Deep(er) Dive Into Towerborne | Official Xbox Podcast

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Games in this podcast range from E to M. Hey everybody, welcome to the official Xbox Podcast. This is the only podcast coming to you from Inside Xbox, that I'm aware of. Joining us today is my online partner in crime, Kelly Lombardi. How have you been?

KELLY LOMBARDI: Hi, I'm good, how are you?

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Also my Co-Op partner.

KELLY LOMBARDI: Yes.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: We've been playing a lot of Towerborne.

KELLY LOMBARDI: Yeah.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: And I'm really glad that we get to sit down and speak with the people who make the game. So welcome back, actually return visitors, Trisha, Daniel McLaren. We'll just call you McLaren, it's good to have you back.

TRISHA STOUFFER: Great to be back.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Yeah.

TRISHA STOUFFER: Thanks for having us.

KELLY LOMBARDI: Yeah. So it's been a little while since we've had you here so, Trisha, as CEO and President of Stoic, which is such a cool title, how are you guys feeling on the eve of launch?

TRISHA STOUFFER: Yeah, the teams doing well. We've been through certification, which is always a big hurdle to overcome and we're doing well there.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: And you've done it!

TRISHA STOUFFER: We've done it! Yeah, we are like in the can, we're ready to go. And you know, March was a bit stressful for us to get us there and we're very excited and now all we want is to get there. We just want the 29th to be here, because we're so excited to share Towerborne with the Xbox fans.

KELLY LOMBARDI: That's amazing. And McLaren, as Game Director for Towerborne, I imagine the last seven, eight months have been pretty chill for you, just hanging out.

DANIEL MCLAREN: Yeah, they just feed me grapes and I'm like, "Make the thing better."

KELLY LOMBARDI: Uh-huh, yeah.

DANIEL MCLAREN: No, it's been pretty crazy the amount of hours that the whole team has been putting in. The amount of work that was left. I think Trisha and I were talking about this and I was saying, this release is kind of a major turning point for us because up to this point, it's everything we had to do to make the game good and polished, to take in all of the feedback that we were getting from the players and there's nothing that we could really reduce or change or cut. It was like, this is what has to be there for this release for Xbox, for game preview, for all these just tons of people that are going to come in and so, you have no choice. You have to do these things to that game to reach that high water mark. So now the cool thing is that, you can start focusing on like, alright, what's this really cool idea you want to do? And it's kind of nice to have that shift and I think the team is going to appreciate that.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Let's get into this, because last time we spoke it was during Gamescom of last year somehow. The game was about to enter early access in Steam and you were talking, I remember, about how you wanted to build the game alongside people who were invested and wanted to give feedback. It's been awhile that the game has been available that way. Now, it's coming to Game Pass as you said, it's coming to Xbox Consoles, it's coming to PC Game Pass as well. You always do a great job listening to your players. What I always love to hear whenever there's a beta or there's some sort of early access thing is like, what is that going to mean? What have you changed and where are all the things that these Xbox Game Pass and console, who are sitting back there going, "When do I get to play this?" What do they get to benefit from the work that you've put in? So, we can dive into a lot of stuff, but I can say Kelly and I were playing last week and it was one of those things where every time I go see my mom she's like, "Are you getting taller?" I'm like, "No mom, you're getting shorter." But because it's been months it's like, whoa, the difference is really pronounced and I was like, "Are the graphics different? Does this feel different? I feel like it feels different?" And it feels like it's a lot of different stuff. So where do you all want to start?

TRISHA STOUFFER: I mean, it's all of the above, all of those things. I will say, we've had an amazing group of founders and early access that have helped us to much and we really pride ourselves in being able to take in the feedback that they gave us. I tell people very often that I started with zero friends on Steam, I literally only played solo games and now I have like 120 and that was simply by going into our Discord community and being like, "Who wants to play today?" and play directly with them and they've been great. We have a whole feedback channel and they've given us, I mean like, detailed feedback beyond what you would ever expect and so that's been amazing. And really, we want to build this game alongside players and so yeah, where do we start? It's everything.

