of Western Australia.
Q: I understand there’s a glossary of Australian lingo for players overseas that might be confused?
A:Yes, yes. You know, we like it. It’s pretty funny as well to see people’s reactions, especially when we’ve demoed the game at Gamescom. Where there’s terminology, slang, and lingo, the player can move the mouse over on PC or on controller, highlighting a particular term.
You’ve seen this in other games likeTyranny, where it tells you the lore and the background and you get a paragraph or two. I think thePathfindergamesdo it as well. Ours is more like, we don’t hold back on the speech. The voiceover reflects authentic Australian dialogue, so does the writing with all that slang and terminology, and the best way is to just have the player able to read in the dialogue windows. It actually acts as an encyclopedia.
It’s both necessary, but also, you know, just something fun and funny.
Q: I understand indigenous communities consulted onBroken Roads, what was that process like? And what did it end up adding to the game?
A:It started long before we even designed out how the game is gonna play over the full story. You know, literally before a single line of code was written. We started speaking to people at an Aboriginal cultural center nearby.
I’m based in Torquay, in Victoria, Australia. I’m originally from South Africa. At the time, we started working onBroken Roads, I’d only been here for not even three years. It was closer to two years. I knew there was no way I was ever going to even try and attempt to do that myself. We got a very positive response from calling around. I ended up speaking to different people around the country and wrote a very wide range of responses–some being “don’t even try, you’re not going to get it right despite your best efforts, it’s not going to work” through to “thank you so much for normalizing us through inclusion and for just telling Indigenous stories.” It was the full range from don’t even try to write what you want, we’ll help you with it, to cool, let’s get some people on the team, let’s get some writers from the area.
It obviously helped add the authentic and respectful representation of First Nations people in Western Australia, because one of the things I didn’t know when I moved here is the massive amount of different language groups. I can’t go to an Aboriginal person near our office and say, “Hey, can you help me write the story? Can you tell me about this or that thing about Noongar culture,” because Noongar is the largest language group where the game is set in Western Australia. You definitely have to speak to somebody from the region. We’ve managed to have a few people over the years just help us design characters, help us improve artwork, help us write dialogue, share traditional stories and dream time stories that we’ve gotten into the game, right down to unique artwork. We’ve commissioned artwork that’s been put into the game that was made specifically for the game by numerous Aboriginal artists as well.
Through this whole process, I’ve learned a lot. It’s also been essential if you’re going to set something in a real-world location. You also obviously have to just be mindful about the political and historical sensitivities. You know, we’re trying to entertain and tell a good story, and let players have fun with it and learn a bit more about Australian First Nations people through the game. I don’t want to make it sound like that’s our objective. It’s more just, if we’re going to include it, wewant to do it authentically and respectfully. It’s a component of that. If we didn’t have it, it would absolutely be missing. There’s no way we could do it without the right people helping us out.
Q: What are some of the bits of Australian-ness in the game that you’re excited to share with a global audience?
A:Well, the main thing we’re super proud of is how our team, the audio team, the writers, level designers, have recreated real-world locations. Almost every spot that you can reach–the locations, the scenes, the landmarks, the towns–have been modeled from or painted from photographs that we took. We’ve taken three trips out there, literally thousands of photographs at this point. The art team then would model or texture based on exactly what the plants, the color of the ground, the street color, the buildings, all those kinds of things in these locations are. You can Google the place, and you can actually see the same buildings. Our audio lead recorded sounds from the locations as well. When you go to Wave Rock, you hear the birds and the wind rustling in the trees and so on. That’s literally recorded right there. It’s about as authentic as you can get. These are these real-world locations. We’ve added some post-apocalyptic garnish to them and hopefully recreated them in a very, very fun way.
When we had Western Australian people playing the game at PAX Australia a couple of weeks ago, they were so excited to see some of these landmarks that we just couldn’t believe some of these little locations were in there and so on. So the response from Australians has been great, and we just hope it’s going to be fun and interesting for international players.
We’ve obviously also got animals in there: both the actual indigenous fauna that you get in the area,as well as some mutated variantsof those. So yeah, I hope people have fun not only with the locations but also the animals and the wildlife.
Q: What caused the apocalypse inBroken Roads?
