✨ Gameplay: more fixed gamesaves
🎨 Graphics: fun with dust renderers
🎵 Audio: dialogue volume adjustments
🔤 Text: fixed typos thanks to your submissions
⚙️ UI: Cutscene subtitles, and Chess puzzle
🎮 STEAM DECK: more touch control stuff!!!!

A small update just in time for the weekend...



Last update we talked a little bit about areas in the game that could get you stuck if saved in a particularly inopportune time. We're now following up with two more areas that will now feature 100% less getting stuck. Hopefully. We think... Hover over black bars with care!

💎 Night at the Museum
It's all about timing. Unless of course you, or the game, decided the best timing to create a gamesave was the very split second before George gets shot... Then it's all about regretting that terrible choice, because reloading this gamesave would load you in just in time to get shot again and not much else. That's what we in the biz call adeathloop and that's what we in the biz also call abug. So we squashed it.



🗝️ Locked out of the toilet
This one requires a bit of setup. In Syria when Ultar has left to wait for you at his taxi George can not leave the club without leaving the toilet keys on the bar! When you do that, a bespoke animation plays, and it would really appreciate if you let it finish. Because for those who interrupted the animation by Fast Exiting out of the club, that animation was still pending! Not a big deal if you return to let the animation finish before saving or quitting the game. Else you'd get stuck forever...

Pending logic is never saved because the game never expected to be so rudely interrupted. Well it should get used to it, cause Fast Exits are here to stay! This should now be adjusted in past, and future gamesaves!




⌛ Fun with Dust Renderers
This is an environment you briefly experience in Spain when you descend into an ancient well - and if you know anything about descending into ancient wells it's how dusty it can be. That's why this animation was so befittingly labelled "Dust".
Though, we wouldn't blame you if you never noticed that it was supposed to be dust at all...

Here it is in Original:
Here it was in Reforged: (can't tell? neither could we...)
Here it is in Reforged now - new and improved flavour:
Steam Updates only support gifs 5MB and under, so maybe you should check it out for yourselves, but we can really tell the difference, and we think it's so pretty :)



✌️ V-Sync enabled by default
Smoother and better behaved on devices with high refresh rates!



🚑Under Pressure
In Update #1 we briefly touched on the light map! While this is not technically related, it's still affecting the overall feel of vibrancy in the game. This time just a little colour adjustment on the blood pressure gauge in the Hospital. We debated even mentioning it, but are curious if you'd notice the difference?




🔉 More Adjusted Audio Levels
We have already turned the default music volume down and adjusted the master levels!
This time we've also revisited dialogue volumes in one of the final impactful cutscenes. Hopefully that's now a lot more enjoyable.

This is just a continuation of our initial improvements. Please read Update #1 for details on audio feedback!




✍️ More Typos and Errors
Thank you all for submitting us typos, mis-translations, and copy and paste errors in various languages of the game. It truly helps us, and we were able to put quite a lot of them in :)
Was that all of them, or are there more?!

As stated previously, text takes its lead from the speech files, so in the few cases where the original voice lines have more complex circumstances that aren't quite typos, we're taking the side of the voice lines...



♞ Check Mate
As in, check, Mate, if the UI will be in the way of the Chess puzzle... Which, technically it probably didn't if you knew which moves to make, but if you were tying your luck with the top row you would inevitably open the top bar menu, hiding the very area you were tying to interact with! We can't believe this hasn't been complained about more, but if you had an unnecessarily difficult time with that puzzle, we are so sorry, and after this update it will never ever happen again. Hopefully. We think...



💬 Subtitles in Cutscenes
In Broken Sword - Shadow of the Templars: Reforged, you get to style your subtitles! For some reason
though, the cutscenes would always show the default colour and font. This has now been addressed!

Turns out some of the times Speaker Names weren't properly displaying in the subtitles either! Tricky because it wasn't missing all of the time, or consistently for specific characters, but happened seemingly random? We took a swing at it and hope this is now fixed as well :)



🎮 Tiny Controller Improvement
The Controls Help menu is now ironically easier to navigate with a controller.



Steam Deck! Steam Deck!
Thank you so much for all the wonderful comments about our touch controls! We got so many messages, and so much helpful feedback.

This update includes even more extra effort we put into the touch controls of this game, so that if you wanted to, you could complete the entire game using only touch inputs! And as last time, we invite you to do just that and let us know how it feels! That way we can make them even better!

