Former-BioWare and Dragon Age dev Mike Laidlaw gives us a closer look at his new action-adventure Eternal Strands

Yellow Brick Games provides insights into the design of Eternal Strands, an action-adventure game featuring magical threads, physics-based combat, and a Weaver named Brynn who seeks to recover her people's cultural home.

Yellow Brick Games has shed some fresh light on its design inspirations for Eternal Strands, along with some hopes they have for how players will experience the game. 

Speaking as part of the Future Games Show Summer Showcase's Expansion Pack, creative director Mike Laidlaw (of former BioWare and Dragon Age fame) and Frederic St-Laurent, game director explained a little more about the upcoming action adventure with sandbox physics.

In Eternal Strands, you play as Brynn, a young Weaver determined to recover her people's cultural home. As you can see, you'll be armed with powerful magical abilities that take the form of magical threads, coupled with a whole arsenal of magic-infused weaponry. You can use these to manipulate the environment and the world's temperature to take on huge, fantastical creatures but also create new paths for exploration. 

"The four of us that founded the company had some sort of shared interests. All of those games that make you feel like a fantasy superhero in a way, where you're going up against these titanic creatures," says Laidlaw of the team's vision for the game. 

"I've been fascinated by physics-based games for a very long time," admits Frederic St-Laurent, game director. "I like the toy-ish aspect of them. Sometimes they're ridiculous, sometimes they're really inventive, but the thing I wanted to pull of with this one was trying to push the physics gameplay into more of an action adventure and how that would apply to combat."

The physicality has been a big driving force behind every single one of Brynn's powers in the game.

"Our tech team has some incredible understanding of the universe," laughs Laidlaw. "They've created this space where every power is a physical entity."

"My hope is that players will create synergies that we haven't thought of," says St-Laurent, before giving an example where a dragon can breathe fire across a body of water to create vapor that you can then use to hide yourself away.

Eternal Strands doesn't have a launch window yet, but will be dropping on Xbox Series X, PS5, and PC when it does eventually launch. You can wishlist it right now on Steam to stay up to date. 

If you’re looking for more excellent games from today's Future Games Show, have a look at our official Steam page.