Broken Roads - turn-based Australian post-apocalyptic RPG with "unique morality system"

[BING XI LAO]

Oof. NumaNuma writer hired, then same narrative problems as NumaNuma, the single worst-written RPG game EVAR.

It's worth remembering that McComb was responsible for by far the weakest parts of Fallout 2 and Planescape: Torment. His reputation as some kind of prolific RPG writer/designer was always unearned.

Which parts did he do?

 

[lycanwarrior]

How much cannibalism is there in the game? Allegedly it was once commonplace for Aboriginals to eat both their own children and other relatives, as well as hunt strangers for food: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannibalism_in_Oceania#Australia

I'm more worried about how quickly Liberals would adapt to the post-apocalyptic setting, looks like they are already getting warmed up to the idea: https://www.newscientist.com/articl...ubtle-view-on-the-ultimate-taboo-cannibalism/

Pretty common among Polynesians and Papuans to engage in cannibalism from my understanding as well.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

Oof. NumaNuma writer hired, then same narrative problems as NumaNuma, the single worst-written RPG game EVAR.

It's worth remembering that McComb was responsible for by far the weakest parts of Fallout 2 and Planescape: Torment. His reputation as some kind of prolific RPG writer/designer was always unearned.

He wasn't much of a designer in his prior job at TSR, either.

 

[luj1]

Oof. NumaNuma writer hired, then same narrative problems as NumaNuma, the single worst-written RPG game EVAR.

And the only CRPG to have core systems designed worse than Pillars, quite an achievement...

 

[luj1]

It's worth remembering that McComb was responsible for by far the weakest parts of Fallout 2 and Planescape: Torment. His reputation as some kind of prolific RPG writer/designer was always unearned.

Have to agree. Dude is a nobody, just like Ziets.

 

[v1c70r14]

Oof. NumaNuma writer hired, then same narrative problems as NumaNuma, the single worst-written RPG game EVAR.

I made the huge mistake of installing and trying to play Numanuma in between Broken Roads sessions, for entirely unrelated reasons, got a massive craving for Dying Earth or so many ages into the future that technology and magic are indistinguishable and thousands of civilizations have come and went, the Gene Wolf sort of thing. Hated pretty much every second of it. The original Torment was a game born from Avellone's frustrations with the genre, and so you played not as a fresh faced adventurer whose foster father/mentor was just killed and village burnt down, but the living corpse of someone that didn't just have a presence in the gameworld, but that had been around for so long and through the ringer so many times he keeps forgetting who he is. So it makes sense that you don't get to create your own character with your own portrait.

In Numanuma I cringed when the introductory sequence started describing me as a Brazilian, and then, while I was given the option of class and all that I didn't even get to pick a portrait, but was stuck with looking like not just a Brazilian troon but one that got into a fight with a hairdresser. I know the general premise of the game from reading about it, and there's no reason to have me play as a static character since I'm supposed to be one of many bodies that some jerk inhabited and he keeps changing them up all the time. Didn't get any better from there, and I only lasted a couple of hours before uninstalling it in disgust.

It's the embodiment of this post in a game format.

A very common phenomenon from creators that are passionate about the medium and sincere but talentless. Works from them just end up reference storm of the great classics without any real attempt to actually walk the talk. The problem isn't about being pretentious because the classics can come off as such too. It is more that they have no understanding of the medium, of the interplay between the audience and creator within the context. Like a storyteller supposed to tell a story but end up reminiscing about his prior experience of hearing a better one and just bore the audience.

That sort of cargo cult game design that misses the point of why certain things were in the game and how they were used. McComb was the creative lead on Numanuma, and the premise could have been fixed into something better by one simple adjustment. Planescape: Torment was Avellone: The Game, and it would have been impossible to copy everything that was good about it for the sequel, but the changes they made in their retread of it entirely destroys the original dynamic and makes the story trivial. Why should you care about some guy that is trying to escape death is out there. There is the vague notion of revenge for abandoning your body as a shell, I suppose, but that's not heavily pushed early on, and there is the entity that is after him and by your relationship to him, also you.

You could make the story have more weight to it, and also become more meaningful, by having the player star in the role of the one in pursuit of immortality. You'd roll up new characters, and since players love doing that, it'd be this feature that you could keep doing that without any of the game integrity breaking meta of having someone reset your stats for you. As your characters outlived their usefulness and you rolled new ones you'd cast them away, and they might come back to bite you in the ass later on. That game breaking OP tank you rolled for that boss battle? After you needed to switch to a thief and abandoned that body, he's now coming after you. Did you let him keep his gear? You're fucked.