DANIEL MCLAREN: I mean, there's so much. I think the big thing that we were pursuing from the start was, does this feel good and is this what you want? And a lot of the feedback was very much in the framework of, "Man, this combats really good, but..." And so we just kind of took all of those things and started going down the list. There were a handful of things that we knew needed to exist just to complete the game. We knew that the progression that existed was too shallow. Really you just kind of got a level and then you gained a little bit of health and a little bit of defense and that was it. So we completely introduced a new progression system for everybody. We knew that the way that we had laid the map out and the content that was on the map, was a nice starting point, but didn't have a lot of purpose. And so we just kind of went through all of the feedback. "Hey, I want to see a little more narrative. I wish things were more purposeful on the map. I wish I had better progression. I wish it was balanced like this. I wish it was this." We just tried to take as many of those pieces as we could to give the player a more robust, holistic experience. So I think you're going to see a ton of that, we'll see a new progression system coming, which is huge. But now we've set ourselves up to this point where everything we do going forward is now going to be additive to the game. How do you make the game bigger? How do you make it deeper? How do you make it more engaging?

TRISHA STOUFFER: And I think one of the big things for us as well, like I said, now I have this large group of friends that I've played with, but one of the things we absolutely had to deal with was, it's a multiplayer game and we weren't great at doing multiplayer yet. And so that has been totally revamped and now it's quick and easy. You basically walk up to someone and hit a button and --

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: We did that!

KELLY LOMBARDI: Yeah, I think Jeff was asking me, he was like, "Okay, so how do we party? Oh, we're in a party!" He didn't even finish his thought, because I was just like, boop.

DANIEL MCLAREN: The fact that you said that, it just brings such a deep joy to my heart because for so long, we wouldn't even into play test and the first 15 minutes of play test was just trying to get groups together and it's one of the biggest issues we've heard from the community. But that was a big, big investment and we actually moved a lot of stuff around to make that from a logistical point of view, happen, and it's been hands down probably one of the best things we've ever done.

KELLY LOMBARDI: I think as we were playing, that was one of the things that I mentioned to Jeff. It went from being a game where you can imagine how great it's going to be, to just being a great game.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Right.

KELLY LOMBARDI: Like everything just kind of fell into place. Where before it was like, "Oh, the combat feels really great, but if it were like this." And now when you play it there were no "buts". It's was just like, we got into the tower, we partied up, we knew exactly where we were going to go. I got to make my character customized and then even there was a point where I was like, "Oh, I look like a nerd with this helmet on. I spent all this time with my hair, what do I do?" And a prompt came up saying, "You can hide your helmet by doing..." and I was just like, "They thought of everything!"

DANIEL MCLAREN: It's those little things. I think what's really cool is to see the response of the players, it's very consistent. "Oh, I really love playing this game!" But again, it's always the "but" and then "if I could have all of this stuff". So there's this excitement to put all of these things out there, to let the players group up. I think there's this kind of sentiment as well like, if I'm forced to play solo, the game feels this way. Like, it's fun, but it's eh. But as soon as you're able to be in a group, people's complaints kind of shift very dramatically, then they have a lot more positive things to say about it. And so being able to move the needle from, "Yeah, it's primarily a solo game and if you really put in a lot of effort you can group with people" to "Great, it's very easy to just group with people and play." That sentiment changes as well.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: So you're in this social area, like pretty much from the start. The Belfry, are we still calling it?

TRISHA STOUFFER: Yes.

DANIEL MCLAREN: Yeah.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Great. And you can just go up to someone and you just hit a button, right?

DANIEL MCLAREN: It's a prompt. You'll see the marker over their head and you just hit the prompt and it's like, "Hey, you want to be friend with them?"

TRISHA STOUFFER: You want the hang out?

DANIEL MCLAREN: You want to innovate them to a group? Yeah, you want to be a buddy and hang out me? Please, I'm alone. Yeah, yeah.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: And then one of the people goes to the map and then wants to initiate it and then everyone sees it.

DANIEL MCLAREN: Right.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: And you can be in or out at that point.

