Broken Sword 3: The Sleeping Dragon

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.

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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.

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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.