Aussie Fallout RPG Broken Roads delayed at last minute to playtest “thousands of permutations”

Post-apocalyptic role-playing game Broken Roads – billed as a “classic RPG for the modern age” – has once again had its release delayed from 14th November this year till early 2024, as developer Drop Bear Bytes have been caught out by the scale of their own creation. Still, we can rest assured that it is finally “content complete”.

“Since 2019 the Drop Bear Bytes team has been pouring their hearts and souls into Broken Roads, spending countless hours designing, troubleshooting, and adjusting to player feedback,” reads a statement on the game’s Steam page. “While Broken Roads is still coming, we’ve made the decision to delay the release to allow for additional polish time and QA manpower plus resources to ensure a higher quality bar for the thousands of permutations that can arise.

“While the game is now content complete, it is also coming in longer than we originally anticipated at [around] 30 hours of gameplay and nearly 400,000 words of dialogue,” the statement continues. “As you can imagine, it’s extremely time-consuming to properly test all of these.

“This is not an easy decision, however the teams here at Drop Bear Bytes and Versus Evil have decided that to ensure we deliver the highest quality product, it would be best to delay the games launch just a bit longer until early next year.”

I had Broken Roads pigeon-holed as a visual novel for some reason – I guess I’m confusing it with Road 96 or one of the many visual novels that are also roadtrips, like Wheels of Aurelia. Now that I actually look at it, I’m thrilled to discover that it’s Aussie Fallout with an intriguing Moral Compass system, which dispenses with the usual Good or Evil questions in favour of a a piechart’s worth of more elaborate, competing philosophies, from Machiavellian to Nihilist, each of which gives you special options in dialogue. It reminds me of Disco Elysium’s personified character stats.

Ollie is also keen on the Moral Compass system, writing a Supporter post specifically about it in January. “I can see a dozen different ways in which this Moral Compass may end up being a bad idea in practice,” he commented. “But I don’t care. I adore it. And I’m going to play Broken Roads solely so I can see the consequences of my actions in satisfying radial form.”

The game eschews RPG classes, with approaches to combat, infiltration and so forth determined by individual skills and abilties. The combat, meanwhile, follows Fallout’s system of turns and action points. All good stuff, and it sounds like they have ample reason for the delay, which does at least give the unconvinced time to check out the Steam demo (devs generally take these down after release). Let’s just hope this is the very last change of dates.

Frivolous skit to end on: I would quite like to play a “modern RPG for the classic age”. “Not physically possible”, you say? That’s defeatist thinking! Somebody do a gamejam about it, please.