loading . . . Phantom Brigade 2.0 Interview Though mech tactics title Phantom Brigade released in February 2023, the team at Brace Yourself Games is far from done with it. Earlier this month, it announced a free version 2.0 that, among other things, includes an overhaul of its pilot systems and campaign. RPGamer was given the opportunity to chat with Brace Yourself Games's Aaron Gordon and Dakota Bosman-Kennedy about the 2.0 update and how the game's community has played a significant role in its creation. Responses have been transcribed and lightly edited for clarity.
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Alex Fuller (RPGamer): Can you introduce yourselves and your roles in the team?
Aaron Gordon: My name is Aaron Gordon; I'm the Game Design Director at Brace Yourself Games and I've been working with the Phantom Brigade team for the last six months, embedded with the team for the 2.0 launch.
Dakota Bosman-Kennedy: I'm Dakota, I'm the Designer with Phantom Brigade and I've been on this project for a year and a half now. Working on the 2.0 version has been so exciting and such an opportunity to do so many good things that I've been looking forward to on Phantom for a long time.
RPGamer: What made you decide to go for a version 2.0 overhaul of the game as opposed to moving onto another project?
Dakota: With the way Phantom Brigade was at launch, we knew it was a strong game with a really good core concept, but we felt like we could push it a little further to get more out of it. It felt to us like the best choice was to double down on getting Phantom to the exact dream point that we wanted, and so it made the most sense to go for that rather than starting on a new project.
RPGamer: What were the primary goals you were aiming to achieve with the 2.0 version?
Dakota: So the main goals that we want are hitting player expectations on what they want from a mech tactics game. For me, one of the highest priorities was getting pilots to where players want them to be, getting a good robust system that feels exciting, makes you want to play further, level them up, and get your strongest pilots out.
Aaron: We aligned as a team on this; previously, the team has worked with the community on quality-on-life features, the boss update, and more missions and scenarios. For 2.0, we looked at what we could do and where we could go to ground for a little bit longer to make some really fundamental and robust changes to some core systems, so that we can elevate core combat and elevate or streamline all of the other features that make Phantom great.
Some big feedback we got on the 1.0 launch is that players wanted more variety and optionality. We really took a look at our core systems to see how we could ensure that players get the variety they're expecting, how we can present them with different scenarios at every opportunity, and how we can add new maps, scenarios, and content to the game to ensure that players are incentivised to change up their mechs or strategies and do that awesome build-crafting. Dakota will definitely talk about the in-depth balancing we've been doing, but there's no better time to get into Phantom now that we've established there are different ways to play, and the weapons all have a unique feel to them. We also improved new player guidance as well, we wanted to make sure we tutorialised our systems robustly and get you into the action as quickly as possible so we don't just give you walls of text.
RPGamer: How much has fan feedback influenced the changes and additions in the version 2.0 update?
Dakota: Oh, a lot of it. We have such an incredibly core fanbase that we're talking to all the time. They're always giving us great feedback; people often use the in-game bug report to send us feedback. We're collecting it from everywhere and read all of it. It's helped us really shape the update in general; obviously the team has thoughts and ideas on what we'd like to do with the game, but using the fan feedback gives us a really good razor to cut through and say "this idea lines up with everything that we're seeing people saying, so let's go ahead and implement it". And sometimes we get brand new ideas from people and go "That's right! This would be amazing in the game, we could implement that easily, let's do that".
It's a beautiful process, and I'm always looking forward to seeing what people say. I often find that because of how dedicated and how much love there is for the genre within the fanbase, even negative feedback will often have those good points, as maybe you're frustrated because this thing isn't what you want it to be, but you've told me what you need for it to be that, so I can take it and turn it into the thing that you're looking for. It almost feels hand-in-hand sometimes with the way their influence shapes our development.
Aaron: Sometimes me and Dakota will be having a design discussion and go "oh, that sounds cool, I remember someone in the Discord had a similar idea". Then we'll go back and check it and go "yeah, that sounds better, let's do that". Or we'll just post a question to our Discord player base and they'll answer us. Dakota, can you think of any specific example that's come through?
Dakota: Oh, you've put me on the spot. Some players were discussing some of the different weapons and saying it would be neat if it had an extra status ability to it. I was like "you're right, that would be neat", and so that's something we've taken on and are going to create a separate weapon based off that because it allows us to create a new way for an existing weapon to work and give it a new function in our ecosystem.
