Eternal Strands, the brand new recreation from Dragon Age artistic director Mike Laidlaw’s Yellow Brick Games, is ready to launch on January 28—and at the moment Laidlaw introduced {that a} week earlier than that occurs, a playable demo will likely be launched to offer curious avid gamers a style of what it is all about.
“It’s January, so I’m happy we are able to say we’ll launch a playable demo of Eternal Strands on Jan. twenty first on Steam,” Laidlaw wrote on Bluesky. “Lots of oldsters have been asking about one, and it is a recreation that advantages from ‘feeling’ it, I feel.”
That’s most likely legitimate. Eternal Strands has leaned closely into its physics-based interactions to date—”The world is your weapon” and all that—however what it is really about is tougher to pin down. Even the outline of the sport world on Steam focuses extra on how you will be doing issues than why: “Explore the wilds, the capital metropolis of Dynevron, and the secrets and techniques beneath as each floor is climbable. Magical talents can create bridges, burn obstacles, or launch Brynn internationally. The next-generation physics system encourages and rewards participant creativity in exploration as a lot as fight. As the Enclave’s secrets and techniques unfold, return to base camp to seek the advice of with a wealthy solid of characters.”
Despite that relative dearth of narrative grounding, Eternal Strands has a number of the PC Gamer crew excited based mostly solely on the potential to trigger chaos: Associate editor Ted Litchfield wrote in June 2024 that “if Eternal Strands can ship on that promise of physics-powered spellcasting, I’ll be all-in on it,” whereas workers author Harvey Randall mentioned that even when the story falls flat, “I’ll nonetheless have a blast seeing precisely how I can fashion on some dragons.”
Laidlaw did not say how a lot of the sport the Eternal Strands demo will include, however he did admit to being “nervous, excited, and intrigued” about its forthcoming launch. “It’s been such a pointy context shift for me,” he wrote. “60 individuals as an alternative of a whole lot, indie finances as an alternative of AAA, and so forth. My two large hopes: individuals have enjoyable, and I can preserve working with this group. YBG crew has been professionally rejuvenating.”
Hopefully so, however it’s been hit-or-miss for BioWare veterans putting out to do their very own factor. Former Dragon Age lead author David Gaider discovered success with the “musical RPG” Stray Gods, and James Ohlen’s Archetype Entertainment continues to be working away on Exodus. But former BioWare basic supervisor Casey Hudson closed Humanoid Origin in November 2024 with out releasing the “multi-platform AAA recreation” it was engaged on, and a pair days later former Mass Effect artistic director Mac Walters did the identical at Worlds Untold, only a 12 months after it was introduced.Â
