Today, QC Games announces Breach, an action-RPG that straddles the boundaries between Diablo, Guild Wars 2, and Monster Hunter. Breach has been in development since 2015, and the principle members of QC previously spent time at EA building games like The Old Republic and BioWare’s canceled Shadow Realms.
Breach takes place in a near-future mashup of high fantasy and cyberpunk tech, where the barriers between the arcane and the mundane are breaking down. Functionally, the game plays out in 15-minute sessions as an asymmetrical multiplayer dungeon crawler, where four players choose highly customizable classes and complete missions in a gauntlet riddled with mythological creatures.
A fifth player takes the role of the “Veil Demon,” an omnipresent dungeon master-type deity who can lay traps, set obstacles, and personally possess and control the monsters in the corridors
I've now met, I would say, almost every single one of my rock idols. I feel like I should just drive off a cliff now.
Combat, like in many MMOs and MOBAs, is a mix of auto-targeting skills and aimed skillshots, but the classes are unusually diverse: there are sharpshooters, necromancers, and even acrobatic Devil May Cry-style swordsmen. The idea, says game director Gabe Amatangelo, is to create an arena that feels different every time you play. “We wanted to distill the online dungeon crawling experience to the parts we’re most passionate about,” he explains. “We want players to own it, so they can bring their classes and experience from various other games and put them together here.”
Breach will be free-to-play at launch, with a progression system where you unlock more ways to tailor the specific abilities and builds of the classes the more you play.Studio president Dallas Dickinson says he intends to build a game with an ultra high skillcap, while still allowing for people to come in who just want to “smash some stuff.”
That requires balancing not only how good a player is, but also how often they want to play.”You see it in these online games where when you go away for a bit, you lose contact with your friends,” he says. “Our game is about jumping in, having fun, and maybe you fall off for awhile and decide to come back because we’ve added a new class that you’re excited about. It’ll take you a day to remember your skills, but other than that, you’re back in.”
Breach will enter paid Steam Early Access later this year with the free-to-play full launch coming sometime in 2019. You can read our world-first hands-on impressions here on PC Gamer tomorrow at 9 AM Pacific.
The official website, playbreach.com, will go live later today, and Breach will be playable this week at Gamescom 2018.
- Advertisement -
Our Cyberpunk 2077: Everything we know about CD Projekt’s next RPG roundup suggests The Witcher 3 dev’s latest will be huge. The latter game’s sophisticated and intricate quests were one of its most redeeming features, and it seems CDPR’s next outing will follow suit.
Speaking to Samuel at Gamescom, quest designer Patrick Mills says logic was crucial while crafting The Witcher 3’s DLC quests. He says he and his team would often ask themselves if certain in-game actions made sense—both in relation to quests and the game’s overarching plot.
“You’ve got a quest giver, you’ve got a person over here—but you could just go straight to that second person and take the quest from them and do it that way?” says Mills. “[The process] has gotten even more complicated in Cyberpunk—there are more multiple ways to resolve individual quests. Before, there were usually a few ways, a couple of decision points. Now there are whole different ways to play the quest.