A:The short of it is its nuclear war, massive nuclear bombs, and most of the capital cities being bombed.
The longer answer is from now until 50ish years from now, humans have made the wrong choice every time we could have handled a political decision or an approach to environmental disasters, climate change, rising sea levels, or another global financial crisis. Further division, the way people speak to each other on social media and online, driving things to the point of a second American Civil War. America then basically said “You’re with us or against us,” and the rest of the world had to choose a side. You ended up with a new Axis and Allies, and a war between those twoopposing groups became World War III.
Maybe 100 years or so after that, we’re picking up the story. 150 years from now, 100 years after the apocalypse. People are trying to rebuild and make a life for themselves in a Wasteland future in Australia.
Q: Tell me about the origin stories you may play through? That was a very big draw for people at PAX Australia, right?
A:Well, the cool thing about PAX was people were playing a special demo. See, we’ve got a live demo on Steam where you can play the Hired Gun origin, one of four. At PAX, people were able to get their hands on the other three.
There’s a surveyor, who is like a mapmaker and an explorer. In our world, their job is to find new trade routes and discover unknown locations they’ve heard word of. The surveyor’s job will be to help map together the rebuilding of post-apocalyptic Australia.
The Hired Gun is a mercenary, it’s a more combat-focused character. Then there’s the Barter Crew, which is essentially a merchant or a trader that’ll have some unique abilities. They can spot things in the world to trade that other character types don’t actually know about. There’s a different experience and different rewards for those.
Finally, the Jackaroo is essentially an Australian cowboy, a female Jackaroo is called a Jillaroo, and it’s somebody who’s grown up on what’s called a cattle station, which is essentially a farm. They’re handy with a gun because they have to be. They’re good with tending to animals, can do first aid, biology, and so on.
Each of the origin stories gets a bonus to one of the game’s attributes, as well as some of the skills, and then will have unique dialogue options and unique quest resolution options available to them. But beyond that, we try to make it as classless a system as possible. You can build up whatever character type, whatever origin story type, with whatever morality, and have a viable character built based upon your skills and stats. There is no skill or stat that is an attribute unavailable to you because of a particular origin story.
Q: You mentioned morality, what can you tell me about the Moral Compass mechanic?
A:We wanted to have our own take on alignment and having a character be just like the real world. People are not one-dimensional, things are a lot more complex than that, and we don’t find ourselves one of nine alignments or somewhere on a binary between good and evil. We are composed of a little bit of this and a little bit of that. If we have something that’s kind of spread, it’s over a two-dimensional plane arena represented on a computer screen. But if you have a range of available choices, made up ofdifferent elements of moral philosophythat comprise a character’s worldview just like a real person is able to conceive of, “Hey, in this circumstance, I might justify this action.” Or, “I should always behave this way because I do care about what is right and treating everyone with dignity and fairness.” Or, well, “I don’t really care about anyone except myself,” or “In this situation, I’m so desperate that if I don’t steal, my children will go hungry.”
You can always justify something depending on your worldview and so on, or you might, from the outside, not understand how somebody is capable of doing something. That’s only because you don’t really necessarily know what they’re going through and what their circumstances are.
The Moral Compass really came out of wanting to represent the much broader array of choices and considerations that a human being can have than we’ve seen in video games to date. We were motivated particularly because of the way people speak to each other on social media, the reductive “you’re in this group or you’re not, you like this or you like that.” You display this one characteristic that is common with this person I don’t like, therefore I’m going to project all those other characteristics on you. “This guy didn’t like my tweet, he’s literally Hitler.” That kind of ridiculous, reductive thinking is something that the Moral Compass was designed to combat.
Within your worldview, the worldview actually gets narrower, but the edge of it extends further out. That golden arc you can see extends further to the outside of the Moral Compass, and you’re able to then make more extreme choices. If you make decisions all over the place, you become broad-minded, so you’ve got more choices. But the extreme ones, they’re just more close to the outside of the campus, those are unavailable to you if you make choices all over the place. So that’s another consideration players will have to make is, “Am I really going to go all-in on this worldview? Or do I want to be broad-minded knowing I’ll have more choices, but limited in the extent of them?”
