ROAD WARRIORS

BROKEN ROADS brings the end of the world back home

- Jody Macgregor

Here's how Australian Broken Roads is: instead of magic potions, you drink beer. Game director Craig Ritchie casually mentions this when listing consumables, alongside bandages and first aid kits. "You H can't get magic potions in our game so we have multiple sources of beer," he says. "The beers have different abilities."

Broken Roads is so Australian one of its character archetypes is summed up as someone who "wouldn't even blink in a shit storm". Funny thing is, this post-apocalyptic homage to classic RPGs like Fallout wasn't always set in Australia. It wasn't even always an RPG. When Ritchie first told a friend about his videogame idea in 2019, it was a tactics game, "A road trip with tactical battles along the way." The focus was on turn-based combat, and the setting was a "pos-apoc place".

That friend was Jethro Naude, who became co-founder of Drop Bear Bytes with Ritchie, and Broken Roads became their first game. But not without changes along the way. Within a month they realized it made sense for an Australian studio to set its Mad Max-esque game in Australia, and they wanted it to be about more than just combat. They wanted to deepen the characters, expand the story, make it more like the game they both consider their favorite: Baldur's Gate 2. "We made a decision, I think in early February," Ritchie says. "This is going to be a narrative driven RPG like the greats of the genre that we love."

As their ambition expanded, so did the studio, with new staff acquired by diverse means. Composer and audio lead Tim Sunderland was found via Reddit, while narrative director Leanne Taylor-Giles came as a recommendation from creative lead Colin McComb, the two having worked on Torment: Tides of Numenera.

SLANG GANG