The World is Your Weapon in Eternal Strands

Fantasy fans take your seats — there’s a new adventure waiting in the wings about to take center stage. Eternal Strands is a single player third person fantasy action-adventure game that tells the story of Brynn, a magic-wielding Weaver who leads her weaverband back into the Enclave to uncover its mysteries. The game is set in an original universe, rich with lore, colorful personalities, and some seriously oversized foes who find themselves on the sharp end of the game’s environmentally charged interactive combat system. To learn more, Intel Gaming Access donned its magical cloak and channelled some raw energy alongside Jeff Skalski, COO and executive producer at Yellow Brick Games.

Eternal Strands is Yellow Brick Studios’ first game, and not content with an original IP and big game scope straight out of the gate, the Quebec-based team has also decided to self-publish. Sounds ambitious on paper, but with their commitment and triple-A chops, they might just pull it off. Either way, they know what they like.  “We knew from the beginning what Eternal Strands would be. We enjoy building worlds and the lore needed for them to be believable places,” explains Skalski. “We love combat and systemic play, and giving players tools to creatively overcome the challenges in front of them in unscripted ways is core to our approach.”

In Eternal Strands that approach manifests as a combat system that lets you channel raw magic into fire, ice, and telekinetic abilities and use the environment to your advantage. Burning trees can be thrown, and attacks can be blocked with ice walls — which all sounds cool until you come up against an enemy built like a house. Then it’s time to get creative. “What if the player could manipulate the temperature in ways to hold back a dragon’s breath or freeze an enemy’s limb to the ground?” suggests Skalski. “What if all the entities in the world had a weight and material properties that could be altered through interactions? Discovering those unique gameplay possibilities is the road we ventured down.”

The game’s highly creative combat is only one part of the experience, of course. “We also wanted to build a setting players would want to explore and escape to, while meeting a memorable cast of characters along the way,” Skalski says. “We have a joyful cast of characters all fully voiced in English and French. We’re so lucky to have the incredible cast who have lent their talents to these characters we love.”

The broad and deep experience Yellow Brick is giving to players with Eternal Strands takes inspiration from some big hitters in the world of fantasy adventure. “From the big, beast-climbing battles in Shadow of the Colossus to the physics playground in the latest entries in The Legend of Zelda series, our goal was to find a fun experience at the crossroads of where physics gameplay meets action-adventure,” Skalski explains.

Central to the crafting aspect of the gameplay in Eternal Strands is of course the gear and materials you collect, among which are eight complete sets of armor recipes and nine magical weapon designs. Everything in the game — be it drops from defeated enemies or environmental finds — can be crafted into numerous variations of looks and stats for each specific weapon and armor piece. “If you’re driven by fashion, we’ve got you covered. If you’re a stat min-maxer, we’ve got you too,” assures Skalski. “The crafting system is there to adapt to your playstyle, so have fun!” As you acquire better materials you can improve your gear, and it’s worth remembering that your ability to heat and cool physical items alters their loot tables and the rewards you get.

One of the biggest production challenges the team faced is being a small team relative to most of their previous projects in the world of AAA. “We really had to find the beauty in our constraints, as having hundreds of people working on features was just not possible for us,” says Skalski. “Not only are we building our first game at Yellow Brick Games, but we’re also self-publishing it, so we had lots to learn, with no one but ourselves to rely upon to get our dream game into the hands of players.”

“I believe we were able to achieve all of this because we kept an open discussion on scope and priorities every step of the way,” continues Skalski. “We understood our strengths as a team, but more importantly our weaknesses, so we could work around them. Everything always started with ‘How is this good for the player?’ and in the end, there were no outside forces telling us what to do. We just made the game we really wanted in a very supportive work environment of amazing human beings. I’m very proud of what this team was able to accomplish.”

To ensure strong visual fidelity with the level of physical interaction in the game, the team targeted a minimum recommended spec that supports 60 frames per second (FPS) on PC. “While I can personally confirm the game is enjoyable on handheld devices even if running at a solid 30-45 fps, 60 fps is where the experience sings,” says Skalski. “There are a lot of complex calculations going on under the hood, from the voxelization of our thermodynamics simulation that’s tracking and propagating temperature, to the complex motors and constraints driving the animation of Brynn and the gigantic bosses.”

Another part of the optimization process was working with Intel on a number of aspects, including improving performance with Intel^® Arc™GPU. “They provided us with implementation details of the various patches and optimizations that were made specifically for their integration within the rendering pipeline of Unreal Engine,” Kalski explains. “The deep knowledge they shared with us really allowed us to build a better-performing experience for the players.”

When it comes to post-launch plans for Eternal Strands, things are already moving fast and looking very interesting indeed. “We’re putting the finishing touches on our day one patch and moving ahead with our free spring title update, which includes a collaboration with none other than Square Enix’s own Creative Studio 3 team, creators of Final Fantasy XIV: ONLINE and Final Fantasy XVI,” Skalski enthuses. “We couldn’t be more over the moon to work with their legendary concept artist Yusuke Mogi on a new epic creature, armor set, and weapon designs.”

Fever-dream collaborations aside, what really gets the team fired up is the game’s potential for connecting with fantasy adventurers the world over. “What’s got us excited is to see the reception of Eternal Strands. We put everything we had into this one and we hope to be able to continue to work on it,” says Skalski. “I would love to release a physical version, extended to other languages beyond the current seven we support, and explore other digital platforms like GOG. Anything we can do to get more people to experience our labour of love from these past five years the better.”

Eternal Strands launches for PC and consoles on January 28, 2025. A PC demo will be available on Steam on Jan 21^t, with players able to carry their save game over to the full game.

Wishlist Eternal Strands en Steam.