Hyper Light Breakeris gearing up for a massive update entitled ‘Buried Below’ that’s bringing sweeping changes to gameplay and onboarding while introducing plenty of fresh new content. An all-new Breaker, Rondo, will be debuting with this update, and players will also face a new Crown—one ofHyper Light Breaker’s capstone bosses—who goes by the foreboding name of Maw. The update adds new tutorial elements, weapons, points of interest, and completely changes the overall roguelike run structure of the game in line with sentiments from player feedback.
In an exclusive interview with Game Rant,Hyper Light Breakerlead producer Michael Clarkrevealed everything that’s coming with this milestone update. He weighed in on the team’s thought process behind some of its most substantial changes, the key characteristics of the new Breaker and Crown, and some of Heart Machine’s priorities for upcoming Early Access developments.This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
The Biggest Changes Coming to Hyper Light Breaker
Q: What would you say are some of the most impactful changes arriving with this update?
Clark:This update is built around two major changes - eliminating the vault (where gear can be saved between runs) andeliminating multiple lives. We’ve rebalanced the game around these changes, and the majority of the features and changes in this update support this major shift.
Additionally, we’ve taken a lot of player feedback to heart around our Breakers not feeling unique enough, and we’ve changed how Breakers work in pretty radical ways.
Q: This update is heavily inspired by player feedback. Can you talk about some feedback that was particularly influential for the team?
Clark:The most influential feedback we’ve received is from players who opted into our experimental beta in February, where we put out a very rough, unbalanced prototype of thenew run structure. Even though this was fast and dirty, folks took to it and shared a tremendous amount of feedback. It validated our hypothesis, if you will - it made us very confident in radically changing the game with the Buried Below update.
Players also repeatedly called out that our Breakers did not feel unique enough - differences between them were too nuanced and subtle to be the important choice they wanted it to be.
Q: Although there have been many changes based on player feedback, are there things that either players or the development team have found should remain the same?
Clark:When players saw us adding Fog of War in the March update patch notes, we had a number of folks push back on it and share their skepticism. Those same folks came back after playing and realized it felt better, and it better captured the sense of exploring new worlds.
We’re a feedback-heavy studio, and we look at it like this - feedback is data. The more feedback we have, the more information we can put in front of the folks who are making decisions. However, it is the role of those decision-makers, the designers, leads, etc., to take that feedback, curate it, and craft a plan of action that is best for the game.
That isn’t a democracy, and we don’t look to appease all of the people who are providing feedback - oftentimes, feedback is contradictory between individuals, which makes appeasing both either impossible or diluted to the point of uselessness. But reading between the lines and finding a solution that is right for the game is not the role of the community, but rather the creator listening to their feedback.
Q: A new boss is arriving. What was your approach to its design? How does it differ from other bosses players have faced?
Clark:Maw isunlike our other Crowns- I think she herself is larger than the entire church arena that Dro’s fight takes place in. Our other Crowns tower over the player, but are still just characters moving through an arena - Maw doesn’t move around the arena - she towers over it and reaches in to attack the player.
Q: Can you talk about the new Glaive and Saber weapons? What playstyles do they emphasize, and what are some possible builds involving them?
Clark:The Gloom Shiv (Skill Glaive) is a bladed polearm that is great for crowd control with its sweeping attacks, deals extra damage and stagger damage when performing a Flash Step, and its blade special allows you to charge into groups of enemies to rack up quick, powerful multi-hits.
The Dreamblade (Balanced Saber) will look familiar - the Swordmaster Assassin that showed up in our March update wields it. Charge it up to unleash multi-hit attacks, and pop your blade special to slice every enemy in range.
In the Buried Below update, Breakers can no longeruse every weapon in the arsenal– if you want to play with both of these new weapons, the new Breaker, Rondo, can use both, and the Gloom Shiv’s flash step ability synergizes well with Rondo’s Bladedancer SyCom Perk, which further boosts your flash step.
Q: There’s been a major revamp to the overall run structure. Can you describe how runs have changed, and your reasoning behind the revamp?
Clark:Very simply, we changed up our old Cycle structure (multiple lives per Cycle, gear is vaulted and stored between Cycles) into a more classical roguelite loop - one life, lose all of your gear on death.
That change does two things:
First, it allows us to balance each Cycle/run in a vacuum. Now, each run has a more consistent zero-to-hero feel. Previously, with gear persistence across runs, the game was both too brutal early on and too easy once you had amassed a dragon’s hoard of half-used, hyper-rare items.
Second, it changes everything: It increases the value of your life, which makes you play differently. It heightens the risk/reward interplay - the “should I press my luck further?” mentality.
