Towerborne is set to hit Xbox Game Preview via Xbox Game Pass on April 29, 2025, joining Steam Early Access.
The Xbox console exclusive is being published by Microsoft, built by independent studio Stoic, known for The Banner Saga. Towerborne draws on inspirations from side-scrolling beat 'em ups of yore, such as Golden Axe and Streets of Rage, blending them with modern flair and service game elements.
Indeed, Towerborne will be free to play once development has wrapped up, but until then, the team is working with its community to build out its foundation.
To learn more, I recently we caught up with Stoic co-founders Arnie Jorgensen and John Watson to learn how Towerborne is shaping its future.
Turning MMORPG experience towards a classic genre
Last week, I wrote a piece about how I'd become mildly addicted to Towerborne, although had some on-going reservations about the service-style structure the game has. I admit that I don't have a ton of experience playing games in early access, but I think that's one of the potential risks of creating impressions based around what is essentially unfinished content.
I wanted to learn more about Stoic's approach here to Towerborne, given that building out a service game in 2025, without a widespread testing regime, is perhaps foolhardy. Stoic partnered with Microsoft to help facilitate the feedback loop the team felt they needed, which is where we find ourselves today, ahead of Xbox Game Preview.
Arnie and John both have experience working on MMORPGs, including Star Wars Galaxies and Star Wars: The Old Republic, having worked across companies like BioWare and Sony in the past. You can feel some of that experience in Towerborne from the ground up — the game guns for looter-style progression, on top of tight, meaningful combat.
"Finishing up Banner Saga 3, we knew we wanted to do a bigger game," Arnie Jorgensen explains. "We knew we wanted to do a live game, so we began ramping into the next game. Me and John got together, and we say, 'what is the game? what are the pillars?' And here they are."
The team describes Towerborne as having a continuous loop, with great depth, and overlapping long, medium, and short term goals. Indeed, you treat Towerborne a bit like a piecemeal experience, hitting levels in 5-10 minute bursts, or do several in longer sessions. Arnie Jorgensen uses terms like "living game," and "endless content," while describing Towerborne's design goals.
"We're really excited to get feedback from the community and have them help us build out Towerborne. We want it to be approachable, we want it to be fun to watch. It was important to us coming off 'the depression simulator' The Banner Saga, since it was a slow game, nobody wanted to watch others play it. We also want customization to be big, too."
John Watson elaborates that Towerborne is driven more by scaling mechanics than its story, with a design that allows for infinite expansion. "We want to make something that we can actually iterate on the mechanics and the players can, can really get in the nitty gritty with it. Let's make a different game system that is driven more by the mechanics than the story. Towerborne certainly has a story, and it certainly has narrative, but it it the mechanics are kind of take the front seat."
Figuring out how those mechanics flow into Towerborne's future will be driven by community feedback and engagement. "Having an engaged community for a game, is sort of a superpower for that game. It gives it longevity and legs, and it gives you energy as a developer. It gives you motivation to cater to that community."
On working with Xbox, and Towerborne's future
Towerborne will be free to play once its finished, but Stoic has a strict policy of "cosmetic-only" for its monetization layer. In Xbox Game Preview, you can pick up battle passes and the like in similar vein to Fallout 76 or Helldivers 2, which let you choose which cosmetics you want to grab as you ascend through the tiers — Towerborne's "battle passes" won't ever expire either. Stoic is gunning for a more relaxed style of live service game, swerving the so-called "FOMO" tactics you often see in the genre.
Free to play access, Xbox Game Pass' install base, and its playability on cloud will doubtless give the game a ready made audience once its finished. Towerborne's design gives it immense scalability potential, and Stoic chose to work with Xbox, at least in part, for its live ops experience.
"Working with Xbox, it's been great," Arnie Jorgensen explains. "When we were pitching this game around and shopping around, we talked a lot of potential partners, and it was clear the end of that process that Xbox was the best option. The thing that was really impressive about Xbox from the beginning and throughout is that they were really bought into the idea of the game. They got it."
Arnie explains Xbox's enthusiasm for Towerborne made the partnership feel less transactional, and more emotional, but expertise also had a huge role to play. "And, you know, Xbox has a lot of expertise. They have a cloud platform. We got a lot of help. We had people embedded in the team, for technical aspects, design aspects, and other other areas as well." Other Microsoft studios like Rare pitched in to help with Towerborne too, simply because they wanted to, rather than being mandated to do so.
Throughout the rest of the interview, we touched on leveraging Killer Instinct alumni to develop Towerborne's combat, the game's approach to story telling, itemization, and much more.
Take a listen to the full interview over here, and be sure to check out Towerborne in full on Xbox Game Preview on April 29, 2025 via Xbox Game Pass, or today on Steam Early Access.
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