Seattle-based game studio Harebrained Schemes has entered into a “mutual agreement” to separate from its owner Paradox Interactive. On Jan. 1, Harebrained will once again become an independent studio.
Headquartered in Stockholm, Paradox had previously acquired Harebrained in 2018 for $7.5 million, shortly after serving as the publisher for Harebrained’s video game revival of the BattleTech franchise.
Paradox is best-known for its broad-focus strategy games, such as Stellaris and Crusader Kings. It’s also the current owner of the horror-themed World of Darkness setting, which includes the Vampire: The Masquerade series and the forthcoming Bloodlines II.
Harebrained’s most recent game, The Lamplighters League and the Tower at the End of the World, came out Oct. 3 for Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox Game Pass, and Windows. First announced back in March, TLL is a turn-based strategy game which pits an eccentric assortment of thieves, criminals, and renegade mystics against a globe-spanning occult conspiracy.
“Paradox has refocused its strategy towards its core niches within strategy and management games with endless qualities,” said Charlotta Nilsson, Paradox’s COO, in a press release. “…A new project or sequel in the same genre [as TLL] was not in line with our portfolio plans. Hence, we believe that a separation would be the best way forward.”
Under the terms of the agreement, Paradox will retain ownership of TLL “and other games developed by the studio,” which presumably includes BattleTech.
“Harebrained Schemes will support [TLL] through the end of the year while we seek funding and partnerships for an independent future in 2024,” wrote Brian Poel, Harebrained’s studio operations manager, in the press release. “Our studio mission remains the same: to make games that challenge your mind and touch your heart.”
Breakdowns in the system
On Oct. 10, one week after TLL’s release, Paradox Interactive issued a press release to announce it had decided to write off the game’s development cost as a loss.
“Even though we see cautiously positive player numbers in subscription services, the commercial reception has been too weak, which is frankly a big disappointment,” wrote Fredrik Wester, Paradox’s CEO, in the release.
Subsequently, on Oct. 11, PC Gamer confirmed a rumor that Paradox had instituted layoffs last summer at Harebrained Schemes, saying its staff had been “significantly reduced.” The rumor, spread via video game message board ResetEra, claimed that 80% of Harebrained’s developers had been let go in July.
In retrospect, TLL was always going to have a rough reception. 2023’s video game calendar has been insane, with October alone seeing a new Mario, the Sony-exclusive Spider-Man 2, and the long-awaited survival horror sequel Alan Wake 2. They join a murderer’s row of 2023 releases that incudes the Dead Space and Resident Evil 4 remakes, a new Final Fantasy, Bethesda’s space RPG Starfield, the latest Legend of Zelda, and Street Fighter 6, among many others.
By virtue of its genre, TLL was also going up against Larian Studios’ Baldur’s Gate 3, which is still going strong almost three months after its release. BG3, due to being an adaptation of Dungeons & Dragons, is also a turn-based strategy game. While it’s much less accessible for new players than TLL, BG3 has licensing and brand associations that TLL can’t match.
Against that backdrop, TLL was up against impossible odds in the marketplace from the start. Then its publisher wrote it off as a loss after its first week, and its development studio got cut to the bone three months before TLL came out. This isn’t simply a case of a niche video game failing to immediately find an audience; it’s a cautionary tale about the state of the video game industry in 2023.
A critical aside
I’ve been playing The Lamplighters League for the past couple of weeks via the Xbox Game Pass for PC. I wanted to like it more than I did.
Built in Unity, TLL is made up of equal parts Indiana Jones and H.P. Lovecraft, where you’ll face down the forces of the occult with witty one-liners, revolvers, folk magic, and a good right cross.
It’s set in the pulp-action 1930s, with World War I still fresh on everyone’s minds. Your characters are all new recruits for the nearly-extinct Lamplighters, a secret society that opposed dark forces from all over the world.
Now, three disparate occult warlords compete to be the first to reach the Tower at the End of the World, which contains a strange power that could allow its holder to reshape Earth in their image. In a rare burst of genre awareness, these warlords made sure to destroy the Lamplighters first.
The lone survivor is forced to form a new group of Lamplighters out of whatever mercenaries, rookies, and outright criminals he can find, in order to mount a dangerous, last-ditch campaign to keep the Tower secure. You’re not an opposing army in TLL; you’re playing as saboteurs and assassins, who whittle away at the warlords’ influence one small, hands-on strike at a time.
The most obvious games you can compare TLL to are XCOM, inXile’s Wasteland 3, or 2020’s Desperados III. You begin each mission in TLL with your agents infiltrating a mission site, and can use sabotage or stealth to whittle away at your enemies’ ranks before you openly attack. If you’re very careful or lucky, you can even skip fights entirely, or end them before they start.
In combat, you’re encouraged to use hard cover to protect your agents from enemies’ gunfire. If one of them ends their turn out in the open, they’re likely to get shot down before your next turn. You’re often better off throwing away an action in order to keep an agent safe, rather than getting in that one last attack.
Each of your agents is a unique personality, with decent voice acting, and designs that have a certain modern-animation flair to them. (If you’d told me TLL was a stealth prequel to Disney’s Big Hero 6, I’d have had to believe you.) It’s easy to like your characters, and you start off with three of the strongest members on your team. They’re a fun bunch to spend some time with, and TLL’s alternate history is carefully built to always raise more questions than it answers. It’s a great cast in a great setting, and I would absolutely buy a tabletop RPG that was based on Lamplighters League.
Unfortunately, I did bring up XCOM for a reason. TLL shares that game’s notorious RNG problem, where it can seem like an attack with less than 100% chance to hit will always miss. Naturally, that’s not an issue that’s unique to TLL.
What is, however, is its poor overall performance. It’s mechanically sound, for the most part, but my time with TLL, playing on Xbox Game Pass for PC, has been plagued by glitches. These include strange enemy behavior, the camera swinging around drunkenly during combat actions, map features that simply do not work, and several occasions where the AI took so long to resolve its turn that I thought the game had locked up. There’s one particular map that TLL reuses a lot for various missions, where the grid-based movement system almost consistently breaks down if you get too close to a wall.
This creates the overall impression that TLL was rushed out the door before it was done; this cake’s not baked all the way through yet. It’s still playable, but every session I’ve had with the game has been punctuated by small, mounting annoyances.
TLL could’ve been a modest hit under the right circumstances. There’s a lot here for strategy fans, and I’d give it a cautious recommendation if it got a patch that addressed its bugs and stability issues. As it is, however, TLL has simply been mismanaged by its publisher, and thrown out into the cold.
