A version of this story was originally published in PC Gamer 385, 2023 issue.
Here's how Australian Broken Roads works: Instead of magic potions, you drink beer. Game director Craig Ritchie casually mentions this when listing consumables, along with bandages and first aid kits. "You can't get magic potions in our game, so we have multiple sources of beer," he says. "Beer has different abilities."
Broken Roads is one of the archetypes of his Australian character and is summed up as someone who "won't even blink in a filthy storm." The funny thing is, this post-apocalyptic homage to classic RPGs like Fallout didn't always exist in Australia. It wasn't always an RPG.
When Richie first told a friend of his idea for the video game in January of 2019, it was a tactical game, "a wild ride with tactical battles along the way." The focus was on turn-based combat, and the setting was a "general post-war setting".
That friend was Jethro Naude, who went on to co-found 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 more sense for an Australian studio to put a Mad Max-esque game in Australia, and they wanted it to be more than just a fight. They wanted to deepen the characters, expand the story, and make it more like the game they both consider to be 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 genre greats we love."
As their ambitions expanded, so did the studio, with the acquisition of new employees by a variety of 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, as the two worked together on Torment: Tides of Numenera.
slang gang
The larger and more spread out team was helpful when it came to ensuring dialogue accuracy. Broken Roads is full of evocative Australian slang. Kids are called the "ankle bite" or "sprog," a legend in his lunchbox for the overconfident driver, and insults you'll hear include "derro" and "bogan." My favorite phrase in Broken Roads is "Technicolor yawn," which is a poetic way to describe vomit.
What counts as Australian slang is a divisive topic among Australians, as residents of different states are baffled to learn their neighbors use different words. "Even Lynn and I disagree on some things, and they're both from Queensland," says Sunderland. Because Australian culture is often inaccurately portrayed in novels, especially dialects, people are protective of what is considered "real" slang. Whether you call it a slice of battered and fried potatoes, potato cake, scallops or pancakes can start the fights.
"It's interesting," says Taylor Giles, "because my husband grew up in Victoria and I grew up in Queensland. I'll walk up to him and I'll say, 'Have you ever heard that phrase?'" He said, “No, what does that mean?” Then I have to think and go, “I don’t actually know.” So this is the whole linguistic journey of knowing.” I found a source of nuanced dialogue equally close to home: older relatives. "I just call my grandmother or my uncle and listen to them talk for a while." Yes, those are some good phrases, and I put them to play. "
Further research meant traveling throughout Western Australia, the state's broken roads, and in particular the Wheat Belt region, were mapped. They've taken thousands of photos and audio recordings of places like the Super Pit, which used to be Australia's largest open-pit gold mine. It's a 600-meter-deep hole that emits a sound that Taylor-Giles calls "a drone like the background of the universe."
I'm sure it was also important to look for beer. "It's all about Craig," says Sunderland, "he loves craft beer. We were in Kalgoorlie, which is in central Western Australia, and he found a craft beer restaurant. What? How?"
"What I did was look at the real flowers, the plants, the kind of things that would or could be used in craft beer that are the animals of a certain area of the wheat belt in Washington state," Ritchie explains. "You get like peas and desert peas, I can't remember all of them now. You get that ingredient, you take it to the right person, and there's a new beer in the world."
Another site visited is Wave Rock - a hill naturally formed in the shape of a breaking wave that the team compares to Erana Peace, the peaceful haven in Quest for Glory: So You Want to Be a Hero. Sunderland is very happy to have picked up an authentic voice to accompany him. "When you're in Wave Rock [in the game], you hear Wave Rock right where you are," he says. "Not just Western Australia, but exactly where you're standing."
Sunderland also composed the score, creating a balance between a gentle piano and instruments he had unearthed in a wasteland, making out of scraps and broken guitars. It was written from the perspective of "a musician who lives in a tin shed who's had a very, very bad heatstroke and has collected all these instruments and synthesizers and such over the years. They're just experimenting in this little shed."
It sounds like the kind of raggle-tagged instrument that only Tom Waits could love, and beg to be played a certain way. "Playing this cigar box guitar is awful, because I used the nails on it as frets, and they're sharp and they're rusty and I probably got tetanus. It really changes the way you play an instrument because you think it's just a guitar, but then you pick it up and say, 'This doesn't It looks like a guitar. This looks like a weapon."
The final layer of authenticity came through the reference photos, from which the facades of the buildings have been faithfully rendered (except for the emblems, for legal reasons). Broken roads not only look realistic, with graphic art style and visual brushstrokes.
