Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon

Gameplay

The gameplay in Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon is a departure from previous instalments in the series, using a direct control interface. The player guides George Stobbart's movements with a keyboard or gamepad, while Nicole Collard is also a playable character at certain times. George must collect objects that can be used with other collectable objects, parts of the scenery, or other people in the game world in order to solve puzzles and progress in the game. George can engage in dialogue with other characters through conversation trees to gain hints of what needs to be done to solve the puzzles or to progress the plot. The player has action choices in the bottom right of the screen - there are four circles with anywhere from one to four actions available at any time; the player selects the desired action with the corresponding key. As in the first two Broken Sword games, in The Sleeping Dragon player character death is possible, although the penalty for death is less severe than that of the other two games in that it simply forces the player to repeat the scene where the death occurred rather than wipe unsaved progress.

Plot

Following the events in Smoking Mirror a few years ago, George Stobbart has returned to his life as a lawyer, and finds himself flying to the Congo Basin, alongside his pilot, Harry Gilligan, to meet a scientist by the name of Cholmondely, who claims to have created a machine that can make limitless energy. However, a storm forces the pair's plane to crash land on a cliff-top, close to the scientist's lab. Escaping the wreckage, George makes his way to the lab, arriving just in time to see the scientist gunned down by a pale, lanky man, known as Susarro, and his bodyguard, after being questioned on an unknown subject.

A postcard hidden in the lab prompts George to travel to Glastonbury, England, to search for a man named Bruno, a friend of the scientist who had advised him to flee. In his attempts to find out where Bruno is, he quickly learns that he disappeared before his arrival and is now in danger. Although not knowing where he is exactly, after visiting a fortune teller, George spots a building that caught fire, and goes to deal with it, saving an old man trapped within it. When they chat, he quickly learns that the old man's name is Bruno Ostvald, the scientist he met in the Hotel Ubu in Paris, and a Neo-Templar. Bruno reveals to George that he left the group after the events of Shadows of the Templar, and that they are now led by Susarro, who took over and renamed it the Cult of the Dragon. Susarro is seeking to gain immortality through the use of the Earth's ley lines, which Cholmondely was using in his experiments, and Bruno explains that he is able to track these with a special device he has, believing Susarro may be going to a site in Paris to find something important, prompting the pair to follow after him.

During these events, in Paris, Nico Collard prepares to meet and interview a hacker named Vernon Blier in his apartment, who recently decoded the Voynich manuscript, but is afraid for his life because of what he found out from it. Vernon is murdered in his home by a woman impersonating Nico, named Petra, just before the former gets there. When the two confront each other inside the apartment, Petra fails to kill Nico, and flees, leaving a few clues behind. Nico quickly tries to find what she needs to prove her innocence, but after the police arrive to investigate the murder, the detective in charge chooses to arrest her, based on the witness account of Vernon's landlady. Following her arrest and subsequent release two days later, Nico decides to find out more about what Vernon had found out, and returns to his apartment, finding his girlfriend, Beatrice, residing inside, still coping with the loss of Vernon. Finding and managing to open a hidden safe, Nico finds diagrams and a DVD, and the latter she plays back at her own apartment before showing it to Andre Lobineau, an old friend of hers, finding it contained a message from Vernon about what he found, believing the bizarre storms happening across the world are a sign of a global catastrophe in the making. Finding out about an abandoned theatre on the Ile St Louis in Paris, connected to a mask the killer had with her when she fled Vernon's murder, Nico heads out to investigate it but gets captured by Petra and her boss, Susarro.

Development

Revolution first discussed the idea for the game in 2000. At first, The Sleeping Dragon was planned to have similar cartoon-quality visuals to the first two Broken Sword games; however, Revolution decided not to use the "flat" look, claiming it lacked visual depth. The team wanted the game to look believable, but not necessarily realistic, similar to Japanese animated films. Textures were hand drawn to achieve the "cartoon" look, while the light-map employed radiosity to create realistic lighting. Advances in hardware plus the changes in methodology allowed the game to move to 24-bit colour.

