After a long hiatus from our 10 Turns Interview series, we’re back with an exciting feature: an interview with 6 Eyes Studio, the talented developers who, back in 2019, released Fell Seal: Arbiter’s Mark, one of the closest modern experiences to Final Fantasy Tactics. I had the pleasure of chatting with them about their newly announced project, Pathbreakers: Roaming Blades, and several intriguing details emerged.
Hello, and thank you once again for taking the time to chat with me. It’s fantastic to see you back with a new project, bringing with it the same level of excitement that Fell Seal did.
Pathbreakers is a mercenary-sim RPG, much like titles such as Battle Brothers, Wartales, The Iron Oath, and many others. The question is: have these games inspired you, or are there other projects that are currently influencing your work?
I believe that’s an apt comparison. We’re avid gamers, so there’s a high chance we’re getting inspirations from all sorts of titles, even unknowingly at times, but if I had to narrow it down, I’d say Battle Brothers and Uncharted Waters: New Horizons and the two biggest influences for Pathbreakers. I think the easiest description of Pathbreakers is that it’s a hybrid of those two titles, with overall leaning a little more towards Battle Brothers.
Managing a mercenary company is a central element of the game. How deep does the economic and strategic decision-making go outside of combat?
A big focus of the game is managing your money. Money pays for food, salaries, equipment, healing herbs, exploration supplies, and many other things. Thus, securing a source of income and being wise about how you spend it are key components of the gameplay. To that effect, the game features many elements that are tied to generating money.
The main ones are getting mercenary contracts, getting paid for charting the world and making discoveries, and finally, old fashioned trading. Trading is one spot where the Uncharted Waters inspiration comes in. Every town sells various trading goods that can be purchased and then resold elsewhere for a profit (or a loss if you’re not careful).
There’s trading goods carrying capacity, different prices based on proximity, local terrain, city size, local products and many other factors. As complex as the trading system is, it’s still only one facet of the gameplay and, technically, an optional one at that. While it’s vital to earn some money to keep your company afloat, you could still focus solely on paid contracts, charting the island or discovering and exploring dungeons. Or you could of course do all of it. The end goal is to offer great player freedom and very high replayability.
What motivated the shift from a narrative-driven tactical RPG like Fell Seal to a procedurally generated open-world experience in Pathbreakers?
The first thing of note to mention on that front is that Pathbreakers will also have a story. Multiple ones actually. Again, the core inspiration on that front would be Uncharted Waters, which starts you with a choice of several protagonists to select from, each with a small but unique story. That is essentially our plan for Pathbreakers. That being said, you are correct that the game will not be anywhere near as story driven as Fell Seal was.
The combat in Pathbreakers will be different from Fell Seal, but should still offer an interesting and challenging tactical experience. There will still be lots of character customization options like there was in Fell Seal. As for the reasons for the shift, you could say we just wanted something a little different from Fell Seal for the next game. It’s still a somewhat far away dream at this point, but as a Studio, our goal would be to have 3 core ‘franchises’, each with a distinct style and we’d cycle in making a game of each over time.
The goal is to make sure we’re always working on something new and interesting and to reduce audience fatigue with sequels, which is something we’ve observed with many indie franchises. Lastly, we’re hoping a change of specific genre, while still remaining in the Tactical RPG sphere, will help us broaden our audience and help us get our name out there even more.
Is Pathbreakers going to be a challenging game?
I think so. I mean, balance in such a complex world is not going to be that easy, especially with lots of procedurally generated content, but the goal is for the baseline difficulty to be fairly challenging. We are planning on having different difficulty settings though, much like in Fell Seal, to help gamers tailor the experience to their own preference.
What are the biggest challenges you are currently facing, have faced, or expect to face in the development of Pathbreakers?
All in all, our development is going fairly smoothly, much like it did for Fell Seal. That being said, we had our first child at the very start of the development cycle of Pathbreakers, and that turned out to be our greatest challenge overall. I don’t think we were quite prepared for the impact our energetic little boy had on our development time! We still wouldn’t change it for the world though! Otherwise, I think our biggest challenge is probably going to be building our audience.
Between taking a break after Fell Seal and the little boy taking so much of our time, we haven’t managed to interact and stay active as much as we wanted to with our community on Discord, Social Media and the like. I think that’s something we’ll be feeling down the road as we won’t have as much ground covered already than we wanted when Release and other big announcements come around. It is something we’re going to rectify though, and it won’t be happening for subsequent projects.
