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Broken Sword 3: The Sleeping Dragon archived preview

Adventure fans have been tracking the progress of Broken Sword 3: The Sleeping Dragon for many months, but Revolution Software’s ambitious project has now officially been premiered to the gaming press at the ECTS games show in London. As Charles Cecil set forth in a presentation, Broken Sword 3 presents an important evolution from the traditional point-and-click adventure game. His confidence makes you believe that he's really onto something revolutionary. Broken Sword 3 is pioneering a new generation of streamlined 3D adventures that – if successful – will send point-and-click down the same road as the text parser interface.

“This is the game I have always wanted to write and it is certainly the best I have ever designed,” Charles proudly boasts. “I personally believe that it represents the 20 years that I have spent writing adventures.”

Revolution was founded in 1990. After their debut title Lure of the Temptress, Revolution quickly established itself as Europe’s leading adventure game developer – first as the adventure division of the now-defunct Virgin Interactive, later as a fully independent studio.

Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars and its sequel Broken Sword 2: The Smoking Mirror are their biggest commercial successes to date, with exceptional sales numbers on both the PC and Playstation.

The Broken Sword series sees George Stobbart, a young American lawyer, team up with French journalist Nico Collard to solve a murder mystery entangled in ancient myths. While Broken Sword 3 will introduce many new characters, it’s very much an amalgamation of the previous games. The story reintroduces the Templars from the first game and brings back the concept of the geomantic powers from the second game. The Sleeping Dragon promises to wrap these elements into a well-rounded trilogy.

Charles started the press conference with a statement that will surely cause for much controversy among adventure game traditionalists. “The point-and-click adventure is dead,” he exclaimed. “No two ways about it. It is no more. However, long live the adventure. As a genre the adventure is extremely healthy and probably has as much – if not more – potential than any other genre.”

With the current drought in adventure games, the future of the genre has been a lively topic on many adventure-related message boards. Some believe the genre has to stay the same. Others believe it has to change. Perhaps paradoxically, Broken Sword 3 does both.

Next: the problem with point-and-click adventures.

The nature of the beast

“One of the problems with point-and-click adventures is that there was a grammar developed by people and the people who were in the club understood was the grammar was, and the people outside didn’t,” Charles reasons. “Puzzles became more and more obscure and to the vast majority of people the games became boring. […] To stop the player from progressing too fast you had to make it difficult and you had to make it obscure. This game does have puzzles and we’re very proud of the fact that it has puzzles. But we’re taking a completely different attitude. We don’t want the player to be frustrated by puzzles. If they don’t get a puzzle after a certain amount of time, we will probably give them the answer if they go looking for it. With the ability to move around in a 3D world, stealth and the action events, there is so much more than we ever had with a point-and-click adventure.”

Charles Cecil believes the game will appeal to both mainstream and adventure gamers. He cites its traditional values as having cerebral gameplay instead of requiring manual dexterity, and its strong story and characters. The contemporary gameplay and 3D engine will create a different atmosphere and tension that mainstream gamers should appreciate.

So it’s a tennis game then?

There has been some confusion as to whether The Sleeping Dragon will have much action in it. Charles Cecil is quick to point out that Broken Sword 3 is not an action/adventure, which he characterises as “an action game with a bit of story added on”. Broken Sword 3 will be an adventure with action elements, where the narrative and characterisations are integral to the gameplay. Even though the pace is higher, the game will require cerebral thought rather than manual dexterity.

Saving the world

Charles was keen on not giving too much away of the plot. We now know that the game starts with George flying over to the jungles of Congo to visit a professor who plans to patent a new engine. George agrees to the job as it’s much more exciting than his normal legal work in America. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, Nico Collard knocks on a door and is let in by a computer hacker. He tells her to come in quickly because his life is in danger. She agrees and shoots him three times. The player will soon be swirled into an adventure in which they have to prevent a megalomaniac from reawakening an awesome power that brought about the near-extinction of man ten thousand years ago: the titular “Sleeping Dragon”.

While the story is promised to be heavily rooted in the other two Broken Sword games, Revolution is careful not to bring back too many familiar characters. The designers want to avoid the risk of adding too many characters that people who didn’t play the first games won’t recognize. For example, Duane was originally going to make a reappearance, but was taken out of the game later. Rest assured though, you should still meet about four or five other characters from the previous games. The new screenshots prominently feature two of the new characters, namely Petra – a blonde ‘femme fatale’ who is after Nico – and Susarro, the bad guy pulling all the strings.

Revolution is taking the same careful approach with the relationship between Nico and George. “We feel that the relation between these two characters is central to Broken Sword. We look at the relationships between male/female protagonists in other media. Mulder and Scully are very obvious comparisons in some ways. As such our thoughts are to keep the relation pretty stable in the way all these other people do because then the audience gets to know what the relationship is and enjoy it on that basis.” The relation between Nico and George isn’t at a status quo however. At the start of the game they actually haven’t seen each other for years. They split up for various reasons that we will find out about later. It’s only much later in the game that they get together and realize they’re both on the same quest.

Next: why Broken Sword went 3D.

