Beyond a Steel Sky - sequel to Beneath a Steel Sky from Revolution Software

[Boleskine]

https://adventuregamers.com/articles/view/40133

Beyond a Steel Sky hands-on preview

Written by
Laura Cress — April 15, 2020

Returning to Beyond a Steel Sky after my brief demonstration with Revolution's CEO Charles Cecil at last year's gamescom (which now seems like a lifetime ago), I was looking forward to finding out what more Union City and its colourful cast of reprobates and robots had to offer. At the start of this sequel to the 1994 sci-fi point-and-click adventure classic Beneath a Steel Sky, it's clear that returning protagonist Robert Foster doesn't share my intrigue – he'd pretty much rather be anywhere else than back in the place he spent much of his time trying to escape last time. But the main part of my playthrough put me in control of Foster on the outskirts of the city trying to find a way past the gate back in.

As with its prequel, Beyond presents Foster's current predicament using the beautiful comic book panel stylings of award-winning Watchmen artist Dave Gibbons. The intro does a good job of summing up Foster's past for anyone who hasn't yet given the now-free Beneath their time (or has simply forgotten in the ensuing 26 years). Foster's still a nomad, travelling from tribe to tribe in the desert scrubland outside of Union City, called The Gap. Of course, all that changes very quickly when a group of masked strangers burst up from the ground in a strange bipedal machine and in the attack they take Milo, one of the current camp's children, with them. It's up to Foster to track the gang down and get Milo back, and unsurprisingly, it soon becomes clear that all roads, and answers, lead to Union City.

Unlike its predecessor, Beyond will be completely 3D with characters and backdrops that have a cel-shaded comic book feel, in a similar vein to Telltale's The Wolf Among Us, if with a less noir-styled, slightly brighter palette. Some have bemoaned Revolution's decision to change Beneath's 2D graphics, but stepping into the busy arena outside the city proper, I was struck by how much freedom 3D allowed life to take its course. Characters move around even more freely, birds fly overhead, and nearly everything is an object that can be used or examined in some way. There's always a danger with 3D that areas are so open that vital objects or puzzle clues are easy to miss, but there seemed to be just about enough clear signposting in my demo to make it obvious where I should be exploring.



Moving Foster is a case of using the WASD keys and mouse for the camera, pressing Shift to run. (A gamepad option seems likely, as this game is coming to consoles as well, but I wasn’t able to test this on PC.) There is no key to highlight hotspots in the area, but when in close proximity to something interactive, an option will flash up for you to engage with it or use an item from your inventory on it. This works well enough in practice, though it does mean you have to be right in front of an object you want to interact with, which feels a little bit clunky sometimes when using the WASD keys. As for the camera itself, mercifully it moves pretty freely along with you, never making it feel like you're having to fight it to show what you want to see. Running around the Union City outskirts, I was struck by how high you could look up the intimidating walls, all the way to the cloudy sky overhead.

The new aesthetic plays right into Revolution's Virtual Theatre idea. First used in their games back in the '90s, it sees every character moving about with their own motivations and paths, which you'll need to manipulate to progress. The added flexibility afforded by 3D obviously is much better suited to this concept, in that there's much more space both vertically and horizontally for characters to roam around in. I didn't really find myself using this conceit for problem solving during the demo; instead it more meant I was often running after or trying to find characters to trigger a new branch of dialogue. But according to Charles, it will feed into puzzles more organically in other areas of Beyond, alongside making everything seem more open and alive.

One updated system for puzzling will see you able to hack into certain computers or devices (similar to LINC in Beneath) using a special scanner and swap “logic nodes” to pretty much make computers do as you wish. For example, if a bridge requires a type of key card or chip to allow you to pass, but you don't have that pass, you can swap the two blocks of “grant access” and “access denied” around, so that now NOT having a key card means you're allowed in. It's a really cool idea that I'm hoping gets used more in the full game as there were only a few simple examples of it in the demo. Fingers crossed this will add a new dimension to gameplay alongside dialogue and inventory solutions.

Spoiler

Another nice feature I noticed was a hint system, not dissimilar to the kind used by Revolution in the recent Broken Sword. It seems there'll be a “cool down” restriction, whereby after asking for one hint you'll have to wait at least two minutes before you can ask for the next one. It's a nice idea to encourage people to only turn to help when needed, while still offering the chance to solve the issue yourself without having the complete solution spelled out.

