One of the games coming to PC and Xbox that we think will be a huge hit, but not much talked about, is developer Stoic's upcoming Towerborne. It's often described as a Castle Crashers contender and offers co-op for up to four people as well as role-playing mechanics.
On Tuesday night we got to see a new trailer, but via Xbox Wire we have now also received lots of pictures and more information. Among other things, executive producer Kristofor Mellroth from Xbox Games Studios Publishing talks about one of the goals of the game, namely to make it so fun that we want to play it for a long time:
"We all have the same goal - to create a game that people love for a long time. From the start, we knew our approach with Towerborne was going to be a little different. By being very targeted at the start and building up to bigger audiences, this allows the team to continue iterating and honing the most complex systems to make them the most fun they can be."
Stroic's co-founder, Arnie Jorgensen, also explains why they now choose to focus on free-to-play after having previously made mainly single-player titles. It turns out that they missed the close contact they had with the community while working on the multiplayer game Banner Saga: Factions (which also was free-to-play):
"They were helping us building our combat and just making the game better in general, everyday we'd get feedback and do updates, I must have spent three hours a day just talking to the community. We really missed that aspect after going back to working on a single player game, so we're excited to bring it back."
Stoic are also clear that they don't necessarily want to make a game you spend all your time on. The idea is that you should be able to play a few minutes a week or several hours every day and still feel that it entertains and gives you something. Jorgensen says:
"You don't have to invest hundreds of hours every month to keep up with everybody else. Play as much as you want to, go away and play other games, and then come back. It's important to acknowledge that everyone plays games differently. You can play for five or ten minutes and still feel like you accomplished something great, or you can play for five hours."
You can check out all the new images below, where we've also included the Gamescom trailer. Towerborne will be released in 2025, but an Early Access beta on Steam starts on September 10 and it will also be available as Xbox Game Preview after that.