EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
NARRATOR: Ratings for games in this podcast are pending.
– Hello and welcome to the official Xbox Podcast, the only podcast that, you know, comes to you from inside Xbox. As much as I love talking about the gaming news of the week, every episode, my favorite shows that we do are the ones where we get to dive deeply into a single game. And this is one of those shows. I also love it when I get to hang out with Kelly Lombardi. Kelly, how are you doing?
– Hi, I’m great. How are you?
– All right. I’m really happy you’re joining us here for this deep dive episode.
– I’m really excited. This is a game that is near and dear to my heart that I’m so excited for. And it’s one of my most anticipated releases, so can’t wait to get into it.
– Always a good sign when the developer show up to the studio, and they give you a hug. And I’m like, OK, all right. I picked the right co-host here this week. So on this special episode, we’re actually going to meet the creators of Towerborne. And we’re also going to get a look at some brand new gameplay. So, hey, let’s meet them. Hello, Trisha Stouffer, you’re the CEO and President of Stoic. And Daniel McLaren, we’ll just call you McLaren for the rest of the episode, the Game Director here. Now, I personally know Stoic as the developers of the awesome and influential Banner Saga series, where I made some very poor decisions while playing, but enjoyed it all the same. Help us get to know Stoic.
– Absolutely. Stoic, independent video game developer. Been around for 12 years. Started with three people who made the original Banner Saga. We’ve grown from that to 5 to 12, and 20 when I joined back in 2020. And I’m about to hire my 100th person to the studio. And this whole team is dedicated to Towerborne and bringing that to the audience.
– Very excited, because we are going to be doing that here. In fact, we’re going to do something a little bit different for this episode. In previous deep dive episodes, we’ve looked at footage. And we’ve sort of broken down those footage. But I see computers. I see controllers. You’re actually going to be playing the game. And we’ll be talking about it. But before we get into that, let’s talk a little bit about Towerborne. For those who are watching that might not be familiar with the game, give us a quick rundown on what type of game it is.
– Yeah. Towerborne is a side scrolling brawler action RPG. The idea here was that we wanted to create– we kind of wanted to deviate from what we had done on the Banner Saga. And I say we as if I was there doing that. I did not do anything there. But they sat down. And they said, look, we made our Depression Simulator. It was super heavy–
TRISHA STOUFFER: I confirm.
DANIEL MCLAREN: Yeah, yeah, 100% And the idea was we wanted to sit down and be able to play the game with our family or our friends. For them, it was– the statement they said, like, we’d like to be able to sit on our couch with our kids and actually play this game. And that kind of started this brainstorming of like, well, what could we do that? And the Couch Co-op came to mind. And then the Brawlers came to mind, and all of those classics. And so we said, well, what if we take it further than what people have kind of done before? And so you now see Towerborne.
– So you guys have been working on Towerborne for quite some time. And you just shared some pretty exciting news. Can you give us a recap?
– We did. Today we announced we are coming to Steam in early access on September 10. And we’re very excited about that. And then in 2025, we’ll be coming to Game Preview, which includes Xbox consoles, PC and Game Pass. And we’re just really excited to get the game into the hands of the players.
– Yeah. So can you tell me a little bit about why you chose early access, why that’s important for players, and then why Steam first?
– Absolutely. Early access on Steam allows us to work with the players, bring them into the game early, create that– create and form that community, build that relationship there, and have them be a part of the voice that helps us determine where the game goes, and what it looks like, and how it plays, and things like that. It’s what we’ve done historically as Stoic in our Banner Saga games. We still have a great community that exists there. We’re looking forward to building that and engaging with it on Towerborne as well.
– Yeah. Something that’s very important to remember as well is that Banner Saga was started on Kickstarter before everybody else was really doing this sort of a thing. The trust that the community gave us, the big thing that Stoic was all about was we want to engage the player. And so as soon as they were able, they were throwing builds over the wall to the players. They were just like, how does this feel? Does this– do you like this? Does this feel good? And that process, that entire game balance was actually built with the players alongside them. And they did that for all three games.
And so this is our next step. Instead of saying we promise we’ll give you a game in the future, well, we’ve actually had the resources to build this game. And now we’re going to hand them a very robust game. There’s a lot there. And you can play the full core loop. And we’re going to say we want to build so much more. We want to continue to expand this. Please be a part of this and engage with us. So we’re very, very excited to continue the tradition.
– So that early access is through the purchase of a founder’s pack?
– Correct.
– Can you explain to us how that works?
– Yeah. So at the start of early access on September 10, you will be able to purchase one of two founder packs. And in doing that, will get access to the game. And you might go, but why would I pay to do this? Well, because we are looking for people who are really excited to be a part of that journey. And we do want to have an opportunity to engage with a core group of players who are very committed to it. And I understand there’s a lot of players who look at early access and like, hey, I really just want to play the whole thing when it’s all done, awesome. And we want to make that a great experience.
And part of getting to that point is having people who are so excited to get into that, who want to get into, oh, I think this number should be a six instead of a two. And we’re like, actually, that’s pretty right. A six is better there, and even deeper. Like, oh, could you make this thing happen, and that thing happen? Like, we’re here to serve the player. And so we want them to feel like we need them. And we want them to feel like this belongs to them. And we want to go on that journey with them together. So I’m personally very, very excited about this.
– And we’re about to give them a taste of what they’re going to get with that founder’s pack, because you have controllers sitting here. You’ve got gaming PCs.
– Yeah.
– Why don’t we just jump into the video, right? Or not video, let’s jump into live gameplay. This is live gameplay, right?
TRISHA STOUFFER: –live gameplay. You are watching my input or my monitor. And oh-oh. OK.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: So I know the game is– like people in Germany at Gamescom are playing or playing Towerborne right now. Is this the Gamescom demo, or is this something else?
TRISHA STOUFFER: This is– no, this is not the Gamescom demo. This is the latest and greatest builds. It’s everything. So in Gamescom, they’ll be playing a very specific level against the Pangojera boss. This, we’re showing you a bit right now. We’re on belfry. This is the tower. And this is the social space. There’s things you’ll do here. You can see there’s some NPCs here to interact with, and all of that. But it’s the hub that you’ll come back to.
But the really exciting stuff is, oops, I went up the stairs for no apparent reason. Really fun stuff that you really want to see is we’re going to go ahead and play a mission. And Towerborne as you know a multiplayer online, up to four players. And McLaren and I are in a group right now. And so I will be the leader. And when you come out here on the world map, you can see it’s zoomed in pretty far. But I can zoom out. And boy, oh, wow. What’s over there? I want to go check it out.
But for now, we’re here. You’ll see these larger tiles with names on them. Those are called ventures. And they’re infinitely replayable, and part of a quest line that you might be following. You can see on the right side of my screen, I have some quests that I am supposed to be taking care of. We could actually go play one of them and get it knocked off the–
KELLY LOMBARDI: Tell me more about these treasure chests.
TRISHA STOUFFER: Oh, the treasure chests. Goblin soul goes right to the–
KELLY LOMBARDI: I love some of those.
TRISHA STOUFFER: –available. So talk about loot in the game.
DANIEL MCLAREN: Yeah. So the core of what we’ve done here is we want players to be killing things, and finding stuff, and getting a bunch of loot, and getting more powerful. Like everybody loves loot games. Well, not everybody, but I do. And so–
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: You’re in a comfortable, safe place.
DANIEL MCLAREN: Yeah. Listen, it’s all about the loot. We’re all about that. And so what you see here is the framework of the build that will be going live for early access. You might see some weird quirks. We’re still finishing it up. But the whole loop is there. You’ll be able to go into missions. You’ll be able to kill monsters. You’ll get loot drops. You’ll be able to upgrade your stuff. The whole core loop is there. So I hope players find that super exciting, because we find it super exciting. And I’m always that individual who’s like, I just need this last piece to make my build go crazy. And I’m willing to grind into the endless hours of the night.
TRISHA STOUFFER: You started to say– we were loading into the mission. And you said, you hope– and you looked at me. And I thought, you’re about to say, I hope that you will do well in this mission.
DANIEL MCLAREN: I wasn’t going to– I think it’s a little too early to start the trash talk. But don’t– don’t fear. I’m ready.
KELLY LOMBARDI: Yeah. You guys are on the same team as–
DANIEL MCLAREN: Are we though?
KELLY LOMBARDI: Yeah.
DANIEL MCLAREN: Are we though?
