Adventure Gamers - Forums

Agreed about Leah Remini.  Her Grace was excellent.  The attitude present in every line—perfect.  If only the two characters that you have to hear the most often (Gabriel and the Narrator) weren’t so obnoxious, I’d be able to give the game a much higher pass in terms of voice acting.

Haha, I love the extremes some people get to

Well, negativity is always quite fun (as has been seen in this thread many times ).

oh, Lambonius, I turned off that narrator’s voice the first thing. She annoyed me so much. Some people loved her voice, but, I found it very irritating. Luckily, they had that option that one could turn that off. I doubt I would ever have finished the game if I had to listen to her voice the whole game.

I for one am EXTREMELY excited!
It’s one step closer to GK4!
And I’m hoping that the fans will still purchase the remake, even if they don’t like the look of it. Just to support our dream of GK4 coming to light.
Activision will allow GK4 to happen, but only IF the remake is successful…
I’ve already purchased Mystery Game X through the Kickstarter, but I may purchase another copy to further the chance of it selling well.

Lambonius - 11 October 2013 04:31 PM

Agreed about Leah Remini.  Her Grace was excellent.  The attitude present in every line—perfect.  If only the two characters that you have to hear the most often (Gabriel and the Narrator) weren’t so obnoxious, I’d be able to give the game a much higher pass in terms of voice acting.

Just turn on the subtitles and turn off the narrator’s voice.  As much as I love the voice acting in that game, I always do that.  Her voice is the one exception for me.  Which they must’ve anticipated to some extent, given that they give the rare option to turn off only her voice.

Detective Mosely - 11 October 2013 11:17 PM

Just turn on the subtitles and turn off the narrator’s voice.  As much as I love the voice acting in that game, I always do that.  Her voice is the one exception for me.  Which they must’ve anticipated to some extent, given that they give the rare option to turn off only her voice.

Heh…yeah, that’s what I always do.  I’ve tried several times to play with the narrator voice on, and I can never hold out beyond the first few rooms.  One thing I like about the layout of GK1 is that all the subtitles appear below the background art, so you never have to worry about obstructing the view.

I’m pretty surprised by the reaction. Sure, personally I’d have loved it if they remade the third one, which I was never able to get through, but I don’t think I’m the target audience for this game.

I’ve shown the screenshots to my wife, who previously refused to look at GK1 because it was too ugly, and she found them much better. Pixel art enthusiasts probably don’t represent a huge market share, and most of us who’ve played the original will probably buy this one anyway just out of curiosity. Porting to iOS/Android is also super smart to increase the market segment.

What I’d really like to know and wasn’t even brought up in the interview: the original game had the Sierra issues, i.e. deaths and dead ends (yes, dead ends. If I have to replay all of day 10 then it’s a dead end IMO), and also has a technical issue where if you don’t do something as early as possible the game gets stuck on day 6 IIRC.

So, is this going to be an LSL-style remake, where the conventions are updated to modern times?
GK 1 is one of my top ten AGs (the only Sierra one there, too), but I do think it would’ve been better with hotspot highlighting and better design to prevent getting stuck. I also wouldn’t mind if the arcade sequence with the mummies were changed or dropped.
Probably too early to tell, but is it possible any such changes are coming?

Hot spot highlighting in a Sierra game….*shudder*  No thank you. 

The only way to really make that work would be to get rid of the global hotspots and a large part of the environmental interactions, and that would be just too big a sacrifice.  It’d be KQ7 all over again.  *wretch* 

I’m a pixel art advocate, but it seems to me that this remake will be a truer representation of the “realistic” style that Jane and her team were originally shooting for.

The original has some stellar background artwork, but the limitations of the time (colour palette, resolution) have given it a limited shelf life that is long past. Doubling its native resolution (which is almost mandatory if you don’t want to play it in a tiny window) is pretty rough on the eyes. It’s not like more stylised games—Snatcher, for example—that embraced the limitations of pixel art and still look great today. The graphical overhaul is much-needed for the game to find a new audience.

