How Stoic shifted from dark strategy to hopeful beat ’em up in Towerborne

When we talk about the most beloved indie games from the last console generation, The Banner Saga trilogy would certainly be high up there. Developed by Austin, Texas-based Stoic (a team founded by three BioWare Austin alums), the three tactical RPGs garnered for their striking artwork, mature stories, deep combat and award-winning composer Austin Wintory’s music.

However, the team wanted a change of pace. Enter Towerborne, a more lighthearted affair focused on beat ’em up action.

To learn more about the Xbox-published game, MobileSyrup sat down with game director Daniel McLaren, senior lead level designer McKenna Bearce and principal systems designer Tyler Bearce. Together, they talked about the pivot to a different genre and tone, making an approachable action game, taking on a “live service” approach and more.

Watching the developer overview from last year’s Xbox Extended Showcase, you talked about wanting to make something hopeful about the triumph of the human spirit. I think there’s often an inclination with stories about Norse mythology and Vikings to be very serious and dramatic. Why did you decide to go with this more optimistic story focus and what did you want to convey through it?

Daniel McLaren: [With Banner Saga], there was an internal joke at Stoic that we made our “depression simulator.” And so we had wanted to do something a bit different. And so when the group that had built Banner Saga had wrapped that up, they had sat down and discussed, “What could we do next? Would we do something similar to Banner Saga?” The consensus was they didn’t want to do anything like it. It had drained them. It had been very intense and a very long journey. And they said, “How can we build something that we can just sit on the couch and play with our kids and with our family and friends?” And that’s really where this was kind of born from, and looking for a hopeful theme. There’s no secret villainy, it’s very like traditional “good versus evil” — just a lot of hope. We call it the “post-post-apocalyptic game.” So we’re already past the horrors of the post apocalypse there, and we’re trying to rebuild and do something better.

The Banner Saga 3.

McKenna Bearce: A lot of the inspiration was from like [Studio] Ghibli anime at first. I definitely think there’s a lot of inspiration there, especially with the different type of biomes and that type of stuff that we have. I also think they just wanted it to be a lot more colourful and inspirational and hopeful feeling, so not as dark and gloomy as The Banner Saga series. I think with those two things combined, we’ve created our own look, but there’s definitely some inspiration there.

Stoic has talked about making Towerborne a deep game, but also one that anyone can play? So how do you go about making a game that’s approachable, especially from gameplay perspective, but also does have that added depth to it?

Tyler Bearce: I think one of the ways that we aim for it is to make a game that’s easy to pick up and play. First of all, you can just jump in the game and start tapping light attacks, pressing X, and have some success. We try to make the UI pretty streamlined. We’re not overwhelming you with options right away, and then, as you get deeper, you’re unlocking new abilities. You’re unlocking new features. But even even at its most complicated, I think it’s pretty accessible and easy to play, even then, and that depth is still there for the players that want it.

There aren’t a lot of couch co-op games nowadays, and I’ve seen a lot of people excited about Towerborne, in particular, for that reason. What inspired you to go down that route and what were some of the things that you wanted to do with that particular style of game, especially that we might not have seen in recent years?

McLaren: I think as I was saying a bit earlier, the impetus for a lot of this game was I just want to sit down with my kids and be able to play something. That extends to the couch co-op — the ability to just pick up a bunch of controllers, have a bunch of fun, and it’s manifested quite well in a lot of ways. And so the core of this is to say, “What can we start with, and where can we go with this development?” And couch co-op is certainly a feature that we want internally, and because we love that internally, we’ll just continue to go like, “How can we do different things?” I don’t think there’s a real plan to sit and go like, “We’re going to absolutely revolutionize couch co-op, hop in! The world is going to be blown away.” I think it’s just like, “Wow, this doesn’t feel good. How can we make this better?” That’s kind of the philosophy that we have when we pick up the controller and play with the game.

One of the things that I like that you’re doing is breaking up the couch co-op action elements in the Belfry. What led you to arrive on this and what were some of the things you wanted to offer the player in this combat-free area?