TRISHA STOUFFER: There’s some co-opetition there. Like you’ll see at the end of the mission, there are some stats there. So if you want a little friendly, like, hey, who did more here? One of the things that’s unique about Towerborne is you’re following my camera right now. And unlike a lot of online co-op games, you’re restricted to the same space. This encounter right here is about three screens wide or two screens wide, and which means I can be off doing something. And McLaren may not be in the picture at the moment. But we are still fighting to do the same thing. We’re trying to protect this tent right now from three waves of enemies. And here they come.
DANIEL MCLAREN: Yeah. This is one of the many challenges. So a lot of our game, a lot of our missions are procedural. So there is a lot of stuff that you can go and play. And you can replay, and there won’t be the same things. We’ve added a lot of handcrafted content to the game as well. So sometimes you’ll get a procedural mission, but you will find various little challenges like this popup through it. Those are all handcrafted. We continue to add more all the time. And then there are the larger, as Trisha was talking about a bit earlier, the larger, we call them venture missions. There’s no AD in this world, only ventures.
– All right. Let’s talk about– there’s a lot to call– to talk about here, everything from the art style to just what I’m seeing, the weapons you’re using. You just casted magic.
– Yep.
– Not magic. No magic.
– Tell me.
DANIEL MCLAREN: Yeah.
– All right. Well, let’s talk about it.
– That was my Umbra, Morbi. Talk about Umbra a little.
– Yeah. So the premise of the game is that you have died. And you’ve gone into the ebb. And you were pulled back from the ebb by an Umbra. And the Umbra are these spirit creatures on the other side. And you form relationships with them. You can find different Umbra. They do different things. They have their own set of powers.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Is that who’s floating behind you there?
DANIEL MCLAREN: Yes, that’s who’s floating behind me. This is Iska. Iska is a little colloquially called the Catball. And Iska can shoot a little projectile out and hit your enemies. And who do you have?
TRISHA STOUFFER: I have Morbi, one of my favorites. And Morbi will drop this massive shockwave down from the sky. And it’s good for clearing out. If you’ve got a lot of enemies around, and you just need to clear some space that you can not get killed.
KELLY LOMBARDI: I need one of those for my email inbox.
[LAUGHTER]
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: So I’m assuming the red bar underneath you is your health. And then the three segmented blue bar, what would that be?
DANIEL MCLAREN: That’s your focus ability. So if you notice each weapon has abilities attached to them. There you go. That’s one for her.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Oh, that’s a big one.
DANIEL MCLAREN: And then I have a launcher. And there are different abilities that require more power or less power. So my two pip ability will be a spin to win flaming–
TRISHA STOUFFER: –get that one.
DANIEL MCLAREN: Yeah, I know. I got to–
TRISHA STOUFFER: –go take care of the–
DANIEL MCLAREN: Yeah.
TRISHA STOUFFER: You do these guys.
DANIEL MCLAREN: So basically, you just earn focus by actually completing your combos. So this was something that we have worked through and talked about quite a bit. In earlier builds, you just would get focus power by just hitting. And what was happening is people weren’t using their full combo setup. And so it kind of turned into this diminished play, where you have all these neat combos with a weapon. But players weren’t actually using them.
So we’ve modified the system so that you actually get more focus power by completing your three or four button combos. And then when you do, you can then do more interesting stuff. So you can see I’m still getting it. But when I complete a whole combo, if I could actually do that, I’m good at the game. I promise. You will get more pips of power.
TRISHA STOUFFER: I’m showing off some of my fun moves. Stay here for a moment.
KELLY LOMBARDI: And I see–
TRISHA STOUFFER: –the fun, woo.
KELLY LOMBARDI: I see, McLaren, you have a big war club.
DANIEL MCLAREN: Yes.
KELLY LOMBARDI: And then Trisha has really cool gauntlets. So do the combos vary based on the kind of weapon that you choose? Do you want to talk about that a little bit?
TRISHA STOUFFER: Sure. Like here I am doing a combo. And based on– I am– gauntlets are pure, in-your-face, up-close combat. It’s distinctly different from what you’ll get in war clubs, or dual daggers, or sword and shield.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: How many different sort of types of combat is there?
DANIEL MCLAREN: There are four classes in the game. And each class uses a different weapon type. You can swap classes any time you want, except during combat like this. And there’s the war club, the sword and shield, the dual daggers, and then, of course, the gauntlets, which you see Trisha wearing. And we will be adding new classes over time, so new play styles, new weapons. You almost sabotaged me with that barrel.
[LAUGHTER]
That wasn’t very nice.
TRISHA STOUFFER: I was trying– you on your toes. We’re trying to– in this mission, we’re trying to save these prisoners that have been taken hostage, if you will. And so we’re helping them. But the enemy is nearby. So we have to get them.
DANIEL MCLAREN: Yeah. And this is the best way to help others, which is to swing a big, giant weapon at the cage and with no damage to them. That’s lessons for real life, kids.
TRISHA STOUFFER: You know.
KELLY LOMBARDI: Yeah.
DANIEL MCLAREN: Yeah.
KELLY LOMBARDI: And so between being able to swap out, you can swap out your Umbra, correct?
DANIEL MCLAREN: Yes.
KELLY LOMBARDI: And you can swap out your weapon class. And so between the two, it seems pretty customizable. So the Umbra aren’t attached to your weapon. So you could swap out whatever special powers are attached to them. And your weapon seems really customizable.
DANIEL MCLAREN: Yeah. The idea here was to create a game that has a lot of variety in how you play, and the builds that are available to you, and the gear that you find, and the modifiers that you find, which we call– which we call aspects. And we just wanted players to play the way that they wanted, and be excited about it, and be excited about the stuff that they find. That’s, kind of, the core part that makes these games fun is when you discover something that you like, and you find a way to modify it to do really interesting things. Like that feels good.
KELLY LOMBARDI: Yeah.
TRISHA STOUFFER: I also think– we always talk about Towerborne as being very approachable but deceptively deep, right? Again, I’ve put the controller in the hands of a four-year-old and an 88-year-old. They both loved it and did well. You can button mash. You can– if somebody comes over and never played it before, I say, left thumb stick, and X and Y. You will feel– you will feel successful. But if you love fighting games and combat, you will want to go find all of the combos, how to do them, how to do them well. One of my favorite here with the gauntlets is the elbow drop. Boom! I do it.
KELLY LOMBARDI: That’s awesome.
– Do you have any folks on the team that maybe have a fighting game pedigree or something to add additional depth?
– We certainly have several people who’ve helped us out. Your own James Goedert has–
– Oh, I worked on Killer Instinct, Street Fighter, yep.
– Yep. And our combat director is a guy by the name of Isaac Torres with a long history of combat experience and fighter experience, has competed in tournaments like this. We have several very legit designers on this game who’ve contributed and continue to make our combat better and better every day. We got LP on the scene.
TRISHA STOUFFER: We just completed our challenge, which means a Lieutenant shows up. And now the fun starts.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: So they have a secondary bar there. They have a sort of an armor bar?
TRISHA STOUFFER: That’s a shield. Yes.
DANIEL MCLAREN: Yeah, yeah.
TRISHA STOUFFER: Absolutely.
DANIEL MCLAREN: It’s a break bar. And so the way– I mean, the typical break bar, you will do damage through the break bar to both their health. But you’ll deplete the break bar. And once you do, they’ll go into a stun state. And you get– punish days begins.
TRISHA STOUFFER: Yes. Now it’s all about how quickly– because they will get back out of it.
DANIEL MCLAREN: That’s right.
KELLY LOMBARDI: Elbow drops for the win.
– Some abilities will do break bar damage. Some abilities will do health damage. So I used that spin to win, which does more break bar damage, and was able to really get them grind them down.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Very good. Very good.
DANIEL MCLAREN: Yeah.
– It sounds like the combat is– the depth is there if you’re looking for it. But if you’re not, so is the difficulty level of the game on a sliding scale, or is there just the one way to play?
– There’s a whole range of difficulty levels. So we start out pretty easy. Danger Level 1, you just go through. And you can mash buttons. And then as you get better, and you work through the game, you can level up the world’s difficulty. And then you can select difficulty on the tiles. So you have some options there.
– So can we talk about leveling up? Is it purely based on those types of stats? Is it when you finish a level? Is there any sort of unlockable skills, or is it mostly numerical?
– So the process right now is each class has its own progression path. In the early access build, everything is, kind of, fixed at the moment. So you’ll gain levels. And you’ll be able to– your health will increase, that sort of stuff. In the future build that we have coming later during early access, we’re working on improving that system so that as they level up, you can actually select different abilities. There will actually be either points to invest in things. So Phase 1 is the classes are there. They level up, you’ll get a little bit stronger. Your health is all based off of that class. Each class levels up independently. So as you go through the– as you go through the game, you’ll want to invest in each weapon that you like.
