[h3]WIDE SCREEN, BUT NOT AS WE KNOW IT[/h3]
Originally releasing in 1997, and remastered in 2010, Broken Sword 2's "original resolution" was a choice reserved for people with immaculate eyesight who hadn't upgraded to a 4k display yet.
To avoid eye strain you were given a choice of these generous alternatives:
AUGMENTED:
Before: slightly bigger but still on the smaller side of windowed..
fun fact: this resolution was based on an old iPad format since Broken Sword 2 (and 1) was originally remastered for the first iOS devices.
New and improved flavour: Augmented is now a bit bigger, and way more size appropriate for your display!
FULL SCREEN:
Before: w i d e - once 16:9 took over as an aspect ratio for the average monitor, everyone was just so wide. Screens have since gotten even wider, and some of you were experiencing cropping issues. Not ideal (which is British for "absolutely horrifying"), but the best we could do at the time! Well, that time is OVER!!! You deserve better!!!!!!
New and improved flavour: The original game has a lot a scenes with very long background artwork that was intended to make streets and locations that George and Nico are walking around in, feel more continuous. This means we're in a unique position as devs of 90s adventure games, to offer a new full screen experience, that in most places can actually cater to new aspect ratios. WITHIN REASON!!! Some areas do include original artwork that was made to size exactly, especially in enclosed locations, and for those areas we included very tasteful (standard black) sidebars.
[h3]ACHIEVEMENTS[/h3]
Just as the prophecy foretold!!!!
Some of you already noticed that we sneakily added achievements a few weeks ago while testing commenced!! Well testing commenced, and we smashed it!!!!
Enjoy 27 carefully picked achievements, with such bangers as;
[h3]RECOMPRESSED FOR YOUR CONVENIENCE[/h3]
FILE SIZE REDUCED BY ABOUT 40%
"How do they do it?" - Glad you asked, cause apparently THERE IS A SPREADSHEET?!
This is going to be real nerdy, so please scroll past this section if you're just here for the bants. More for you further down!!! Promise!!!!
Still here? I'm so glad, let's dissect..
COLUMNS
The columns are all the different assets in the game
Game Cluster:
Clusters are bunched together by locations, for example "Paris Cluster" or "Definitely-not-haunted-museum Cluster". These contain zipped location graphics and animations in the game's original archive format.
Fonts:
Any font that is displayed in the game, of which there are about 3, each in 3-8 different sizes, give or take!
Comic:
New to the remaster is an in-game digital comic, made accessible from the (brand spanking new) menu after reaching a certain point in the story.
Face Panels:
The close up facial expressions on characters in dialogues. They get their own thing, in case you were wondering!!
Menu Textures:
When we remastered the game, we absolutely rehauled the entire menu; background, images, widgets, you name it, its new!!
Movies:
Not only have all movies been recompressed using a more efficient way, but the big one was the Intro Movie, you see.. the intro movie is special, as its the only video file that contains localised graphics! Previously that meant we had to provide a separate movie file for each language!!!!! 7 different rendered movies. Crazy!!! Now we have 1 rendered movie, and we draw graphics over the localised bits. And it means the graphics are actually sharper with higher resolutions! And it saves tons of space!!!! But we're getting ahead of ourselves here, this stuff should be explained in 'rows'!
Speech:
"HUGE amount of speech in the game, yeah - says Andy, the programming wizard behind this recompression and in 5 languages
Music:
Background music, Cues, Menu Music, Credits, ominous piano music - it's all there
Other:
Everything else!!! Assets that werent touched at all like script logic, stuff in the original game that remains exactly as it was, etc.
ROWS
The rows are the techniques we use to compress or repackage the data. Many of these are only applicable to one type of data, so you usually see one column benefit greatly at a time.
BASELINE:
Size of the assets prior to the update
cull:
Roughly translates to delete shit - Not super fruitful, but we shed a few bits in the Menu Textures that werent referenced, as a side effect of the overall menu spruce up.
zstd:
A general purpose compression format which helped us further condense down Game Clusters, and the Comic.
webp:
This is an image specific compression format, like .jpeg or .png and impacted Game Clusters, Fonts, Face Panels, and Menu Textures
opus:
A compression format for audio. This one affected Game Clusters (due to the stored sound effects), Speech, and Music. By far the biggest impact with 407.70 MB chopped off the game size
vp9 + combine:
Rolls off the tongue doesn't it? Vp9 is a new compression format that saved us ton of bits here, and "combine" as in 'we recompressed the intro movie, and combined all language variants previously saved as 7 different intro movies, into one movie with overlaying images for the bits that needed localising', but that's a mouthful, so "combine" it is.
[h3] NERDY STUFF OVER BACK TO BANTS [/h3]
Picture of Charles as a palate cleanser:
MENU AND UI REFRESH
1) No more tiny UI!
2) Layout and sizing of buttons now more appropriate
3) Back button is now consistent! No more different buttons that all mean the same thing! Only one.
4) Fancy borders in the main menu, amongst tons of other little spruce ups and additions!!
5) Main menu looks new, because it is.
Oh!! And when you click for characters to walk somewhere, you now get the tippy tappy shoe prints until they're done walking there. When they say Quality of Life updates, this is what they mean! We truly live in the future.
DIALOGUE FONT
Higher resolution? Higher Font! No more trying to read tiny tiny letters on an already far away screen and feeling old and frail. You are stunning and in the prime of your life and nothing should make you feel otherwise!
CLOUDSAVES
Ever looked at the sky and thought "Man I wish my gamesaves lived there" - well do we have news for you!!! It's actually even cooler than it sounds, because these cloudsaves can even travel crossplatform between Windows, macOS, and Linux - given you stay in the Steam ecosphere of course. We're not magic. Well, Andy might be.
STEAM DECK
From now on Broken Sword 2 is 100% Steam Deck compatible!
We wanted to add beautiful pictures here, but we ran out of time, and the one in the office is a dev kit, which just doesn't look as cool. But if you have a Steam deck and can take artistic pictures of Broken Sword 2 running on it, we'd be over the moon to see!!!!
As a placeholder, please enjoy this Broken Sword 2 gif that was posted to discord:
and last, but not least;
NEW GAME ICON
It's really pretty, and follows the beautiful stained glass style we went for when we refreshed Broken Sword 5! BEHOLD;
[h3]ENJOY[/h3]
Hope you enjoy this update, and YES we're already eagerly working on Broken Sword 1. It's next!!!
Thank you all for being so patient with us. It's a delicate process, and a huge task for a team our size. It doesn't mean we don't always do our best! You deserve it, and we love you.
SPECIAL SHOUTOUT;
Next Monday, the 19th of September, Ron Gilbert and his immensely talented team are releasing "Return to Monkey Island" - a game we've been on the edge of our seats about. We love the team, some of them even have some Broken Sword overlap, and we wish them a wonderful launch! A great way to support indie games you love is wishlisting them until they release, and then leaving positive reviews on their Steam page!
As always;
Be vigilant, but stay kind.
Lots of love from all of us at Revolution
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