Hyper Light Breaker Creator On Sequel’s Genre-Breaking Possibilities: Why Not Hyper Light Racer?
After getting a hands-off look at some early gameplay from upcoming Hyper Light Drifter sequel, Hyper Light Breaker, it’s clear that the follow-up is both thematically very Hyper Light while also functionally a significant departure from the first game. While Hyper Light Drifter was a single-player (at launch), top-down action-adventure, Hyper Light Breaker is a multiplayer-focused, 3D, roguelike action game.
Why change genre so dramatically for a follow-up when fans were, presumably, expecting more of the same? Creator Alx Preston doesn’t have that deep a reason: Hyper Light Breaker is simply the game the team wanted to make, and that he specifically wanted to make “for quite a long time” after Drifter’s release. So he’s not too fussed about how people feel about the changes – in fact, he might do a similar departure for another Hyper Light game in the future.
“People will like it or not like it, and that’s up to them,” Preston says. “We’re just making a game that we want to make, and I feel like the Hyper Light world has room to have a lot of different things in it as far as game styles go. Why not a Hyper Light racing game? It’s a robust world, and it can maintain many different identities as far as gameplay goes so I don’t think there are any limits to it.”
That said, Hyper Light Breaker is still very clearly tied to Hyper Light Drifter. We talked about some of the similarities in our hands-off first gameplay preview, but Preston adds that Hyper Light Breaker takes place in a “not too distant” time frame in the same world. It has story threads that tie into Drifter as well as recognizable elements such as tech, language, and symbology. And he says they’ve plotted its place in the Hyper Light timeline “very carefully.”
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