– Can we talk about the map? So you finished that level. Did that unlock a certain area? I know when you zoomed out, it looked like the Marine Layer was having a day. Like it was mostly fog of war. But are you unlocking more through those battles?
TRISHA STOUFFER: Yeah. So with every tile that you unlock, the adjacent tiles are then available.
KELLY LOMBARDI: And so you complete a mission, and it takes you back to the world map. And you can either choose to dive into another mission or go back to the tower based on how you’re feeling, if you want to change out your weapons, however–
TRISHA STOUFFER: You don’t even have– you can go to the tower. You’ll need to go to the tower to go to the forge to enhance. But right now, I can go right here. And I said, I don’t want to do my gauntlets anymore. Let me change my class. I’m going to do– let’s check out some duel daggers next time. And–
KELLY LOMBARDI: Yeah. You do like throwing elbows. I see you–
TRISHA STOUFFER: –do level seven. Yes. I can do it right there. And then I just check my load out. I have Catball here. I still like playing with Barbie. I’m going to keep that going.
– One of the things that I’m passionate about in games is how I look. So can you tell me a little bit about how customizable your appearance is, and how you would go about changing that?
– Absolutely. So I think someone tried to do the math a while ago, a few months ago, on how many different combinations you could have from an appearance standpoint. So keep in mind, there’s your appearance of what you look like physically. But then there’s the gear that you might also put on, which also changes your appearance. And then there’ll be other ways of changing that. So if we go over here to face right, you’ll see here I can put my helmet back on if I want to or not. But this is me in the game. And I can change from a masculine physique or a female physique. We’ve got multiple voices that you can even have in the game. So when you hear this sound effects, you make sounds when you’re playing.
KELLY LOMBARDI: Oh, wow.
TRISHA STOUFFER: So many– this is skin color right now. And it’s just this easy. I can– you could just throw a dart and decide what you want to be. Or some people like to be very fantastical in what their appearance is. Some people want to be, how can I make– my husband, every time he goes in, he’s like, I want to make me. And he’s always looking for that. But I can change whatever I want. We’ve got a lot of options. You could– yeah, you can see my irises right there. Even– like we have combinations. So this is the head. And then you’ve got your head shape, your facial features. There’s subcategories below all of these. The hair, you can change the color really quickly, everything that’s on the color scale. And the eyes get pretty fun. I just found the iris details the other day. I was like oh what’s–
KELLY LOMBARDI: When did this guy here–
TRISHA STOUFFER: –you can have no irises. You can look– just be like alien, all sorts of things.
DANIEL MCLAREN: You’re in a fantasy game. So you have pointy ears. There’s really a lot of freedom here to be something else.
TRISHA STOUFFER: And then there’s lots of details that you can apply to the face.
KELLY LOMBARDI: And this is all unlocked at the start?
– 100%, yes. We’re really looking forward to what players like. I can just imagine the gallery now. We have people internally who are doing a lot of cosplay. They built out different characters, and you know.
– You don’t look like a level one person even when you’re level one, right?
– Yeah.
– Well, at least your equipment might but your–
– Towerborne fashion show.
DANIEL MCLAREN: And I’m even wearing our cool– I’m over here. I use my little cosmetics to wear my possum. It’s our cosmetic. So there is a cosmetic system. I’m wearing the paw-some, P-A-W, like awesome. That’s awesome.
– I meant like paws, like a animal paw-some.
– I realized when I said possum that my pronunciation made it sound like I was wearing an actual possum.
– Yeah, yeah. I was like, this is a little more–
– Yeah, yeah. This is a little–
– Tanuki style or something.
DANIEL MCLAREN: Yeah. But no, this is a cosmetic. So you’ll have full cosmetics. You can change everything from tip to tail, including weapons, and even the Umbra. We’ll have skins.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: And emotes as well, is that what I’m saying?
DANIEL MCLAREN: Yeah, there will be emotes and stickers and–
TRISHA STOUFFER: Yeah. So again, social space on the tower. So if you want to use a sticker, want to use an emote, you’ve got those on the wheel. There’ll be others that you can earn and take advantage of.
– Will you just be seeing your party in the tower, or will you see other folks playing?
– –other folks.
– Yeah.
– Right now–
– Other folks are not playing right now. Yeah.
– We might see somebody run by if–
– There was somebody on the world map when I was running around, when you–
– Well, that is also an interesting piece. Not only will you see players on the tower itself, you’ll see them on the world map running around. So you might see a group of people like, why is everybody over there? What’s up? You know, should I be over there, too? We just really want people to see what’s going on and where they might want to head for the action.
– And so is your party leader in charge of selecting the level that you go to? So basically, your party leader will go out to the world map, choose your mission, and then everyone else will get sucked out there?
DANIEL MCLAREN: Yep.
– Yes, you can be anywhere. And like, McLaren can stay here on the tower. You won’t see him because I will leave. And I will go into one. And even if you aren’t, we haven’t talked about danger levels and danger licensed trial here on the map. If I zoom out, you can see this red line. Oops, let me get over there. You can see this red border. And that’s because that can see the three. I’ve earned my way into Danger Level 1 and 2. And I haven’t done the trial yet for three. So that’s still locked to me.
DANIEL MCLAREN: You can only go everywhere the light touches, Simba.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Yes.
DANIEL MCLAREN: Yeah, basically.
TRISHA STOUFFER: And if McLaren had only hadn’t gotten through two yet, I could still take him into a Danger Level 2. He just may be a little under geared.
DANIEL MCLAREN: However, what is really cool about what we’ve done is we’ve tried to balance the gear versus the skill. So I fully expect somebody to be completely naked running through doing the maximum danger level.
KELLY LOMBARDI: You always have to plan for that.
– The underwear.
– 100% like beating the hardest thing. And it’s taking four hours, because they can only do like one damage.
– And so the reward for completing the trial and getting into a higher difficulty level is more XP, better gear, all of that jazz, and explore the world map, more better stuffs? Yeah.
– So right now, we’re loading back into the mission. McLaren had happened to be on the tower at the time. He got a message that popped up to accept. He could decline. And off we go.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: And so we’re seeing the two of you play together. But you can play up to four?
TRISHA STOUFFER: Up to four, yes.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: And does the difficulty balance based on that?
DANIEL MCLAREN: Yeah.
TRISHA STOUFFER: It does.
DANIEL MCLAREN: Scales based on number of players, the difficulty that you set. Yeah. And then of course, we will be tuning and balancing the game quite a bit over the– oh, I wasn’t even paying–
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Question, Trisha. So you switched over from the gauntlets to the double daggers. I see you now have a different, sort of, meter. It looks like a segmented three yellow ones.
TRISHA STOUFFER: Yes.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: So tell us about that.
TRISHA STOUFFER: For this particular weapon, you get a special move with that. And it’s where you can teleport to where the dagger is thrown.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Oh, nice.
TRISHA STOUFFER: Yes.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: All right. That’s going to be–
TRISHA STOUFFER: –want to be watching–
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: I’m calling it.
TRISHA STOUFFER: Yeah, it’s awesome. You’re like, let me get over there really quick. Take care of that enemy. That’s one.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: And that regenerates. But you also do have the blue skill as well that builds.
TRISHA STOUFFER: Yes, I can show you what that is. Let me get a good spot. And–
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Yeah a little bit.
TRISHA STOUFFER: –dashing–
KELLY LOMBARDI: I love that. But I also love the giant war club, just–
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Yeah, just–
KELLY LOMBARDI: Yeah, just go–
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: –smash.
TRISHA STOUFFER: They are both– I mean, they all serve their purpose. And they’re all super fun. And it’s one of those things where we think people are going to be like, all right, I’m getting pretty good. I’m good at this. Let me go try the next. And can I play this level with dual daggers? Is it better? The one thing you mentioned aspects earlier. And so these are– we put them on your weapon and gear. There are– we’ve only been in grasslands. We should go into another biome. But different biomes might have different types of enemies that hurt you in different ways.
So you can have an aspect that might help you in those certain biomes or help you do different damage to the enemies. I think I have an aspect on right now that after six hits, it applies poison to the enemies, even though I’m not poisonous myself. So there’s things like that that you’ll– there will be some strategy. I talk about– it’s not a strategy game. But I do think there is strategy between how you load out for different biomes, different enemies, bosses, whatever they might be, but also how you take care of– what order do you take care of the enemies?