TRISHA STOUFFER: Yep.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: So if you accidently buddy up. But if someone sees it you might end up just going on an adventure.

DANIEL MCLAREN: And then we put a group finder in the game, so that people can actually more purposefully group up. So "Hey, I just want to farm a boss. That's all I want to do. I just want to grind, I'm looking for gear." You can go and just get into a group. And we took a lot of examples from other games, we're kind of looking at how they engaged and we tried to pull the best of it. And we'll still continue to add improvements to it. I think the idea is that, look if you want to play Towerborne solo, Gods speed. Have fun. But really the game, it's a brawler, it's a beat-em-up, it's a four player Co-Op game at its heart and we want to make sure that that is fully represented and easy to engage with.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: One of the things we were discovering, so I ended up using for a little while, everyone sort of starts off with this sword and board, the Sentinel class. Which by the way I do love how the Parry feels, it feels very nice. But then I moved over into trying out the Rockbreaker class, the mega gauntlets. You know, punch everything sort of class. And there's a move where you hold down RB, the right bumper, and it charges up this thing. And you got it charged, then you hit it again and you just send everyone flying, which is just -- it feels so great. But then we were like, "Wait, what if I punch this person to you?"

KELLY LOMBARDI: And then I hit them back!

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: You him them back.

KELLY LOMBARDI: Yeah.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: And just the fun you can have Co-op, it's just emergent I guess in a way that you just don't get by yourself.

KELLY LOMBARDI: Yeah, the camaraderie of arriving each other too. At one point Jeff was like, "Where are you?" I was like, "I'm down over here." (laughter) I was like, "Can you come pick me up?" [ Laughter ]

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: As part of that, you've changed how healing works, right? Before you died, you respawn, you had a certain amount of lives. It kind of felt like an old school brawler, like a TMNT, and it was like, "Oh, I've got three lives and then I'm done" or whatever.

DANIEL MCLAREN: There were a couple of fundamental systemic changes that we made. One of them is the class skill system which we'll talk about I think a little later. But the other was the healing flasks. We call them Mender's Flasks. And so, we had a lot of conversations around this. Even way, way back in the beginning. It was like, "Should we have health globe, should we have health potions? Like, what should we do here?" And there were a lot of conflicting opinions so we just went with the standard, you know, you die, you res. You a certain number and then players have to resurrect you and that will take more time every time you have to resurrect. But it just didn't feel good, that's the best way to describe it. And so we talked about a health system and Isaac and his team quickly prototyped a healing system and put it in the game and we started playing it and we're like, "Dang, this is good. We need to do this." And so, that's where that came about. Now when I play on the live servers, I'm like, "This is dumb". I keep trying to heal and then I die and I'm like "Ahhh!". And so it just makes such a difference. And then we're able to take that system, expand that out in the class system which we'll talk about a little bit later.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Let's talk about it now.

KELLY LOMBARDI: Yeah.

DANIEL MCLAREN: So that was the other major thing that we did was implement progression into the game where now you get skill point on level up. You can now pick the abilities that you want to use as opposed to waiting for a weapon to come into play. And you're like, "Well I want to be Spin-to-Win, but I can't do it because I'm a (inaudible)". Just level up and then spin the point in there. We've added in support skills, we've added in a depth of combat. In fact, when I was setting up the builds for GDC, so that everybody could play and test it, I actually had to go through and purposefully select simpler setups, because now what the combat team has done, is they've put in these deeper combo moves and things that can connect each other and you're like, "Oh, I want to have ability to recover in air and then dash and then do a combo in the air that I couldn't do before." And you're just like, "Whoa, there's a whole cognitive load that is built for that high-skill player who wants to master that." I need to kind of set this up so that it's, you know, people who are just picking it up for the first time can feel like, "Oh, this isn't overwhelming to me." So now you can pick skills that allow you to consume a flask and resurrect when you die.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Like automatically?

