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Games never launch in perfect condition, and with early access games especially there's a greater expectation of jank. When you buy an early access game, you are knowingly signing up for an unfinished experience. But even by those standards, the day-one experience with Hyper Light Breaker fell short. The new open-world roguelike (or roguelite, if we want to get technical) from Hyper Light Drifter and Solar Ash developer Heart Machine landed on the wrong foot. Performance issues and a stupefyingly punishing solo and new-player experience brought on a flood of negative Steam reviews. Rapid patches from Heart Machine dramatically improved the game within days, and Breaker has since recovered to 63% positive reviews on Steam, but a lot of work remains to be done.
Few people were more excited for Hyper Light Breaker than me. I enjoyed Hyper Light Drifter immensely years ago and awarded near-top marks in our Solar Ash review. A new game from Heart Machine in a memorable universe, combined with one of my favorite genres, was a no-brainer. But despite some positive preview sessions with Breaker, I was also among the most disappointed when it actually came out. I generally agree with what Justin said in our Hyper Light Breaker review: it's a promising idea off to a rocky start.
Could be better, could be worse
In some ways, the devs expected a harder launch than what they're used to. Lead producer Michael Clark says the biggest surprise was "how oppressive the difficulty was for players," acknowledging that "we overshot" a bit as they balanced around their own experience. "I think there is a community expectation of a rougher launch than a game that launches at version 1.0, but there were more issues that made it out the door than we would have liked," says Clark. "We had some performance issues pop up right before shipping that were unfortunate and unexpected, and while there is always an expectation that there will be some issues with specific PC configurations, we saw more of them than we would have liked."
Community and PR manager Yiyi Zhang highlights the irony of a launch like this. On one hand, it's not necessarily the response you want. Of course it would be better for everything to run and review splendidly. But on the other, passionate criticism beats apathy, and the point of early access is to improve.
"Was it a rough launch? In some ways, yes," Zhang continues. "But the high volume of feedback we received in those early days, especially reiterations of the same actionable feedback, have provided us with invaluable data for planning our future roadmap, and motivation for all of us to keep at it. My greatest fear as a department of one person heading up PR and community was for us to release and immediately fall into obscurity. That absolutely did not happen and that’s wonderful.
"Some of our negative reviews were also the most useful and impactful ones – enabling us to identify [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."
With the launch fires mostly quelled and a roadmap ironed out, Clark is confident the game is on the mend and feels optimistic about its future. He says the studio's long-term plans for early access remain largely unchanged despite the day one issues: "We’ve always 'held space' in our Early Access plans for responding to player feedback." The top priorities for now are bug fixes, performance improvements, and the aforementioned balance changes. April will start to introduce more significant new content with a new Crown boss, added areas to explore, more enemy and character variety, and "some new features we can talk about more in the future."
Technical blockades preventing some people from playing at all were quickly resolved – "if someone can’t play the game, the game sucks," as Clark puts it – and Breaker already runs much better. But design issues are more difficult. These things aren't so measurably working or not working. "We expected that the game would evolve, potentially radically evolve, over the course of Early Access, and that was something that we’ve always held internally and have viewed as a feature, not a bug," Clark adds.
Making combat feel better
Skim the top-rated Hyper Light Breaker Steam reviews and you'll find a laundry list of issues giving players conniptions. Let's start with one near and dear to my heart: the parry. Simply put, Breaker's parry ain't great. It's hard to land, risky to use, and it isn't very rewarding when you do pull it off. Heart Machine, you'll be glad to hear, is working on it.
"Our parry has gone through a lot of changes over the course of development," Clark explains. "Right now it exists in a space where it is too demanding in the timing and coordination of your other moves. We have a lot of work going into improving how it works, some of which will be evident in our February update." The devs want it to be easier and more intuitive to parry mid-combo and land perfect parries, and for those parries to be more impactful at base and even more so on certain builds. "Parry is something we see as core to the game, and we’ll continue to iterate on it until it feels right to our players," Clark affirms.