If you watch, you’ll see the different tiers. We start with claw gobbos and bomb. These are tail whippers. You can see there with the yellow toe. That’s the warning that they’re about to come at you. We got the shields who are mostly on the defensive. But there’s spear gobbos. And when they come through, you better take care of them, because they’re going to get you. The bomb gobbos, a lot of people have fun just seeing if they can get them to blow up their little buddies instead of us. It’s really fun to bait them. And they’ll throw a bomb. And then you get out of the way. And then earlier we played. And you might have seen a tent. And that’s where–
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: That was re-spawning enemies.
TRISHA STOUFFER: Yeah. So you want to take care of that, because you can’t just sit there. And you might say, I’ll just farm some enemies here. But that’s not really how it works.
DANIEL MCLAREN: Now we have diminishing returns. So you can’t just exploit the enemy spawners as long as you want. You are incentivized to kill them before they overwhelm you and kill you.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Yeah, yeah.
DANIEL MCLAREN: And I’m just going to stand there and let them stab me in the back because why not? That’s–
TRISHA STOUFFER: Yeah, those are the spear gobbos. And they will stab you. But they will also come charging at you, and–
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: That was a good move there.
DANIEL MCLAREN: Yeah
TRISHA STOUFFER: Yeah, that’s the spinning–
DANIEL MCLAREN: Clean them out.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: So we’re seeing a lot of the offensive attacks. Is there any sort of defensive things, like either parries, or specific dodges, or anything like that?
DANIEL MCLAREN: So you have all of the dodging ability. And then if you equip sword and shield, you actually parry. And there’s an ability where you can activate perfect parry to stun an enemy and roll them up. So that’s pretty great. Yeah, it’s pretty cool.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: –daggers or sword and board. I don’t know.
DANIEL MCLAREN: –the best part. Swim board actually has a really great shield dash that’s super awesome. You just clear out stuff. And they have a decent, kind of, spin attack. But really, if you want to spin and win, you go war club. That’s what you do.
TRISHA STOUFFER: I like being rewarded for actually using my shield because I tend to just attack first, ask questions later. So when there’s a reward for actually shielding I’m a big fun.
DANIEL MCLAREN: It is a challenge.
TRISHA STOUFFER: I died.
DANIEL MCLAREN: Sorry. I don’t know what to tell you. And I took that bomb to the face.
TRISHA STOUFFER: Yes. So you saw me die. And a few seconds later, I come back to life. And I can do that three times. Well, I can do it twice. And on the third time, I am downed. And I need whoever I’m playing with to come and help me and revive me. And the first time you get revived, it’s pretty quick. But if you keep–
[LAUGHTER]
–but if you keep going down, it takes a little bit longer each time for you to be revived. So you have to be careful, like lead the enemies away from them so you can get over there and have enough time to revive, because you are vulnerable when you’re reviving someone. So you have to be careful, so–
DANIEL MCLAREN: Play again?
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: –you can–
TRISHA STOUFFER: We got the end of mission screen that will show all of our– well, show my cool loot. And then we can compare scores–
DANIEL MCLAREN: 100%.
TRISHA STOUFFER: –which I don’t expect to have done a lot of damage. I was on the daggers, but–
DANIEL MCLAREN: I mean, I too am fond of excuses on why I can’t carry my weight. Finally I got a war club upgrade. All right, cool.
– So what is the loop? Like, do you typically, after finishing a mission, go back to the tower and do stuff? Or do you just frequently jump right into the next level?
– I mean, it’s up to you. The best part about this is it’s structured in a way where as long as you’re not in a mission– so one of our focus points here was we didn’t want players stopping the flow of a mission. Because it is cooperative in a lot of ways, the last thing you want is trying to kill that boss and somebody opening their inventory. What do I want to put on (MUMBLES). And you just don’t want that at all. You’re like, just stay focused, dude. So once you get out, you can open up your inventory from the world map. You can go back to the tower if you’d like. And you can look at all the loot you’ve got. You can make decisions on what you want to equip. You can dismantle stuff for spirit dust. It is the beginning of an upgrade system that we are working on that will come over the next year.
So one of the things that happens in an RPG is because it is a loot-centric grind, and find sort of a mentality, games over the years have introduced relief systems. So you have Diablo III. And you have things like the Enchanting system. You have Kanai’s Cube. You go into Path of Exile. And you just have a crazy deep crafting system in there. And they try to introduce deterministic behaviors. And so what we’ve done just to set the baseline is you’ve found some gear. And sometimes it can take a while to find that next upgrade, which can be frustrating. So what we’ve said is, well, look, certain gear can be leveled up a certain number of times and just raised up a whole tier level, so that you can keep playing. And you’re not just stopped and grinding something that’s way below you because you just can’t get the piece that you need.
So you can dismantle the stuff that you find. You can just do a very simple upgrade or enhancement to raise it up a tier. And then over the coming year, we’re going to introduce a more advanced system that will allow for more deterministic behavior, choosing stats that you want to find, modifying things. There’s a lot of stuff we want to do there. So from anywhere, you can just open up your– you just open up your inventory. I’m doing it as if my screen is showing over here, which it is not.
TRISHA STOUFFER: What are you trying to–
– I was just going to show what you’re doing right there, which is go through your inventory, see what you like and make changes, so–
– Yes.
– Yes, it’s awesome. One of the things I do want to touch base on, which I can’t believe we haven’t yet, is just the art style. Like just like some of the textures, the detail, and even when you’re fighting, the outline of your character, there’s just so much there. Can you tell me a little bit about what inspired you guys, or what some of your favorite parts of the art style is?
– Yeah, this was originally thought of as a Ghibli-inspired game. And so anime, Ghibli, that was kind of– again, when we talked about this way earlier, the concept of sitting with your family, having a more family-friendly game, getting away from that depression simulator. We wanted something bright and colorful, something that was fun to look at, and something that was fun to play. And the anime-esque style fits so well for us. And so we’ve pursued that over the years. They’ve continued to evolve it.
Our art team is brilliant. They are fantastic. It’s led by Pedro. And he’s just freaking amazing. He’s done an incredible job directing the art style of this game. And it’s gone through many revisions. And then every time we change the lighting, it’s got to go through. But they’ve just managed to make it just look so inviting.
– Yeah, it feels hopeful.
– It does. It is very hopeful. Yeah.
TRISHA STOUFFER: One of the things, you asked about inspiration, one of the things we really wanted was that it should feel like you’re watching an animated movie when you watch the game. And I really do think it is a fun game to watch.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: So many things are animated. Like, I just I love looking at the backgrounds. And everything is moving. The leaves are moving on the ivy. The trees are moving. The fans are moving. There’s a waterfall. All these sort of NPCs are doing their own thing. At one point, yeah, we saw these two kids sort of playing with each other here.
TRISHA STOUFFER: One is playing by the fire, which, you know–
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Yeah, it’s– kids love it. Kids love a good open flame.
KELLY LOMBARDI: –how blaze.
DANIEL MCLAREN: I don’t think he’s playing. I think he’s on– I think he’s on the clock. Yeah, he’s on the clock. Yeah, he’s–
TRISHA STOUFFER: Yeah. And you’ll see things here that are part of the story that you’ll see they’ve brought back to the tower to remind them of things that have happened. And that’s one of the things that’s good to remind people or tell people about. This is not a Banner Saga story. Like Banner Saga was a very rich story-driven game, narrative-driven game. This has lore. It has deep lore. It has story in it. It has quests that you’ll take on. But if you’re expecting to have that same sort of story interaction that you did with Banner Saga, that’s not what you’re going to find.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: This is action first, right?
DANIEL MCLAREN: Yes.
TRISHA STOUFFER: Absolutely, right. And you can see here I’ve got Courage is one of the NPCs, also an Umbra of mature Umbra. It’s got something else for me to go take on. And so that’s how you’ll continue to learn more about what’s happened here in this world, and with these people and what’s going on here, and why are we all here? Why are we on this tower?
KELLY LOMBARDI: What does it all mean?
TRISHA STOUFFER: Why do I keep going out and risking myself to– why am I protecting these people?
– All right. You showed us so much. So Trisha and McLaren, thank you so much for just bringing this demo with you. When do we get to experience Towerborne?
– Towerborne will be available early access on September 10 on Steam.
– After that, what can players expect?
– Yes, in 2025 will be coming to Game Preview and Game Pass.
– All right. One more time, Trisha and McLaren from Stoic studio, thank you so much for being here today. And Kelly, thanks as always, for joining us here on the show. We love to do these deep dives. If you want to see us do another deep dive in the future, let us know what you’d like us to do. In the meantime, thanks so much for watching or listening. And we’ll see you next week.