DANIEL MCLAREN: Yeah, like automatically so now you don't have to wait for people. But if you're out of flask, then you need somebody to resurrect you, you can increase the number of flasks. You can actually have support skills now like, "Hey, I heal and the people around me get healed." So we've tried to add a lot of options. The wonderful thing is, we've set it up so that we can just continue to add new skills to that Tree overtime, so that there are more options for people to engage with. So, those two things just expand the depth of the play dramatically.

TRISHA STOUFFER: I think playing the game right now in early access, you have a whole inventory system that you have to deal with. When I'm playing I'll just -- anything that's below the level that I'm already, I'll just dismantle it. Because why? I don't even care if it's my favorite skill on it or whatever. But now the level of individuality that you can have on it, you can have somebody with the same load out, same weapon and gear and all of that, and yet they have gone through the Tree and picked something so distinctly different, I think it's just going to be super fun. And I will say I was caught off guard when I first played with the new Mender's Flask because I'm running around. I've never, you know, I'm pretty good at this game by now and I've never had to worry about dying and then all of a sudden I died and I'm like, "What do you meant defeat?" [ Laughter ]

KELLY LOMBARDI: What is this?

TRISHA STOUFFER: I get two more lives?

DANIEL MCLAREN: I got a very nasty Slack last night.

TRISHA STOUFFER: I went in there pretty quickly and found how do I change this? But I think that's a reflection of responding to feedback. People were like, "I want to do this thing, but it's either the luck of an RNG or you know?"

DANIEL MCLAREN: Yeah.

TRISHA STOUFFER: I want to be more empowered when I'm playing and I want to play the way I want to and I think that's cool.

DANIEL MCLAREN: It's always been a big focus of ours too is that, especially over the next year, it's the continued focus of, "How do we provide randomness in a good way that feels good?" Like, "Oh, I got a reward, I was looking for that." And then continue to add more deterministic, what I call like, relief valves, right? Nobody wants to be caught in a lottery situation where you're just like, "Well, I'm on my 500th scratcher. Cool, this is great. Still haven't won anything." How do we respect that time? How do we give people away that as they level up, they can make deterministic choices to shape the play that they want? And then we leave the random parts to the parts where it's actually fun and it actually feels good? It's like, "Oh yeah, I got the thing!" Or I didn't or, you know.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: In the loot drops.

DANIEL MCLAREN: In the loot drops, yeah. For sure.

KELLY LOMBARDI: So as a self-proclaimed loot goblin, I love that I can scoop up everything and Trisha, very similar to you, I'll just start marking anything that's a lower level than my current set up. But I do like that you're still rewarded for getting that loot when you dismantle it. Can you tell us a little bit about with you play through a level, you end up with some new gear, some new skill, a bunch of different things. Where do you go from there? Because that for me was like, "Oh, I want to play another level and see what else I can get" and then dismantle and then build upon my current set up.

DANIEL MCLAREN: Yeah, we've done a pass on all the items. We've also changed the item curve so it's not as stair-steppy as it was where you're like, "Okay, well I get to the level 30 stuff" and we've add more granularity in that, we've added more things. We've taken some stats off that we realize didn't matter to the players, that were just kind of like filler junk stats. You want to kind of have this balance when you're thinking about itemization. There is a purpose for junk in a gaming world, both from a loot perspective or from a statistic perspective. Because it does make you feel like, "Well that's not quite the thing I want. I want to keep pursuing that." But you can tip too far where it's just like, you guys are just artificially inflating the grind in a way that doesn't even feel good. So there's a lot of thought that went into that, we've removed that. We've added new legendries into the game as we well. And the purpose was, if players are able to pick their things. Like I want to play in this way, I want to use these abilities, I want to have these passives, I want to play in this particular way. Everything that's on the gear now should feed into making that thing better. So the idea was, "How do we make things additive as opposed to foundational?" We wanted all the foundational things to not be randomized because that literally says to the player, "Sorry, you can't play the way that you want until you get lucky." And I was like, "I don't want that at all." I want it to be, this is the way I want to play, so I just have to do these things and then I'm guaranteed to play the way that I want to play. And then all of this stuff that's more random is like, "Oh, that's so cool! That changes the thing. I love that." And so additive in the random, purposeful in the foundational.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: So clearly you've put a lot of work into the mechanics, into the numbers, into the systems and making sure they all play together. I know Stoic for stories, you know? I played the Banner Saga games, I think you referred to them last time I talked to you as a bit of a depression simulator. Only if you make the choices I made I think. [ Laughter ] But, when the game first loaded up as we were playing the version here that everyone is going to get to play in just a few days, there was a cut scene at the beginning and there was background. So can you tell me about the narrative and the work that you all have put in there? Because that's what we know you all from so much.

