The name Mike Laidlaw may be familiar for those who played games for a while: he’s known for making and directing a good number of memorable Bioware role-playing games like Jade Empire and the Dragon Age series. Well, he’s been out of EA’s grasp since 2020 and has formed a new studio called Yellow Brick Games alongside a few Ubisoft veterans.

Today, he and his team just unveiled their first-ever game from the company: an action-adventure title named Eternal Strands. The project has been in the works for 3-and-a-half years and features physics-based combat where the world becomes your weapon. You play a girl named Brynn, a young Weaver (of magic) who has to restore the culture of her home by uncovering the secrets of a nation called the Enclave. You have to fight a ton of giant constructs and monsters called Arks; Brynn can not only chuck objects onto enemies using telekinesis, but also climb them and hit their vulnerable spots Dragon’s Dogma 2-style. Brynn also has access to elemental magic that becomes more effective depending on the weather and location; ice spells are better in cold places like a tundra or snowscape.

Here are some design thoughts from Laidlaw (video via IGN):

“Our hope with Eternal Strands is to deliver an adventure that brings a sense of fun and excitement to fantasy, while encouraging players to experiment with its systems. It’s a very different game to ones I’ve worked on in the past, and it’s been a delight to generally answer the question ‘what if the player does X?’ with ‘Cool!’ It’s also exciting to have a chance to build an all-new world that encourages and reacts to this kind of play.”

This is all sounding like a Western developer’s take on The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, only with a possible better story and less stupid mechanics like breakable weapons. Please don’t add in breakable weapons. Eternal Strands will be out in 2025 for PC.