Seattle-based virtual reality developer Polyarc Games unveiled its next project Tuesday morning. Glassbreakers: Champions of Moss is a multiplayer strategy VR game that’s now available in Early Access for the Meta Quest 2.
Glassbreakers made a public debut last week at the 2023 Gamescom conference in Germany, and Polyarc released its own showcase video Tuesday morning.
The game is set in the same fantasy universe as Polyarc’s award-winning Moss series. In Glassbreakers, players once again take the role of Readers: anonymous people from another dimension who can interact with the Moss universe by reading a magical book.
Here, you’ll play the “Game of Glass” against a single opponent, where the goal is to destroy your opponent’s Glass idol while protecting yours.Toward that end, you can recruit a team of up to three champions, and send them out on the field against your opponent’s, in a combination of real-time strategy and a board game. If you’ve ever played a multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) game, like League of Legends or Dota 2, then Glassbreakers is likely to look slightly familiar from the start.
The difference, however, is that both you and your opponent are face to face in-game.
“Glassbreakers is unique because your opponent is sitting directly across from you,” said Chris Bourassa, the design director, in the prerecorded showcase. “You have the ability to see all their moves and strategy in real-time. This allows you to decide, do you want to counter what they’re doing, or attack with your own strategy and force them to react to you?”
The game initially offers a total of seven original champions, which players can mix-and-match at will. Each champion has unique abilities that can get upgraded over the course of a single game, in a similar fashion to MOBA. You can also collect power-ups, such as adding extra health to a champion, by taking and controlling specific points on the game board.
Winning matches will reward you with tokens and dyes that you can use to customize your Reader and champions, including the ability to make your own team banner or change your Reader’s mask.
Glassbreakers is the mystery game that Polyarc teased back in March with an open playtest. At the time, Polyarc CEO Tam Armstrong told GeekWire that the project was “us beginning to introduce some of the things we want to do in the future with the company,” such as exploring a range of new game mechanics.
Polyarc was founded in 2015 by Tam Armstrong, Danny Bulla, and Chris Alderson, all three of whom were former employees at Bellevue, Wash.-based Bungie (Destiny 2). Polyarc’s debut title, Moss, is a virtual reality adventure where players help guide the heroic mouse Quill on a quest to rescue her uncle. Its 2022 sequel, Moss: Book II, won Best VR/AR Game at the 2022 Game Awards.
At time of writing, Glassbreakers is a free, early-access download from the Meta App Lab for anyone with a Meta Quest 2, with plans for a Steam release later this year. Players who start playing Glassbreakers before Sept. 4 will receive a number of free customization tokens as part of the game’s first Bonus XP event.
