In a small booth tucked away in the corner of Gamescom, I talk about 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Broken Sword with its creator Charles Cecil for over an hour. Even that dꦕidn’t feel like enough time. Cecil is full of so many captivating stories about the games and Revolution Software that I could have spent all of Gamesco🎐m listening and still not have heard them all.
As he shows me the new remaster of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:B🐓roken Sword - Shadow of the Te𝐆mplars: Reforged in action, he tells me, “Everybody looks at this and goes, ‘Isn’t that great? That looks exactly how it did.’” I immediately agree. With a grin, Cecil changes the graphics, and the game switches to the pixelated retro graphics of the original launch. “That’s how it looked back then,” he lau𒁃ghs.
“That’s why we have to put this toggle on, because otherwise, people are going to say, ‘You haven’t done very much though, have you?’” He’s right, of course. When I first saw the screenshots for Reforged, I was naturally impressed with how clean they looked, but my nostalgia told me the game had looked pretty damn good ba💖ck in the day. Oh, how my memories had lied.
As Cecil shows me more of the game, he points out how the team has taken the original animations and cleaned them up. George now has a real-time shadow as he moves around scenes, and a light rim surrounds him. Cecil credi🍌ts a “genius” programmerꦡ who had to get inventive to make the shadows work well in 2D.
“We’re very respectful of the way the original was,&rdq🅷uo; he tells me. “What we want is the same game, but just way better. We’re not going to change it. We&rsqu♑o;re not going to do a Monkey Island and change the art style.”
Revolution Software has added more details to the characters but maintained their original look. Artists were instructed not to reinvent the characters, but to take what we k💜now of their personalities from the gameplay and voice acting to flesh out their designs a little more.
These sort of graphic tune-ups have relied on AI in the past, an approach that is increasingly becoming controversial. Cecil is open and direct about “the slightly thorny subject” and explains how the team did, and did not, use AI. “We use AI as an artist’s tool. Back in the day, we had people doing this mindless job of taking sprites, inking, and painting. It was just horrible. What's wonderful for the artists is they do the dogsbody stuff, then they put it through the AI. The AI is now able to create the body outright, which means that [the artists] can focus on the facial expressions, drawing the hands, the stuff that the AI can't do. The things that a human should do—to create interesting expressions, to create meaning, and make sure the eyes look nice when they look at each other.”
While Reforged is working hard to maintain the spirit of the original, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Broken Sword - Parzival's Stone is getting a bit more adventurous with the art style, without alienating what fans love. It takes the style of the original games but utilises a mix of 2D and 3D elements to create a 'Super 2D' environment. That's not the only way it hopes to change things up either, as Cecil explains that Parzival's Stone will be a little braver, "It will be a really good point-and-click adventure, I promise you, but it will be more adventurous. It'll be slightly brave in terms of how George and Niko are conveyed, the puzzles, and everything. "
Reforged isn’t the first time the originaꦛl Broken Sword has been re-released, as Revolution Software also created the Director’s Cut for Nintendo Wii and DS in 2009. However, that&rsqu꧋o;s not the version that Reforged is based on.
“When we did the Director's Cut, we reimplemented from the Gameboy Advance [version],” Cecil explains. “We got as much in as we could within the memory. The level of animation and exchanges that didn't come across—hardcore fans went, 'Why did you take it out?', well, that's not the right question. The right question is, 'Why didn't you include it when you reimplemented it?'. The answer is, ‘We didn't have space.’ We've decided to go back to the original, which has a lot more content and, for hardcore fans, is the canon, and base it on that. We might bring the content across from the Director's Cut, but we're not doing it for its first release.”
Revolution Software is maintaining this canon version of the first Broken Sword for Reforged, but that doesn’t mean they haven’t changed a few small details in addition to giving the game a much-needed glow-up. The team plans to utilise some animations and voiceover lines that were created for the original launch an🦂d never used. Cecil also tells me if something seemed inconsistent or had a dated cultural relevance that needed addressing, the team fixed it.
For example, when you return to the bar after the bomb detonates in the original, the stool the bomb was on was still intact. But in Reforged, you can see the explosion has ripped apart the stool. Another example he points to is the animation when the assassin returns to the hotel. Heꦫ’s still wearing his purple jacket despite Albert having found the jacket prior. Cecil jokes that there are some things he can’t fix, such as how Albert can get the jacket to a seamstress 𝓡within ten minutes of the explosion, but he can at least put the assassin in a shirt to show he took his jacket off.
“We had a very progressive writer, he was great. So actually, there are so few things that feel out of sync in 2023,” Cecil says, but he does tell me of one character in Broken Sword that he was worried about, a 🧜Syrian character who felt too stereotypical, so minor changes were made to address that.
Though the team are making some small changes, one important thing will remain the same. When I ask Cecil whether Rolf Sax🌠on, the original voice actor of George Stobbart, will be returning for Parzival’s Stone, he tells me that he wants him to. Saxon has also spoken of a desire to return, so unless something goes catastrophically wrong, we should see him reprise his role as George.
“We are in this incredible position where we have these games, we have a wonderful audience, and we've got a heritage,” Cecil says, but he learned the hard way that bringing point-and-click to modern audiences wasn’t that simple. “I was absolutely horrified to find that my assumption that everybody could play point and click because it was obvious, just wasn't true at all, particularly on mobile. People who are experienced gamers were getting stuck.”
To start testing user experience without giving the game away of what Revolution Software really had planned, the team started testing a low-resolution version of Broken Sword 2 with some new features, such 🍷as a hint system. That way, playtesters would assume they were just re-releasing the old version, rather than guessing that a high-resolution remaster of the first game was planned.
Cecil wasn’t originally sold on the idea of a hint system. “I found that when I was playing adventure games again more recently, it really pissed me off. Why should I go for a hint? What great games do is you fail, you know why you failed, and you get better, and then you succeed. That is gameplay.” Interestingly enough, his own interactions with a hint system later changed his mind. “God knows why, I was playing Candy Crush. I was like, 'Oh, God, there must be three, and I can't see them.' Then there was a little twinkle. It struck me that I wasn't patronised. It had waited a certain amount of time [before revealing the hint].”
That’s why Revolution Software trialled this hint system in their phony Broken Sword 2 test, offering a traditional mode for hardcore players who want to figure things out for themselves and a story mode for those who might want a little help. It’s the same content but with added features. Little sparkles for hints, and if you interact with something an꧃d it doesn’t have a use, it becomes greyed out. If you combine two items that don’t work, they become greyed out too. As you work harder to solve puzzles, the options shrink to hﷺelp the answer become clearer.
The team faced a similar challenge with the touch screen. Play🅘ers were getting confused about which bit was highlighted when choices appeared, so they made the hand transpa🎶rent to make it obvious what they selected. The user experience testing was invaluable to the team.
Reforged and Parzival’s Stone will offer these same features too. &ldqu🐻o;[Broken Sword] 1, 2, 5, and 6 will have identical interfaces, identical icons, you will know you are in the Broken Sword world.” He acknowledges that with Broken Sword 3 and 4 being 3D, that’s another matter. Still, with the team removing the numbers from the titles, most of the series can stand proudly next to one another in 4K.