Now I’m torn whether to finally play it or wait for the remake. I guess I’ll wait for the verdict on the new voices—probably not from die-hard fans of the original because I doubt you guys will ever be happy —but from people that will judge the actors on their own merits.

im a diehard fan, and i will be a tough sell on the remake (though not literally.. iv already bought it technically..)
If the voice acting is any less than “very good” all-around, then i will just keep asking myself “why? why not just play the original?”
It also needs to handle VERY smoothly. Every phoenix game iv played has been clunky.. with annoying animations and badly inflated sequences for the sake of being “cinematic”. That doesnt belong in gk1. All the flashy art will be for nothing if it doesnt handle with the same or greater fluidity as the original.
I will also give credit where credit is due… but yeah, it will have to be outstanding for me to be overall happy with it.

orient - 12 October 2013 02:12 AM

I’m a pixel art advocate, but it seems to me that this remake will be a truer representation of the “realistic” style that Jane and her team were originally shooting for.

The style of the original GK1 art wasn’t meant to be “realistic,” per se, but rather to imitate the inky blacks and rich color of graphic novels. Here’s one of the more extreme examples:

And of course GK1 is well-known for its comic panels during some cutscenes:

The “ink and color” graphic novel influence in the original art is less pronounced in the background art than it is in the cutscenes, but it’s still there:

We haven’t seen any remake cutscenes yet, but even comparing the backgrounds, this stylistic influence from graphic novels is less evident in the remake art we’ve seen so far, which have detailed textures you would not generally see in a graphic novel, certainly not in the early 1990s when graphic novels were not computer colored.

The remake seems to be going for more of a photoreal approach with the textures. Note the detailed grain on the wall stones behind the altar, which as I mentioned isn’t really apropos to the traditional, hand-painted graphic novel style. Note also the difference in lighting, the dimensionality of the 3D assets, and the lack of inky black areas. Doing a paintover and adding atmospheric effects on top of the 3D assets in the remake do help retain some of the original feel, but it’s clear from the screenshots that Jane and the team also decided it was OK to depart somewhat from the graphic novel look. I’ll explain my theory on why they chose this in a moment.

You can see how far in the photoreal direction they’ve gone with a screenshot like this:

Or this:

Note that by photoreal I don’t mean that the overall image looks like a photo—the second screenshot from Jackson Square actually looks rather fake and plasticky in its current form—I mean that the textures mapped onto individual assets are often photo-derived. The individual blades of grass and the rock textures in this Jackson Square screenshot show their photo origins clearly in the bright lighting—though in fairness, this may also be a work-in-progress background that hasn’t had an intended paintover yet.

So the question becomes . . . why did the remake team go more photoreal? You suggest, Orient, that it’s because GK1’s original art was intended to be more realistic in style, but the limitations of the time didn’t allow it to be, so the remake team is fulfilling what the original game could not. But I don’t know of any evidence for this. In the old Making of Gabriel Knight video, they discuss the game’s graphic novel inspirations (as I’ve also demonstrated above), and indeed the original game art succeeds quite well at looking like a graphic novel, aside from being pixelated. The limited color palette of the time is perfectly sufficient for creating inky blacks and rich colors.

Instead, here is an alternate explanation for why the remake team went more photoreal that I find more plausible. Whatever team Activison originally had assigned to do the art for the remake probably worked faster and with more experience in 3D than in 2D, like most game teams today, therefore a 3D art approach would have been basically mandatory in order for development to proceed at a reasonable pace. However, 3D art is not naturally good at emulating the “ink and color” style of a graphic novel because of the way the 3D objects are modeled, textured, and lit. You either have to do a lot of optimizing with textures and write complex shaders, or it’s not going to happen. And even if you do take the shader approach, it’ll never look exactly like hand-drawn.

So I think the team instead chose to embrace what 3D is good at, like photoreal textures, not so much because they knew these were the perfect choice for the remake, but because they sort of had no choice. They opted to turn what could have been a weakness into a strength, and used the shift toward realism to give a new take on the New Orleans setting, which is, after all, a real place. Note, however, that the paintovers the team is doing on top of the 3D render are an attempt to restore some of the graphic novel look that inherently goes missing with the 3D approach.