RPGamer: Can you talk about the current team and how you work together?
Dakota: The core team of Pavel (Efimov), Artyom (Zuev), and I seem to work really well iteratively. A lot of our designs and systems will have some general ideas, then we'll beat them up together. Because we all have specialised knowledge within the game, it gives us a perspective from say programming, design, and art to come together and see where the holes might be and where we can fill them or put something else in to make it work. From there, we can implement and do some playtesting, then talk to each other about it and say "this didn't feel so good, maybe make this do more damage or give this more health". Everyone has a shared vision of what we want for the game -- we just work together and almost interlace on the streams of thought that we have into one cohesive thing that comes out as the end project.
Aaron: To expand on my perspective supporting the core team of three developers over the last few months, what I've seen is the huge amount of trust they have with each other. Dakota is the design specialist and he knows the game inside-out; any weapon stat, any mech behaviour, he knows it. We also have a lead engineer and a lead artist, together we're all goal-oriented and working against the problem. We'll be playing one of our new breakthrough missions, for example, and doing a review together and going "it's not quite clicking here". We're not a proscriptive team, there's nobody at the top saying "we're doing exactly this"; often we'll go away and come back in a few days to review it, and everyone in their own discipline will come to the table with the best way they can solve that problem, such as making weak points more obvious or adding UI elements.
RPGamer: What are the challenges in being able to balance numerous systems and enabling players to come up with different strategies to use?
Dakota: There's a lot of them! To me, the one that always stands out the most and that I'm trying to keep in mind is ensuring weapons feel exciting and good to use -- fulfilling the power fantasy that you're going for, but at the same time making sure that when the enemy is using it, it's not frustrating. As a player, I love to one-shot something with a sniper rifle, but I hate it when someone one-shots me with a sniper rifle! Having added pilots and pilot traits provides one of the best tools we've had to offset that. We have weapons that are evenly balanced across things, but the pilot modifier that can increase their power is something that the player has access to and we don't have the AI always having access to is something we can use to shift that balance out.
Otherwise, because Phantom is such a big game and there are so many systems, every once in a while we'll come across something where we go "let's make this set of missile launchers medium range", but it will have a knock-on effect somewhere else where it'll be "I've just broken this squad preset over here as they were relying on missile launchers being a different range". There's often knock-on effects we have to look for when changing things; it's just a part of a project at this point. The more you go through and the more times you hit it, it becomes easier to foresee where you're going to hit knock-on effects, but it's always an extra challenge.
Aaron: This is the benefit of having a small team. We want there to be loads of interloping systems, but often the thing that someone will ask for is not actually the thing that they want, myself included most of the time. Often, I'll be playing with Dakota and I'll suggest something like upping missile launch damage, and I'll see Dakota go into his mind palace for a few seconds and go "I know what's wrong". Then he'll explain that it's not the damage that's wrong, it's something to do with the range. Half of that has gone over my head, but Dakota has the ability to go and make the ten small, interconnected changes needed to support that change. Then a couple of days later I'll be able to say that missile launchers feel way better than before.
RPGamer: How do you go about designing weapons, do you start with a simple "I want X" or try and identify tactical holes that can be filled?
Dakota: At this stage in the project, my starting point is to identify all the weapons we have and see what role or interesting function is missing. From there, I'll spec out a design on paper, write out some thoughts on damage, range, status damage, or anything, and then pass it out to the team to beat it up and identify problems or holes. Artyom might say "this will make it hard to implement, but if you do it this way you can still achieve the same thing". Once we get the overall OK from there, I can start implementing within the game. I'll do some local testing to see if what I thought on paper translates correctly to the game, then I'll disperse it to everyone else to try playing around with. Once everyone is on board, then it's signed off and good to go!
Aaron: We start off with something called user stories for a lot of our design. Rather than starting with "I want a sniper rifle that does 300 damage", we start asking what is the user experience that we want the player to have. That is fuelled a lot by our community, where we'll translate their requests into a user story. Then we'll look at our toolkit to see what we weapons we can create to meet that user experience, but we'll always come back to the user story to see if comes back to meet that. We're often surprised by what solutions we come up with, just because we keep focus on the user story and don't get distracted of the initial idea like "I want a flamethrower" by asking "do you really want a flamethrower, or do you want to inflict a burn status effect to lots of enemies in a cone around you?", as an example.
