Although I had an excellent time with Hyper Light Breaker at last year's Summer Game Fest, the game's had a rough go of it since hitting early access a month ago. The game currently sits at a 63% Mixed rating on Steam, with players put off by tech trouble, issues with the controls, and the simple fact the game might just be too dang hard.
But the devs at Heart Machine tell PCG they're undaunted, and despite a "teamwide 'oops, guess we made it too hard' moment" when the game first hit Steam, they've got "No regrets" about releasing in early access. "There is no amount of time you can spend in isolation that will make the game great," says lead producer Michael Clark. "You get the best version of a game by maximizing the amount of feedback-and-iteration loops you can go through, and Early Access is the way to do that for a title like this."
So, for now, Heart Machine has turned its first barrage of mixed feedback into an early access roadmap, released yesterday. The devs promise a February update consisting of performance fixes, a combat and gear rebalance, bug fixes, and new stuff: enemies, affixes, a new player character, and so on.
That'll be followed by another (relatively) small update in March before a bigger, named patch in April: the Buried Below update. That one will feature more tweaks, more new stuff, and an "improved onboarding" experience for new players who find themselves a little baffled by the game at first blush. Which, yeah, I get that. Although I liked my time with HLB, I could easily see a new player getting overwhelmed with how much is going on and bouncing right off. Better hand-holding wouldn't go amiss.
I've got high hopes for the game, and Heart Machine sounds very open to change. "We had a lot of balance changes going in right up to launch," says Clark, "and we had been tuning things to be more difficult, as we had found that we were getting pretty good at beating our first Cycle on a fresh save." But they might have overcorrected just a little: "We knew that we were better at the game than a new player would be, but we misjudged the difficulty.
"We want the game to be tough, but fair and clear to understand… We aren't looking to make it easy, but it should be fair and you should be able to analyze what you did wrong and git gud." Not a bad philosophy, if you ask me. Here's hoping Heart Machine pulls it off.