It'd also keep the focus on you, the player. Instead of stumbling over your own past self's schemes, paranoid traps, and helpful notes to further selves, you'd be resetting things. That guard that you convinced to let you into the warehouse? He doesn't know it's you anymore. Or maybe you could point out how uncomfortable it makes your companions that you don't have the same body as a week ago, and that that guy/girl that you had something going with is now thinks you're not half as attractive anymore. Those are just some ideas out of many possibilities they could have used to actually make a spiritual successor to Planescape: Torment. Instead we're stuck with a fixed protagonist even though it doesn't make any sense, and the plot is really about some other guy somewhere else, and whatever he did in the past doesn't matter that much to us. There are no cycles of regret.

I'm already posting a much longer post than I intended to, and this is just the premise of the game and that I got mad there wasn't a proper character creation, I could continue on like this picking the writing apart but I have made my point. Colin McComb was the creative lead on Numanuma and he was a creative lead on Broken Roads, I'm sensing a pattern here. Naturally Craig Ritchie is going to take full responsibility for everything, the entire game was his idea, and at the end of the day he was calling the shots, but there is no way that a guy making his first video game isn't going to defer to the wisdom and experience of a veteran like McComb. At the very least he'd run things by him. There is no way things could go wrong with someone who worked on the original Planescape: Torment on your team, right?

Well, McComb didn't do much on that game. His Planescape game got binned, which was supposed to be a King's Field ripoff, and if he gets to determine things like genre he'd go for the Todd school of thought every time. This is from an interview with him.

I was not especially thrilled with the way combat felt in the Infinity Engine, but I write this off to my predilection for the immediate rush of first-person shooters, and the fact that the AD&D rules are in themselves a shorthand for that immediacy as well. I have always felt that the biggest problem with tabletop gaming is the pure nitpickery of slogging through combat; entire sessions have been wasted on a single battle. Computer gaming should, in theory, create a seamless flow, allowing action to occur naturally and fluidly. I suppose the Infinity Engine was the closest one could get to such fluid action while still retaining at least the outline of the basic AD&D rules. Essentially, I’m torn between the desire to immerse the player in a combat situation and the desire to make sure even slow-twitchers get something out of a game.

As for what he did after his Playstation action game was cancelled:

Avellone had at least a broad outline of the entire game from start to finish, with all of the major characters sketched out, by the time I’d joined the team. The rest of the design team added minor characters, stuff not exactly crucial to the main quest, and other fun stuff, and fleshed out the stuff he couldn’t get to. Avellone is a madman, I’ll tell you that – it was only with the greatest regret that he passed off Fhjull and Trias to me, and I heard him weeping bitter and solitary tears in his office when he assigned the Brothel to Dave Maldonado.

Avellone had written out a draft for almost all of the dialogue in the game before the game left pre-production while being on drugs, since he was working on Fallout 2 at the same time and overworked himself into an early burnout. McCollin came to the project late and did... Curst, fleshing out Avellone's drafts. Maybe Craig should have gotten Avellone onboard instead.

 

[Twiglard]

The OC is railroady but gets way too much hate. For me SoU > OC > HotU... HotU is a bit of a mess

The OC was bad. SotU was tedious. HoTU was the only one that was fun to play.

 

[Nikanuur]

I haven't been monitoring for some 15 last pages or so. Has the average play-time been discussed / uprooted again since the last time?

Here it says that the 7 hours of gameplay a rather unfortunate, almost-nonsensical kind of thing.
While it's just another "trust me bro" kind of relevance, many people seem to be genuine about the game being much longer.

https://steamcommunity.com/app/1403440/discussions/0/4362373914166997055/

 

[luj1]

This Aussie flavored Disco Elysium sat on 40.63% reviews score on Steam, now on 49.18%... what a disaster

 

[cyborgboy95]

April PC Update

Originally posted by author:
Hey everyone,

Thank you for your ongoing patience while we address player feedback, add requested features, and, of course, continue to fix bugs.

The major changes in this patch are that you can now manually level up your companions. There are now auto-assign buttons for each companion on level-up, following the same auto-level profiles that they had at launch.

Just like when leveling up your player character, if don't go to a companion's character sheet, that companion will stay at a lower level until leveled up.

We've also added an Agility check when fleeing random encounters on the overworld map. If you are not successful, your party enters combat in the 'Ambushed' status, suffering a -50% penalty to initiative for that battle.

Next up, there are now stat restrictions for the higher-tier weapons. You will need to increase your characters' Shooting Mastery or Melee Mastery skills to higher ranks in order to be able to equip the +1, +2 or +3 variants (for example, SR98 +1 requires shooting Mastery 25+, Cleaver +2 requires Melee Mastery 50+, etc).

The full list of changes is below, split up into general and spoiler notes.

This is just our first step in improving Broken Roads - something we are committed to doing until it satisfies your expectations. We will update again with more details on the May patch, which will be considerably larger and on top of many more combat encounters, will also be more focused on the companions, Moral Compass, narrative.

We hope you enjoy these new changes and fixes.

