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

polygon.com:

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 Zerowere 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.”

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