Some things we refined:

👇 More improvements to dragging and dropping items
🎯 Better interaction with a moving target


👇 Dragging & Dropping
The main "problem" with touch is that once you select what you want to interact with, your grubby little finger is in the way!!!! The most classic solution, and the one we also opted for, is raising the object above your finger by an offset to let you continue to see what you're doing, as you're dragging and dropping. Groovy! Less groovy if that invisible offset remains applied from then forth, making you feel like you're missing everything you want to interact with. That would be crazy making... 🙃
Hopefully much less crazy making now!!!!!


🎯 Moving target
Or more accurately; moving hotspot.
Most of Broken Sword is pretty stationary, and so are the hotspots. However some locations have moving environments, and/or moving interactable characters. In both instances the hotspots would be dynamic.

To make it easier to interact with characters as they are moving about, we make those hotspots "sticky" as soon as you engage with them. Sticky means the game thinks you're still pressing, even if you're not physically pressing.

This actually competed with a different feature; exploring your environments by sliding your finger over the screen. Now you had this character moving around the environment like some sort of beacon!!!!!
That should not be happening anymore.

What also shouldn't be happening anymore is the UI de-spawning because the character you tried to engage with has moved since you first tapped on them. The little action pop up box should now follow the character around!

We might continue to refine touch controls more, depending on your feedback, so let us know what you think :)



http://discord.gg/revolutionsoftware

That's the best place to engage with us directly, and be part of our community!
We always try to be here for you, and read as many messages as possible.

Be it to collect your feedback, documenting the bugs, or troubleshooting issues you might be experiencing, we always try to be there for you, and read as many messages as possible.

Join our wonderful community of adventure gamers, and come say hi!

Thank you for playing Broken Sword, and we hope you know how much we appreciate all of you.
As always we look forward to hearing your thoughts on this update!

✨ Gameplay: restoring beloved exits, and getting you unstuck
🎨 Graphics: textures, cropping, and lighting
🎵 Audio: some important initial improvements
🔤 Text: subtitle shadows, typos, and updated credits
⚙️ UI: a few bits for quality of life, and a little bit of fan service
🎮 Steam Deck: tap your way through the game

End of cliff notes! Beginning of mountain notes...




🔍 Operator - I need an Exit
In the original Broken Sword - the Shadow of the Templars, some doors or exits to scenes also gave additional dialogue when explored. This was always kind of hidden, because most of the time, right-clicking to leave would just do the same as a left click. When launching Broken Sword - Shadow of the Templars: Reforged we got so many reports about this being missing from the game, which surprised us for two reasons; 1) How did you even find these?! & 2) They're in the game! - or at least now they are.

Turns out we forgot to add hotspots to the few doors that did originally have that feature! Happy hunting :)



🗝️ (Can't) Open Sesame
This one's a spoiler, so only hover over the black bars if you don't mind knowing what happens in Syria.
When solving one particular puzzle with a ring pull it triggers an animation .
It's in our nature as adventure gamers to want to save when exciting things happen, and for a very unlucky few that was exactly what got you stuck!

Specifically when the ring pull was used to open the cave, and a gamesave was created before the cave had fully opened. This gamesave would recall a cave that had not yet been opened, and on the other hand also recall that the item to do so had already been interacted with.

The game now understands that it shouldn't restore your gamesave without certain key elements being reset, so going forward saves made in areas like these will self-adjust.

If you were affected, your gamesave should now be adjusted, and give you the opportunity to continue your playthrough. The game also now recognises how to prevent you from saving yourself into a pickle, so hopefully you have nothing to worry about!

We know that there are more areas where this is technically possible to have a gamesave that leaves you with limited options, like in the museum, and while those are caused for slightly different reasons, we know they can feel very similar, and we're already exploring solutions for those too!



🚶 On the road to nowhere
Or at least he was! This was an extremely rare case of the game crashing when exploring wide maps. Specifically when asking George to walk the opposite direction to an item you wanted to take a quick look at, just before it scrolled off the edge of the screen.

Broken Sword is overall a pretty sedentary game. George stands around, you click, you wait until George ambles over, you click, you are listening to dialogue, etc. The game does not ask for much. And to make that experience more cinematic, we actually hide the interactable "hotspots" you just clicked on, while George is en route or already interacting with them. Repeated clicking on the hotspot you're already going to wouldn't make anything go faster anyway.