Everyone here will be voiced, and there's a large cast to meet in your first few encounters back in and around Union City, from Ember, a sassy scavenger; to Chipsworth, a robotic butler. Foster's voice actor (different from Beneath's CD-ROM version) lends the character some much needed grizzled gravitas thanks to all of his time spent out in the bush. Dialogue options (shown on-screen as text) will update themselves with a green arrow once you've unlocked something more to speak about; otherwise they’ll be highlighted in yellow for options relating directly to objectives, or blue for additional dialogue lines. The writing feels snappy for the most part, aside from one strange meeting with an Irish woman that came off as stilted and artificial – let's just say that Foster is best at leaving the comedy to others.

As well as the outskirts of Union City, which I'd seen previously, I got to venture inside a little bit as well. Speaking of comic relief, after Foster left, his robot pal Joey took charge with the aim of transforming it into a utopia. Whilst he appears to have improved much in the ensuing years, Joey's now nowhere to be seen, with the City instead ruled by the Council, a group of rather autocratic Nineteen Eighty-Four-sounding ministers more interested in controlling the population than improving it.



Having managed to gain access to the city by swapping another person's ID chip for my own, I headed back to my “new” (read: the other guy's) apartment, only to find a member of the Ministry of Welfare on my doorstep inquiring as to why I had been absent from work for so long. This challenged me with finding out as much as I could about the identity of Foster's accidental benefactor to try convincing the Minister that I was him, which required some snooping around the apartment to discover a bit about his hobbies and where he worked. It was then time to be quizzed by the Minister, which included an amusing section of having to interpret the mimed actions of my alter ego's wife standing behind the inquisitor to guess some extra answers in a nice demonstration that Revolution's sense of fun is well and truly intact.

It's clear there's still some fine-tuning needed before the release of Beyond a Steel Sky, with the odd bug remaining here and there, though nothing too unexpected at this stage. Mainly, though, there's great promise in the prospect of being able to go anywhere and ostensibly do anything within reason in a free-form way, and I'm left feeling hopeful that Revolution will be able to harness that potential and use it to enhance the traditional adventure game fare. At the very least the intriguing plot, eclectic cast of characters old and new, and Dave Gibbons' comic book art should make for a memorable trip back to Union City.

 

[V_K]

The new aesthetic plays right into Revolution's Virtual Theatre idea. First used in their games back in the '90s, it sees every character moving about with their own motivations and paths, which you'll need to manipulate to progress. The added flexibility afforded by 3D obviously is much better suited to this concept, in that there's much more space both vertically and horizontally for characters to roam around in. I didn't really find myself using this conceit for problem solving during the demo; instead it more meant I was often running after or trying to find characters to trigger a new branch of dialogue.

So I guess nothing much changed in that regard.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/20...work-but-it-already-has-really-great-puzzles/

Beyond A Steel Sky needs work, but it already has really great puzzles
Make robots, not war

I’m not a big one for early previews myself, but having played the demo for Beyond A Steel Sky, the new pointy-clicky 3D adventure game from Revolution Games, I will concede that it was an hour and a half of my time well spent on puzzles and robots and hacking.

Beyond A Steel Sky is set in a sort of Mad-Max-meets-cyberpunk dystopian mash-up from Charles “Broken Sword” Cecil, and famous comics artist Dave “Watchmen” Gibbons. The game’s traditionally rubbish, genre staple name is actually a hangover from the game to which this is a sequel, Beneath A Steel Sky, where gruff everyman Robert Foster and his AI robot pal Joey freed a city-state from the clutches of its evil AI overlord. Now, years later, Foster is dealing with the aftermath.




That aftermath is pretty predictable, I think. The preamble catches you up on the plot of Beneath and sets up some of Beyond (the preamble is… lengthy, and takes the form of a comic strip). I’m pretty sure even the most technophobic rube, on witnessing Foster telling Joey the robot to just “make everyone happy” before leaving Union City, ostensibly forever, would sagely remark “Ye fucked that up, lad,” without even removing the ear of corn from their mouth.

And as it turns out, by the time you rock back up again, Joey has apparently disappeared, the citizens praise him like some sort of god, and the city is ruled over by a council of five extremely suspicious people, each responsible for one aspect of life. “Comfort” covers custodial duties, for example. “Wellbeing” sends people round to check on you if you take too many days off work. That sort of thing. Also, children are being kidnapped from the surrounding desert and smuggled into the city by night. That’s also a thing.



I should say from the off that this was a very preview-y preview build. Beyond is currently sitting on Steam with a “coming soon” release date, and I hope they give themselves plenty of time before locking a firmer date in, because the animation in particular is clearly a work in progress. This game is 3D, with a distinctly Telltale or Borderlands kind of look (or, I suppose, those games have a distinctly kind of Beneath A Steel Sky look), which does make it more fun to run around the different areas. But it also means more can bugger itself up.

