Famous for his work on adventure classics like Broken Sword and Beneath a Steel Sky, infamous for his statements about the death of point & click... the very name Charles Cecil evokes strong feelings in many adventure gamers. AG shot the breeze with him at the Game Developer's Conference in March and found the man behind the name to be a down-to-earth, charming guy who really does care what adventure gamers want. Read on to find out why.

Let's talk about Broken Sword 4.

Okay. [takes a deep breath] At the end of Broken Sword 3, it wasn't financially viable to continue to run a single product studio, with all the staff, so we scaled right back. When we agreed to write Broken Sword 4 with THQ, we decided to work with a company called Sumo Digital. They took our source code, they resurrected it, and they updated it. They took on a number of Revolution staff; I'm also working with a number of other people that worked on the team previously. So a lot of the people that were involved in Broken Sword 3 are still involved in Broken Sword 4, but the way that we're doing it is completely different. I'm in a great position because instead of having to worry about staffing and technology, I can really concentrate on the gameplay, on the story, and on the design, which obviously in an adventure is really paramount.

So Broken Sword 4 is 3D?

Yes.

Is it point & click?

It's both point & click and direct control.

How does that work? You can choose one or the other?

Yes, you can play purely point & click, or you can choose to use both the mouse and the keyboard.

Are gamepads supported?

We haven't decided. They probably will be.

I played Broken Sword 3 with a gamepad, and I found that made it much easier to control.

I quite liked it with the keyboard. A lot of people didn't, and we've very much taken on board the fact that people resented us moving away from point & click. We have a very loyal audience, and if people complain, we take what they say seriously, because that ultimately means that we can keep writing games. Our primary audience is the people that play Broken Sword. We want to expand, of course, and that's what we're always aiming for, but we won't do anything if we can possibly help it that is likely to alienate the core audience.



How about action elements? That's the other thing people complained about, a lot.

I made a mistake in that. The principle, which I still completely stand by, is that we want to put the player under pressure. Like in a movie, you want to have the pacing go up and down. The thing that I think we did wrong is that we made people make split-second decisions. We've changed it slightly, in that you are in a situation in which you have a limited time... right from the very beginning there are guys trying to smash the door down with fire axes, and you've got to get out, but you have a fair bit of time to do it. So it's unlikely that they're going to break through, because particularly in the beginning, we're giving hints as to what you do. This idea of pressure is important, and it has featured in all our previous Broken Sword games. In Broken Sword 1, the player had a limited time to trick Khan on the cliff top; in Broken Sword 2 Nico had to stab her assailant before she was strangled. The old school adventures—Monkey Island, Sam & Max, Day of the Tentacle—they're great games, but they followed very different principles. They were a product of the nineties, and those games aren't selling anymore. I think we need to be more filmic, and part of that is the idea of actually changing the pace.

Any more crate puzzles?

[laughs] You're asking me all the difficult questions! Again, I must take responsibility. What happened with those crate puzzles is that... the crate puzzles were absolutely legitimate in the sense that at the very beginning you move the crate around the plane to balance it. That works well, because that's an adventure puzzle. Then you have to move the crate onto the pressure pad, change something, come back, move it again, that worked well. What happened was that the designers—and I'm not blaming them, because I should have been managing this better—they extrapolated more and more box puzzles. And what I should have realized is that the box puzzles should have been used as they were in the beginning, instead of purely as blocking mechanisms. The problem arose when they were used purely for blocking, or worse, when they were used for blocking at a point in the act when you expected to be able to move forward. So the answer is no, we haven't gotten rid of moving crates, because it's a legitimate puzzle mechanic. What we've gotten rid of is the idea of blocking for the sake of blocking.

So you make sure that if the puzzle's in there, it has something to do with the story, and moves you forward?

Absolutely, and also, like on the plane, the box puzzle was not to block you, it was to balance the plane. In the cave, it wasn't a block, it was there to put pressure on the pressure pad so you could move to jump and step on something. So where we use those sorts of puzzles, they'll be used in conjunction with other puzzles.

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