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
NARRATOR: Ratings for games in this podcast are pending.
– Hello and welcome to the official Xbox Podcast, the only podcast that, you know, comes to you from inside Xbox. As much as I love talking about the gaming news of the week, every episode, my favorite shows that we do are the ones where we get to dive deeply into a single game. And this is one of those shows. I also love it when I get to hang out with Kelly Lombardi. Kelly, how are you doing?
– Hi, I’m great. How are you?
– All right. I’m really happy you’re joining us here for this deep dive episode.
– I’m really excited. This is a game that is near and dear to my heart that I’m so excited for. And it’s one of my most anticipated releases, so can’t wait to get into it.
– Always a good sign when the developer show up to the studio, and they give you a hug. And I’m like, OK, all right. I picked the right co-host here this week. So on this special episode, we’re actually going to meet the creators of Towerborne. And we’re also going to get a look at some brand new gameplay. So, hey, let’s meet them. Hello, Trisha Stouffer, you’re the CEO and President of Stoic. And Daniel McLaren, we’ll just call you McLaren for the rest of the episode, the Game Director here. Now, I personally know Stoic as the developers of the awesome and influential Banner Saga series, where I made some very poor decisions while playing, but enjoyed it all the same. Help us get to know Stoic.
– Absolutely. Stoic, independent video game developer. Been around for 12 years. Started with three people who made the original Banner Saga. We’ve grown from that to 5 to 12, and 20 when I joined back in 2020. And I’m about to hire my 100th person to the studio. And this whole team is dedicated to Towerborne and bringing that to the audience.
– Very excited, because we are going to be doing that here. In fact, we’re going to do something a little bit different for this episode. In previous deep dive episodes, we’ve looked at footage. And we’ve sort of broken down those footage. But I see computers. I see controllers. You’re actually going to be playing the game. And we’ll be talking about it. But before we get into that, let’s talk a little bit about Towerborne. For those who are watching that might not be familiar with the game, give us a quick rundown on what type of game it is.
– Yeah. Towerborne is a side scrolling brawler action RPG. The idea here was that we wanted to create– we kind of wanted to deviate from what we had done on the Banner Saga. And I say we as if I was there doing that. I did not do anything there. But they sat down. And they said, look, we made our Depression Simulator. It was super heavy–
TRISHA STOUFFER: I confirm.
DANIEL MCLAREN: Yeah, yeah, 100% And the idea was we wanted to sit down and be able to play the game with our family or our friends. For them, it was– the statement they said, like, we’d like to be able to sit on our couch with our kids and actually play this game. And that kind of started this brainstorming of like, well, what could we do that? And the Couch Co-op came to mind. And then the Brawlers came to mind, and all of those classics. And so we said, well, what if we take it further than what people have kind of done before? And so you now see Towerborne.
– So you guys have been working on Towerborne for quite some time. And you just shared some pretty exciting news. Can you give us a recap?
– We did. Today we announced we are coming to Steam in early access on September 10. And we’re very excited about that. And then in 2025, we’ll be coming to Game Preview, which includes Xbox consoles, PC and Game Pass. And we’re just really excited to get the game into the hands of the players.
– Yeah. So can you tell me a little bit about why you chose early access, why that’s important for players, and then why Steam first?
– Absolutely. Early access on Steam allows us to work with the players, bring them into the game early, create that– create and form that community, build that relationship there, and have them be a part of the voice that helps us determine where the game goes, and what it looks like, and how it plays, and things like that. It’s what we’ve done historically as Stoic in our Banner Saga games. We still have a great community that exists there. We’re looking forward to building that and engaging with it on Towerborne as well.
– Yeah. Something that’s very important to remember as well is that Banner Saga was started on Kickstarter before everybody else was really doing this sort of a thing. The trust that the community gave us, the big thing that Stoic was all about was we want to engage the player. And so as soon as they were able, they were throwing builds over the wall to the players. They were just like, how does this feel? Does this– do you like this? Does this feel good? And that process, that entire game balance was actually built with the players alongside them. And they did that for all three games.
And so this is our next step. Instead of saying we promise we’ll give you a game in the future, well, we’ve actually had the resources to build this game. And now we’re going to hand them a very robust game. There’s a lot there. And you can play the full core loop. And we’re going to say we want to build so much more. We want to continue to expand this. Please be a part of this and engage with us. So we’re very, very excited to continue the tradition.
– So that early access is through the purchase of a founder’s pack?
– Correct.
– Can you explain to us how that works?
– Yeah. So at the start of early access on September 10, you will be able to purchase one of two founder packs. And in doing that, will get access to the game. And you might go, but why would I pay to do this? Well, because we are looking for people who are really excited to be a part of that journey. And we do want to have an opportunity to engage with a core group of players who are very committed to it. And I understand there’s a lot of players who look at early access and like, hey, I really just want to play the whole thing when it’s all done, awesome. And we want to make that a great experience.
And part of getting to that point is having people who are so excited to get into that, who want to get into, oh, I think this number should be a six instead of a two. And we’re like, actually, that’s pretty right. A six is better there, and even deeper. Like, oh, could you make this thing happen, and that thing happen? Like, we’re here to serve the player. And so we want them to feel like we need them. And we want them to feel like this belongs to them. And we want to go on that journey with them together. So I’m personally very, very excited about this.
– And we’re about to give them a taste of what they’re going to get with that founder’s pack, because you have controllers sitting here. You’ve got gaming PCs.
– Yeah.
– Why don’t we just jump into the video, right? Or not video, let’s jump into live gameplay. This is live gameplay, right?
TRISHA STOUFFER: –live gameplay. You are watching my input or my monitor. And oh-oh. OK.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: So I know the game is– like people in Germany at Gamescom are playing or playing Towerborne right now. Is this the Gamescom demo, or is this something else?
TRISHA STOUFFER: This is– no, this is not the Gamescom demo. This is the latest and greatest builds. It’s everything. So in Gamescom, they’ll be playing a very specific level against the Pangojera boss. This, we’re showing you a bit right now. We’re on belfry. This is the tower. And this is the social space. There’s things you’ll do here. You can see there’s some NPCs here to interact with, and all of that. But it’s the hub that you’ll come back to.
But the really exciting stuff is, oops, I went up the stairs for no apparent reason. Really fun stuff that you really want to see is we’re going to go ahead and play a mission. And Towerborne as you know a multiplayer online, up to four players. And McLaren and I are in a group right now. And so I will be the leader. And when you come out here on the world map, you can see it’s zoomed in pretty far. But I can zoom out. And boy, oh, wow. What’s over there? I want to go check it out.
But for now, we’re here. You’ll see these larger tiles with names on them. Those are called ventures. And they’re infinitely replayable, and part of a quest line that you might be following. You can see on the right side of my screen, I have some quests that I am supposed to be taking care of. We could actually go play one of them and get it knocked off the–
KELLY LOMBARDI: Tell me more about these treasure chests.
TRISHA STOUFFER: Oh, the treasure chests. Goblin soul goes right to the–
KELLY LOMBARDI: I love some of those.
TRISHA STOUFFER: –available. So talk about loot in the game.
DANIEL MCLAREN: Yeah. So the core of what we’ve done here is we want players to be killing things, and finding stuff, and getting a bunch of loot, and getting more powerful. Like everybody loves loot games. Well, not everybody, but I do. And so–
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: You’re in a comfortable, safe place.
DANIEL MCLAREN: Yeah. Listen, it’s all about the loot. We’re all about that. And so what you see here is the framework of the build that will be going live for early access. You might see some weird quirks. We’re still finishing it up. But the whole loop is there. You’ll be able to go into missions. You’ll be able to kill monsters. You’ll get loot drops. You’ll be able to upgrade your stuff. The whole core loop is there. So I hope players find that super exciting, because we find it super exciting. And I’m always that individual who’s like, I just need this last piece to make my build go crazy. And I’m willing to grind into the endless hours of the night.
TRISHA STOUFFER: You started to say– we were loading into the mission. And you said, you hope– and you looked at me. And I thought, you’re about to say, I hope that you will do well in this mission.
DANIEL MCLAREN: I wasn’t going to– I think it’s a little too early to start the trash talk. But don’t– don’t fear. I’m ready.
KELLY LOMBARDI: Yeah. You guys are on the same team as–
DANIEL MCLAREN: Are we though?
KELLY LOMBARDI: Yeah.
DANIEL MCLAREN: Are we though?