One character, a cheerful delivery driver, demonstrated tremendous thigh strength, requiring only that his chair be 6 foot away in any direction in order to take his ease in mid air. Others treat floor level as a general suggestion, rather than a hard rule. Fun as it is to watch Foster occasionally float across the floor instead of walking, I can’t put my hand on my heart and say that Beyond A Steel Sky is ready for it’s debut ball just yet.

Spoiler

The dialogue system is also a bit opaque to navigate. Talking to characters brings up yer little word bubbles with potential topics, and I’ve worked out that a little green arrow appearing in the corner of one means you’ve learnt something that has opened up further options in that topic. But some bubbles appear yellow and some white, which I think relates to how important they are to the tasks you’ve got on the go – and yet they seem to switch around without my having really done anything. And while characters can prefix some things with “I already told you-“, you do end up in little conversational loops sometimes.

But those (fairly substantial, I suppose) niggles aside, Beyond A Steel Sky did some very good things. The characters were fun and often genuinely funny, most especially the robots, who all have that curious quirk of being self-aware and having personality, which is a terrible thing for a creator to do to a robot. The puzzles were hard enough to be satisfying and make me feel like a smarty pants, but logical enough that I didn’t need to use the walkthrough provided for thicky journalists. Most importantly though, they were so imaginative that solving them wasn’t a chore – a means to an end, where the end is usually a further puzzle – but a joy in itself.



One puzzle involved getting the power cell out of the back of an old recycling robot. He sounded a bit like Ray Winstone, complained about the new model robot floating around yonder, and when I asked if I could have his power cell he refused, because it sounded like dying to him, and he didn’t want to do that. But I had to steal his cell anyway, because I needed it for the aforementioned delivery driver. There are little bits like that, that make you consider what you’re doing even as you haven’t got much of a choice about doing it. But it didn’t make me feel disempowered as a player, it just made me think about the context of the world a bit more.

And not just that! The actual mechanical bits, the metaphorical turning of the jigsaw piece around to see where a piece fits, are just as good. One puzzle involves having to convince an interviewer (who looks like Waluigi would if they ever make a sequel to the Super Mario Bros. film) that you’re a dude called Graham, because you’ve stolen his identity. And since you might not know all the answers to all Waluigi’s questions, Graham’s wife stands off to one side, furiously pantomiming the right responses as best she can.



But the pièce de résistance is the scanning tool, which you get from a teenaged trader outside the city walls (after first luring a vicious carnivorous bird with some out-of-date sausages, natch). You can use it whenever you like, and it’ll give you access to automated systems so you can reconfigure their logic boards. In some cases that means turning a one-per-person vending machine into an unlimited fizzy drink dispenser, or turning on the sprinklers because the flowers outside really look parched. Other times it means patching into two or more systems at once and swapping things around, so a projection of a plant displays a tracking map instead.

It’s simple, and probably not revolutionary, but it feels so creative. It really seems like you’re doing something, you know? And while I can’t tell you how big the game will be, or if the rest of the world is as interactive and interesting as the three areas I got to run around in the demo, I can tell you I do really want to find out.

 

[WallaceChambers]

WccfTech uploaded this preview footage to their channel and it's a *very* early build. I'm not entirely sure if they were supposed to upload this or not...? But it's there until someone takes it down. A lot of the animation is clearly placeholder/unfinished and there's missing music,sfx,etc. Shouldn't be representative of the final product (hopefully).

 

[Haba]

Once again, this thing is a thing that should not be a thing. Stop doing this to us.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.pcgamer.com/2-hours-wit...k-adventure-from-the-creator-of-broken-sword/

2 hours with Beyond a Steel Sky, a cyberpunk adventure from the creator of Broken Sword

Back in 1994, Broken Sword creator Revolution Software released Beneath a Steel Sky, a cyberpunk point-and-click adventure set in a dystopian metropolis called Union City. Now, 26 years later, the studio is developing a sequel. Union City is the setting once again, only this time our hero, Robert Foster, isn't trying to escape—he's trying to get in.

You're introduced to Union City in the first act, and it's an impressive sight. After trudging through a sandstorm in the Gap—a post-apocalyptic name for the Australian outback—Foster crests a sand dune and finds the city looming over him. A dense forest of skyscrapers and smokestacks stretches for miles into the sky, circled by an impenetrable wall, and the scene is well and truly set. A boy, Milo, has gone missing, and the trail has led Foster here.

Beyond a Steel Sky is, as you might expect from Revolution, a fairly typical adventure game in many ways. You talk to people, pick up items, and solve multi-stage puzzles to progress. The two hours I played had the slow, laid-back pace that I've come to associate with this developer. There's no real urgency or time pressure, leaving you to explore at your own pace, getting a feel for the world and the people around you. It's very pleasant.