Let’s make it so that it’s impossible to just be this kind of reductive personality. Even though we don’t use the terms good and evil–we try to avoid them for the sake of writing–if we have a good person 90% through the game, but then they really liked this evil option right at the end, why let them pick that? I think there was this example inStar Wars: Knights of the Old Republicwhere you could be, you know, this amazingly noble Jedi. Right at the end, you go, “Actually, I likethis Dark Side choice, let me go for it.” That was something that we were very conscious that we didn’t want to allow people to do.
It doesn’t just lock you in a particular place, it slowly adjusts and rotates around the Compass based upon the choices that you make. It’s the first time I’ve seen something like this anyway. We did think about doing it in a sphere, like, fully three-dimensional, but that just became too cumbersome too quickly. We’re really proud of the way it works throughout both dialogue choices, how characters respond to you, and some of the unique stuff you can do in combat.
The proof is going to be once the world gets its hands on it, and the kinds of characters and the kinds of unique stories that people make as they’re playingBroken Roads. I’m really excited to see what players make of it.
Q: Could you introduce me to some of the characters that we’ll meet inBroken Roads?
A:Well, I’m kind of seeing how far I can go without spoiling it. Your companions include a companion that matches most of the archetypes in the game. We’ve got Jess, for example, as a member of a Barter Crew, and she also has her camels. She is Sean’s partner. Sean is a Jackaroo, he runs a farm with his father John, and his mother Sarah is a doctor. These are all people you meet really early in the game. If you are a Hired Gun or a Surveyor, you will start the game at a place called Bally Bally Hall, which is where the scouts are located. The scouts generally are known for their hired guns, but they’re essentially scouts that keep the place secure. They will be accompanied by the Crew members or Surveyors on their different journeys.
All the roles that the character can play in the game, you will also meet others in the world who do that. You’ll meet Mick who is the mayor of Brookton, and he plays an important role throughout the whole game. We have Tina, she’s proven pretty popular. She’s a young teenager who basically runs Kokeby Waystation, a very popular trading area. It’s got a marketplace and they have a radio tower. Most locations kept in touch via radio towers powered by solar energy. There’s Sally, who runs the bar the Broken Arms in Brookton. You’ll encounter the same characters regardless of the origin story, but they’ll just respond to you differently and so on.
We also have a larger city called Merredin where you’ll spend quite a bit of time. It kind of becomes one of the main hubs in the game, and there are different people vying for leadership there. Some of them are, let’s just say, untrustworthy–their ways of getting things done are definitely up for debate as to their morality. There are hunters and collectors, which is the Surveyors Guild and the essentially Mercenaries Guild. This is a place in Merredin, and it’s run by two friends, Hunter and Cole. They will give unique quests based on your origin story, and they can play out in the main quests of the game in different ways as well.
Q: What can you share about the game’s narrative?
A:Well, there’s a lot of stuff that happens pretty early on that becomes a big spoiler, but as a lot of it is in the Hired Gun origin story already… You begin somewhere in or around a town called Brookton, which is a real-world Western Australia Wheatbelt town where events transpire that result in an attack on the town. This is at the very end of the demo that’s available on Steam, so while a spoiler, it’s also within the first hour or so of gameplay. Then you need to figure out what happened, who did it, and why.
You have this kind of small world that you think that you’re a part of doing work in and around Brookton and the nearby settlements and communities. But then suddenly, you have to go on a bit of a journey that makes the world seem a lot bigger to you. You’re on your way to Merredin, and you basically arrive at a crashed plane. Now planes have not flown since basically the time the bombs dropped and that becomes a bit of a mystery–like how did this happen? Where did this come from? And then you make your way to Merredin where you have to get inside the gates.
Once you’ve basically established yourself in the city, Merredin becomes like the big central hub, and then the whole world opens up to you to explore. Who did what to Brookton and why? What’s the story behind the plane crash? Who have become the major players, not just in Merredin, but in the wider Wheatbelt and how does all of this tie together?
Going beyond that is absolutely spoiler territory. It’s a story of survival, of forming a little bit of a community with the people that you’ve met in Brookton, and getting yourself established and making decisions based upon what you feel is the right course of action based upon your worldview and the Moral Compass.
Q: It sounds like there’sa lot of replay valuein this game, how important was that as a development consideration?