McLaren: I think it was really important when you’re when you’re dealing with a game where people can get together and socialize, you need some space to have downtime. Once you leave the Belfry, you’re in this combat loop where you’re out, you’re doing stuff that compels you to move forward, explore the next thing, fight the next thing, you’re getting all this gear in this loop. We needed to have a place where players could come back and just kind of chill out and manage things like, “Oh, I want to switch to a different class,” or, “Oh, this gear is better than this gear. Oh, hey, this person’s got something interesting. I want to hang out with them.” And then obviously, we need to tell a story and compel people forward. And those things need to happen in that space. And we didn’t want to divide up; we didn’t want to divide up the game in that traditional manner of, “Oh, hey, you’re moving from one hub to the next hub to the next hub.” We really wanted to have this central space, and then we want to just continue to build the world outside of it and broaden it.

Nowadays, a lot of games can feel like really big commitments that are hard to keep up with, because they’re dozens and dozens of hours to kind of get through it. And with that in mind, you designed Towerborne to accommodate more “pick up and play” sort of gameplay sessions. What led you to go down that road and how do you balance creating a gameplay loop that is obviously both satisfying, but can accommodate more bite-sized sessions?

McLaren: I just tell Tyler and McKenna, “Do that, please.”

Everyone: [laughs]

McKenna Bearce: We do make a lot of the mission content that can be longer ones and shorter ones. So there’s a lot of “Hey, you can just go and play like a mission or two and get things accomplished every single day.” I think the other thing that’s really cool about the way we build our world map is you play one [mission], and then you’re like, “I kind of want to play another one, oh, there’s a chest over there.” So even though it is supposed to be very pick up and play, I find even times when I’m just playing internally, “Hey, I’m going to pick up and play,” and then you’re like, “Oh, I want to do more and more.” Like, “Oh, I want to go over there and see what’s over there and see what I can get.” So the core loop of you’re getting things on the tower, like missions and quests, and then you’re going out into the world and completing those is supposed to be pretty fast and bite-sized, but also, it is very easy to then get distracted and meet up with other players along the way and want to keep doing more and more things.

Tyler Bearce: A lot of modern games, I don’t even want to sit down and play them unless I have at least an hour or two hours, because it feels like, “Man, by the time I start get it rolling, my session’s over.” And so, I think Towerborne is certainly a game [when] you’ve got like five or 10 minutes, you can complete a tile and feel like you’ve made some meaningful progress, and it’s easy to jump back in, even if you haven’t played it for a while.

Circling back to something you said, McKenna, about the smaller missions vs. the larger ones. Can you expand on what a bite-sized mission look like for the player vs. something that’s more meaty and will take longer to get through?

McKenna Bearce: So a lot of our world map is made up of ‘Discovery Tiles,’ which are our procedurally generated missions. It’s a mix of procedural and handcrafted. And so when you go out and explore a lot of the singular tiles on our world, they’re made up of that. And those are our shorter missions. You’re going to get through them faster. And then we have Ventures which I equate more to our dungeons or something more along those lines. Those are the missions that are more handcrafted. They take a little bit longer to complete or are a little bit more challenging. They’re where you’re going to see some of our really big bosses and things like that. And so they are geared a little bit more on the harder side too, because they take longer. That’s kind of the difference between the two.

In terms of combat, specifically, you’re focused on four different classes versus a larger variety. Was that chosen more to keep it more approachable for people or just for a quality over quantity sort of thing?

Daniel McLaren: I think the latter — definitely a quality thing. But also, when we started this game, the idea of a side scrolling brawler — you don’t really have a lot of big examples that are super deep and super replayable. A lot of it’s arcade-y style action. You have some Eastern titles that you know have some longevity to them. And so we really just started with combat. And we said, “How can we make combat really fun? What are the weapons we want to launch with?” And then we settled on these first four weapons. And later in the process, we said, “Why don’t we make these classes and we can do more stuff with them?” We can have people gain levels through them, unlock different things and focus the game more on that.