Turns out that if the conditions were just right, and you managed to get George to amble across a wide map, while interacting with a hotspot that was just about to be pushed off the edge of the opposite far side of that map, the game panicked, didn't know what to do, and crashed.

It is worth mentioning that we weren't actually able to replicate this, so whoever managed to produce this crash has a bright future in eSports, but we did figure that maybe not all hotspots need to stay on the edge of scrolling maps for as long as they did, and put a little code in there that will hopefully avoid this kind of conflict "going forward".

(Technically that's UI, but we figured that experiencing a crash feels more like a gameplay experience, so put it up here!)




🤏 Tiny George
Many of you delighted in Tiny George being able to walk all the way up to the boarded up Café, but Charles made us fix it :(

💡 Light Maps & Shadow Maps
Broken Sword has a light map, and a shadow map.

Generally we think of shadows as black, and in many 3D games they are! But a game like Broken Sword takes artistic liberties, and those have to extend to how we think about the colours of shadows. That's why our shadow maps are bespoke layers of art, that determine everything that's "floor"-like, and picked which colours shadows would be in those areas. A runtime engine then calculates the dynamic shapes and silhouettes of characters, and casts only those areas as "shadows".

Light maps work a little different; A grey scale image that determines roughly how well lit George, or any character, needs to be, at any given moment, based on the values of George's location. Even when George walks around, it can figure out how much rim light and tinting needs to be applied.

There are a few places where this wasn't executed perfectly. Our favourite example would be once again in Syria, so hover with care! When you walk into the cave, the doors open, and George casts a dramatic shadow, lit from behind. And then the doors close... and George... stays lit?!

That isn't the only place it was fixed, but it was by far the most impactful one.
There were also moments when George went from light to dark too dramatically, and we have attempted to smooth that out as well.

While reviewing the light & shadow maps we actually found some areas that were using slightly older versions of background art, and those have been updated too! Don't tell anyone!!!!!



👾 Bilinear vs Nearest Neighbour Filtering
This is for the OGs! Thank you all so much for noticing that one.

This Broken Sword game lets you toggle between Reforged, and Original graphics.
On keyboard it's the Tab key, for the Steam Deck and controllers it's clicking down the right stick or "select"/"back", and if you're using the Steam Deck touch controls it's holding down 2 fingers while tapping a third.

This allows you to compare moments in the game, or even play the entire game in the original graphics.

Bilinear filtering is the far superior option when looking to enhance textures; It smooths, it blurs, it hides imperfections..
UNLESS of course, you're trying to blow up a game from 1996. Then smoothing and blurring hides all the beautiful pixels! So in our case, as some of you so helpfully pointed out, Nearest Neighbour is much preferred.
This was an oversight on our part, and has now been fixed! If you didn't notice this, now you never will.



🎭 Mask border artefacts aka strange lines
Some of you, especially those playing with "original borders", have reported seeing a long line in places like near the roadworks in Paris, Hotel Ubu, and the Marketplace.

What you were seeing are the borders of the separate images (masks) incorrectly fusing with the background layers. Funnily enough this was related to the above mentioned Bilinear Filtering.

Bilinear Filtering works by negotiating a middle ground between the borders that need to be blended. The middle ground between something transparent, and something non transparent will however never be transparent. And that's what that line was.

We devised a fix by adding a duplicated edge to the masks, which defeats the filtering artefacts!



🏩 Hotel Ubu
Hotel Ubu's background art is quite tall, and we noticed that the 16:9 crop was focusing on the centre of the artwork. We moved it a little further down, but if you want to see the full background art you can always play the game in Windowed mode, or go to video settings and select "original borders".




These are some important initial improvements, but we wanted to get these to you as soon as possible.
We are already exploring potential improvements to other areas of the audio that need the most attention (love you, French 😭) and hope that you know how much we appreciate everyone's feedback in your emails to us, your comments on Steam, and your messages on Discord. Thank you for your wonderful support, and your patience.

So for now, these are the adjustments we've made to the audio in this update;


🔉 Adjusted Audio Levels
We turned the default music volume down and adjusted the master levels!
Menu and UI navigation were also quite loud, and are now hopefully less abrasive.

🎞️ Intro Movie & other Cutscenes
Turns out these were just playing at whichever volume they were recorded at - mortifying!
These have now been calibrated to obey the master music volume of the game!