But Beyond a Steel Sky has some new ideas too, in particular its MINOS hacking tool. With this you can connect to computer systems and meddle with the code to help you solve puzzles—changing the speed of a conveyor belt, say, or tricking a hand scanner into accepting your invalid ID. This is all done via an intuitive drag-and-drop interface, and you can even drag nuggets of code between two different objects if you're standing an equal distance between them.

There's a neat built-in hint system too, which gives you increasingly obvious clues about your current predicament—but, cleverly, with a two-minute cooldown timer for each one. Knowing I couldn't just call up a hint instantly made me think a little harder about what I was trying to do. The puzzles themselves are classic Revolution, often involving a touch of slapstick humour, and making use of the large assortment of weird items stuffed in Foster's pockets.

At the end of Beneath a Steel Sky, Foster left the running of the city in the hands of Joey, a sarcastic but fundamentally good-natured self-aware AI he built as a child living in the Gap. Now, years later, it seems Joey is regarded as some kind of deity. Characters say "Praise Joey!" and you overhear snippets about how he transformed the city into a perfect utopia. But the oppressive, bureaucratic atmosphere of the place suggests otherwise.

As you explore you'll see Art Deco statues and murals depicting a one-armed figure. If you played Beneath a Steel Sky, you'll know that this is the faceless android body inhabited by Joey, whose arm was torn off in an accident near the end of the game. Beyond a Steel Sky is a standalone story, and you can dive straight in without playing the original. But if you have, details like this give the sequel a satisfying sense of continuity.

In previous demos of the game, Revolution has only shown one area: a freight depot outside the city gates. But in this hands-on preview build, after solving a series of elaborate puzzles, I'm finally able to enter the city itself. Foster is posing as a dead man he found in the Gap named Graham Grundy, whose citizen ID he transfers to a chip in his hand. Everyone in Union City has one of these, and pretty much everything—from accessing news terminals to opening doors—involves using a hand scanner.

When you enter, you're treated to a series of establishing shots of the city. It's a dramatic looking place, with a dizzying sense of scale. Look down and you can see networks of buildings and streets below the criss-crossed walkways; look up and those smokestacks you saw from afar in the desert seem even more massive. Watchmen artist Dave Gibbons is Beyond a Steel Sky's art director, and the game's colourful toon-shaded visuals do a great job of replicating his distinctive drawing style.

I end up using Grundy's chip to access his apartment, where I find his wife and a bureaucratic city official waiting. Apparently I (well, Graham) have been absent from work for several days, which is apparently a severe crime in this supposed utopia. Next thing I know I'm searching his flat for clues about him, so I can convince the official that I'm actually him. His wife, clearly scared of the city authorities, urges me to play along.

It's a detailed space, cluttered with clues about the late Mr. Grundy's life. Nosing around in people's personal space is a staple of the adventure genre, and I end up knowing far too much about this dead guy whose identity I stole. He's a cleaner, he has a heart implant, and he and his wife sleep in separate bedrooms because their relationship is on the rocks. Like the original, Beyond a Steel Sky has a very idiosyncratic, quirky sense of humour.

I mostly manage to convince the official that I'm Grundy, but I slip up a few times. A cute touch when I'm being grilled is Grundy's wife in the background, miming the correct answers. When I'm asked what my hobby is, she mimics clicking a camera. The bureaucrat eventually leaves us alone, but I can tell his suspicions have been raised. However, before I can see what happens next, the demo suddenly ends. Foster thinks Grundy was involved in Milo's kidnapping, but I guess I'll have to wait for the final game to find out.

I love what I've played so far, even though the early build I was given access to is massively unpolished, with missing animations, bugs, and other anomalies. If you're a fan of Revolution's particular brand of point-and-click adventures, you'll feel right at home with its gentle humour, steady pace, cast of eccentric characters, and abundance of regional British accents. The hacking system is the highlight here, and I'm hoping the puzzle designers force me to use it in increasingly complex, imaginative ways later in the game.

 

[WallaceChambers]

23 minutes of gameplay from Gamespot and this looks like an actual video Revolution meant to have people see. They've edited around some of the more egregiously unfinished animation and there's a proper look inside the new Joey revamped Union City. Much cheerier than the pre-Joey look. Obviously that'll just be the faux Utopian facade but I'm interested to see just how they make it evil cause it genuinely looks pretty chill.

 

[AdamReith]

That inventory selector.