The issues with the parry demonstrate deeper problems with Breaker's combat. There's a tendency to get mobbed by enemies and consequently pummeled by attacks you can't see coming, either because enemies fly in from off-screen, blend into the crowd, or launch attacks with painfully little animation windup. This is especially noticeable when playing solo, and this brings us to that combat rebalance, which is maybe the most important thing on the roadmap. Clark clarifies that Breaker is balanced "around the solo baseline," with enemies and encounters scaling based on the number of players, but recognizes that it's "just inherently easier" to play in a group. More of these "scaling factors" will be added over time.
"We’ve got some improvements into our 'fight choreographer' system that will allow us to better manage the coordination of enemies together and adjust how complex a particular encounter will be more effectively," Clark says. The player's attacks, namely our gun-like Rails, are getting attention, too. Clark says the goal is to have "mixed combat" without Rails dominating fights, but agrees that "some of our Rails are definitely underwhelming right now," so the ranged ammo economy is being looked at. "You can expect to see buffs to certain weapons," he teases.
Controlling the difficulty
The sheer boot-to-the-face difficulty curve of Hyper Light Breaker proved to be one of its most polarizing traits, with some players bouncing off and others relishing a steep challenge. In some ways, this is working as intended. "We wanted to err on the side of too hard, rather than too easy - if you are already struggling with a game and it gets harder with an update, it can feel like you’re being 'pushed out,' and we didn’t want to do that," Clark says.
That said, some decisions, like withholding healing at the start of the game, proved to be "unintentionally too punishing," Clark notes. "With a single medkit, a lot of the team can solo a victory on their first Cycle," he says. But for new and average players, adding one precious medkit to the starter kit helped a lot. Likewise, Clark says "we've softened the beginning – lowering the skill floor, as they say – with our first few hotfixes, and our upcoming February update will have a lot of balance changes that will hopefully make it easier to find your footing in the early game."
As you ease into Breaker, clarity can be a sticking point outside of combat, too. Misunderstandings born of lacking tutorials can contribute to that fog of difficulty. "We were hesitant to put a lot of effort into heavy-handed tutorials for launch, expecting it to be something that would quickly become out of date over the course of Early Access," Clark says. "Part of the fun of a Roguelike is figuring out how the game works, too." On this, I think many players would agree, but there is a difference between finding something on your own and finding a wall with your forehead because you just aimlessly walked into it.
"We still are not onboarding folks well enough," Clark concurs, "and you can see it in the player feedback - it echoes our [friends and family] testing feedback. Shortly after launch, we actually published a full tutorial as an official Steam guide - taking our internal how to play docs and making them available for players, but because this is not in the game itself, and is a very verbose guide, it is really only a stop-gap. We’ve been hard at work on a robust tutorial that will be coming in a future update. It will take time to get it right, so it won’t be in our February update, and will likely not be ready for the public until our April update."
Getting players up to speed ought to make it easier to add and contextualize all-new content. The world itself, which can currently be hard to appreciate between the mad rush to collect things and extract out, is at the core of some of Heart Machine's most exciting plans. It sounds like we'll see the open-world side of the game shine through a bit more. Clark confirms that additional secrets and "unique-per-world" elements are coming to provide "more things to do and find," while narrative director Laura Michet says that "as we continue to add new locations to the environment, you'll see the consequences of the story and the world's history represented in the places and things you can see around the world."
In short, everything is on the table. The divisive gear durability? The devs are exploring "potential changes" that will be tested in a future preview. The oddly quiet soundtrack? Clark says we can "expect to hear a lot more in the world," though audio lead Alex Johnson stresses a balance of ambiance and distinct music, as "we knew we would need to have a very strong and flexible foundation for new experiences as the game develops." Hyper Light Breaker stumbled at the start, but the message from Heart Machine is 'better and more.' Here's hoping the game truly hits its stride soon.
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