Like many other adventure series, Broken Sword has gone from 2D to real-time 3D environments. “The 3D technology fundamentally changes the gameplay interface,” Charles claims. The game uses a simple yet elegant interface in which an icon map plays the central role. Whenever the character approaches an object, different options light up in the icon map. There is no standard set of options, giving the folks at Revolution a wide latitude in puzzle design.

Besides the usual detective work (talking to other characters and using evidence) there are many other types of puzzles in Broken Sword 3. The move to 3D resulted in a much stronger exploration element. Players will be able to climb walls, for example. These actions will be fully integrated into the icon map interface. There will also be stealth action, such as sneaking by adversaries. Finally, there will be self-contained action events, in which the pace of the gameplay quickens and the player is asked to make decisions quickly. These action events will not be about pressing random buttons, but will be tied into the gameplay itself. It should be pretty clear to the player when an action event is about to occur, as the camera will only use cinematic camera points until you are likely to be in danger. (An action event can be seen in the teaser video, where Nico is being run over by a car.)

Besides these gameplay changes, Broken Sword 3 also sports some brand new technology. While the 3D graphics look pretty nice, it will be the small touches that will set it apart. A new ray tracing lighting engine has allowed Revolution to recreate the sunny atmosphere that was so typical to the first game. Night scenes are equally impressive, with some excellent shading applied. Also notable is the game’s facial animation system, adding emotion to the characters.

A Q&A with Charles Cecil

After the press conference, we sat down with Charles to ask him some more questions about the Broken Sword franchise, fan feedback on the first Broken Sword 3 screenshots, and more.

First of all, why does it say GBA on the BS3 page of your website?

And why didn’t I mention it today?

Exactly.

Because GBA [Gameboy Advance] would very much be a secondary. It would be a complete rewrite. All projects will arrive end of next year and the GBA will almost certainly arrive later than that. So it’s not on our immediate radar.

So you are going to use the same story from BS3 and build a different GBA game with it?

Yes, I think GBA games in 3D don’t look great, generally.

Would you say the atmosphere of BS3 is slightly darker than the previous games?

Yes it is, but it is not super dark. There are so many games that are really dark and this is not one of them. We have the humor, we have dialogue that makes you laugh, but we wanted it to be a bit more intense experience.

Have you read the concerns from fans that George looks a bit like Indiana Jones on those screenshots?

Yes I have and they are absolutely legitimate concerns. However, we are very early in development. George actually goes to Congo, and he wears that. But when he’s in Paris he just wears normal clothes. So he doesn’t really wear this outfit for very much at all. Because this is the only model we actually have of him, we made him look like Indiana Jones in Paris. It is a completely legitimate concern, but it’s only because we haven’t got around modeling him in his city clothes.

I guess this also answers my next question: there will be more than one outfit?

Oh yes. And Nico is going to have many, many outfits.

Speaking of Nico, will we be able to control her?

George is very much the main character, but you can control Nico. We swap between the two as we did in Broken Sword 2.

How does George earn the money to go around and save the world?

(laughs) A very good, legitimate complaint is that in Broken Sword 1, when he goes to Syria he hasn’t got fifty bucks and the plane ticket would have cost him thousands. So we don’t worry about the money. George is a very successful corporate lawyer and has plenty of money.

So, Broken Sword 2 for the GBA is still in development. When is that game to be expected?

That will probably be next month.

Have you seen the Broken Sword 2 1/2 game?

Never even heard of it.

A group of fans is using various resources from the first two games, adding their own, and creating a 2.5 sequel game.

(enthusiastically) Oh really? How amazing.

(to Simon Byron of PR) Why don’t we hear about this? It’s crazy!

They are probably afraid that if you heard about it, you’d shut it down.

No, of course we wouldn’t.

Will you create more adventure games with the Broken Sword 3 engine in the future?

I hope so. We have complete confidence and we feel that this is the right direction. The point is that the adventure had a huge following a few years ago and clearly there is a demand for this type of game. It’s just that we felt that the point-and-click interface was holding it all back. By changing all that we will then realize the potential that we have.

As you explained earlier, part of it is also the puzzles being less obscure. So no more things like, say, putting a ladder in your pocket, as in the game Simon the Sorcerer?

The thing that makes me rather cross is that it’s so easy to come up with bad puzzles. (points at a journalist leaving the conference room) There is a guy going out the door. If I could unclip my badge here and throw it like a Frisbee, I could knock him out as he goes through the door. Anybody can come up with puzzles like that. A lot of people think they can write and design adventures, but that’s because anybody could come up with those rubbish puzzles. If you want to come up with puzzles that are really integrated into the plot it really is very hard work. We review our puzzles again and again and work out what’s believable or whether it works within the environment. If it’s too difficult we can provide a clue to the player. We take that aspect very seriously as we don’t want people having to buy walkthroughs because every puzzle is impossible to solve.

Getting away with it

Even though Revolution started on the design last year, Broken Sword 3 has only really been in production for six months. Revolution has clearly set out the direction it wants to take, but only the final product will say whether they will succeed. The design philosophies behind the project testify to Revolution’s willingness to go into new territory for the genre, while at the same time trying to stay true to many traditional adventure game elements. If Revolution’s promises come true, we will be in for a tightly written, fast-paced game that may reinvent your concept of the adventure and begin a new era for adventure gaming.

 

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