Episode Transcript
NARRATOR: Ratings for games in this podcast are pending.
– Hello and welcome to the official Xbox Podcast, the only podcast that, you know, comes to you from inside Xbox. As much as I love talking about the gaming news of the week, every episode, my favorite shows that we do are the ones where we get to dive deeply into a single game. And this is one of those shows. I also love it when I get to hang out with Kelly Lombardi. Kelly, how are you doing?
– Hi, I’m great. How are you?
– All right. I’m really happy you’re joining us here for this deep dive episode.
– I’m really excited. This is a game that is near and dear to my heart that I’m so excited for. And it’s one of my most anticipated releases, so can’t wait to get into it.
Meet the Creators of Towerborne
– Always a good sign when the developer show up to the studio, and they give you a hug. And I’m like, OK, all right. I picked the right co-host here this week. So on this special episode, we’re actually going to meet the creators of Towerborne. And we’re also going to get a look at some brand new gameplay. So, hey, let’s meet them. Hello, Trisha Stouffer, you’re the CEO and President of Stoic. And Daniel McLaren, we’ll just call you McLaren for the rest of the episode, the Game Director here. Now, I personally know Stoic as the developers of the awesome and influential Banner Saga series, where I made some very poor decisions while playing, but enjoyed it all the same. Help us get to know Stoic.
– Absolutely. Stoic, independent video game developer. Been around for 12 years. Started with three people who made the original Banner Saga. We’ve grown from that to 5 to 12, and 20 when I joined back in 2020. And I’m about to hire my 100th person to the studio. And this whole team is dedicated to Towerborne and bringing that to the audience.
About Towerborne
– Very excited, because we are going to be doing that here. In fact, we’re going to do something a little bit different for this episode. In previous deep dive episodes, we’ve looked at footage. And we’ve sort of broken down those footage. But I see computers. I see controllers. You’re actually going to be playing the game. And we’ll be talking about it. But before we get into that, let’s talk a little bit about Towerborne. For those who are watching that might not be familiar with the game, give us a quick rundown on what type of game it is.
– Towerborne is a side scrolling brawler action RPG. The idea here was that we wanted to create– we kind of wanted to deviate from what we had done on the Banner Saga. And I say we as if I was there doing that. I did not do anything there. But they sat down. And they said, look, we made our Depression Simulator. It was super heavy–