Broken Sword: Reforged Interview - How Bringing The Game To Fans Has Changed Since The ‘90s

Summary

Marketing in the '90s was mainly through publications, like Official PlayStation Magazine and developers had less of a relationship with fans.
Today, self-publishing and social media marketing have changed the game industry drastically, making it easier to market games and interact with players.
Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars - Reforged introduces new UI and gameplay modes to appeal to both old and new fans.

168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Broken S🍸word: The Shadow of the Templ𝕴ars originally launched all the way back in 1996. For all you spring chickens out there, let me set the scene. The internet wasn&🅰rsquo;t as widely available as it is now. At best, a few select kids in your class had the World Wide Web at home, but the most they could do was go to some encyclopedia-style website to look up generic information. So, how did we find the best games to play?

There were three main ways.👍 You could go to your local game store and view its selection, which I must emphasise, was nowhere near the number of titles you’d find at any given time in this day and age. Your friends and family could recommend whatever game they wereꦿ playing, and if you were lucky, lend it to you once they were done. Finally, in an era when game magazines were thriving far more than they are now, your last option was to leaf through glossy pages to find your next game.

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And that was how Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars came into my life. My aunt, who was the first person I knew to get a PlayStation, was an avid collector of the Official PlayStation Magazine. We’d go over to her house, read 🅠the magazines, steal her demo discs, and inevitably play all the cool games that we didn’t have at home. After seeing Broken Sword in the magazine, she bought it, we all played it, fell in love with it, and so began a joint family obsession.

Marketing Broken Sword In The ‘90s Versus Today

“Back in the day, our publisher was Virgin,” says Charles Cecil, Revolution Software founder and creator of Broken Sword. “They would spend £5,000 on a page in the Official PlayStation magazine. That was traditional marketing. We then worked d🍒irectly with PlayStation and managed to convince them to publish the game, which nobody was enormously keen on, and it was hugely successful. We went on to sell half a million c♍opies, which was big.

“Even more brilliant was that every month, this game [magazine] sold for five pounds—which was a lot of money for kids—but they would cover ⛦mount six or seven games. They cover mounted Broken Sword in Germany, France, the UK, Australia, and everywhere else. We got the game into the hands of millions and millions of people.”

Kids, as well as most adults to be fair, didn’t have much money to spend on games back in the ‘90s, or as many games to spend it on, so you’d often play the same one over and over again. You’d find a favourite and you’d stick with it, and with the Official PlayStation Magazine dedicating a six-page spread to Broken Sword, you can bet that was the game that many decided would be the one to buy.

And it wasn&rsqꦺuo;t just ꦆthat gamers had a hard time learning which games were worth playing, but game developers had a hard time working out what gamers thought of their games. You didn’t have the same width and breadth of game reviews as we do now.

“When the first game came out, the only way that you could sell games or buy games was through retail,” Cecil says. “Retailers would only take games from publishers. The publishers would then commission developers, so we were several steps away from our audience. We'd read magazines, and that was the closest we ever got to knowing what people really thought.

“Publishers didn't like us to communicate directly with fans because we could cut them out, and they thought that we were irresponsible. When we started self-publishing, one publisher said, ‘The lunatics have taken over the asylum.’”

Nearly 30 years later though, things have changed greatly. Games are so much more easily accessible these days and it’s all too easy to find out what people love or hate about specific titles. It’s easier than ever to shout out your game with the likes of social media and the mass of gaming websites and content creators. Yet it’s a bit of a double-edged sword as it’s still hard to claw your way to the front of the crowd when new game titles are being released week after week and 🐽you have more competition than ever.

George after getting hit by the goat in Broken Sword Reforged in new graphics.

Cecil explains that self-publishing and being able to communicate with fans directly has changed the way the team can market and develop Broken Sword - Shadow of the Templars: Reforged. Whereas before there were only traditional ways to market, such as via public🌄ations, now you’ve got the likes of streamers to showcase and re𒐪commend games.

“For [Reforged], what is fantastic is the opportunity to self-publish knowing marketing has changed profoundly,” he tells me. “What I love about self-publishing is the ability to work with really talented people who work with us, like Renaissance, like Tiny Dragon, and work with agencies. It's an incredibly heady experience to be at the centre of development, but also at the centre of marketing, and I fight with them all of the time.

“As we get close to the launch, we have all of these things to bring together. I'm feeding bugs and requests back to the guys, because I'm watching them play the game, and I'm playing myself and noticing things that I don't like. Because of social media, we can now communicate directly with our community, which we couldn't do before. Because of that, it means that we can now market in a really unique way.”