"I want players to feel like they're playing in concept art," says Richie. “I've often thought the concept art looked better than it actually made it into the game. We started with the same art team that did the Shadowrun Returns series of RPGs. They were working with the art director to finalize the style, yet this was all hand-drawn 2D sprites of 3D characters Wandering around on flat ground. Because we got funding from the publisher and more investment, we were able to increase the budget and now we've recreated the whole world in 3D."
country of origin
Broken Roads has several playable introductions, one for each character archetype, like Dragon Age: Origins. As a hired advocate, my descent involves joining a group of scouts for a job escorting an engineer to Kokeby Waystation—a train station converted into a marketplace—where we'll meet up with another traveler, then take both of them to the nearest town. Along the way I pick up side quests like dealing with a mer hired to protect Kokeby who has become a bully they can't get rid of. Backed by two armed scouts, I try to threaten him, but he won't take it. It ends with a penalty shootout.
Despite modern touches like a moral compass that tracks your decisions and gauges your philosophical leanings across four themes (humanist, utilitarian, Machiavellian, and nihilistic), it feels more like a classic CRPG rather than a radical reinvention of the genre. Bugan Gate over Drongo Elysium.
However, seeing traits activate by reaching certain scores on the moral compass - such as Anomic Aggression, a bonus to nihilism that improves your stats at the expense of allies who find you unsettling - it's hard not to think of Disco Elysium, though I saw it first Breaking Roads premiered at PAX Australia in October 2019, days before Disco Elysium was released. "We shamelessly copy Fallout 2, Planescape: Torment, Pillars 2, Baldur's Gate," says Richie. “Those are our, ‘Yeah, we took from those’ Disco Elysium, we even defined our art style and people said, ‘Look, you’re copying the art!’ I promise, we had nine months before we even got to see that game.”
I'm glad to hear the team refer to classic Sierra adventure RPGs in the Quest for Glory series as well. “Quest for Glory had a direct influence on this game as well, right down to the design of one of the guilds in the main city,” Richie says. “We copied some elements from the Adventurers Guild in the original Quest for Glory, 100%. That game, I played a lot of it. Loved it Just freedom, and I loved the RPG combined with the adventure game.”
Disco Elysium ended up having some impact on Broken Roads. Disco's Idea Cabinet, which allows players to absorb specific memories and thoughts in exchange for changes to their stats and other effects, was very similar to the Broken Roads mechanic where players learn things from books that have been checked out and rethought. "We designed something so similar that we were like, 'If we put this in people's heads, they'll think we totally rip it off,'" Ritchie says.
Secondly, Disco Elysium was successful despite its lack of combat which led them to include additional non-violent methods of problem-solving. "We always planned to have the mix," Richie says, "but I'd say it moves the needle a little bit more in getting more of those."
When you have a problem, Taylor Giles says, "You can solve it with violence, you can solve it with dialogue, or if you're here, and you're like, 'I wonder if I'm taking this item all over the world, if that has an effect?'" " Yes it is."
"You can sometimes bribe people, too," Richie adds. "If you have enough money."
Club philosophers
Recasting the demo as a less utilitarian, more humane vibe, I do just that, propelling my planetary thug's womb to leave town rather than kill him. There were other dialogue options I couldn't choose, shown in crossed out text - something you'll be able to switch to in the final game if you'd rather not know what's being blocked. I definitely prefer to hide them. Seeing my character not be enough to be able to offer some water to a sick man makes me want to game the system so I'm not locked out of similar options in the future, rather than just role-playing.
Basic-level options are always available, Taylor-Giles points out, no matter what philosophical quadrants your spread covers, as are those in a "moral history" that tracks what you used to believe. "If you start out as a humanist and somehow manage to do the full 180 and go Machiavellian, but then you want to make a humane choice and it's within your moral memory, you can still do it because of the person as you used to be."
"It's not so much a lock as it is a restriction," says Ritchie. "Don't try to put a PR spin on it, but it adapts to your playstyle, and evolves with your character."
Taylor-Giles states that while some ways of solving problems will be open to the characters based on the moral quadrants they're in, others will depend on their origin or past actions, "so it feels like a tapestry that you take in sharing. We try to come up with as many solutions as we can." ".
Although they added enough peaceful solutions to make a full peaceful game possible, they never considered eliminating combat completely. As far as Broken Roads has moved out of its turn-based tactics, that's still not a negotiable. As Richie explains, "Publishers contacted us and said, 'Hey, if you can remove the combat from the game, we'll publish it, look at Disco Elysium. '" They wanted us to completely change it up. We were like, 'No, we're a traditional RPG. We're going to have a fight.'"
While he takes the comparisons to Disco Elysium as a compliment, he resigned that Broken Roads "will probably never get out of its shadow." Which is honestly a problem every CRPG faces now. "We're not going to spend our next six months marketing campaign telling people 'No, no, we didn't copy Disco Elysium,'" he says. "We're going to let people on Reddit say whatever they want."
