Five years after Heart Machine captivated gamers with its ponderous, vibrant pixel art action RPG Hyper Light Drifter, the studio has finally delivered its long-awaited follow-up, Hyper Light Breaker. It’s an ambitious departure from its predecessor; Hyper Light Breaker has translated Drifter‘s memorable isometric art style into a third-person, 3D open-world, but that’s arguably not even the biggest shift for the series. Rather than being a solitary single-player Zelda-esque RPG, Hyper Light Breaker has boldly ventured into the growing multiplayer roguelite arena. A group of three players can choose one of several characters to embark on a procedurally generated adventure with, uncovering an arsenal of weapons and upgrades while growing more powerful through meta progression between runs.
It was an experiment worth pursuing, but Hyper Light Breaker‘s Early Access debut was the norm rather than the exception among Early Access launches. Met with mixed reviews, feedback from players through reviews and Heart Machine’s lively community has helped guide the team’s efforts in polishing up its work-in-progress title. To give fans an idea of how precisely the game will improve in the future, Heart Machine shared a roadmap for Hyper Light Breaker with a year’s worth of planned updates. In an interview with Game Rant, lead producer Michael Clark and community manager Yiyi Zhang detailed the new content arriving this year.
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Hyper Light Breaker Dev Talks Player Feedback and Early Access Priorities
Game Rant chats with Hyper Light Breaker’s lead producer about how player feedback is guiding Heart Machine’s next moves during Early Access.
Hyper Light Breaker Has a New Character On the Way
Heart Machine has cultivated a thriving community on Discord. Whether users were fans of Hyper Light Drifter, Solar Ash, or anticipating Hyper Light Breaker, this passionate community is a routine source of inspiration and encouragement for the team. Heart Machine has taken notice of some of the community’s most popular requests, and Zhang says she’s personally excited to see players react to their wishes coming true:
“From a community manager’s perspective, I’m excited for players to experience all the things they’ve been (politely) clamoring for—wish-fulfillment stuff. In our community Discord, there’s a trend of folks changing their usernames to ‘Username – ___ lover’ with the blank filled in by what people are most hype about.
We have folks excited by any incoming character with a big tail (tail lover), things with horns (horn lover), and a very healthy, vocal contingent of people who just really really want Crows. It’s wild how enthusiastic our players get about very specific things, and it’s going to be such a joy for them to finally experience all the things they’ve been waiting for!”
New characters for Hyper Light Breaker are indeed on the way, and they may possess at least some of the traits that fans are hoping for. While he didn’t confirm horns or tails, Clark did reveal that “Our next playable character is more of a glass cannon—a high-risk, high-reward character. You can expect to see more differentiation and larger variance between characters in the future.”
New Weapons and Places to Explore are Coming to Hyper Light Breaker
A greater variety of Hyper Light Breaker weapons are also planned for future updates. In addition, Clark says that new Affixes are likely to arrive with every update:
“We will be expanding the player’s arsenal of Blades and Rails over the course of Early Access – when we tease new Weapons, we mean entirely new weapons, with new attacks and combos, unique abilities, et cetera. We treat the Affixes – the gear modifiers that spawn on each piece of gear – as separate from the weapon itself, and while we’ll have more of those in this next update and likely every update from here on out, a new Weapon involves much more!”
Players looking for fresh environments to use those weapons also have something to look forward to. Hyper Light Breaker‘s Overgrowth will be expanding with a new biome and additional POIs to explore, and this should start rolling out “later this spring.” Clark hinted that players may catch glimpses of what’s to come by looking closely at currently inaccessible areas.
- Developer(s)
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Heart Machine
- Publisher(s)
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Arc Games