Broken Sword is one of my all-time favourite game series. I have so much nostalgia for this beloved point-and-click series, and I can remember the first time I played it all those years ago on PlayStation. I have so many memories with family and friends of problem-solving and bragging over the years as new titles launched, so when the first game, Shadow of the Templars, was given the Reforged treatment, I was absolutely ecstatic.
Last week at Gamescom, I caught up with Revolution Software founder and Broken Sword creator Charles Cecil, who has had to put up with me nagging about Broken Sword 2: The Smoking Mirror ever since the first Reforged was announced, as the second title is my favourite of the whole lot. Fortunately, I didn’t have to wait long for a Reforged version of The Smoking Mirror to be announced, and now I’m excitedly awaiting its launch.
“The Kickstarter was fantastic,” Cecil says about Shadow of the Templars: Reforged. “It showed that there was enthusiasm, which was great. Generally, I think the feeling is we did deliver, in terms of the awards and also the game, because we spent every penny and considerably more, but it gave us so much confidence.”
Much like revisiting the first title, Cecil says it's “a privilege for me to go back”, and with the 30th anniversary of Broken Sword at the end of this month, it feels particularly fitting to see the series going from strength to strength right now.
One of the things that the team wanted to address with The Smoking Mirror: Reforged was consistency. The knife that the priest holds in the opening cutscene is meant to be the same knife that Nico finds later in the game, but the two looked nothing alike. The iconic mask also didn’t match, and so the team were able to address these issues in Reforged.
Cecil shows me gameplay of The Smoking Mirror: Reforged, showcasing the level of detail added in the animations by switching between the old graphics to see George staring dead ahead while strapped to a chair, to the new graphics that show him nervously eyeing the tarantula on the floor in front of him. “There is the requirement to add a lot of animation. For Broken Sword 1, we couldn't recompile the scripts. In Broken Sword 2, we could.”
Broken Sword 1 had 30,000 frames, but The Smoking Mirror boasts 55,000 frames of animation. While the team used AI to upscale some scenes for the first Reforged, for the sequel “everything is hand-drawn from scratch, so there’s no use of AI”. This meant that it was an incredible amount of work for the team to redraw huge numbers of frames.
Cecil also showed me how the clouds in the sky now move, the real-time lighting, and how the eclipse in the background actually grows over time. “We've added so many parallax screens because we're completely enthused by the level of passion and the enthusiasm that the fans have. You might not even notice it, but what you want, in art, in my view, is you don't want to notice. You just need to know that there's a sense of movement that's happening.”
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.thegamer.com/broken-sword-2-reforged-gamescom-interview-charles-cecil/
