CRPG renaissance on hold as one of our most anticipated games gets a last-minute delay to next year

Two wasteland survivors, a mushroom cloud behind them

(Image credit: Drop Bear Bytes)

Pour out a, uh, Fosters? Because this arvo has been proper buggered by the surprise delay of Broken Roads, the upcoming Ozzie CRPG that was one of our most anticipated games of November until it suddenly became one of our most anticipated games of 2024, and that's, um, fair dinkum. Or maybe it's not. God, I wish one of our Australian writers was online.

Broken Roads was originally set to hit under a week from now, on November 14, but the devs at Drop Bear Bytes have announced that the game will be delayed "until early next year" in a post on Twitter. "While the game is now content complete," read the announcement, "it is also coming in longer than we originally anticipated at ~30 hours of gameplay and nearly 400,000 of dialogue.

A message from the dev team: pic.twitter.com/wksnPAgYnzNovember 8, 2023

"As you can imagine, it's extremely time-consuming to properly test all these," says Drop Bear, so the devs have decided to give themselves a bit more time to do it. "This was not an easy decision," says the team, but it's "decided that to ensure we deliver the highest quality product, it would be best to delay the game's launch just a bit longer."

So no Broken Roads for us in 2023, which is probably for the best even if it is a shame. We've been in a bit of a CRPG renaissance these last few years between games like Disco Elysium and Baldur's Gate 3 (although real heads are still shouting about the excellent and unjustly underplayed Pillars of Eternity games), and I've always looked forward to BR as part of that revival. So have the devs, who say they're "unashamedly copying Fallout 2, Planescape: Torment, Pillars 2, Baldur's Gate." Heck, we even said it had the potential to "become the next Disco Elysium" in a preview last year.

Those are some of my favourite games ever made, so I'm very eager to see what Broken Roads turns into once the devs have beaten it into a shape fit for release. Until then, though, I guess the renaissance is on hold.

One of Josh's first memories is of playing Quake 2 on the family computer when he was much too young to be doing that, and he's been irreparably game-brained ever since. His writing has been featured in Vice, Fanbyte, and the Financial Times. He'll play pretty much anything, and has written far too much on everything from visual novels to Assassin's Creed. His most profound loves are for CRPGs, immersive sims, and any game whose ambition outstrips its budget. He thinks you're all far too mean about Deus Ex: Invisible War.