With all of that in mind, we had to change a lot of other elements of runs to lean into that and amp it up further - we streamlined extraction, removed the danger meter and radiation meteors which controlled much of the pacing of each run within a Cycle, have added per-run leveling systems,changed the way SyComs work, and have more or less changed up every part of the game in some way.
It’s a big change, and it’s a good one. We rolled out an experimental prototype for players back in February and received a lot of great feedback on it, and we are very happy with where the game is now.
Q: Players will no longer be fending off waves of enemies during extraction. What was your reasoning for letting go of that mechanic?
Clark:We didn’t deep-six it entirely - you’ll use the old extraction pads after defeating all three Crowns in a Cycle.Games are a series of meaningful choices. “Should I extract now, or press my luck further?” is the core decision players should be making continuously throughout a cycle.
What we found was that by gatekeeping extraction in this fashion, we removed that choice - extraction required enough of a commitment to make it through the gatekeepers that folks didn’t really choose to press their luck.
With the new system, you may extract at any time from a shrine, but you’ll lose your accumulated bright blood. You also level up at the Shrine - using that bright blood. Consistently, this presents a choice to players: do I extract and waste whatever bright blood I have left over, or do I try to push and collect enough BB to level up one more time before I extract?
We find that because extraction is so straightforward and less risky, it is much easier to step away from the shrine and go “hey, I’m one-tap, but I only need to kill one group of enemies to get a whole level” - and that always feels exciting.
Hyper Light Breaker’s New Character
Q: A new tutorial is coming with the update. How do you strike a balance between instruction and discovery? Are there certain things you’d still like for players to find out on their own?
Clark:We want to teach our players the rules, not the strategies. You can’t improve how you play if you don’t know the rules. Someone else would make a sportsball analogy here, but I’d fumble it, so instead let’s try this - you need to know the difference between a full house and a straight before you canget good at Balatro. We want to teach you how to parry and dodge, so that you can figure out that you’d better perfect parry Dro’s leap attack unless you want to die again.
Q: A new playable character is arriving. Can you talk about their capabilities and potential playstyles? Is its design also based on player feedback?
Clark:Rondo,the newest Breaker, has two SyCom perks, each one buffs one of your core combat maneuvers. The Reaper perk causes nearby enemies to bleed whenever you land a perfect parry, and the Bladedancer marks enemies for increased damage when you hit them with a Flash Step. We have a mix of paper and prototype designs for all of our remaining Breakers. Breakers are meant to spearhead playstyles, so they’re not something that we would leave for a reactive approach to design.
Q: Hyper Light Breaker is shifting toward a more class-oriented approach to characters. What have been the benefits you’ve seen from moving to this approach?
Clark:The most immediate impact is that it streamlines things. Each Breaker now has a subset of weapons available to them, which makes it easier to evaluate gear against both your current equipment and the available pool, and gives you clearer directions for crafting builds. This can sound paradoxical - fewer options might imply fewer meaningful choices, right? Except that’s not how we really work as humans. When we’re faced with too many options to evaluate in a short window, we stop evaluating them, instead inventing abstracts to reduce it back down to a manageable number of choices.
But narrow those options, and suddenly we stop abstracting and start comparing all the details. We start making meaningful choices. Imagine this - if we walked into a fully stocked grocery store and I asked, “What do you want to eat for dinner tonight?” you’re going to have too many choices. You’re not even going to go down the aisles to see what is available. But if I ask you if you want a supreme pizza or a BLT for dinner, you’re immediately, almost unconsciously considering each ingredient, the whole, and how both fit into your plans for the evening.
Q: Looking ahead, can you talk about the Hyper Light Breaker team’s focus after this update? What areas of the game are most important for you to work on?
Clark:The next step for us is going to be onenriching the open world, making it more meaningful and rewarding to explore, and increasing the number of things that are available to do in the world. We’re also looking to improve multiplayer support, adding more ways to coordinate with your allies.
You can expect to see all of that, plus a new Crown or two, in our Summer quarterly update. As we get closer to v1.0 (The Buried Below update moves us up to version 0.6), then we’ll start working on end-game progression, difficulty systems, etc. And as always, players can expect to see new Weapons, Breakers, Holobytes, Enemies, and more every month as we will continue to release monthly updates and quarterly major updates until we get to v1.0.
Q: What are you most interested in hearing feedback on with this update?
Clark:We changed a lot. We still have a long way to go to v1.0, but what has us most excited right now is hearing how players feel about these changes - Are they enjoying the shift? Did it all move in the right direction? Is there something they want us to double down on?
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