A:So very much. The numbers and the data show that most people only play a game once, but the fans will play it multiple times. You think about four origin stories, or particular quadrants on the Moral Compass but 360 degrees around, so there’s such a range of choices on the Moral Compass. Then, hen once the world opens up for the player, there are multiple factions to align with.
There is obviously a somewhat linear thread from the beginning to the end, but it’s very, very broad and wide in the middle. I’m not going to say “open world,” because it’s not an open world, at least not as people understand open worlds. But there are ways to tackle the different objectives and so on that are completely different based upon your worldview and the order in which you choose to do certain quests. There’s also some randomness thrown in particular moments that I don’t really want to spoil too much. We think the game is incredibly replayable, just from our own testing.
But because most people only play the game once, it has to be a really, really satisfying single experience for those that go “Yep, I really enjoyed it, I played it as a utilitarian Jackaroo and had a great time, and I’m moving on to the other 10,000 games in my Steam backlog.” However, for those that really do like it, they’ll be able to experience vastly different games upon replaying. We’ve got the violent route if you’re just a gung-ho Hired Gun who just wants to tackle everything with gunfire or a knife or whatever. Then we’ve got multiple pacifist resolutions for getting through the quests. We’ve also got many instances–and people only learned this through experimenting–many instances where running away from a fight doesn’t mean losing. We’ve got a narrative outcome if you want to flee. So fleeing is not always like losing, you know, so you flee and then some other events may occur.
It’s been very important for us from the outset, to have a game that can be completed with a pacifist run like you don’t have to kill anybody. ThenwithDisco Elysiumgetting so much more popularand having no combat whatsoever, we realized, “Look, we can’t just have one pacifist route, we should have a few paths of these routes.” We should make it possible, maybe not the Hired Gun for obvious reasons, but that it’s pretty easy to make it through the game if you really think about your choices without having to kill anybody. That also could be like a challenge. Now I’m going to play it once normally and then one ultraviolent, then once seeing if I can get through without killing anybody.
So yeah, that’s the long answer. There’s a lot of potential replayability, and again, I think we’re going to see some interesting things when people compare their playthrough experiences and how different they were when they’re talking in communities on Discord or Reddit. We hope that encourages people to go back and try something different and replay it again.
Look, there are also multiple endings as well, like vastly different endings. If somebody wants to see them, they will absolutely have to learn all save or replay the game at least four times.
Q: What’s the reception to the Steam demo and what was playable at PAX Australia been like?
A:So far, very positive. I mean, we’ve totally reworked the art in the game, from taking the world and environments for 3D characters to a fully 3D world, so the game is just looking so beautiful. That’s one of the first things most people comment on.
We’re also really happy with the response to the writing. You know, we’ve had people agonize over choices really early on. Especially if you play the Hired Gun, we don’t waste any time. you may kind of skip through the opening tutorial section, and then immediatelyget thrust into a very difficult situation. We’ve had people play that very slowly, like, “Gee, what if I do this? What if I do that?” It’s really rewarding seeing people take it so seriously. We then have people laughing out loud at some of the humor, the references, the jokes, and so on.
So yeah, very, very positive. We just hope that players enjoy the full experience as much as we’ve seen them enjoying the origin story so far.
Q: And is there anything else you’d like to add?
A:It’s been a journey. You know, we started this game, this company, two of us with an idea at the beginning of January 2019. To see it go from an idea to slowly building up the team to having made the cover of PC Gamer has been incredible. A few months ago, we had one about trailers picked up by PlayStation. Our most recent one was shown on an Xbox channel. It’s like, “Oh, shit, we’ve actually made a real game here.” We better get this thing completed and shipped and satisfy all these player expectations!
Now, it’s been a very long journey, and it’s unreal to think it’s been almost five years from the initial concept through to launch. The launch is literally three weeks away. We’re so proud of what the team has done. Obviously, hugely thankful to Versus Evil for their support and helping us get across the line for porting it to consoles and for allowing us to have the budget to translate it into six or seven different languages. So yeah, it’s been incredible.
It’s been exhausting. I can’t wait to ship the game and then and then put my feet up for a little while and see what players think of it.
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Broken Roadsreleases November 14 for PC, Switch, and Xbox Series X/S.