So if anything, it’s the remake that had to compromise, going slightly more realistic likely as a direct consequence of needing to use 3D methods to make the art, but still wanting to use paintovers to restore some of the graphic novel feel. If the remake art were being drawn fully in 2D at the exact same higher resolution, it’s quite possible it would have been drawn in more of a purely graphic novel style like the original, without the photoreal textures and lighting.

The original game, on the other hand, did not compromise in its art style so far as I know, rather it went for a graphic novel style because it wanted to. Yes, pixels and a limited color palette lent themselves well to that style, but that’s just good art direction, like how Grim Fandango used papier-mache figures due to the polygon limitations of early 3D models. In both GK1 and Grim Fandango, that chosen look was not just about technical limits, but was an inherent part of the feel of the game world as originally conceived.

I think it’s readily apparent that the Activision team that made the original remake assets (not POS, who I suspect would have more consciously emulated the graphic novel style of the original—and Cognition, for that matter) did their screens with absolutely no consideration for the very deliberate art direction of the original game.  Most of the 3D renders look pretty soulless compared to the original background paintings, in my opinion.  There are some exceptions to this, though—the swamp screen that’s been shown looks beautiful and somewhat more hand-painted and atmospheric, and I suspect other screens are getting a similar treatment.  I hope POS has the opportunity to go over some of the more “computery” looking scenes to give them that hand-painted touch before the final version is released.  I guess we’ll see though.  I’m very curious to see what POS does with this project though—I know they’re all diehard fans, so it should be pretty interesting. 

Game will be average since its by POS, i have no faith in their talent for such revered IP.

Game sales wont be enough to justify GK4.

Jane will blame old fans and niche market. In reality neither GK remake will look graphically competitive in current market but will also disappoint old fans.

This reeks of confused remake.

i hope to be proved wrong.

Lambonius - 12 October 2013 03:06 PM

There are some exceptions to this, though—the swamp screen that’s been shown looks beautiful and somewhat more hand-painted and atmospheric, and I suspect other screens are getting a similar treatment.  I hope POS has the opportunity to go over some of the more “computery” looking scenes to give them that hand-painted touch before the final version is released.  I guess we’ll see though.

Yes, I like the remade swamp scene, though even it says “art gallery painting or book illustration” to me moreso than “graphic novel.” There’s not much feeling that ink could have been involved in the drawing of the scene, and few graphic novels have such dense, finely painted detail. I do think I might prefer this painted look as a final style to the other screenshots, though I’m not sure Gabriel and other 3D character models would blend well into such a scene without a lot of care and tweaking, and in that respect some of the other screenshots might hit a better balance. Anyway, we’ll see what they do.

Most of the current screenshots (bookstore, chapel, cemetery) that show their 3D origins still look good enough for me to be fine with it, even if those are more representative of the final style they’re aiming for. Either way, it’s a shift from the original art direction, and the ideal GK1 remake of my imagination wouldn’t look quite like either of these things (remade swamp or remade bookstore et al), but rather like a high-res version of the original art direction, blending graphic novel influences into the painted backgrounds Sierra was known for in the early 1990s.

Dag - 11 October 2013 09:02 AM

The new backgrounds looks good, but why aren’t they widescreen? Are they saving space for an iconbar on the side?

I guess no one addressed this question yet. I would imagine it’s because the iPad in particular and Android tablets as well are important target platforms in addition to PC for remaking a point-and-click adventure game. This is why Jane describes the upgraded game art as “retina-resolution, which is 2048x1536.” Retina is the brand name for the high-res Apple display, and the iPad has a 4:3 screen ratio.

I know the original GK1 art was letterboxed, but I imagine they decided they may as well use the whole iPad screen rather than have black bars at the top and bottom. Not sure if the UI icons will be a permanent overlay with transparency (in which case you would still need to draw the background art underneath) or if the UI elements will be hidden when unused and only shown when used. Most likely the latter.