Charles Cecil was the director of the game, and Tony Warriner was responsible for AI programming and some aspects of the game's design. To make the game feel like a film, Revolution brought in a cinematic consultant, Bob Keen, who made sure the game conveyed emotions and atmosphere appropriate for each scene. The music in the game was composed by Ben McCullough. The voice recording was scheduled to take five days; however, the entire process took four days. The voices were recorded with the voice actors together, enabling better acting and interaction. The full script is 6,000 lines in total, similar to Broken Sword II. While Rolf Saxon returned to voice George Stobbart, Nicole "Nico" Collard was played by Sarah Crook.

Revolution held a casting session at a studio called The Spotlight (in Leicester Square in London), in which multiple parts were auditioned for by multiple actors. Originally, Nico was planned to be voiced by a native French speaker, to get the right accent, but she ended up being voiced by Sarah Crook, a native English speaker. The rest of the credited voice actors were Alison Pettit, Andrew Secombe, Bob Golding, Jay Benedict, John Bull, Laurence Bouvard, Peter Marinker, Rachael Rogers, Rachel Preece, Simon Treves, and Seamus O'Neil.

Cecil stated in an interview that the development costs were £2 million. Warriner noted that the game was significantly more expensive than its earlier projects, and cost "another US$1 million over BS1". Though the game made $40 million, as a developer Revolution suffered a massive loss.

Although the PlayStation 2 and Xbox versions are no longer available, the PC version may be purchased from Steam, Mastertronic and GOG.com, and is also a part of the Broken Sword Complete package from Mastertronic.

Reception

The Sleeping Dragon received highly positive reviews from most critics and sold a few hundred thousand copies. Summarizing the game's performance compared to the first two Broken Sword entries, Tony Warriner said in 2004: "[I]t sold more or less the same, and to the same people. We didn't widen the market as we had hoped". In a 2006 interview, Cecil admitted that the game had included too many crate puzzles that acted as a blocking mechanism, rather than furthering the plot.

eToychest gave the game a 5 out of 5, saying that "Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon is a shining example of what this genre is capable of, and it comes as close to perfection as any recent adventure game has". Just Adventure gave the game an A+, saying: "A triumph. It's at the same time a real 3D game and a crackerjack pure adventure. High levels of craftsmanship and designer TLC are evident throughout the game. Playing it is like falling into an exciting movie thriller". Gaming Chronicles gave it a 9.2 out of 10, saying that "adventure gaming is alive and well thanks to designers like Revolution" and that it's a stunning achievement in interactive entertainment, praising its story, characters, visuals, and dialogue, and calling it a "must-own title for anyone looking to relive the golden era of adventure gaming"; they did, however, indicate that the controls were too easy at times. Edge magazine gave the game a 9, praising the storytelling, dialogues and visuals, and while pointing out some sporadic glitches that break the illusion, Edge magazine refers to this game as "a fairytale comeback" and "the adventure's glorious return". IGN gave the game a rating of 8.4, placing it under the "Impressive" category, but noted that the interface was difficult to use and the puzzles in the game were repetitive. Adventure Gamers gave it 4 out of 5 stars, called it a "technical masterpiece", and praised its cinematic introduction, cutscenes, lifelike character faces, and said "it certainly raise[s] the bar for any seen in adventures to this date", but criticised its controls and repetitive puzzles. GameSpot had an overall positive review; Scott Osborne praised its plot, characters, and setting, and (unlike most) found the interface to have its points, although he was frustrated with times in which quick reflexes are required and bored (like most) with some of the puzzles; he also ran into a sound problem, which does not appear to have happened to any other reviewer. Although Laura MacDonald of Mr. Bill's Adventureland panned its repetitive puzzles, she called it an "instant classic" and praised its story, controls, characters and music. Steven Carter of Game Over Online was less positive (criticising its plot, interface, and puzzles – calling most of the last "trivially easy"), but did praise its general appearance, voice acting, and music. Computer Games Magazine was less positive, mainly due to heavily criticising the interface.