Former Dragon Age creative director Mike Laidlaw finally reveals his next game: A physics-based action-adventure 'in which the world becomes your weapon'

GamesActionEternal StrandsFormer Dragon Age creative director Mike Laidlaw finally reveals his next game: A physics-based action-adventure ‘in which the world becomes your weapon’When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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In 2020, former Dragon Age creative director Mike Laidlaw joined withUbisoftveterans Jeff Skalski, Frédéric St-Laurent B, and Thomas Giroux to launch a new studio calledYellow Brick Games. Today, three and a half years later, they’ve finally revealed what they’re getting up to: A new action-adventure calledEternal Strands.

The game’s big hook is a promised use of advanced physics-based systems that will enable players to use the environment and extreme weather to their advantage in combat: Chucking boulders at enemies with telekinetic powers, for instance, or using trees to block incoming fire. As a Weaver, players will also have access to powerful magic that will also interact with the game world: Ice spells will be more effective in the cold, while fire will consume dry grass and trees during heatwaves.

“Our hope with Eternal Strands is to deliver an adventure that brings a sense of fun and excitement to fantasy, while encouraging players to experiment with its systems,” Laidlaw said. “It’s a very different game to ones I’ve worked on in the past, and it’s been a delight to generally answer the question ‘what if the player does X?’ with ‘Cool!’ It’s also exciting to have a chance to build an all-new world that encourages and reacts to this kind of play.”

Visually, Eternal Strands has something of an Immortals Fenyx Rising vibe to it (although you could probably insert any number of stylized, brightly-colored fantasy games into its place if you prefer) but the interactive systems sounds more like Larian’s Divinity games and Baldur’s Gate 3: Dump some oil, set it on fire to burn enemies, then use the smoke to cover your advance. (And hope thatcatastrophe isn’t following too close behind.) Eternal Strands is clearly more action-oriented than Larian’s party-based RPGs so it’ll be very interesting to see how those systems work in the middle of a hectic, real-time fight, but I would imagine the potential for chaos is very high.

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