- The team at Drop Bear Bytes

BROKEN ROADS 1.1 PATCH NOTES

• Added a feature to allow manually leveling up your companions.
• Made many improvements to the random encounters in Chapter 3
• Added a feature to the overworld that lets you flee based on cumulative party agility vs cumulative enemy agility and start a battle with 50% initiative if you fail.
• Added stat restrictions to different weapon types (for example, SR98 +1 requires shooting Mastery 25+, Cleaver +2 requires Melee Mastery 50+, etc).
• Added an additional origin story combat encounter in Kokeby Waystation.
• Added VO for Mad, Mick, Angela, and Sean.
• Various mixing adjustments for Animal and Ambience SFX.
• Fixed a line in the intro cinematic having text that doesn't match VO.
• Improved localisation and added some missing UI text (more to be included in an upcoming hotfix)
• Polished many animations and gestures throughout the game.
• Adjusted many waypoints and interactables in many scenes to only require the player (rather than waiting for the entire party to stand in formation).

WARNING: MID AND LATE-GAME SPOILERS INCLUDED IN THE PATCH NOTES BELOW THIS POINT:

• Players can now (Lie) to Hunter about actually killing the Ripper when handing in evidence for the bounty as well as lie that they were going to hand in the Ripper for the bounty to John and whoever is arguing with him.
• Players can now offer to Ben and Katherine to give the Ripper's necklace to Hunter to pretend they killed the Ripper for their safety.
• Players can now decide to fight in Korrelocking after offering to buy the necklace.
• Cover, enemy placement, and enemy behaviour fixes for Life and Mind raider combat in Korrelocking.
• Fixed a quest logic issue that would not let you discuss books with Talia if it was night time and she was outside of the library in Lake Deborah.
• The player’s party now spawns on the ground floor if exiting Brennan's quarters to start the showdown in Lake Deborah.
• Fixed an issue that could cause a soft lock in the final combat in the game.
• A leadership skill check when speaking to Djet now allows players to successfully convince her to go to Kalgoorlie.
• Fixed an issue where the game could get stuck in combat during the dingo random encounter.
• Solved an issue where it was possible to experience a soft lock while the Loaded Dog quest was active.
• Moved Charlie Evans for Aldersyde CH.3 to be more visible.
• It now costs $5,000 to repair the CAES system in Southern Cross.
• Fixed an unopenable chest at the south end of Brookton.
• Cole now spawns properly in the convoy in Merredin after not being rescued after a set amount of time.
• Players can now speak to Cole in Merredin about his experience in Aldersyde after not saving him in time.
• Adjusted interactable points of containers in Kalgoorlie, Westonia, and Lake Deborah.
• Solved an issue where an incorrect journal entry related to speaking to Kendra regarding firing the Southern Cross device no longer appears.
• Added new animations when trying to trip DJ while making tea.
• Added new animations when beating Priss to death.
• The objective of "Travel to Kalgoorlie" does not activate if players already visited Kalgoorlie or are in the process of finding a way in to the city.
• Changed combat area, cover, and enemy placement of Brookton Chapter 3 combat encounter
• Adjusted combat area, cover, and enemy placement in Brookton Chapter 4 combat encounter
• Adjusted position of clickable POI on Brookton camels so the interactable icons don't cover each other when holding tab
• Added some more camera pans back to the player when speaking to Numbat during Art and Illusion
• Adjusted Merredin navmesh so players can no longer walk through the fence at the north, as well as several other small navmesh objects not marked correctly.

 

[Lord_Potato]

Lots of good changes. I hope these crazy Australians keep up the good work and that Broken Roads will reach satisfactory quality before the end of 2024.

 

[Nikanuur]

I was unable to gather much info about the combat. Could you help me out here by describing it better? I have the feeling it's mostly about plain attack or move, and that there are no active skills, covering, flanking, etc.?
I suppose, the strength of the game lies elsewhere than in its combat.
But I might be wrong. I saw some passive ones—Deadeye, Accuracy, at the very least.
Could someone tell me more about it?

 

[GloomFrost]

I was unable to gather much info about the combat. Could you help me out here by describing it better? I have the feeling it's mostly about plain attack or move, and that there are no active skills, covering, flanking, etc.?
I suppose, the strength of the game lies elsewhere than in its combat.
But I might be wrong. I saw some passive ones—Deadeye, Accuracy, at the very least.
Could someone tell me more about it?

You can take cover, you can use "abilities" like deadeye. There are "magic spells" like pyromancy, push or shield. There are grenades and melee weapons, some very basic gear that increases your stats or armour. If you level up perception/firearms skills at the beginning of the game and put some effort into upgrading a sniper rifle, that's it its a GOD MODE from now on. So year very basic and straightforward, even compared to first Fallout. Don't even think about playing it for combat.