RPGamer: Can you talk about the new pilot elements and what they bring to the game?
Dakota: In general, pilots in Phantom Brigade have been half of the mech. The mech is the unit that's doing stuff, and the pilot is the person operating it. In the current release, they don't have as much of an impact; they have varied health bars but that's the main differences between them.
What we're aiming for now, and what we've implemented, is that each pilot is a huge force multiplier to the mech, and if you slot one into the right mech, it's like night and day. If you put your close-range pilot in your sniper mech, it's not going to be the same as if you put your sniper pilot in the sniper mech; you'll feel the difference. With that, it's going to let players push mechs further. One of my favourite aspects of mech editing and build-crafting in Phantom is using the modules to push whatever stats the mech has even further. I like having the new pilots, because then it gives you something extra. Previously, you wanted to use modules to get as much cooldown or heat dissipation as you could get, but with pilots, you can have one whose whole thing gives them huge amount of heat dissipation, and now you can invest in damage modules so the mech is dealing all of the damage, while the pilot is what's giving me the cooldown to do that damage consistently.
It gives the players extra room to make more pieces of equipment feel more valuable. One of the player feedbacks we frequently get is that heavy mechs don't feel good to use, so one of the things I've tried to target is using pilots and their traits to also make heavy mechs feel better. My heavy mech might be slow and clunky, but if you put the right pilot in, suddenly it's running as fast as a medium mech, but it has the health to go with it. It's really exciting to me how much more build-crafting gets opened up with pilots. Active abilities can now depend on who you have slotted in your mech; you're going to have new combat abilities like sprint, be able to do more damage, or remove the need to build up heat when using weapons. It's giving such a wide breadth to the gameplay options available to players.
Aaron: What we've also done is a system of pilot fatigue and pilot traumas, where if you don't perform well in battle, pilots can get negative or other quirkier effects, which can actually be advantageous if used the right way. But it encourages the players to recruit more pilots and have a roster that includes A-teams, B-teams, and backups. We want players to feel like they can put a level-1 engineer and it'll do fine, but to be excited for their sharpshooter to recover in time for the region boss. One of the big pieces of feedback we got from 1.0 is that after you get a good setup with your mechs, there's not a lot of reason to switch. While that feels awesome for a bit, there's so much more in the toolkit that we want players to be experiencing. Now, because pilots might get fatigue or trauma (or die if they get knocked out continuously), we have a rotation where players can spec their mechs for different pilots. I'm definitely spending way more time on the build screen planning for battles, and we've found that mech fans love that.
RPGamer: Can you talk about the changes to the campaign and how you've tried to make it work more to the game's strengths?
Dakota: From the beginning, we took a look at the campaign structure. The big thing for me was that I liked the old overworld map. It had a ton of provinces and told you that there's this huge campaign ahead of you, but from a design perspective, it was unfortunately kind of limiting. Because the player could go anywhere, it was really hard to say that a player would be here or at this level, and it was hard to build a structure around.
We took a step back and realised that roaming around the provinces was what was really cool and interesting; for example, there is a mission over here: how do I get there fast and what's the best way to move myself around and avoid patrols? We wanted to keep that aspect but also elevate it. Instead of having a giant map that's all interconnected, having one province at a time lets us really make bespoke landscapes that look incredible and are interesting to traverse. It's not just one same topography; there are hills and mountains, there are inaccessible areas you have to drive around and plan for, while planning for what your next mission is going to be as well as which mission you might want to take after that. It gave us a lot of opportunity to expand on that and make it a really interesting and integral part of the gameplay loop.
From there, having the connected provinces lets us set up more of a structure in terms of a distinct early, mid, and late game that you can feel progression through. The difficulty ramps up in a way that feels intentional and overall lets us go in a direction that gives the player a good unique experience throughout while not taking away the agency of letting you pick where you want to go. You finish a province, then pick the next one you want to take on. Is it one that has harder enemies but better loot, or an easier province where you'll take less damage or won't risk traumatising your pilots? We're still giving players that level of control and choice while putting it in a more structured frame that gives them a good, interesting experience for each province that you hit.
