Breach is an ambitious action-RPG from ex-BioWare devs, first trailer revealed

VIDEO: The first trailer for Breach, the debut game from Austin, TX-based studio QC Games.

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. 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 is playbreach.com, and the game will be playable this week at Gamescom 2018.

Luke Winkie is a freelance journalist and contributor to many publications, including PC Gamer, The New York Times, Gawker, Slate, and Mel Magazine. In between bouts of writing about Hearthstone, World of Warcraft and Twitch culture here on PC Gamer, Luke also publishes the newsletter On Posting. As a self-described "chronic poster," Luke has "spent hours deep-scrolling through surreptitious Likes tabs to uncover the root of intra-publication beef and broken down quote-tweet animosity like it’s Super Bowl tape." When he graduated from journalism school, he had no idea how bad it was going to get.