Charlie Cleveland, CEO of theSubnauticadev team, recently spoke toIGNalongside author Brandon Sanderson, to talk about their collaboration for the upcoming turn-based strategy titleMoonbreaker, and he stated that their story outline is meant to last a decade.Cleveland expressed that they’re trying to make an ongoing game that is played for ten years or more, therefore, a lot of plot points need to be set up early, in order to have them pay off way down the line. “We need to have a lot of characters, a lot of throughlines, a lot of overlap between them,” says Cleveland.RELATED:The Finals: Playtest Trailer Showcases Impressively Destructible EnvironmentsBoth Cleveland and Sanderson compared their Moonbreaker’s narrative to The Canterbury Tales, an amalgamation of intersecting stories from a large cast of viewpoint characters. These will be Moonbreaker’s Captain unit characters, which are central to the gameplay. Sanderson says it could take a year post-launch before they even hint at the game’s larger arc, but he already has the ending planned out for the far future.Moonbreaker is a strategy game visually inspired by old-school table-top RPGs, where all characters are represented in miniature figurines that move stiffly across the battlefield as though they were being picked up by hand. It was first revealed at Gamescom 2022, where they showed off some gameplay snippets, as well as a detailed painting mode that allows you to color your miniatures any way you please. As described byDualShockers' hands-on preview, the goal of Moonbreaker is to destroy the opposing captain while keeping yours alive. Subsequently, Captains are also the strongest units on the battlefield. You also get crewmates which you can deploy in a card-based system, though they cost a resource called ‘Cinder.’
Brandon Sanderson is a prolific and celebrated author known for creating the Cosmere universe. He touted how extensive his collaboration was with Unknown Worlds, the development studio. He was asked to help with an “optimistic” sci-fi world, for which he already had two pitches he’d thought up previously for his own books. From there, the collaboration was constant with weekly interactions. “I’ve read about what George [R.R. Martin] did onElden Ring,” Sanderson japed. “And it was kind of like he sent off something into the void and eventually a game came back.”
He assured fans that wasn’t the case for them. “The things Charlie was changing in the game was changing what I was building and the story and the needs of the game.” Sanderson expressed his beliefs that gameplay should always trump story in game development, and that the writing should fit the gameplay, not the other way around. “No writer says that,” joked Cleveland.
Moonbreaker comes out in Early Access via Steam on June 07, 2025. No timeframe has been given for its full release.