Adapting To A New Audience

George speaking to Albert with all the options available in Broken Sword Reforged.

“We're really lucky because we have people of your age who played the game when they were young, often with their parents, often with siblings, and so they are very keen to cover it,” Cecil says, and he’s not wrong as I’ve already introduced Broken Sword to my son. “We are in an extraordinarily privileged position of having an interest that we bring forward from so many people, which makes it an absolute pleasure.”

Howe🌳ver, the modern gaming audience has changed a lot over the years. It’s easier and more tempting than ever to look up a solution to a tricky puz🐼zle, and so many players don’t have the patience to sit there and figure things out for themselves.

“The audience now is quite different and is much less tolerant of getting frustrated or having bugs,” Cecil says, telling me that Revolution Software sent a version of Broken Sword out to random game testers that provided feedback as a service. “To my absolute horror, we were getting a lot of negative reports. We were getting scores of 50 percent. The games were getting 90 percent on Steam and on the stores, and we were getting 50 percent from random people. This suggested to me that we were relying on our existing fans who knew how to play, and the real risღk was that we were alienating new fans.”

That was when the team came up with the plan to redesign the UI. “We sat down and we analyzed exactly why people have got stuck and where they got stuck. We worked together and we put out multiple iterations, and the scores weᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ⁤ಌ⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚnt up and up and up.”

Reforged features two modes now: traditional and story mode, with the new st🍬ory mode aiming to appeal to a new generation of point-and-click gamers. The Story Mode UI works in a more intuitive way that players find easier and more interesting to use. It gives players clues as needed and removes red herrings without simply putting the answer out there, so it manages to retain that feeling of self-discovery. One thing Cecil tells me he dislikes is being able to press a button and immediately have all the hot spots appear. “That's rather ruining part of the joy because it's not looking around, is it? What I hope you get with Broken Sword is the reward of investigation.”

Although Revolution Software is aiming to bring the point-and-click adventure genre to new fans, it has not forgotten its old ones. For traditional fans, there are plenty of treats in store as the team is restoring Bro⛎ken Sword to what💧 they always wanted it to be, going back to the original art concepts, clearing up plot holes, and adding in lines that were recorded and never used, with Cecil giving me the example of, “You can go to Detective Rosso and you can ask him about Peagram's death. That's quite revealing. That was a line written in 1996 that was intended to be played, but for whatever reason wasn't.”

“First and foremost, it's really important that original fans are excited, but certainly a close second is the joy of watching new people play this game,” Cecil says. “Ultimately, our objective has always been we're not looking back. It's fantastic that people remember it, but I want it to stand as a forward-looking game, so someone new to adventures comes, thinks it looks beautiful, thinks it plays really well and starts playing adventures.”

The Broken Sword Control System… Version 2

The opening shot of Paris in Broken Sword Reforged.

Revolution Software doesn’t just have the opportunity to reach a new audience with Reforged, but it could make a new mark in adventure game history with its new UI system. There’s the possibility that current and future developers may adopt the Reforged control system in the way past developers adopted the original Broken Sword system. “When we first wrote Broken Sword,꧟ the other games were Monkey Island, games like that. Monkey Island had six verbs for each hot spot, and each of them had three other verbs. Now, that felt at the time like it was just adding permutations for the sake of slowing down a bit. I think our big change, our big evolution, was to just put the one action and then to 🐬adjust the action: talk to, pick up, examine, interact.

“I discovered at Adventure X that the control system that we invented is called the Broken Sword Control System, and developers generally use it as standard. I'm very flattered that people do. I found myself playing games in 2023 that used the Broken Sword Control System, and it felt really outdated. I'm going to say something really out of place here, and that is that I think it's time for the Broken Sword Control System to be updated to the Broken Sword [Control System] Version 2 2024. If anybody thinks this works, please copy it to your past content. Certainly from the feedback we've had from rapid testers, it is much more intuitive, and it generally feels much more modern. The interface of 1996 existed because pixels were so rocky. Now we can do so much more.”

B🔯roken Sword - Shadow of the Templars: Reforged is launching for PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch on September 19, 2024. For old die-hard fans who want to tackle the challenge of the goat, the traditional mode is stilꩵl there to lap up. For newbies and those dipping their toes in the point-and-click waters, story mode offers up a fantastic new UI that could very well become the new standard in adventure games.