TRISHA STOUFFER: Yeah, I think we recognized pretty early on into it that we weren't grounding people into, "Why should I care?" and "Who am I?" and "Why do I exist?" and "What is that?" I remember having a conversation with our lead writer quite some time ago saying, "I play this play a lot with my husband" and I would say to him like, "Hey, do you know why we're doing this? Do you know why we're escorting people?" And he'd be like, "What? What are you thinking? What are you talking about?"

KELLY LOMBARDI: Pop quiz!

TRISHA STOUFFER: And our writer was kind of shocked, like "What?" Because when are already immersed in that story and you know it, you may not recognize that you aren't bringing it out. So we thought it was really important to start with that opening cinematic to try to ground you a little bit at least, you know, where are you? And then we built the world map that you go out to and play on and there's a lot more points of interest and people the you're going to be talking to and little bits of narrative. You need to give people a reason to care and so we've done a lot more to incorporate that in and you'll get bits and pieces from more and more NPC's and the refugees that you're helping to bring in and I think that this is just scratching the surface of what we can do there and what we want to do there and bring to the players. Because we want this to be something that players care about, that they want to come to. We always talk about Towerborne being a bit of a hobby. Spend a little time, whether it's five minutes or five hours, don't care. But we want you to be there and bring it back and I think people need that connection and we want to bring that and bring more of it.

DANIEL MCLAREN: Yeah and I think the other part of that is that, I was talking to Christopher, our Xbox Executive Producer, and he had been sharing a lot of feedback from the team of like, "Hey, there's story, but it's not super connected." And so for this Xbox release I was telling him a lot of what we've done is try to put the scaffolding in place. You're building a building, right? So we've got all the scaffolding in place and that's all the stuff of, "Hey, we can do cut scenes. Hey, we can start putting in some environmental story telling. Hey, we start putting in some improvements to the quest system and to the conversation system." And now for this release you can start to see what's happening under that scaffolding. So we really focused on reworking the world map and changing -- that was another piece of feedback. Hey, there's a lot of discover tiles on here. I feel like I'm just kind of moving to this random stuff, there's not a lot of purposeful things and they're kind of spread out. And so it's a long time until you get to something that's purposeful. And so we completely reworked the map, we pulled a lot of stuff in. I think a lot of people will be very surprised, they were seeing kind of the edge of the fog and they were like, "Oh, what's that thing right there?" That's all been brought in, so now all that stuffs accessible as well. And then we added handcrafted points of interest, so things that are tied to story. So again, that's part of that scaffolding and part of the stuff that's underneath that. And then what we're going to be focused on, kind of the directive that I've actually been giving the team is like, okay, when we don't have a major release that's like a system like, "Hey, we're working on end game" or "Hey, we're working on these other things." How are we dropping story in over this next year? Where is that going to come in? What kind of quests are we going to be adding? How are we going to be bringing all of these characters to the forefront? What is craft doing? Chris actually brought this up, he's like, "Is it important that Paloma shows up in a mission with you?" I'm like, "Yeah, it actually is." So how do we connect those things? So I think this release you'll see a huge leap forward from the live release and then as you see through the course of 2025, more and more that stories going to come through. That's actually been probably top five pieces of feedback for us. Was I would like to know more. I want to get connected to these characters.

KELLY LOMBARDI: So as the game launches into game preview, how are you going to continue collecting and addressing feedback as players kind of navigate this new beautiful build.

DANIEL MCLAREN: They have to fill it out with triplicates and mail it in. They got to mail it in.