 

[WallaceChambers]

 

[Infinitron]

https://wccftech.com/can-beyond-a-steel-sky-live-up-to-the-expectations-of-fans-hands-on-preview/

Can Beyond a Steel Sky Live Up to the Expectations of Fans? (Hands-On Preview)



Beyond a Steel Sky is the game that adventure game fans have been dreaming of for decades. It has been a long time since Beneath a Steel Sky launched in 1994, and the fans that played it remember it more fondly than almost any game that has come since. Good writing never ages, and that's exactly why players want Beyond a Steel Sky so badly. The grand return to Union City, the story of Foster and Joey, and the universe that players left behind years before, reimagined in Unreal Engine 4 with modern-day production quality. That is the dream. Following the Gamescom 2019 preview, we were recently able to go hands-on with the game at last.

The impetus behind Foster's new journey across the Gap and to Union City is the abduction of Milo, a young child that was taken by menacing androids racing across the Gap in a vehicle on four legs. Foster's search first takes him to just outside the enormous and imposing Union City walls, trying to find a way inside - but of course, Beyond a Steel Sky is an adventure game, and it is deliberately attempting to emulate adventure games of the 90s. As such, you'll be getting inside but it won't be the direct route.

You'll be navigating a small web of options, inventory items, dialogue choices, and much more. Just outside of the walls you'll find two small children from the Gap, a young engineer, a diagnostician from the city, and a truck driver whose truck full of sausages has broken down and is attracting ravenous Gang-gang birds. Imagine a crow-come-vulture which can tear your arm off. You'll be negotiating with the children and the engineer, finding clues from the others, throwing a bird into an electric fence, dancing to open a truck, stealing sausages, having chips implanted into your hand, hacking devices, stealing batteries, and so much more. All of these actions must be put in place in a specific order to open up the way forward, and the only thing that will take you there is closely analyzing your surroundings, and essentially, picking every option methodically when you get stuck.



But this slow pace which forces you to talk to every character is also what makes adventure games charming. You will be forced to learn about each character you talk to, who they are, why they are there, what they really want, and more. Every moment you spend figuring out puzzles you also become endeared to the characters you meet through the mechanics of the world. This is the magic of adventure games that many modern games have lost.

Eventually, you'll find your way inside the city, which is introduced with orchestral music and sweeping camera shots, like you've just entered Jurassic Park. It does look impressive, and the grandiose reveal is warranted: this is exactly what fans of the previous game have been waiting all this time for, and most importantly, the experienced team are entirely aware of fan expectations, and they're determined to nail the atmosphere fans want.

Once inside the city with a stolen ID chip, you'll meet the wife of the man whose identity you have assumed, and before you know it, you'll be researching his background in order to pass off as a man you know nothing about before a government official. It's in these moments that, once again, that classic adventure game style really shines.

Of course, we have Telltale Games to thank for reinventing the adventure game formula with the phenomenal The Walking Dead series, and Beyond a Steel Sky has clearly learnt some lessons from the adventure games that come since. Even the art style of Beyond a Steel Sky has that cel-shaded, comic-book feel, complete with black inked outlines on characters and environments, which make you believe it really could be a comic in motion. Well, it's a good attempt at least, though I'm not sure it's always believable.



The preview build I played did also, admittedly, come with its fair share of bugs, however the developers have made clear that they are fully aware of the issues in this build, and are continuing to debug and polish the game before release, so I can forgive the myriad of minor issues I saw. Honestly, I've seen AAA titles with rougher presentation at this stage in development.

While I do want to continue playing Beyond a Steel Sky and exploring Union City, I have to admit that right now, I have no idea how it'll stack up next to other modern adventure games. This has the advantage of being the God-sent wish of many retro adventure game fans, but whether or not the narrative and gameplay mechanics will continue to be interesting remain to be seen. Though the hacking tool which is introduced early on in the game certainly keeps me feeling optimistic.

Beyond a Steel Sky is still in development, but it looks better every time I see it. This is definitely one to watch for any adventure game fan, with the release supposedly not too far off in the future.

https://www.ign.com/articles/beyond...ol-adventure-game-with-a-modern-coat-of-paint

Beyond A Steel Sky Preview: An Old-School Adventure Game With A Modern Coat Of Paint
This upcoming point-and-click game is firmly rooted in nostalgia without losing sight of modern innovations along the way.

Many old-school PC gamers have a fond place in their heart for adventure games. Landmark titles like Myst, The Secret of Monkey Island, Grim Fandango, and many others put the genre on the map as a premiere format for delivering engaging stories that put the player at the center of the narrative in a way that movies never could. They helped define storytelling for video games. Near the top of that list for plenty of gamers is, undoubtedly, Beneath a Steel Sky from Revolution Software, released in 1994.

Now, 26 years later, Revolution Software is back with a bigger and bolder sequel in the form of Beyond a Steel Sky, which once again puts players in the wayward boots of Robert Foster across a dystopian adventure amidst interweaving storylines of intrigue and mystery. After trying out a demo build of the game and seeing the first couple of hours, I came away extremely eager to see how this one turns out.

