November 2024 Update blog

We’re very happy to bring you another polish update to Broken Roads, including increased font size when using the Large Font setting (especially handy on Steam Deck), improved companion reactions depending on player choices, removing some of the ‘teleporting’ moments that some players found rail-roady, TONS of combat, weapon and consumable balancing, plus a couple of spoilery bits and pieces we won’t mention here.

What’s Been Happening with Broken Roads’ development?

We have racked up hundreds of pages of feedback, notes, suggestions and draft material for improving Broken Roads, and now is the time to implement. We’ve been focusing on improvements that don’t require translations for now, with a lot of focus on improving the weapons and consumables (in terms of AP required, damage, range, reload time, and dollar value).

We’ve also worked on removing some of the moments in the game that used to instantly transport the player to the next location or to complete a quest objective. This approach involves a lot of testing as many things can go wrong, so it’s slow work, but there’s more of this to come.

We’ve also identified some specific quest, journal and objective issues that can still be made considerably clearer for players (we’ll be focusing on Lake Deborah, Merredin and Southern Cross for the next patch).

Steam Deck Verification Update

Broken Roads is now officially classified as Playable on Steam Deck, with the feedback that some of the text and controller glyphs were still too small even with the Large Font option enabled. We’ve addressed all of the points requested by Valve and are resubmitting for full Steam Deck Verified status along with this patch going live.

What’s Next?

More polish and bug fixes, but also the bulk of the work to expand on and improve pretty much every area of the game. We’re doing all of this in English only at first, and will be releasing these updates on the English-Only branch. There’s a new feature in Steam that allows players to seamlessly switch branches without any technical knowhow, and that’s what we’re focusing the next update on.

Without having to get the text translated or put through localisation QA, the turnaround will be much faster. We’re also no longer limited by word count restrictions and can flesh out all of the dialogues we couldn’t at launch, and have the freedom to completely rewrite entire characters, conversations and quests to make the game as good as it possibly can be.

Once this is done, we’ll get to work on localisation and translation and of course patching consoles to get to the same point.

Thanks again for your patience and to everyone who continues to support us as we press on with making Broken Roads the best it can be.

Patch Notes

WARNING: SOME SPOILERS INCLUDED AT THE BOTTOM OF THE PATCH NOTES:

• - Increased various font sizes and controller glyphs for Steam Deck. These can be accessed by all users when the Large Font checkbox in the settings menu is ticked.

• - Increased the size of some tutorial images for better readability on portable devices.

• - Reworked all companion reactions in the Merredin convoy banter to make them considerably less likely to respond unfavourably towards the player.

• - When leaving Merredin interiors, the game no longer teleports the player character back to the convoy area for convoy events. These now only occur when returning to Merredin from the overworld map, except for two specific story cases.

• - Gated certain rude or tactless player options behind