Broken Sword – the Shadow of the Vikings: Reforged launches on PS5 Sept 19

Many of the fans of the Broken Sword that I meet now were the first to discover the line in 1996 when a sample of” Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars” was printed on the cover-mounted CD of the Official PlayStation magazine. I’m delighted that the PlayStation programs that followed the Broken Sword activities have remained incredibly popular. I made the decision to create a significantly improved version of the game for PlayStation 5 a year or two before, encouraged by passionate lover contacts that have continued over the past thirty years. Over 50 times more vividly than the original PlayStation version’s decision, we would redesign all the graphics in 4K, making the trip gameplay feel extremely fashionable.

With over 100 backgrounds, and 30, 000 sprites ( animation frames ) creating this enhanced, or Reforged, version was always going to be a huge undertaking.
The masterful layout artists who had spent the majority of their lives at Dublin’s Don Bluth animation studios produced the original backgrounds by hand drawing in pencil on A5 ( or larger ) sheets. We would base the new high quality artwork on the pencil design, and where the game screens varied for whatever reason, we decided that the tournament’s” canon” should be those original ink design. With trust using the classic game screens as guide, we were able to online restore over the initial linework in 4K, which we had scanned at a very high quality.
Three variations of the same Parisian Museum. This is the first instance of the hand-drawn outline.
This following illustrates how the modern colorist swapped out the pyramids for a goddess to conserve time.
And second, the original artwork restored by way of the 4K Reforged type.
This does indicate that there have been some modifications where the original online colorist has taken shortcuts, such as when the design designer had originally drawn a sphinx in a Parisian museum but the colorist finally made the decision to use a goddess image, which was probably taken directly from a photo. As was originally intended, the high quality game screen then includes a sphinx. We did find a few errors when we painted background elements from the original pencil layout, only to discover that the dialogue lines referenced a distinct image that the online painter had altered when the painting was finished. In 4K, there is now room for even more information, which improves the game experience and makes the backgrounds feel very bright and artistically interesting.
Character graphics sprites were restored to bring back information that were just a mush of pixels in small resolution. Our skilled team of animators spent an hour each drawing, frequently needing to improve animations that looked good in low resolution but did n’t look as good when viewed in high resolution. However, the cost has been paid off – very clean animations, subtle facial expressions, and expressions that resemble great adult animation have been present.
We made the decision to conduct customer testing early in the development process to see how well a new generation of players would react to the initial stage and press interface and the entire user experience. Despite consistently excellent testimonials for the game both in the media and from consumers, we found that some new players were perplexed by the software and found the game to be grating when they got stuck. That led us to fundamentally reevaluate our strategy. While the original Broken Sword had significantly advanced in the genre in the 1990s ( the control system used by most adventure developers is now known as the” Broken Sword” interface because this is what they are copying ), it quickly became clear that it was time to innovate again. Some younger players simply were n’t drawn to a gameplay experience that has n’t significantly changed in the past 30 years. We made it our goal to make sure the gameplay experience provided a wonderful sense of accomplishment because people enjoy solving puzzles that propel the story forward. So we re-designed the elements that those users got snagged on and reviewed the videos and comments they left. We repeated iterations and sending back out for testing, and we consistently found that the user scores increased until we reached the high user scores we had hoped. The user experience and HUD now seem much more contemporary and innovative. We constantly tried to keep in mind that many people enjoy the original approach, so we now let the player choose between the traditional approach and a new story mode.
I hope that you enjoy this new version of the original game, Broken Sword – Shadow of the Templars: Reforged. We have built on a game that was incredibly well-liked when it first came out in 1996, has remained popular since, and can claim to be one of the most well-known adventure games of all time. I am extremely proud of our amazing team, who have continued to develop the passion and dedication to produce a game that exceeds and exceeds the expectations of the original in 4K.