Enchanting a community Spellbreak is among the latest titles to take a stab at the popular battle royale genre. But thanks to smart gameplay, crossplay on all platforms and a player-centric outlook, it’s a strong contender to break into the big time. Seth Barton talks to its creators
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hile the gold rush of battle royale titles has subsided, there are still those who are looking to advance the genre and take a slice of what has proved a very lucrative pie. One of the most promising titles of recent months is Spellbreak, which puts a fantasy twist on the usual template to great effect. In Spellbreak, players are battlemages, with a classbased system enabling fantastical abilities. That means traversal of the map is rapid, and weapons (spells) can have big area effects, providing a far more dynamic battlefield than players might be used to. And all of that is served up with the energy and colour of a saturday morning cartoon favourite. With alpha and beta tests done, the game has received a full release and now is setting out on its first paid-for season. So it seemed a good time to speak with the team at Boston-based developer Proletariat, to discuss both
the creative and technical decisions that brought them this far. “One of Spellbreak’s biggest differentiators is that we are free to explore a much more diverse set of abilities and forms of combat due to our theme,” Seth Sivak, co-Founder and CEO, tells us. “There are so few first or third-person fantasy action combat games and we think the current version of Spellbreak only scratches the surface. By focusing on projectiles, skills with cooldowns, and especially the ability to create elemental combinations, we have unlocked a whole new direction for core gameplay,” Sivak explains. While its setting makes it stand out from the usual military fare, there’s another key reason behind its potential. At launch, Spellbreak supported PC, PlayStation, Xbox and Switch, with both crossplay and
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