Broken Sword's AI upscaling wasn't 'enormously satisfactory'
It turns out Broken Sword's AI upscaling tools weren't as efficient as expected.
Revolution Software co-founder Charles Cecil reflected on the 2024 release of Broken Sword - Shadow of the Templars: Reforged in an interview with GamesIndustry.biz published Tuesday as the company readies to launch Broken Sword - The Smoking Mirror: Reforged.
The remake of Shadow of the Templars brought in more than £618,000 (roughly $825,000) on Kickstarter, but Cecil said the game cost much more. The AI tools didn't end up saving the company money.
Cecil spoke to Game Developer in 2023 about Revolution Software's intention to use AI tools to both reduce "drudgery" for artists and to save money. He said at the time that the tool—which he described as "laying the foundation" for artists who then add "their own touches"—does in 10 minutes what would take an artist an hour. It also cost a lot less, he said at the time.
"That costs about 20 percent of what it would do without AI," Cecil told Game Developer in 2023. "So, of course that's a consideration, but it's also about eliminating drudgery. To put this tool into the same category of some others is frankly ludicrous."
But looking back on development in his conversation with GamesIndustry.biz, Cecil said that the AI tool's result was not "enormously satisfactory." Asked whether it was an "expensive mistake" to commit to AI tools, Cecil said yes.
He continued: "It just wasn't appropriate for us." Revolution Software artists instead redrew the backgrounds for the remake, he told GamesIndustry.biz. "It took more time, but you got better results," he said. "So for Broken Sword 2, we've just done that, we are not using any sort of form of AI as far as the backgrounds and as far as the character sprites [are concerned]."
However, not all the AI tools it used were a bust: Cecil told GamesIndustry.biz that the studio used "enhancement software" to improve "horribly compressed dialogue recordings" from Broken Sword - The Smoking Mirror. The tool, dxRevive from Accentize, uses "highly optimized algorithms based on artificial neural networks" to enhance sound recordings, according to its website.
The only problem was that the studio found the tool right before release; it had to patch the game to update the audio.
Cecil previously said AI was vital to remastering Broken Sword - Shadow of the TemplarsThe AI tool used for the 2024 game was created with the University of York; and it was fed only data that's owned by Revolution Software, Cecil told Game Developer in 2023. He defended the use of the tool as something that would increase creativity for the team.
"I am going to defend to the heavens the fact that AI is able to do most of this work, and then a human gets involved and brings in their creativity," he said. "We have human artists using their creative talents to create facial expressions, correct animations, and finesse the details, but the base work is no longer needed."
Cecil told GamesIndustry.biz that he made statements like that in "good faith at the time," but that the controversy some of it caused wasn't necessarily a bad thing. "And I think that actually if you are taking a game that is 30 years old and you are reforging it, you're enhancing it, actually having a little bit of controversy is not a bad thing, because it makes it feel relevant, it makes it feel contemporary," he said.
For Broken Sword: The Smoking Mirror's reforged edition, Revolution Software is relying on Philippines-based animators, some of whom worked with Fil-Cartoons on the original game released in 1997, Cecil told GamesIndustry.biz.
Through the rest of the interview, which you can read in full at GamesIndustry.biz, Cecil reflected on Revolution Software's history—the struggles it faced under publisher THQ and how it stayed afloat in recent years self-publishing its own works.
Revolution Software relied on Kickstarter backers for its recent games, as well as its back catalogue sales, which are "a decimal point" for big publishers, but "really good" for Revolution Software, Cecil said. Revolution Software has had to contend with its financial woes, like the rest of the industry, and the push to AI was part of that cost-conscious nature.
It didn't work out, but Cecil linked the "expensive mistake"—that he didn't know would be a mistake, of course—to the resurgence of the franchise. "If I'd known how expensive it was going to be to [make Broken Sword - The Smoking Mirror: Reforged], there is no way that we would've ever had the balls to actually do it," he told GamesIndustry.biz.