You’ve included modding support in Pathbreakers. What inspired this decision, and what possibilities do you envision for the modding community?
Fell Seal also had modding support, so it felt natural to make sure Pathbreakers would have all the possibilities of Fell Seal, and then a lot more. Overall, I don’t think adding modding support to the game is too costly, as long as it is well thought out from the beginning of the project. It is always a little more complex and lengthy to prepare systems that account for modding, but it’s certainly not “too much”. We’re hoping to give players as many options and as much replayability as possible, and mods could play a good role on that front.
As for what’s possible in Pathbreakers, it handles everything that was possible with Fell Seal, like simple data files (actually, simpler than Fell Seal, as we’ve switched to JSON rather than XML) to add and edit classes, abilities, weapons, armors, stores, towns, names, etc. But,Pathbreakers has a lot more options than Fell Seal did. It has a built-in spell editor to create new spell visuals and a built-in map editor to create new “generation templates” and premade maps for procedurally generated battle, dungeon and world maps.
You can add your own sprites and sounds to the game (adding sprites is technically pretty easy, but drawing them is another matter…) and the game will have a small ‘sprite packing’ utility bundled with it to create atlases for the sprites. Most of the game’s data is bundled in a ‘scenario’ file now, so it’s easy to create self-contained mods that don’t need to change the base game (although that is still possible), which should make things easier and cleaner.
All in all, formats have been simplified, more notes and comments added and we have a tool to generate lists of “all possible values” for all the data so there are solid references. Finally, I have a JSON editor in the works tailored to the game’s data to edit all that stuff easily, although that might get released a bit after the game’s initial release.
What lessons have you learned from Fell Seal not only in terms of development but also marketing?
I don’t think there were too many epiphanies from Fell Seal in terms of development overall. I’d worked in the industry prior to Fell Seal for more than a decade, so I think we were in a good spot there.
The development was pretty smooth and nothing too grave stood out to us, although there were a number of small things we wanted to improve on, for sure, and that’s helped with Pathbreakers already. I think the marketing front is probably an area where growth was desperately needed for us. For Fell Seal, we opted to work with a Publisher, mostly because we didn’t know anything about the marketing aspect and the best way to handle that.
For Pathbreakers, we’re still not certain if we’ll want to team up with a Publisher or not, but we’re trying to operate under the idea that we won’t, to force ourselves to make a concrete plan to handle marketing, PR and social aspects. Starting next month, we’ll be getting more hands on deck to ensure we remain very active at all times with the community and to get some more PR going.
As for marketing, I’ve been quizzing many other indie devs, especially those opting not to use a publisher, about their own experiences and thoughts and we’ve now made plans on that front, where we’ll be a lot more aggressive with marketing when Release is around the corner. We’ll see how that plays out, but we’re optimistic.
Pathbreakers was announced just a few months ago, with a release date planned for 2026. Concretely, how far along are you in development?
It’s a tad difficult to gauge for us exactly, as we’re new to the procedurally generated style and this game is a sandbox, rather than linear like Fell Seal was. But I’d say that we’re nearing about 75% completion on anything that isn’t music. The music hasn’t started yet, although that’s high in our list of things to get going.
Now, that’s with respect to getting everything working, but not really factoring a heavy balancing pass. We won’t be releasing the game until we’re fully happy with the game’s balance, and Pathbreakers is a pretty complex game, so that could take a while.
What are your long-term plans for the game? Do you already have ideas for expansions or post-launch updates?
Nothing concrete honestly. Right now it’s all hands on deck with just finishing the game, so we’re not thinking about expansions. That being said, assuming the game is received well enough, it’s certainly something we’d like to consider.
What’s one thing you hope players take away after playing Pathbreakers: Roaming Blades?
Our goal in making games is to entertain, delight and provide a good time to people. If there’s a take away we’re hoping for, it’s that people feel a renewed tactical and strategic vigor after playing Pathbreakers! And hopefully an increased love for pixel art too, since that’s our jam.
The last turn-based game you have enjoyed?
If we’re not talking about a tactical turn-based, but purely turn-based, I’m currently playing Metaphor, which I think is pretty good. Right before that, I played Crystal Project, which was also pretty good.
If I had to go with a recently played game that I truly immensely enjoyed though, I’d have to go with Wizardry 8. That game is incredible. That was me replaying it though (re-re-re-re… playing it, haha).
Thank you so much for taking the time to read this. Pathbreakers is definitely a title I’ll be following with eager anticipation. In the meantime, here are the Steam—I encourage everyone to add the game to their wishlist!