The first thing worth discussing is the complete shift in gameplay style. Rather than being another actual point-and-click adventure game from a side-scrolling 2D view point like the original and Revolution’s other popular series, Broken Sword, Beyond a Steel Sky actually plays a lot like most other 3D action-adventure games of the modern day. There’s a familiar third-person camera floating behind Foster, movement uses WASD controls on PC, you can hold down Shift to jog more quickly, and you’ll navigate conversations with Bioware-style dialogue topics. But don’t get it twisted: this is still a classic adventure game at its core.

In Beyond a Steel Sky, you’re on a mission to track down and rescue a young boy named Milo who’s been captured by a giant mechanical beast. It flees across the desert toward Union City, so you set off to figure out who took him, why he was kidnapped, and how to get him back. It’s a good story hook that adds urgency and doesn’t take long to get you invested.

While purists might initially lament the shift in perspective, it doesn’t take long to realize the developers didn’t lose sight of their origins. Sky’s got a wonderfully colorized comic book-style intro scene reminiscent of the original and the art style is bright and vibrant with bold lines resembling graphic novels, much like TellTale’s adventure games such as The Walking Dead.

The vast majority of your time is still spent sifting through conversations, meticulously searching environments for items and clues, and good old-fashioned trial and error to get through countless puzzles. What stood out to me with the approach this time around, though, is a larger focus on set-piece moments and using the power of 2020 hardware to deliver iconic, sweeping visuals that would have never been possible nearly three decades ago.

For example, after the intro animation, the camera pans over the desert (or gapland) showing Foster walking out through the wasteland. That sort of cinematic presentation just isn’t possible with a more traditional adventure game format, and it helps build up the emotion and anticipation of the narrative. The same thing happens again once you finally get Foster inside of Union City itself, with a sweeping camera shot that highlights the cyberpunk aesthetic.

All that being said, classic adventure games have a certain type of simplistic charm that is missing here. Perhaps it’s due to the era in which I grew up, but pixel art is just inherently endearing to me whereas a cel-shaded aesthetic often struggles to flow well, can come off as stiff, or even lack nuance since textures are mostly flat. A finely crafted scene of pure pixel art just oozes personality by contrast. It’s also much faster and easier to quickly scan entire environments, click on many things, and try out puzzle solutions without having to always physically move your character and explore every nook and cranny manually.

To counteract this it does seem like, at least initially, Revolution Software is utilizing more simplistic puzzles from what I’ve seen as compared to adventure games of yore. You can still expect multiple solutions to some events and often overlapping objectives, but I didn’t find myself bashing my head against the wall getting stuck on things as often.

That’s not to say things aren’t complex though. For example, I still had to retrieve a data transmitter from a bird, to then give it to a young woman to get an ID, which I needed to get into the city, to find a person. Domino effects like that still happen everywhere and adventure games are all about figuring out which order to lay out the pieces before you start knocking things over.

With Revolution Software’s new format and modernized form of play, the elegance of playing Beyond a Steel Sky seems to be due to clear game design and decades of experience building worlds that tell stories both implicitly and explicitly.

 

[Tom Selleck]

If by "expectations of fans" they mean "expectations of fans (of the original)" then I imagine those expectations are "this game looks like shit" in which case, I'm 100% certain it will live up to them.

 

[Boleskine]

00:00 Intro
00:40 How is Charles doing during times of Covid-19?
02:55 When is Beyond a Steel Sky coming out?
04:01 Will there be a DRM-free version?
04:30 BASS on other plattforms?
05:00 German voice-overs?
06:50 Will there a be big box release?
09:47 Do special boxes in retail still make sense?
11:00 Is Joey returning?
12:20 Will we see other familiar locations and characters from BASS 1?
12:50 How did you find the look for Beyond a Steel Sky?
15:50 Work with Dave Gibbons
17:27 What are the puzzles in Beyond a Steel Sky?
22:12 Puzzles with multiple solutions
24:00 Multiple endings?
24:45 How does the dialogue system work?
26:00 Hints
27:15 Was BASS meant to be a standalone game?
28:30 How important is it to have a meaning behind the story?
32:20 A new Broken Sword in Germany?
34:20 Do you still like playing adventure games?

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.pcgamesn.com/beyond-a-steel-sky/making-it-in-unreal

Making it in Unreal: bridging the ’90s and today in Beyond a Steel Sky
Famed adventure game designer Charles Cecil explains how the genre can still break new ground in game design and graphics tech

*Extremely Morpheus voice*: What if I told you that back when they were one of the most dominant genres in PC gaming, “point-and-click adventures actually represented the cutting edge of graphics technology?”