TRISHA STOUFFER: There’s some co-opetition there. Like you’ll see at the end of the mission, there are some stats there. So if you want a little friendly, like, hey, who did more here? One of the things that’s unique about Towerborne is you’re following my camera right now. And unlike a lot of online co-op games, you’re restricted to the same space. This encounter right here is about three screens wide or two screens wide, and which means I can be off doing something. And McLaren may not be in the picture at the moment. But we are still fighting to do the same thing. We’re trying to protect this tent right now from three waves of enemies. And here they come.
DANIEL MCLAREN: Yeah. This is one of the many challenges. So a lot of our game, a lot of our missions are procedural. So there is a lot of stuff that you can go and play. And you can replay, and there won’t be the same things. We’ve added a lot of handcrafted content to the game as well. So sometimes you’ll get a procedural mission, but you will find various little challenges like this popup through it. Those are all handcrafted. We continue to add more all the time. And then there are the larger, as Trisha was talking about a bit earlier, the larger, we call them venture missions. There’s no AD in this world, only ventures.
– All right. Let’s talk about– there’s a lot to call– to talk about here, everything from the art style to just what I’m seeing, the weapons you’re using. You just casted magic.
– Yep.
– Not magic. No magic.
– Tell me.
DANIEL MCLAREN: Yeah.
– All right. Well, let’s talk about it.
– That was my Umbra, Morbi. Talk about Umbra a little.
– Yeah. So the premise of the game is that you have died. And you’ve gone into the ebb. And you were pulled back from the ebb by an Umbra. And the Umbra are these spirit creatures on the other side. And you form relationships with them. You can find different Umbra. They do different things. They have their own set of powers.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Is that who’s floating behind you there?
DANIEL MCLAREN: Yes, that’s who’s floating behind me. This is Iska. Iska is a little colloquially called the Catball. And Iska can shoot a little projectile out and hit your enemies. And who do you have?
TRISHA STOUFFER: I have Morbi, one of my favorites. And Morbi will drop this massive shockwave down from the sky. And it’s good for clearing out. If you’ve got a lot of enemies around, and you just need to clear some space that you can not get killed.
KELLY LOMBARDI: I need one of those for my email inbox.
[LAUGHTER]
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: So I’m assuming the red bar underneath you is your health. And then the three segmented blue bar, what would that be?
DANIEL MCLAREN: That’s your focus ability. So if you notice each weapon has abilities attached to them. There you go. That’s one for her.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Oh, that’s a big one.
DANIEL MCLAREN: And then I have a launcher. And there are different abilities that require more power or less power. So my two pip ability will be a spin to win flaming–
TRISHA STOUFFER: –get that one.
DANIEL MCLAREN: Yeah, I know. I got to–
TRISHA STOUFFER: –go take care of the–
DANIEL MCLAREN: Yeah.
TRISHA STOUFFER: You do these guys.
DANIEL MCLAREN: So basically, you just earn focus by actually completing your combos. So this was something that we have worked through and talked about quite a bit. In earlier builds, you just would get focus power by just hitting. And what was happening is people weren’t using their full combo setup. And so it kind of turned into this diminished play, where you have all these neat combos with a weapon. But players weren’t actually using them.
So we’ve modified the system so that you actually get more focus power by completing your three or four button combos. And then when you do, you can then do more interesting stuff. So you can see I’m still getting it. But when I complete a whole combo, if I could actually do that, I’m good at the game. I promise. You will get more pips of power.
TRISHA STOUFFER: I’m showing off some of my fun moves. Stay here for a moment.
KELLY LOMBARDI: And I see–
TRISHA STOUFFER: –the fun, woo.
KELLY LOMBARDI: I see, McLaren, you have a big war club.
DANIEL MCLAREN: Yes.
KELLY LOMBARDI: And then Trisha has really cool gauntlets. So do the combos vary based on the kind of weapon that you choose? Do you want to talk about that a little bit?
TRISHA STOUFFER: Sure. Like here I am doing a combo. And based on– I am– gauntlets are pure, in-your-face, up-close combat. It’s distinctly different from what you’ll get in war clubs, or dual daggers, or sword and shield.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: How many different sort of types of combat is there?
DANIEL MCLAREN: There are four classes in the game. And each class uses a different weapon type. You can swap classes any time you want, except during combat like this. And there’s the war club, the sword and shield, the dual daggers, and then, of course, the gauntlets, which you see Trisha wearing. And we will be adding new classes over time, so new play styles, new weapons. You almost sabotaged me with that barrel.
[LAUGHTER]
That wasn’t very nice.
TRISHA STOUFFER: I was trying– you on your toes. We’re trying to– in this mission, we’re trying to save these prisoners that have been taken hostage, if you will. And so we’re helping them. But the enemy is nearby. So we have to get them.
DANIEL MCLAREN: Yeah. And this is the best way to help others, which is to swing a big, giant weapon at the cage and with no damage to them. That’s lessons for real life, kids.
TRISHA STOUFFER: You know.
KELLY LOMBARDI: Yeah.
DANIEL MCLAREN: Yeah.
KELLY LOMBARDI: And so between being able to swap out, you can swap out your Umbra, correct?
DANIEL MCLAREN: Yes.
KELLY LOMBARDI: And you can swap out your weapon class. And so between the two, it seems pretty customizable. So the Umbra aren’t attached to your weapon. So you could swap out whatever special powers are attached to them. And your weapon seems really customizable.
DANIEL MCLAREN: Yeah. The idea here was to create a game that has a lot of variety in how you play, and the builds that are available to you, and the gear that you find, and the modifiers that you find, which we call– which we call aspects. And we just wanted players to play the way that they wanted, and be excited about it, and be excited about the stuff that they find. That’s, kind of, the core part that makes these games fun is when you discover something that you like, and you find a way to modify it to do really interesting things. Like that feels good.
KELLY LOMBARDI: Yeah.
TRISHA STOUFFER: I also think– we always talk about Towerborne as being very approachable but deceptively deep, right? Again, I’ve put the controller in the hands of a four-year-old and an 88-year-old. They both loved it and did well. You can button mash. You can– if somebody comes over and never played it before, I say, left thumb stick, and X and Y. You will feel– you will feel successful. But if you love fighting games and combat, you will want to go find all of the combos, how to do them, how to do them well. One of my favorite here with the gauntlets is the elbow drop. Boom! I do it.
KELLY LOMBARDI: That’s awesome.
– Do you have any folks on the team that maybe have a fighting game pedigree or something to add additional depth?
– We certainly have several people who’ve helped us out. Your own James Goedert has–
– Oh, I worked on Killer Instinct, Street Fighter, yep.
– Yep. And our combat director is a guy by the name of Isaac Torres with a long history of combat experience and fighter experience, has competed in tournaments like this. We have several very legit designers on this game who’ve contributed and continue to make our combat better and better every day. We got LP on the scene.
TRISHA STOUFFER: We just completed our challenge, which means a Lieutenant shows up. And now the fun starts.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: So they have a secondary bar there. They have a sort of an armor bar?
TRISHA STOUFFER: That’s a shield. Yes.
DANIEL MCLAREN: Yeah, yeah.
TRISHA STOUFFER: Absolutely.
DANIEL MCLAREN: It’s a break bar. And so the way– I mean, the typical break bar, you will do damage through the break bar to both their health. But you’ll deplete the break bar. And once you do, they’ll go into a stun state. And you get– punish days begins.
TRISHA STOUFFER: Yes. Now it’s all about how quickly– because they will get back out of it.
DANIEL MCLAREN: That’s right.
KELLY LOMBARDI: Elbow drops for the win.
– Some abilities will do break bar damage. Some abilities will do health damage. So I used that spin to win, which does more break bar damage, and was able to really get them grind them down.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Very good. Very good.
DANIEL MCLAREN: Yeah.
– It sounds like the combat is– the depth is there if you’re looking for it. But if you’re not, so is the difficulty level of the game on a sliding scale, or is there just the one way to play?
– There’s a whole range of difficulty levels. So we start out pretty easy. Danger Level 1, you just go through. And you can mash buttons. And then as you get better, and you work through the game, you can level up the world’s difficulty. And then you can select difficulty on the tiles. So you have some options there.
– So can we talk about leveling up? Is it purely based on those types of stats? Is it when you finish a level? Is there any sort of unlockable skills, or is it mostly numerical?
– So the process right now is each class has its own progression path. In the early access build, everything is, kind of, fixed at the moment. So you’ll gain levels. And you’ll be able to– your health will increase, that sort of stuff. In the future build that we have coming later during early access, we’re working on improving that system so that as they level up, you can actually select different abilities. There will actually be either points to invest in things. So Phase 1 is the classes are there. They level up, you’ll get a little bit stronger. Your health is all based off of that class. Each class levels up independently. So as you go through the– as you go through the game, you’ll want to invest in each weapon that you like.
