Thanks to the Wii and the DS the point and click adventure genre - think Monkey Island - is back in vogue. The interface of both Nintendo consoles combined with the new expanded gaming audience - which value cerebral challenge as much as reflex tests - means the time is ripe to revisit some of the of classics of the genre and bring them to this new audience. That's exactly what Ubisoft have done with Broken Sword: Directors Cut for the Wii and the DS. I spoke with Charles Cecil, creator of the Broken Sword series and asked him why adventure games were back and whether Beneath a Steel Sky was next up....
Broken Sword: Directors Cut – what changes have you made to the original game?
The main addition is the inclusion of several hours of new story / gameplay interweaved into the original narrative. The original games started from the perspective of the main protagonist, George Stobbart, an American tourist who happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. He witnesses an assassin, dressed as a clown, planting a bomb and is lucky to survive the ensuing explosion. Shortly afterwards he meets Nico Collard, a Parisian photojournalist, who indicates that she has been investigating the killer for quite some time. Together they investigate a series of murders and are drawn into a terrifying conspiracy. The new game starts a day before the original and is told from Nico's perspective – she is invited to interview a famous Parisian statesman who is then brutally murdered.
The additional content goes into elements of the backstory that were just hinted at in the original. My approach was that anything from the original cannot change – which obviously raises the question of why the new elements of the story, as experienced by Nico, was not revealed to George first time around. So the new thread is about dark secrets. Nico initially discovers the nasty secret about the statesman, but is then devastated to discover her own – a secret that she cannot reveal to George. When the game was given to testers who hadn't played the original, they were unable to tell what was original and what was new – so hopefully people will find that the joins between original and new are seamless.
We have also added facial animations, drawn by comic book artist Dave Gibbons, that depict the changing expressions of characters as they talk.
A hint system has been incorporated – please see answer below for description.
A diary system has been added to record events as they unfold. As well as being a useful record, they also help provide solutions to some of the new puzzles.
We have added first person views for dramatic scenes, context appropriate mini-games, higher resolution backgrounds on Wii – plus loads of other small features. Together these add up to a huge enhancement over the original. I very much hope that this new version will appeal both to the existing fans and to those who have not played Broken Sword or adventures before.
How do you cater to the predominantly casual/less experienced Wii and DS audience while still retaining the tricky puzzles that point and click games are known for?
Many traditional hardcore adventure gamers enjoy obscure puzzles which keep them stumped until they make huge logic leaps. For others this equates to a frustrating gameplay experience. My solution to balancing this contradictory requirement has been to incorporate a context sensitive hint system that attempts to determine when the player is stuck and then flash a question mark to indicate that a hint is available. Initially the hints are obscure but if the player still fails to progress then new, more obvious hints are offered. Hardcore gamers can turn this off if they feel that it spoils the game experience. The feedback that we received from the casual testers was that this feature worked really well, allowing the game to be played as a hardcore adventure or more an interactive narrative experience.
How important is it not to upset fans of the original game with your changes to the Directors Cut? Or are you assuming that most of the audience for the new games will not have played the original?
My main aim was to ensure that game would appeal to the fans of the original. For this reason, I have left the original content unchanged except where higher quality assets exist. All elements of the new content have been designed to interweave seamlessly with the original game.
Of course I hope that the game will also appeal to a new audience. Anyone who enjoys the new generation of adventures like Professor Layton, should really like this Broken Sword because it is every bit as accessible in terms of the interface, and I would hope that people will find the story much more engaging – certainly more mature. I also hope that the game will draw in the so-called 'casual games' audience, the people who are playing hidden shape or gem matching games but realise that the medium can offer so much more.
Why do you think the point and click genre fell so far from the mid 90s height?
The genre was very popular through to the mid 90s because it offers such a pure form of interactive narrative with the story and gameplay inextricably interlinked rather than, as with almost all other genres, simply having story progression as a reward for completing a section of gameplay. However from the mid 90s, games increasingly moved towards 3D – the PlayStation generation - with more visceral gameplay and more complex controls. This increasingly alienated people who wanted a more cerebral gameplay experience and these people simply stopped playing games. As demand dropped, it no longer became financially viable for companies such as Lucasart or indeed Revolution to produce them. Now, however, we are going full cycle and adventures are proving to be an ideal genre for a new audience on a new range of platforms.
Have the Wii and the DS ushered in a new golden age of point and click adventure games?
The tactile control systems of the Wii and DS have resulted in games that offer simpler, less visceral gameplay experiences – they are just fun! The original audience is returning, and a new audience is being drawn in. And the adventure, as was the case last time around, is the perfect game genre for this audience. The proof will come from sales, but everything is pointing to a resurgence of the adventure genre, suggesting that we are now at the critical point at which creating and publishing ambitious adventure games will make financial sense again – which is incredibly exciting.
How important is writing/script to point and click games? Or is it all about puzzle mechanics?
An adventure game requires the narrative and the puzzles to be written in parallel since they interlink so extensively, each driving the other. Ultimately the puzzle mechanism must come first, since people won't get to experience the narrative if they don't like the interface. But the narrative must then drive the player to want to continue. Clearly the narrative and the mechanics have a totally symbiotic relationship.
Recently we have been approached by a major film studio to license Broken Sword as a movie, and I have been re-writing the game to work as a film script. While I have written many film-to-game adaptations, I have never done this in reverse. What has become clear is that while a film requires the protagonist, or hero, to be motivated by emotional conflict, in a game it is the player who needs to be motivated. Quite different requirements which require different approaches.
What about Wii versions of some of your other games, such as Beneath a Steel Sky?
This Broken Sword: Director's Cut game is incredibly important – because it will dictate the level of our ambition in relation to adventures going forward. It has been a great pleasure to reengaging with Dave Gibbons and we have restarted discussions about working together on a new project – possibly a new Beneath a Steel Sky, possibly something original. In the meantime new platforms, including Wii and DS, offer opportunities to reinvent some of our original titles. It is a very exciting time.
Has the success of ScummVM helped or hindered plans for future remakes? For example Steel Sky is available for free.
Without a doubt, ScummVM has helped us enormously. Both Lure of the Temptress and Beneath a Steel Sky were written for MS-DOS and so couldn't be played when Windows operating systems stopped supporting the antiquated DOS format. ScummVM converted the games to their interpreter and allowed people to play the games again on multiple platforms. We chose to make the games available for free – my feeling being that since the games were only available because of ScummVM technology, it would be disingenuous to then charge for them. The effect of making them available for free has been that literally millions of people have played them in the past few years – and the brands are really widely known. As such the opportunity for future remakes is greatly enhanced. I owe the ScummVM team a debt of gratitude – or several rounds of beers.
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