🦆 Smoother Ducking
Ducking refers to the music temporarily "ducking" out of the way, by lowering the volume while a character is talking. We felt that the un-ducking curve was a little harsh. The music should now come back in more gently!

🎧 Popping
Especially noticeable when wearing headphones, there were two instances popping would occur; repeating effects, and skipping dialogue. Neither of which should make the audio pop anymore...

🔊 Missing UI Effects
Added the missing sound effects to the Conversation menus, consistent with the Inventory.




⏸️ Pausing Dialogue on Auto Play
The ESC key will now pause dialogue, even on Auto Play.

Broken Sword - Shadow of the Templars: Reforged already lets you choose between cinematic dialogue, or click-to-continue dialogue. The setting is called "Auto Play" and can be toggled on and off.

There are many reasons why it would be nice to pause dialogue in a pinch, even with Auto Play on, so we added it!

Pressing "ESC" will pause dialogue once the in-progress voice line is finished. The game then temporarily switches Auto Play off!

Any input after that (for example a mouse click) will automatically switch Auto-Play back on.

Lost your place? You can always check the dialogue history before continuing your game.

⚙️ D-UI-it yourself
For those of you who really want to turn off cursor snapping and cursor flashing;
There is a file called "vt7.ini" that sits in the same location your gamesaves are located in!

By default on Windows, it should be under:
Select your user account name, and go to
Open that file in a text editor, like notepad.

You can now add either of these two lines, depending on which UI element you'd like to turn off.
Simply copy and paste either, or both of these lines into the .ini text file, and save changes.

To undo the effects of these changes, simply go back to the file, and delete the lines of text you manually added. Remember to save, and reboot!

Don't worry, you won't break anything that "verify integrity of game files" wouldn't fix :)



🖼️ Resizing windows
Dragging a window into a new size, or even maximising from windowed mode actually just takes the lower resolution from the smaller window, and stretches it across your screen. No artists were hurt in the documentation of this bug, but this option has now been removed to protect everyone's feelings. You can toggle between windowed and fullscreen through the settings, or even press Alt + Enter. That way you'll always get the crispiest image!

For those of you with multi monitor setups, you can run the game on your preferred display by going into windowed mode, dragging the window to which ever monitor you would like the game to run on, and entering full screen mode! This should also keep your game there the next time you boot up.



⛪ Improved navigation in the Church
Not enough floor was clickable. Now more floor is clickable. Happy ambling!




📜 Updated Credits
We also took this opportunity to add a couple more of our Kickstarter backers who've sent in their preferred name in credits, and made an effort to include all of the change requests we received since launch!


✍️ Typos and Errors
Thank you to everyone who sent in their typos, we tried to get those corrections in as best we could!
If you still see typos, please reach out, it's always appreciated!
However text takes its lead from the speech files, so in the few cases where the original voice lines have more complex circumstances that aren't quite typos, we're taking the side of the voice lines... (love you, German 😭)



💬 Subtitle Shadows
The way the game calculates the shadows behind subtitles is by creating a shape, or block. This is rendered into a texture off-screen, then blackened, blurred, and put back behind the subtitle. So all the subtitle shadow is, is a black, blurry version of the subtitle itself.

Because blurring is quite expensive we were being really strict with what the maximum size could be, so when presented with something outside those stipulations the renderer got a little confused and made some of the subtitle shadows appear a little wonky. Thoroughly de-wonked!!!



We absolutely love the Steam Deck! This update includes all the extra effort we put into the touch controls of this game, so that if you wanted to, you could complete the entire game using only touch inputs! In fact, if you do, we would LOVE to have some feedback to make them even better!

Some things we refined:

🔍 Checking if exits can be examined by swiping over them
🗺️ Better navigation on the Map
👾 Toggling between Reforged and Original graphics by holding down 2 fingers while tapping a third
⌛ Opening the Dialogue History with long presses anywhere other than on hotspots
👇 Improvements to dragging and dropping items

And for those unaware, double-tapping hotspots automatically selects the primary action!

We might continue to refine touch controls more, depending on your feedback, so let us know what you think :)



http://discord.gg/revolutionsoftware

We always try to be here for you, and try to read as many messages as possible.
We're there to help with puzzles, log your bug reports, collect your feedback, troubleshoot obscure errors, and generally like to feel closer with people who play our games.

Join our wonderful community of adventure gamers, and come say hi!

We’re so grateful to have such a strong, vocal, and passionate community around our games, and we look forward to hearing your thoughts on this update!