Those are the words of Charles Cecil, creator of such point-and-click icons as the Broken Sword series and Beneath a Steel Sky. It’s a strange thought in today’s world of near photorealistic open worlds, but for proof, you only need compare the glorious colours and painting-like backdrops of Cecil’s worlds – and genre stablemates like Discworld and Monkey Island – to the blocky graphics of shooters, RTSes, and platformers at the time.

This explains why Cecil is keen to ensure Beyond a Steel Sky, his long-awaited sequel, remains a showcase for graphics technology just as its forebears were, and in this quest, Unreal 4 was his engine of choice. “I wanted to carry forward the charm and the core values of the original and translate them into a hugely ambitious adventure that once again leveraged cutting-edge technology,” Cecil tells us. “We wanted to use the most advanced solution available to create a game that looks graphically unique and reinvents the genre’s gameplay. Our choice of Unreal Engine 4 allows us to raise the bar, with the aim of developing our most ambitious adventure game to date.”

Unlike many developers we speak with for this series, the team at Cecil’s studio Revolution was both highly experienced – with 30 years of developing adventure games to its name – yet also new to Unreal. “Initially we found it hard to source level designers with experience in UE4; universities and colleges often choose to teach their students using simpler engines,” Cecil says. Fortunately, Revolution was able to get to grips with UE4 with a little help from its vast developer community.



The helpfulness of that community is well-documented in this series; we’ve heard many stories of thorny technical problems de-thorned with its help. We are less often told about what Epic itself does to cultivate that community. “Epic was able to offer comprehensive support, such as hosting Unreal Fest, to which we sent a number of team members,” Cecil says. Unreal Fest is a growing annual gathering of UE4 game developers, all networking, sharing knowledge, and hosting presentations and panels.

Once Revolution were up and running, the studio found “UE4 was able to provide a comprehensive base on which to build most of our technical requirements,” Cecil says, although the team “did choose to reach out [to facial animation software company Speech Graphics] for lip syncing. Whilst simple lip flap was a solution, it wouldn’t have met our aesthetic quality objectives.”

Many of the old point-and-click adventures – including Beneath a Steel Sky, but also the first Discworld and Monkey Island – were known for a particular and lavish pixel art style. With the likes of Discworld 2, Broken Sword, and Day of the Tentacle, this look had evolved into that of a colourful children’s cartoon, like you might see on Nickelodeon on a Saturday morning. But in an era where highly realistic graphics are possible, it may seem a lofty challenge to create a successor to one of the classics of this genre that can be true to its legacy and yet also remain a showcase for graphics tech.

The trailer for Beyond a Steel Sky shows how Revolution is aiming to tackle this challenge. The world is fully 3D and explorable, but rendered in a style that recalls a comic book – a little like Borderlands, but more subtle (which, let’s face it, is a low bar to clear).

“The game is being developed in partnership with Dave Gibbons, the artist and co-creator of the classic graphic novel Watchmen,” Cecil says. “Dave’s distinctive style guided our ambition to recreate the look and feel of an interactive comic book.” This style is achieved through ToonToy, a post-processing technology custom-built by Revolution’s Emanuele Salvucci, which includes an image-processing technique called Canny edge detection.

“We initially implemented Canny at the end of 2016,” Salvucci tells us. “At that time Unreal was version 4.11/12 – now we are almost at 4.25. To our knowledge, this was the first ever implementation of the [Canny edge detection] algorithm in Unreal, in which materials are created by means of ‘networks of nodes’, rather than through ‘programming’, in order to be ‘portable’. While Canny is a well known image-processing technique, it is surprisingly hard to find a working, modern implementation of it in real time, so we essentially wrote the algorithm from scratch.

“We chose this algorithm because it gives a unique look to line rendering. One of its special features is that it is able to provide exactly one-pixel wide lines at any screen resolution. We now have four different algorithms for line-rendering in ToonToy that we can mix together. All in all, our solution provides more than 500 adjustable parameters in order to get the desired look under different conditions.” If you’re curious, an overview of the pipeline and structure of Revolution’s post processing shader can be found in this technical paper.

Spoiler

But it isn’t just technology that has moved on since the original Beneath a Steel Sky. The adventure genre itself is unrecognisable since the ’90s, with old-school point-and-clicks having long been superseded by the likes of Life is Strange, or first-person adventures like Dear Esther and Gone Home, or visual novels like Doki Doki Literature Club. Satisfying the original fans while appealing to new audiences inspired by these successors was a key challenge.

“Right from the start, we asked our fans what they would want to see in a sequel and used their responses as design pillars,” Cecil says. “These included the relationship between Foster and Joey (Joey had to be in it!); a return to Union City but viewed from a different perspective; and the juxtaposition of a dramatic story that raised questions about modern society with humorous exchanges.”