– Can we talk about the map? So you finished that level. Did that unlock a certain area? I know when you zoomed out, it looked like the Marine Layer was having a day. Like it was mostly fog of war. But are you unlocking more through those battles?
TRISHA STOUFFER: Yeah. So with every tile that you unlock, the adjacent tiles are then available.
KELLY LOMBARDI: And so you complete a mission, and it takes you back to the world map. And you can either choose to dive into another mission or go back to the tower based on how you’re feeling, if you want to change out your weapons, however–
TRISHA STOUFFER: You don’t even have– you can go to the tower. You’ll need to go to the tower to go to the forge to enhance. But right now, I can go right here. And I said, I don’t want to do my gauntlets anymore. Let me change my class. I’m going to do– let’s check out some duel daggers next time. And–
KELLY LOMBARDI: Yeah. You do like throwing elbows. I see you–
TRISHA STOUFFER: –do level seven. Yes. I can do it right there. And then I just check my load out. I have Catball here. I still like playing with Barbie. I’m going to keep that going.
– One of the things that I’m passionate about in games is how I look. So can you tell me a little bit about how customizable your appearance is, and how you would go about changing that?
– Absolutely. So I think someone tried to do the math a while ago, a few months ago, on how many different combinations you could have from an appearance standpoint. So keep in mind, there’s your appearance of what you look like physically. But then there’s the gear that you might also put on, which also changes your appearance. And then there’ll be other ways of changing that. So if we go over here to face right, you’ll see here I can put my helmet back on if I want to or not. But this is me in the game. And I can change from a masculine physique or a female physique. We’ve got multiple voices that you can even have in the game. So when you hear this sound effects, you make sounds when you’re playing.
KELLY LOMBARDI: Oh, wow.
TRISHA STOUFFER: So many– this is skin color right now. And it’s just this easy. I can– you could just throw a dart and decide what you want to be. Or some people like to be very fantastical in what their appearance is. Some people want to be, how can I make– my husband, every time he goes in, he’s like, I want to make me. And he’s always looking for that. But I can change whatever I want. We’ve got a lot of options. You could– yeah, you can see my irises right there. Even– like we have combinations. So this is the head. And then you’ve got your head shape, your facial features. There’s subcategories below all of these. The hair, you can change the color really quickly, everything that’s on the color scale. And the eyes get pretty fun. I just found the iris details the other day. I was like oh what’s–
KELLY LOMBARDI: When did this guy here–
TRISHA STOUFFER: –you can have no irises. You can look– just be like alien, all sorts of things.
DANIEL MCLAREN: You’re in a fantasy game. So you have pointy ears. There’s really a lot of freedom here to be something else.
TRISHA STOUFFER: And then there’s lots of details that you can apply to the face.
KELLY LOMBARDI: And this is all unlocked at the start?
– 100%, yes. We’re really looking forward to what players like. I can just imagine the gallery now. We have people internally who are doing a lot of cosplay. They built out different characters, and you know.
– You don’t look like a level one person even when you’re level one, right?
– Yeah.
– Well, at least your equipment might but your–
– Towerborne fashion show.
DANIEL MCLAREN: And I’m even wearing our cool– I’m over here. I use my little cosmetics to wear my possum. It’s our cosmetic. So there is a cosmetic system. I’m wearing the paw-some, P-A-W, like awesome. That’s awesome.
– I meant like paws, like a animal paw-some.
– I realized when I said possum that my pronunciation made it sound like I was wearing an actual possum.
– Yeah, yeah. I was like, this is a little more–
– Yeah, yeah. This is a little–
– Tanuki style or something.
DANIEL MCLAREN: Yeah. But no, this is a cosmetic. So you’ll have full cosmetics. You can change everything from tip to tail, including weapons, and even the Umbra. We’ll have skins.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: And emotes as well, is that what I’m saying?
DANIEL MCLAREN: Yeah, there will be emotes and stickers and–
TRISHA STOUFFER: Yeah. So again, social space on the tower. So if you want to use a sticker, want to use an emote, you’ve got those on the wheel. There’ll be others that you can earn and take advantage of.
– Will you just be seeing your party in the tower, or will you see other folks playing?
– –other folks.
– Yeah.
– Right now–
– Other folks are not playing right now. Yeah.
– We might see somebody run by if–
– There was somebody on the world map when I was running around, when you–
– Well, that is also an interesting piece. Not only will you see players on the tower itself, you’ll see them on the world map running around. So you might see a group of people like, why is everybody over there? What’s up? You know, should I be over there, too? We just really want people to see what’s going on and where they might want to head for the action.
– And so is your party leader in charge of selecting the level that you go to? So basically, your party leader will go out to the world map, choose your mission, and then everyone else will get sucked out there?
DANIEL MCLAREN: Yep.
– Yes, you can be anywhere. And like, McLaren can stay here on the tower. You won’t see him because I will leave. And I will go into one. And even if you aren’t, we haven’t talked about danger levels and danger licensed trial here on the map. If I zoom out, you can see this red line. Oops, let me get over there. You can see this red border. And that’s because that can see the three. I’ve earned my way into Danger Level 1 and 2. And I haven’t done the trial yet for three. So that’s still locked to me.
DANIEL MCLAREN: You can only go everywhere the light touches, Simba.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Yes.
DANIEL MCLAREN: Yeah, basically.
TRISHA STOUFFER: And if McLaren had only hadn’t gotten through two yet, I could still take him into a Danger Level 2. He just may be a little under geared.
DANIEL MCLAREN: However, what is really cool about what we’ve done is we’ve tried to balance the gear versus the skill. So I fully expect somebody to be completely naked running through doing the maximum danger level.
KELLY LOMBARDI: You always have to plan for that.
– The underwear.
– 100% like beating the hardest thing. And it’s taking four hours, because they can only do like one damage.
– And so the reward for completing the trial and getting into a higher difficulty level is more XP, better gear, all of that jazz, and explore the world map, more better stuffs? Yeah.
– So right now, we’re loading back into the mission. McLaren had happened to be on the tower at the time. He got a message that popped up to accept. He could decline. And off we go.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: And so we’re seeing the two of you play together. But you can play up to four?
TRISHA STOUFFER: Up to four, yes.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: And does the difficulty balance based on that?
DANIEL MCLAREN: Yeah.
TRISHA STOUFFER: It does.
DANIEL MCLAREN: Scales based on number of players, the difficulty that you set. Yeah. And then of course, we will be tuning and balancing the game quite a bit over the– oh, I wasn’t even paying–
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Question, Trisha. So you switched over from the gauntlets to the double daggers. I see you now have a different, sort of, meter. It looks like a segmented three yellow ones.
TRISHA STOUFFER: Yes.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: So tell us about that.
TRISHA STOUFFER: For this particular weapon, you get a special move with that. And it’s where you can teleport to where the dagger is thrown.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Oh, nice.
TRISHA STOUFFER: Yes.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: All right. That’s going to be–
TRISHA STOUFFER: –want to be watching–
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: I’m calling it.
TRISHA STOUFFER: Yeah, it’s awesome. You’re like, let me get over there really quick. Take care of that enemy. That’s one.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: And that regenerates. But you also do have the blue skill as well that builds.
TRISHA STOUFFER: Yes, I can show you what that is. Let me get a good spot. And–
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Yeah a little bit.
TRISHA STOUFFER: –dashing–
KELLY LOMBARDI: I love that. But I also love the giant war club, just–
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Yeah, just–
KELLY LOMBARDI: Yeah, just go–
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: –smash.
TRISHA STOUFFER: They are both– I mean, they all serve their purpose. And they’re all super fun. And it’s one of those things where we think people are going to be like, all right, I’m getting pretty good. I’m good at this. Let me go try the next. And can I play this level with dual daggers? Is it better? The one thing you mentioned aspects earlier. And so these are– we put them on your weapon and gear. There are– we’ve only been in grasslands. We should go into another biome. But different biomes might have different types of enemies that hurt you in different ways.
So you can have an aspect that might help you in those certain biomes or help you do different damage to the enemies. I think I have an aspect on right now that after six hits, it applies poison to the enemies, even though I’m not poisonous myself. So there’s things like that that you’ll– there will be some strategy. I talk about– it’s not a strategy game. But I do think there is strategy between how you load out for different biomes, different enemies, bosses, whatever they might be, but also how you take care of– what order do you take care of the enemies?
