Interview: Charles Cecil unsheathes third Broken Sword

At the end of the year, bumbling amateur sleuth George Stobbard and svelte cohort Nico Collard are returning to the scene in a brand new, epic and globe-spanning Broken Sword adventure heading to PC, PS2 and Xbox.

Subtitled The Sleeping Dragon, this third in developer Revolution's acclaimed adventure series finds the duo unearthing the dark secrets of an ancient conspiracy, delving into the mysteries of the Templars, fighting against a fiendish source of pure evil and ultimately trying to save the day.

When we were recently presented with the opportunity to interrogate Revolution's managing director Charles Cecil about Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon, we leapt in with spotlight at the ready, seeking to discover further details on the game...

When you started out on the initial stages of development, what were the key things that you wanted to ensure made it into the game?

Cecil: As well as wanting the spirit of the adventure, which is very much investigation, we wanted the exploration and the action as well within the environment of an adventure - primarily that the difficulty and the challenge is in working out what to do, rather than how to do it.

As well as the investigation, we have an inventory that players can use - so this is still very much recognisable as an adventure. But we've also put in generic gameplay, things like shimmying and dragging boxes around the place.

The other thing is that we realise that we're in familiar territory, so we play up to that - we sort of take the piss out of ourselves. We don't want to take ourselves too seriously. The story itself is very serious, but we try and make it humorous as we play through, and that's very much the formula that we've used in previous Broken Sword games.

Visually, Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon breaks a mould for the series. Why not stick with what we're familiar with?

Cecil: One of the things that's driven the whole feeling of the game is visual contrast, because we wanted to create a look that felt different, in the way that the original Broken Sword games were unique in the way they looked.

We originally went down the cartoon/cel-shaded route to emulate what had gone before, and it just looked too childish. So what we've come up with is a dual-pass texturing system where we actually apply the lightmap in real-time, it's generated using radiosity - radiosity is the next generation of ray-tracing.

But the textures are hand drawn, so what we have is ultra-realistic lighting combined with hand drawn textures. It gives the game a very distinct look.

Another thing is that by changing the lightmaps, going from day to night, we can return a player to the same area. By bringing people back to the same area, the game feels a lot less linear.

How has the switch from 2D to 3D changed gameplay dynamics?

Cecil: By moving into 3D, we can be a lot more dynamic that we could ever have been in 2D. Obviously the direct control requires and larger environment for exploration, but it feels a lot more contemporary. There are some beautiful point and click games around at the moment, but to me they just don't feel contemporary.

How important are cut-scenes to the game?

Cecil: We have a number of cut-scenes, and because they are engine driven, they are absolutely interlinked seamlessly with the gameplay - I feel that they're not intrusive. A lot of very good games out there use cut-scenes, but something like Metal Gear Solid 2 has cut-scenes that go on for tens of minutes; and our chief advantage is that, in an adventure, we can tell the story as the game progresses, because we do it through communications.

Can you tell us briefly about the interface?

Cecil: We have up to four "action" buttons, and these are context-sensitive, so we have like 20 actions. So when I walk up to a box, for example, I can pull it, interact with it or look at it, and in some cases I might be able to climb onto it as well. So the fact that you've got four action buttons instead of one means that you've got an exponential increase in the opportunities.

We've seen part of the game where Nico, in Paris, is wrongfully accused of murder, and this isn't the first game this year where a major female character has found themselves in such a situation in the city...?

Cecil: Yes, except that Tomb Raider is definitely copying us, rather than the other way around. A lot of people commented on the fact that Tomb Raider is really coming into our territory - we're certainly not going into Tomb Raider's territory.

We've always thought that people might look at The Sleeping Dragon and think "Tomb Raider"...?

Cecil: People look at ledges and the screenshots of the game and they think we're actually producing something like Tomb Raider, like an action-adventure. This really couldn't be further from the truth.

As you know, we have no worries at all about killing a player, but we'll do it at the climax of a scene. We're not going to do it because someone walks to a cliff edge to investigate and falls off.

This game is really not about pixel-perfect jumping, and that's the key difference. That's why, when people ask: "How much action is it, and how much adventure," I answer that it's 100 percent adventure. We're using a low-risk interface.

Broken Sword 3 is all about trying to work out how to get on to the next stage and challenge. It's not about worrying over pixel-perfect jumps.

We've heard mention of action-events in the game - could you go into more detail here?

Cecil: An action-event is where we put the player under pressure, a point where they have to act quickly. The player doesn't have to react immediately, but they have to react to a situation within a second or two.

For example, in one part of the game, following a cut-scene, you'll have to run towards a truck and board it to escape from enemies, and if you're not fast enough you'll be shot.

How tough are the puzzles in The Sleeping Dragon? Because in the point-and-click genre they've become progressively more cryptic?

Cecil: My feeling is that adventure games became more cryptic because a certain hardcore group knew the grammar and they'd get very frustrated because they could get through a game too quickly. Therefore, designers were making puzzles more and more obscure and, in my opinion, more and more contrived.

The problem with that was that it alienated everyone else, so a dwindling hardcore group demanded more and more obscure puzzles.

It's really only the hardcore that are now playing point-and-click, and what we want to do is bring the adventure back in the way that 10 years ago it was one of the biggest genres. And there's no reason why it shouldn't be back in that position again.

So the fact that we have this additional gameplay - the action-adventure, the shimmying, moving blocks and such - means that this game is huge, but we don't really have to put in really obscure puzzles. Hopefully the puzzles will be challenging, but they're logical rather than obscure.

Also, one of the key things we wanted to do was get away from the idea that you could use an object on every other object and solve the puzzle, because that's basically the way everyone solved puzzles in point-and-click when they got stuck.

A lot of point and click was about frustrating the player, and I think the times have now changed. I don't think you can get away with frustrating gameplay now. We want to encourage the player in The Sleeping Dragon.

How does this affect the pace of the game?

Cecil: We're encouraging the player to go through the game at quite a fast rate, and if they die we only take them back to the beginning of a scene, which is never going to be more than a few minutes. We don't want to punish the player by making them replay large chunks of the game.

Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon movie (PC, PS2, XBX)
Download here

Stuart Bishop