KELLY LOMBARDI: Carrier pigeon.

DANIEL MCLAREN: Handwritten only. If you type it up I'll just reject it.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Because this isn't 1.0. This is really the next phase in Towerborne, right?

TRISHA STOUFFER: Yeah, one of the reasons we wanted to make a live game was to build the community and engage with that community. We have no interest in going, "Okay, we've got it now, you know, we're good." So joining Discord is probably one of the best ways to do it because we already have built up a community there. We've got feedback forums that have been really popular and really active and one of the things I'm most proud of is, anytime somebody has a response on there that says, "It's clear that the devs care. It's clear that they're listening to us." That's what we strive to do. So, we'll take it all in and triage it as we need to and make things better.

DANIEL MCLAREN: We felt all these differences and I think Xbox console players who maybe had a little bit of FOMO, for the past several months. Guess what? All those things are done now and you're going to get the best version of this game.

TRISHA STOUFFER: Mmm-hmm.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: And you're also going to get something that I think this game, just from a genre, was screaming out for and that is couch co-op. So talk about that experience.

DANIEL MCLAREN: That's been a journey.

TRISHA STOUFFER: Yes, it is. You know, couch co-op isn't easy. There's a reason not every game goes and does couch co-op. And it's a funny story, I got my husband a hand-held and he loved it. And then we had been doing some other things and we went back and focused on couch co-op. We brought it back in and I said, "Hey, let's go play again" and he's like, "This is the first time I've ever played the game with a controller." And I was like, "What are you talking about? We played it for like eight months straight on a controller!" And you know, it sort of left his mind and he's like, "This is great." We really enjoy having games like that where we can just both be immersed in it and enjoy it and like I said, have the fun ability of just being there and kind of egging people on or harassing them a little.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Last night I was actually, I just wanted to play a little bit more before we came in here and I was like, "Let me see how this works on my ROG Ally." And it works really great! It's a really good experience that way.

TRISHA STOUFFER: Yeah, we've always thought Towerborne is a great handheld and we're looking forward to more of that.

DANIEL MCLAREN: It's nice to be in a meeting and just go, "Oh, I'll just reach over and grab my handheld" and then I can be in a meeting talking at things that we're looking at or reviewing and I can just be playing on this screen and I can set it down and engage stuff. It's super convenient.

TRISHA STOUFFER: Well, you know, the other convenience or the great thing about it is, because we're on Xbox it's a Play Anywhere title and it's an xCloud so gosh, where do you want to play it? Feel free to do so and you know, I think that's great and opens up a lot of opportunities for people to participate in.

DANIEL MCLAREN: Yeah the initiative has been "Play anywhere" and so we've built a Stoic account system so that you can link your account and no matter what, if you're on your PC, if you're on your Xbox, you can access that. You're playing together. It's the same world, so if you link your accounts together, you can actually have access to all your stuff. Play that same character. Play with whoever you want. And you're like, "Oh, today I want to sit on the couch and sit and play on the handheld or I want to play on the Xbox on my big TV" Or I'm at my desk and I don't want to do any work, because I work from home and I'll just play, not that I do that! But h you could just play Towerborne while you work.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Can you write that down for my boss?

TRISHA STOUFFER: The linking's really important because that does give you your progression and your inventory carries with you. And to remind everyone, this is cross-platform play. Whether you link your account or not, again, you might get on, you might see people on a PC, you might see them on Xbox. We have icons to show you where they're playing and things like that. But we're just excited for this audience and this player base to continue to grow and it's pretty seamless.

DANIEL MCLAREN: I've never been a fan of segmented audiences like that. I understand it from a technical perspective and the development perspective, like why you would make those decisions. As a player I'm just like, I want to play with as many people -- if I'm playing in an online game, I want to play with as many people as possible. And the good thing is John Watson was very much the same way. He was like, "We got to get everybody together." And I was like, "You got it John, we're on it."

TRISHA STOUFFER: That's exactly how John sounds.

DANIEL MCLAREN: (inaudible) real mad, real gruff.

TRISHA STOUFFER: Ten out of 10 impression.