And then we can release new classes over time. And that gives us the ability to actually think about what is the game missing. We get a lot of suggestions. “Oh, you should put this in, or you should put that in!” And a lot of times, we’ll sit down and we’ll talk about it, and we’re like, “Well, that fundamentally changes the dynamic of combat.” And we very deliberately picked these so that we didn’t wind up in a sort of Holy Trinity scenario. We didn’t want people going into a mission trying to find other players and being rejected because they weren’t using the right class, or they needed a healer, or anything like that. We wanted people to just be able to play what they want, pick it up, drop in and just start playing. So the more you add, the more thoughtful you have to be that it works with those with the existing composition. So we started with four, and we’ll continue to add over time.

Springboarding on the subject of adding content. This is sort of envisioned with more of a live service model. Obviously, people on the team have a background with MMOs. But of course, Banner Saga was a little different than that. So I’m curious — what inspired you to go that route for Towerborne? And what did you want to take from what you’ve seen from previous live services, whether it’s ones that Stoic devs have worked on or others, and bring forward to Towerborne?

McLaren: I kind of hate the term “live service.” It feels like we’re working at Amazon. We’re a “living game” — we’re a game that’s live. And it’s important to us, because we wanted to do something that we could start a bit differently than we had done. Our history is we started Banner Saga on Kickstarter. Well, the Kickstarter works a little bit differently. It’s the promise that we’ll do something, and then you pay us now, and we promise we’ll get you something, and we can see how that works out. It worked out great for us. And so through that, we wanted to kind of take the next step, which is, “Well, wait a minute. We love interacting with our fans. We love building Banner Saga with them.” We threw it over the fence to this very small group of Kickstarters. The problem with Kickstarter is, once your Kickstarters are over, if you’re not doing a some form of a pledge system, or actively doing that on your site, you now have to take all that infrastructure on yourself to add more people to the game and get them engaged. We’re like, “Well, if we’re going to do that sort of work, why not make a living game, start it the way that we want to start it, and see if there are other brawler fans who are interested in seeing the genre kind of get expanded, go forward?” It’s just kind of in our nature. We wanted to be with our fans and hear them and hear our players. And it’s a lot harder to do on a single player game.

On the subject of harder, what are the benefits and challenges of shifting to that development model?

McLaren: Yeah, nothing at all. It’s not a million times more complex. [laughs] Yeah, it’s super complex. You have all this infrastructure that you have to maintain. You have to be ready to support tons of players being in the game. And it’s not just, can they log in and play? You have everything that’s associated with that, everything from account security, data privacy, customer service — there are so many pieces that come together. How do we support the player more than just being in the game and playing? Making the game is, I dare I say, the easiest part. Making content, expanding the game — that’s what game devs do. That’s what we’ve been doing for years. So that’s the part where it’s like, “Yeah, great, let’s make a game now. Let’s put it on a very complicated rocket ship and launch it to Mars.”

This is probably hard to pick, but what are you most excited for players to experience in Towerborne?

McKenna Bearce: I’m really excited just for other people to match up with other people and play the game as a group. I’m also excited to play with them. We’ve been playing a lot internally, and I’m excited to see all the people in The Belfry and, interacting and hanging out and seeing them out on the world map and stuff as well. The other thing I’m really excited about is, I really like our umbra, which are our little spirit creatures that aid you in fighting. And they’re just one of my favourite things in the game in general. And I look forward to people having to go find them, and each of their missions are a little bit differently themed. And I look forward to seeing which ones people choose. There’s a little bit of them looking different, and they all function different, but I think people might pick them based off how they look and also how they feel. And I think it’ll be fun to see what is most popular amongst players.

Tyler Bearce: I’m just really excited to see how people will actually play the game. We had so many dev play sessions where it’s like, “play these missions for two hours straight or get this balance feedback.” But man, I just want to see, like, organically, how someone who isn’t going in with a specific expectation just takes to the game and it makes it their own.

McLaren: I totally agree with that. There’s a big thing when you’re making games on the first side of it, you’re making what you think you want. But at the end of the day, we’re a service organization. Without players, we don’t have a game. If they don’t like it, if they don’t like what we do, which is a very real possibility, then we’re out of luck. And so I’m very, very excited to see players get into this. The reception has been very positive so far, and I just want to know what we’re going to be doing next for them.

This interview has been edited for language and clarity.

Towerborne will launch in early access on Steam on September 10th ahead of a full release on Xbox Series X/S and PC (plus day one on Game Pass) in 2025.