After a hard launch, Hyper Light Breaker dev says negative reviews were key because "you can’t pay for QA of that caliber! That all comes from true giving a damn"

Hyper Light Breaker has had a rough launch into early access, but the devs are turning it around week by week with patches and a new roadmap outlining changes to come. The developers still found all the negative reviews valuable, though.

"Day One was incredibly eventful, with joyous highs (hanging out in the #1 slot on Steam Top Sales for a bit), and some disappointments right out the gate (the initial batch of negative reviews)," Yiyi Zhang community and PR Manager at developer Heart Machine tells GamesRadar+.

Although players were initially frustrated with the difficulty and performance issues, the Steam reviews are now up to 67% positive at the time of writing.

"Was it a rough launch? In some ways, yes," Zhang admits. "Some of our negative reviews were also the most useful and impactful ones - enabling us to identify QOL [quality of life], accessibility, and performance improvements early on. Some of our fiercest criticisms were entire essay-length breakdowns of ways we can improve onboarding, mechanics, storytelling, and the overall game experience - you can't pay for QA of that caliber! That all comes from true giving a damn."

I'm sure the Heart Machine QA team did care about their work, but there's really no way to test games on the kind of scale you see at launch, so constructive player feedback will always be useful – if players know what they want, that is. PC players have all sorts of different hardware, so it's just not feasible for devs to be able to test every little thing. Also, devs and playtesters who've been working on a game for months or years are likely going to be much better than new players, so they may make a game a bit too difficult by accident.

Despite the initial wave of negative reviews, at least people care about Hyper Light Breaker and are still playing the game. "My greatest fear as a department of one person heading up PR and Community was for us to release and immediately fall into obscurity," Zhang says. "That absolutely did not happen and that’s wonderful. From day one, our players demonstrated that they really passionately care about the universe of Hyper Light."

Hopefully the new roadmap and some more time to fix issues you've all brought to the devs' attention can turn Hyper Light Breaker into the prequel Hyper Light Drifter deserves.

In the meantime, check out some other upcoming indie games that you've got to look forward to this year.