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Moonbreaker blends Warhammer love with Brandon Sanderson lore and an audio drama

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Subnautica developer Unknown Worlds’ new early access game is a curious combination. Moonbreaker is out now in early access on Mac and Windows PC via Steam.
The new game from the developers behind Subnautica is not a lone, pelagic pilgrimage through the hostile waters of an alien planet, but a strategy game designed to integrate Warhammer-esque miniatures into a world penned by Mistborn author Brandon Sanderson.
Moonbreaker, available now in early access on Mac and Windows PC via Steam, is therefore something of a surprising pivot from Unknown Worlds.
“My pitch was always like, we’re making a digital miniatures game, full stop,” Unknown Worlds co-founder Charlie Cleveland told me during an interview for Moonbreaker at Gamescom 2022. “Think about it: Painting? Yes. Digital miniatures lore? Yes. Turn-based strategy? Yes. Sharing paint jobs… It just seems so obvious. But it’s not until people see the painting that it starts to click.”
Moonbreaker has been in the works behind closed doors for a whopping five years. Both it and Subnautica: Below Zero were made simultaneously at Unknown Worlds, although Cleveland himself only worked on Moonbreaker.
“I needed to switch away from Subnautica,” he said. “I’d been working on it for five years, as intensely as I have been working on Moonbreaker for five years. But this one I want to keep working on. I love Subnautica, but those five years were really tough.
“Some of the team dynamics were tougher on Subnautica, because we had so many people and we didn’t know what the game was going to be for so long. I wanted this open-world, challenging game that wasn’t going to hold your hand, and other people wanted it to be a little more guided. It was ultimately really good, because we came to a nice middle ground. It was just completely draining. And then Moonbreaker… I feel like a lot of the time, we didn’t know it was gonna be a good game.”
What the team did know, however, was that they had a very clear and cohesive vision for what Moonbreaker should be. It was a game that was partly inspired by Warhammer, but not just because the latter has miniatures. Unknown Worlds wanted to allow you to paint your own minis, sure, but it also wanted to build a dense world with engrossing lore in which all of the individual parts contributed to a gestalt.
As mentioned previously, this was achieved with the help of a particularly well-renowned author who happened to have played — and loved — Subnautica a couple of years prior.
This was another reason Moonbreaker was kept secret for so long: You can’t just announce Brandon Sanderson is writing your game without being absolutely sure that said game is as good as it can be.
“Brandon is extremely prolific, super creative, and he’s basically a game designer,” Cleveland said. “He thinks about his magic systems very mechanically, in a systems-oriented fashion with integrity and rules. He’ll create a magic system like in Mistborn, where characters are basically eating different metals. They ingest the metals and they burn them inside their bodies, and depending on what the metal is, they have a new power. Only certain people can use certain metals, and each metal gives a certain ability. It’s a very systems-level approach, [which is why] it was such a no-brainer for him. We loved his work already, and then talking to him is so natural, because he understands we’re making a game. He built a universe that is systemically perfect for a video game.
“[The systems] are already gamified. I can just tell him, ‘Hey, we need this substance that we can use as an energy source, and it can give someone powers.’ And he comes up with this idea of Cinder, this magical rock. He’s figured out exactly how it works in the universe and why it’s there, where it lives, how people get it, what happens when they get it, what happens after people get it, what happens after second order, third order, fourth order. It’s a lot easier to work with someone like that — a traditional author, I guess.”
But lore is only one part of Moonbreaker, which still has a strategy component, a painting component, and an entire audio drama series to back it up. It’s worth delving into all three of these streams, especially given Cleveland’s earlier nod to Warhammer, to gain insight into how Moonbreaker hopes to launch in a scene where “digital miniatures strategy game” still sounds pretty niche, if not completely unheard of.

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