DANIEL MCLAREN: And you know, look, I've been working on it for a few years.

KELLY LOMBARDI: I mean, yeah, for me that is huge because as cool as couch co-op is, that's not an option for me as a lone wolf, you know? So I got to go online to meet my people.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: I feel you.

KELLY LOMBARDI: Yeah. And so, my friends play on a bunch of different platforms that friends I've met online, from playing different games on different platforms or in real life friends that were playing online together, some are you know, PC snobs, some are Xbox lovers. You know? [inaudible 00:25:13] >> In 1600 frames per second. And I'm very happy for you and I'm that way sometimes as well. I fall into all of these classes that I'm naming by the way, so no hate. But it's really great to be able to not have that barrier to say like, "Oh, I would have loved to invite this person but they're, you know, on this platform now." It can just be, "Oh yeah, we're all playing together and it doesn't matter where you're playing."

DANIEL MCLAREN: It turns out as you get older people have families and kids. One of my best friends literally has a laptop that he uses for work stuff and then when we want to play games together, he's always on the console. So now with this, he's like, "Hey, you want to play?" and I was like, "Yeah." And then I can sit down, I'm on my PC, he's sitting on his couch and then we're playing together and it's just is actually really nice.

KELLY LOMBARDI: Yeah.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Can we talk about what's next?

DANIEL MCLAREN: No, absolutely not.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: No rest for you. This comes out in just a few days on April 29th. But a game like this, you'll see exactly how quickly people run through a lot of the content that's there and they'll be like, "Cool, what's new and interesting?" and you've already got an answer for that. Golden Week is coming up, a big week in Japan and you all have something and support of that. Do you want to talk about it?

TRISHA STOUFFER: Absolutely, yeah. We are blessed to have Hiro Harada as our VP of marketing. And Hiro is very well versed in Golden Week and when he realized when we would be releasing, he was like, "What a better way to show that we strive, you know, with Towerborne to be inclusive of many cultures and you know, this is a great way for us to start off with a bang. And so, you'll meet someone on the Tower that asks for your assistance and there's a series of missions that you go and participate in and it's the first time that we've had an NPC actively participating in the mission with you. And there's a few secrets in there, you'll want to go dig into it and all that. But, it's great, it's fun, it's beautiful. Yeah, we're just really lucky that we had this moment coming together at the same time. But we'll look to do more things like that in the future. In early access we had Towe take overs with Halloween and a bit of a winter theme there in December and things like that. So, we continue to look for those opportunities and tell an interesting story, a story that maybe people wouldn't have been exposed to otherwise. And there's also another side of this that I'm actually really excited to talk about, because you don't see it a lot in PC. You see it a bit in mobile. One of the initiatives that we've given to the team is, we've set up a live team and I've given them a very clear directive of, put cool stuff out. I want the team to experiment with game play styles, with mechanics that might not make sense. Just put it out for a week, let people hammer on it and if they think it's cool, we'll pull it back, we'll schedule it into a large update. We'll make it into a feature and we'll put it into the game! And one of the things that we've been learning and I think you can kind of see it evolving as games move forward is, the players want to be engaged in your process and it's okay, as long as you communicate it to the player, right? You can't sell it as, "This is going to be this perfect polished thing" and then you put it out and it's like, "Well what's this?" But we want to kind of separate and draw this line of, hey, there are these events, like Golden Week. Where that's a big polish item, we put in a lot of effort, we planned that multiple months in advance, we built towards it. And then we will really sit, we turned it on, we turned it off, it'll come back in the future. Versus, the team having the initiative to say, "What can we do in two weeks?" And time trials is a great example of that where Isaac and the live team were like, we want to put out this mode that doesn't exist in the game, we don't totally have support for it. But like what if you could just fight a bunch of enemies then at the end get three choices of a power that you'd like to pick and then just kind of move forward? And we put it out and people loved it! And now, that's going to become something that we want to invest in over time. And now they're already thinking of other stuff and my initiative is like, "Move fast, get them out." Because you know what? If it's bad, we'll just take it out and it'll never come back. Or maybe we'll see like a little line of something where like, it didn't really land but this part was really cool. What do we want to do with that? And so that's something I think that you don't see and that we want to lean into and I think it's the best way to use the human time investment, as opposed to us having the hubris of, "Oh, well we just know everything that the players want, so we'll just build this thing." And then you put it out and nobody plays and you're like, "Well, that was a waste of time." And everybody's mad. Now players can engage with something. And the other thing that makes me really excited is like, I want the design team to feel unleashed. I want them to feel like, "I have this really cool idea" and not have to have me shoot it down like, "Well I don't think that's going to be any good." Maybe. Maybe it won't be. But can you build something small? Can you put it out? I would love to be wrong. I would love the players to go like, "That was the coolest thing ever" and I'll go, "Well, shoot. I guess I'm not as smart as I thought I was. When you're in game development, there are things that you need to get done.

