Australia's answer to Fallout, Broken Roads has a release date

Drop Bear Bytes doesn't muck around. The release date trailer for the Australian developer's upcoming CRPG lets you know it's coming on November 14 right out the gate, and then gets on with highlighting its post-apocalyptic setting, morality system, and turn-based combat.

I spoke to the creators of Broken Roads earlier this year, and game director Craig Ritchie mentioned some difficulty the indie studio had finding a publisher due to the combat: "Publishers actually contacted us and said, 'Hey, if you could remove combat from the game, then we'll publish [it], look at Disco Elysium.' They basically wanted us to change it completely. We were like, no, we are a traditional RPG. We are gonna have combat."

Ritchie listed Broken Roads' main influences as "Fallout 2, Planescape: Torment, Pillars 2, Baldur's Gate", and yes, this was before Baldur's Gate 3 came out of early access and became everyone's favorite RPG. Broken Roads also has playable prologues for each of its player-character archetypes, which put me in mind of Dragon Age: Origins.

You can play through one of those prologues in the demo of Broken Roads on its Steam page. Drop Bear Bytes will also be showing Broken Roads off at PAX Australia, which runs from October 6–8.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.