Adventure Gamers - Forums

Hi folks,

Some of you may be aware of a team currently working on a re-imagining of Tex Murphy: Overseer. Today they released a major content update. In the update is 18 new screenshots, 4 new videos, and a bunch of other cool stuff.

Full update article can be found here: Poisoned Pawn Website

Here are some of the screenshots (more on the website):

There is also a first official Teaser Trailer: Teaser Trailer on YouTube

And some game-play footage: Gameplay Footage on YouTube

Chaotic Fusion is the new name of the collective of folks working on the game. They are made up of a handful of talented developers in the fan community as well as certain individuals who worked on Tesla Effect. This project has the full backing and support of Big Finish games and is headed towards being a fully fledged and official game release; not only as a remastering of the Overseer story, but a key component in the continuation of the Tex Murphy primary story arc.

Here is a funny little update from the Big Finish Games crew, showing their support in endorsing the project: A message from Chris Jones and Aaron Conners

The team is projecting a mid / fall 2017 release date for the game, if all goes according to plan.

Looks great, and reminds me I should probably play the copy of Tesla Effect I backed :-/

Quick tip (that you’ve probably already thought of): have the option to disable the head-bobbing. It doesn’t bother me, but it looks pretty pronounced in your video and I know it makes a lot of people feel sick.

Great update, interest went up a lot

orient - 11 May 2016 02:50 AM

Quick tip (that you’ve probably already thought of): have the option to disable the head-bobbing. It doesn’t bother me, but it looks pretty pronounced in your video and I know it makes a lot of people feel sick.

Indeed. Yes a few people mentioned this as well. We certainly agree and will either: a) add an on/off option, b) add a slider to adjust the degree of “bobbing”, or c) remove it entirely.

Being a community project, we are extremely happy to hear feedback and take suggestions on board. It is this enthusiasm which drives us to achieve great things with this game. Will be be engaging closely with the community throughout development to ensure we implement as much as we can to the benefit of as many players as possible, while using past experience to improve areas which were previously lacking.

Feel free to ask any questions you’d like, and also we hope many community members here are willing to answer some questions we have along the way so that we may better understand what people like/want.

Really looking forward to this! Overseer is a game that always has me very intrigued everytime I begin to play it but that I always end up using a walkthrough to finish due to a loss of interest about half the way through. Love the story but there’s something with the gameplay and puzzles that doesn’t click with me. It gets tedious, almost in the same way Mean Streets did. I Like PD and especially UAKM (and perhaps even MM) a lot more. Haven’t played Tesla yet.

Please hurry up!:)

Veovis - 12 May 2016 06:54 AM

Love the story but there’s something with the gameplay and puzzles that doesn’t click with me. It gets tedious, almost in the same way Mean Streets did.

Glad you mentioned that. Reworking some of the puzzles (or even replacing them completely with more logical puzzles) was one of the goals we had in mind for The Poisoned Pawn. Glad to know this decision is a positive one!

Which actually brings me to my next question: For those of you who played Overseer (or perhaps any other Tex Game)—from your experience, what kind of components would you love to see re-worked / fixed to be more entertaining to a modern audience?

Jabod - 12 May 2016 12:23 PM

And I bet you get complaints about the post at the Fresno Office but it was never a problem for me as real life is like that.

This is the one that stands out most in my mind. It’s one of a few places in the game where an event is triggered by an unrelated event, and there’s nothing to convey that information to the player. There’s no reason to ever believe you need to go back there or that you’re looking for any mail that might have a reason to end up there, it just happens and if you don’t randomly backtrack to past locations, you’ll never find it.

I’m guessing the video upscaling is done through NeatVideo or Photon Pro. Looks kinda plastic with the heavy chroma filtering. But yeah, I would have done the same. There is only so much you can do with mpeg2 4:3 cropped ws.

Frogacuda - 12 May 2016 05:10 PM

Jabod - 12 May 2016 12:23 PM

And I bet you get complaints about the post at the Fresno Office but it was never a problem for me as real life is like that.

This is the one that stands out most in my mind. It’s one of a few places in the game where an event is triggered by an unrelated event, and there’s nothing to convey that information to the player. There’s no reason to ever believe you need to go back there or that you’re looking for any mail that might have a reason to end up there, it just happens and if you don’t randomly backtrack to past locations, you’ll never find it.

I just can’t let that stand as there is a hint: When you go there the first time Tex says something in the vain of “Looks like the mail is still delivered”. It’s a very light hint, sure, but the mail getting delivered later isn’t completly random.

Jawa - 12 May 2016 05:32 PM

I’m guessing the video upscaling is done through NeatVideo or Photon Pro. Looks kinda plastic with the heavy chroma filtering. But yeah, I would have done the same. There is only so much you can do with mpeg2 4:3 cropped ws.

You have a very keen eye! The process was close to this, although a lot was manual labor:

First step was de-interlacing the footage. This was not as easy as it may appear, because the faux widescreen (letterboxed in the 4:3 frame) meant the interlaced lines were not precisely every 2nd line of resolution. The interlacing has to be analyzed before being removed.

Next step was actually ADDING quite a bit of noise and grain. This was to create a more predictable and consistent noise profile to overlay the terrible and aggressive (and unpredictable) MPEG compression.

Third step was using NeatVideo to reduce this noise and smooth out the footage, while attempting to preserve as many fine details as possible. But as you said: it can only do so much. A lot of the sharpening and preservation was done in the next step…

All 3 steps until now have still been in SD. The fourth step was upscaling, and this was done using a combination of Lanczos and NNEDI3 techniques, with various detail enhancing post-processing filters. The strength of each setting is adjusted depending on the scene / action.

Lastly, it was re-graded a touch as the original was way too saturated.

As much as I would have loved to have gone back to the original tapes (which I have all of them) their deterioration is actually a lot worse in many cases.

tomimt - 12 May 2016 05:19 PM

It’s been a while since I’ve played Overseer, but I do recall it had a bit of an annoying habit of making you run between places a couple of times when there wasn’t a clear goal in sight. That’s not really something I’d call great design.

I agree with this. At the beginning the game flows nicely with clear objectives and it’s easy to know the logical next step to bring things forward. Around halfway through there are so many possible places to go and people to visit which, together with a lack of feedback and direction, makes the game tedious instead of fun. I remember feeling the same way about Mean Streets, which I guess isn’t that strange since overseer is a remake of sorts of that game.