DANIEL MCLAREN: Yep.

TRISHA STOUFFER: And then there's things you want to get done.

DANIEL MCLAREN: Yes.

TRISHA STOUFFER: And we're on the cusp of we get to do the things we want to, because we love them, because the players love them. Like, that's a very exciting time and we're just right there.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: And you're at a point where just like so many more people are going to be jumping in.

DANIEL MCLAREN: Yes.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Just next week. So we've talked about the roadmap, we've talked about all these different enhancements to different systems, to the visuals, to the moving of the flash, to the social system. Before we go, anything that we've left out? Anything that we need to touch on that people need to be paying attention to when they load this up on the 29th?

DANIEL MCLAREN: So they'll be at the progression wipe and the way that it'll work is, you will keep anything that you got through the Curios system. So if you unlocked a Curio and you haven't completed it, that's okay. You will still have that Curio, can complete it at your leisure. If you've unlocked cosmetics for that, your cosmetics will stay, you will not lose any of that. But had will happen is, you will be reset on all of your progress, your itemization. Because we think that this update is so foundational and so key that we need everybody to kind of go through it. So you'll go through, there will be a new first time user experience, new story elements, you'll get to level up your classes and make those choices. So all of that will be reset. So then everybody who comes in. The PC users, the Xbox users, those founders, they will all be starting together and they will be playing together and growing together through that. Then over the course of 2025, we will continue the expand the game. We're going to add more depth in the itemization system, customizing your items. We'll add an economy, not necessarily player to player trading, but an economy of like, "Oh, I need to go and find these things, I need to invest in these things, I need to use the forge and then we'll eventually culminate in more story and an end game system that we'll be focusing on over the year.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: So much to come. It all starts on Tuesday as folks on Xbox consoles and Windows PC's and of course Game Pass, join the folks that were founders on Steam. So a lot more players, there's going to be a lot to do. You have a livestream that's coming up that day, don't you?

TRISHA STOUFFER: Yes.

KELLY LOMBARDI: April 29th a big day for you guys.

TRISHA STOUFFER: It is, yeah. Why not pile more into it? [ Laughter ]

DANIEL MCLAREN: We've got nothing to do.

TRISHA STOUFFER: I may be offline for a few hours while I talk about stuff. So John Watson, whose one of our Co-founders and our CTO, he and I will be here again and we'll do a livestream and there's some cool exciting stuff wrapped around that livestream and I hope people join in and I think after that you'll see me every day streaming the game, because I do get to play the game as part of my daily work.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: One of the perks, of managing the studio.

TRISHA STOUFFER: Whose going to stop me?

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Presidents and CEO's get to play the game.

TRISHA STOUFFER: I need to be there, I need to be immersed with the players.

KELLY LOMBARDI: I think I need to join you.

TRISHA STOUFFER: Okay.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: For official work reasons sometimes. Because you need people to play with. We've got four here.

TRISHA STOUFFER: Absolutely, there we go.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Alright, Trisha, McLaren, of course Kelly, thanks so much for joining us. So watch that stream on Tuesday, maybe while you're downloading and/or playing Towerborne on April 29th! And you know, that does it for this episode, so thanks so much for joining.