Perhaps boldly, Cecil says Beyond a Steel Sky is “unashamedly an adventure game” in that it utilises many of the gameplay elements that a fan would expect from a 3D adventure. But that doesn’t mean he hasn’t found some exciting ways to innovate. “These classic mechanics sit above a concept that we call Virtual Theatre – a system in which intelligent characters inhabit the game world. They pursue their own motivations and respond and react to world events. These motivations can be subverted by the player; either directly through their actions, or indirectly through hacking the interconnected AI systems to create unexpected outcomes for those characters.”



When designing new systems, the ability to rapidly prototype, test, and then iterate can save months of development time. And so, as with many games in this series, Revolution found Unreal’s tools invaluable in doing exactly this. “The use of UE4 has left us super agile in our development approach,” Cecil says. “Through the extensive use of Blueprints [a visual scripting tool that enables even non-programmers to code game functionality], we prototyped the technologies and gameplay, which allowed us to build and rapidly iterate on the vision.”

Beyond a Steel Sky faces one final hurdle in bridging the past with the world as it is today. Although it was set in a dystopian future, Beneath a Steel Sky was very much a game of its time: when it was released in 1994, “British society was going through turmoil as financial deregulation made some hugely wealthy whilst impoverishing others,” as Cecil puts it. “The Berlin Wall had recently fallen, appearing to deal a death blow to communism. The British Prime Minister [when the wall fell], Margaret Thatcher, famously said ‘there is no such thing as society’, which felt like a profoundly depressing statement. For the original game, I sought to project how this journey might end – badly.”

But this was over 25 years ago. Have these themes become more or less pressing? “We have seen huge change,” Cecil says. “After a sharp decline, the communist powers have come back stronger and every bit as belligerent, the number of countries with nuclear weapons has proliferated, and the capitalism embraced by the West has not propelled us to happiness in the way that we had originally expected.”



It sounds like the sequel should have plenty of fodder, then. In what ways has Revolution’s treatment of this subject matter changed?

“Beyond a Steel Sky describes a benign regime that seeks simply to make people happy – from an AI’s perspective. I hope that it will feel very relevant in the modern day – the perceived notion of wellbeing and happiness, and how this connects to societies where AI is being used to reward or punish people at a micro-level of human activity. How much can we trust AI to comprehend genuinely human behaviors – and how dangerous might it be when we do? It feels that the time is right to explore these questions as Orwell’s 1984 did for the Cold War era. I also take inspiration from Terry Gilliam’s Brazil in terms of the juxtaposition of the terrifying and the ludicrous. ”

Beyond a Steel Sky is coming soon to Steam and Apple Arcade. Unreal Engine 4 is now free.

In this sponsored series, we’re looking at how game developers are taking advantage of Unreal Engine 4 to create a new generation of PC games. With thanks to Epic Games and Revolution Software.

 

[agris]

“Dave’s distinctive style guided our ambition to recreate the look and feel of an interactive comic book.” This style is achieved through ToonToy [...]

ToonToy really says it all when it comes to describing the look that they’ve developed.

 

[Infinitron]

 

[AdamReith]

Look at those pesky ugly words, pity they couldn't find enough screenshots to take up the whole two pages.

 

[baud]

Look at those pesky ugly words, pity they couldn't find enough screenshots to take up the whole two pages.

pencil pusher are paid depending on the number of words and screenshots are cheap (provided by the game dev), so in those lean times, the editor made the hard choice (lol) of spending as little as possible on writing.

 

[Tom Selleck]

 

[AdamReith]

Look at those pesky ugly words, pity they couldn't find enough screenshots to take up the whole two pages.

pencil pusher are paid depending on the number of words and screenshots are cheap (provided by the game dev), so in those lean times, the editor made the hard choice (lol) of spending as little as possible on writing.

The fucker just wrote step by step what happened to him in the game. Just make a video if you want to do that.

 

[Agame]

How many virgins I have to sacrifice to make sure this will turn out good?

A year later, what is the body count, and is it working!?

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

How many virgins I have to sacrifice to make sure this will turn out good?

A year later, what is the body count, and is it working!?

Just yourself would be enough, but you decided to back out at the very last minute, and then... well, you know the rest.

 

[Venser]

 

[jac8awol]

WTF is this disney kiddy crap. Tone feels waaaay off. This isn't cyberpunk, this is jar jar binks.

 

[Grauken]

BaSS wasn't ever really cyberpunk, just post-apocalypse with some future city visuals, hardly cyberpunk

 

[Darth Roxor]

and it was in fact fairly jar jar binks to begin with