The developer of a promising cRPG dubbed Australia's answer to old-school Fallout has delayed the game just days before it was due out.
Australian indie studio Drop Bear Bytes had set Broken Roads’ release date for November 13 but announced a delay to early 2024 “to allow for additional polish time”. The delay was so last-minute that at the time of publication, Broken Roads’ Steam page still carried the original release date.
Broken Roads is a traditional isometric RPG in which players make their way across a desolate future Australia. It’s due out for PC, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation, and Xbox.
Drop Bear Bytes said the game is “content complete”, but it is now “coming in longer than we originally anticipated at around 30 hours of gameplay and nearly 400,000 words of dialogue”.
“As you can imagine, it’s extremely time-consuming to properly test all of these,” the developer added. The delay was a “difficult decision”, Drop Bear Bytes insisted, but is best for the game. Extra resources will now be provided to quality assurance (QA) in order to stamp out bugs.
Remarkably, Broken Roads had already supplied publications with review copies of the game. Indeed, IGN was in the process of reviewing the game before receiving word of the delay.
In a subsequent post on X/Twitter, the developer confirmed that all versions of the Broken Roads are delayed. The plan now is to release the PC and console versions at the same time, as opposed to a split release.
“Right now our QA teams should be able to handle things since we're delaying and giving them extra time to properly test everything,” Drop Bear Bytes said.
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.