Aaron: One of our guiding principles has been "perceivable variety", and we use that phrase every day. While in previous iterations of the game, this variety did exist, but it would be in the nitty-gritty of stats, but to a player breezing through it wouldn't feel as different. As Dakota said, splitting it up into chunks means that we can really push those differences, and Dakota's been working really hard on different factions such as the army, reserves, spec-ops, and experimental factions. Each of these has exclusive weapons and strategies; if you're taking on the spec-ops, they'll deal a lot of pilot damage to you. If you go into the campaign map, you'll be able to think that you'll need to invest in more heavy mechs before taking on the spec-ops, so you get more flavours of choice.
Also, splitting up the campaign like this has allowed us to invest in what we've called the mission director system. Some fair feedback we got was that mid-game resulted in repeated things and missions popping up over and over again. Now we have more defined early, mid, and late game, we can really show that difference, and the mission director system means that if you've done an assassination mission, you won't get one for the next little while and will make sure to serve up new content.
RPGamer: Are there any lower-key additions that have surprised you or that you're particularly excited to share?
Aaron: The improvements to the salvage screen that we have made. After a mission, players had loads of salvage to go through and there wasn't an easy way to compare it to the parts you already have. We were talking to our programmer and saying it would be a great way to compare your rewards to the loot you already have. He said to leave it with him and came back a week later saying he had used all his toolkit to make it better and let you compare equipment. I initially replied saying that was neat, but I was very surprised how transformative that makes the game feel. Because you have a salvage budget, you have to make choices about your salvage after every mission, and this makes it really easy to make informed decisions on what you take.
Dakota: I know exactly what you mean, I was like "cool, cool", but then I saw it in game, and was like "oh, this is gooooood, this is what we want!". I think for me, the other one is being able to see the squads that are in a combat mission from the overworld. When I'm picking my missions, I can see that this might be a close-range charger squad and knowing that I can bring out my long-range weapons so they can't touch me. Previously, you had to go in a guess what might be there, so having the information makes picking and prepping for a mission so much easier.
RPGamer: Can you talk a bit about the community and how pleased you are that you've been able to cultivate that close feedback loop?
Dakota: I can't state it enough: it's so wonderful to get the broad consistent feedback from a big group of dedicated people that are so willing to dive into their thoughts. There's been times where somebody will be like "I want X", and I'm like "cool, but what do mean by that?", and they'll really dig in and explain the things that they want based on these games and experiences. It gives me such a broad amount of info where I can take it and do something with it. Being able to just chat with them and have good conversations has been a lovely experience, it's so good. I've been in different game communities as a player myself, and being on the other end, I know how exciting it was to get to talk to developers, and being able to help facilitate that and help grow the community is joyous.
Aaron: At Brace Yourself Games, one of the big things we're trying to do with all of our games is engage the community and be as transparent as possible. It's led to such an improvement on all of our games. From our recent release Rift of the NecroDancer, for six months we were working with the community constantly to get feedback. And also, when they let us know what they don't like, we get the chance to address it before the game launches or we have a better chance to frame expectations around something. We don't have to release a game and bite your fingernails hoping they like it, because we know they like it, and we are able to prepare hot-fixes and patches ahead of time. Since we've been sharing updates about the 2.0 launch, we've been really humbled by the community's response. One of the strengths of being a small studio is that we can have that transparency and community engagement.
RPGamer: Is there anything else you wanted to cover about the update?
Aaron: One thing I do want to cover is that the scope of this update is so huge that we called it 2.0 specifically because we kept on playing it internally and saying that it feels like a brand-new game. We really wanted to set expectations that it's not just another update -- it's a fundamental transformation of everything you loved about Phantom Brigade. It's doubling down on what made it great, we've touched almost every system in the game, every aspect has been streamlined or worked on, and just we're really excited get it out to players.
Dakota: Obviously, I want time to work on this to make it as good as possible. But also, every time I'm playtesting, I'm so excited for the players to get this.
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RPGamer would like to extend our thanks to Aaron Gordon and Dakota Bosman-Kennedy for taking the time to answer our questions about Phantom Brigade's upcoming 2.0 update. The update will release on November 19, 2025, with the game currently available for PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store.
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