If you watch, you’ll see the different tiers. We start with claw gobbos and bomb. These are tail whippers. You can see there with the yellow toe. That’s the warning that they’re about to come at you. We got the shields who are mostly on the defensive. But there’s spear gobbos. And when they come through, you better take care of them, because they’re going to get you. The bomb gobbos, a lot of people have fun just seeing if they can get them to blow up their little buddies instead of us. It’s really fun to bait them. And they’ll throw a bomb. And then you get out of the way. And then earlier we played. And you might have seen a tent. And that’s where–
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: That was re-spawning enemies.
TRISHA STOUFFER: Yeah. So you want to take care of that, because you can’t just sit there. And you might say, I’ll just farm some enemies here. But that’s not really how it works.
DANIEL MCLAREN: Now we have diminishing returns. So you can’t just exploit the enemy spawners as long as you want. You are incentivized to kill them before they overwhelm you and kill you.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Yeah, yeah.
DANIEL MCLAREN: And I’m just going to stand there and let them stab me in the back because why not? That’s–
TRISHA STOUFFER: Yeah, those are the spear gobbos. And they will stab you. But they will also come charging at you, and–
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: That was a good move there.
DANIEL MCLAREN: Yeah
TRISHA STOUFFER: Yeah, that’s the spinning–
DANIEL MCLAREN: Clean them out.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: So we’re seeing a lot of the offensive attacks. Is there any sort of defensive things, like either parries, or specific dodges, or anything like that?
DANIEL MCLAREN: So you have all of the dodging ability. And then if you equip sword and shield, you actually parry. And there’s an ability where you can activate perfect parry to stun an enemy and roll them up. So that’s pretty great. Yeah, it’s pretty cool.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: –daggers or sword and board. I don’t know.
DANIEL MCLAREN: –the best part. Swim board actually has a really great shield dash that’s super awesome. You just clear out stuff. And they have a decent, kind of, spin attack. But really, if you want to spin and win, you go war club. That’s what you do.
TRISHA STOUFFER: I like being rewarded for actually using my shield because I tend to just attack first, ask questions later. So when there’s a reward for actually shielding I’m a big fun.
DANIEL MCLAREN: It is a challenge.
TRISHA STOUFFER: I died.
DANIEL MCLAREN: Sorry. I don’t know what to tell you. And I took that bomb to the face.
TRISHA STOUFFER: Yes. So you saw me die. And a few seconds later, I come back to life. And I can do that three times. Well, I can do it twice. And on the third time, I am downed. And I need whoever I’m playing with to come and help me and revive me. And the first time you get revived, it’s pretty quick. But if you keep–
[LAUGHTER]
–but if you keep going down, it takes a little bit longer each time for you to be revived. So you have to be careful, like lead the enemies away from them so you can get over there and have enough time to revive, because you are vulnerable when you’re reviving someone. So you have to be careful, so–
DANIEL MCLAREN: Play again?
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: –you can–
TRISHA STOUFFER: We got the end of mission screen that will show all of our– well, show my cool loot. And then we can compare scores–
DANIEL MCLAREN: 100%.
TRISHA STOUFFER: –which I don’t expect to have done a lot of damage. I was on the daggers, but–
DANIEL MCLAREN: I mean, I too am fond of excuses on why I can’t carry my weight. Finally I got a war club upgrade. All right, cool.
– So what is the loop? Like, do you typically, after finishing a mission, go back to the tower and do stuff? Or do you just frequently jump right into the next level?
– I mean, it’s up to you. The best part about this is it’s structured in a way where as long as you’re not in a mission– so one of our focus points here was we didn’t want players stopping the flow of a mission. Because it is cooperative in a lot of ways, the last thing you want is trying to kill that boss and somebody opening their inventory. What do I want to put on (MUMBLES). And you just don’t want that at all. You’re like, just stay focused, dude. So once you get out, you can open up your inventory from the world map. You can go back to the tower if you’d like. And you can look at all the loot you’ve got. You can make decisions on what you want to equip. You can dismantle stuff for spirit dust. It is the beginning of an upgrade system that we are working on that will come over the next year.
So one of the things that happens in an RPG is because it is a loot-centric grind, and find sort of a mentality, games over the years have introduced relief systems. So you have Diablo III. And you have things like the Enchanting system. You have Kanai’s Cube. You go into Path of Exile. And you just have a crazy deep crafting system in there. And they try to introduce deterministic behaviors. And so what we’ve done just to set the baseline is you’ve found some gear. And sometimes it can take a while to find that next upgrade, which can be frustrating. So what we’ve said is, well, look, certain gear can be leveled up a certain number of times and just raised up a whole tier level, so that you can keep playing. And you’re not just stopped and grinding something that’s way below you because you just can’t get the piece that you need.
So you can dismantle the stuff that you find. You can just do a very simple upgrade or enhancement to raise it up a tier. And then over the coming year, we’re going to introduce a more advanced system that will allow for more deterministic behavior, choosing stats that you want to find, modifying things. There’s a lot of stuff we want to do there. So from anywhere, you can just open up your– you just open up your inventory. I’m doing it as if my screen is showing over here, which it is not.
TRISHA STOUFFER: What are you trying to–
– I was just going to show what you’re doing right there, which is go through your inventory, see what you like and make changes, so–
– Yes.
– Yes, it’s awesome. One of the things I do want to touch base on, which I can’t believe we haven’t yet, is just the art style. Like just like some of the textures, the detail, and even when you’re fighting, the outline of your character, there’s just so much there. Can you tell me a little bit about what inspired you guys, or what some of your favorite parts of the art style is?
– Yeah, this was originally thought of as a Ghibli-inspired game. And so anime, Ghibli, that was kind of– again, when we talked about this way earlier, the concept of sitting with your family, having a more family-friendly game, getting away from that depression simulator. We wanted something bright and colorful, something that was fun to look at, and something that was fun to play. And the anime-esque style fits so well for us. And so we’ve pursued that over the years. They’ve continued to evolve it.
Our art team is brilliant. They are fantastic. It’s led by Pedro. And he’s just freaking amazing. He’s done an incredible job directing the art style of this game. And it’s gone through many revisions. And then every time we change the lighting, it’s got to go through. But they’ve just managed to make it just look so inviting.
– Yeah, it feels hopeful.
– It does. It is very hopeful. Yeah.
TRISHA STOUFFER: One of the things, you asked about inspiration, one of the things we really wanted was that it should feel like you’re watching an animated movie when you watch the game. And I really do think it is a fun game to watch.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: So many things are animated. Like, I just I love looking at the backgrounds. And everything is moving. The leaves are moving on the ivy. The trees are moving. The fans are moving. There’s a waterfall. All these sort of NPCs are doing their own thing. At one point, yeah, we saw these two kids sort of playing with each other here.
TRISHA STOUFFER: One is playing by the fire, which, you know–
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Yeah, it’s– kids love it. Kids love a good open flame.
KELLY LOMBARDI: –how blaze.
DANIEL MCLAREN: I don’t think he’s playing. I think he’s on– I think he’s on the clock. Yeah, he’s on the clock. Yeah, he’s–
TRISHA STOUFFER: Yeah. And you’ll see things here that are part of the story that you’ll see they’ve brought back to the tower to remind them of things that have happened. And that’s one of the things that’s good to remind people or tell people about. This is not a Banner Saga story. Like Banner Saga was a very rich story-driven game, narrative-driven game. This has lore. It has deep lore. It has story in it. It has quests that you’ll take on. But if you’re expecting to have that same sort of story interaction that you did with Banner Saga, that’s not what you’re going to find.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: This is action first, right?
DANIEL MCLAREN: Yes.
TRISHA STOUFFER: Absolutely, right. And you can see here I’ve got Courage is one of the NPCs, also an Umbra of mature Umbra. It’s got something else for me to go take on. And so that’s how you’ll continue to learn more about what’s happened here in this world, and with these people and what’s going on here, and why are we all here? Why are we on this tower?
KELLY LOMBARDI: What does it all mean?
TRISHA STOUFFER: Why do I keep going out and risking myself to– why am I protecting these people?
– All right. You showed us so much. So Trisha and McLaren, thank you so much for just bringing this demo with you. When do we get to experience Towerborne?
– Towerborne will be available early access on September 10 on Steam.
– After that, what can players expect?
– Yes, in 2025 will be coming to Game Preview and Game Pass.
– All right. One more time, Trisha and McLaren from Stoic studio, thank you so much for being here today. And Kelly, thanks as always, for joining us here on the show. We love to do these deep dives. If you want to see us do another deep dive in the future, let us know what you’d like us to do. In the meantime, thanks so much for watching or listening. And we’ll see you next week.
