Blade Runner - The Game. Anyone know this?

Everything you pick is logged in the police unless you disable the automatic feature through a puzzle. Then you choose what’s logged. What you pick up (show to yourself) vs what you don’t and what you log vs what you don’t is critical for choosing a main plot.

Iirc picking up or not the photo at the beginning of the game puts you up in a replicant vs. no replicant path that is very hard to move from later on.

There were many subtle ways to influence the plot from the beginning. But they were subtle. It took a lot of playing to start seeing the patterns. I did get all endings back in the day, and some of them you definitely can’t reload a late game save to choose.

Edit: While I never used a guide when playing it, I just looked for an ending guide to see whether

or not, since I was curious on whether the game managed to fool me and was indeed way simpler. Turns out most endings are dependent on both random replicant generation and stuff you do in act I and III (out of V), so you do need to play from the beginning to access different paths. Seems to be three main paths the story can go on and then variations of those. And that guide is missing some endings at least.

It is a pretty complex game. I think the approach to story is unorthodox in that you have an unreliable protagonist, and since it’s a game, that puts the player in the position of being an unreliable player, which is pretty unique, and I guess can be very off putting to many people who don’t connect with the approach. The main character’s motivations are what you decide they were at the point of decision, and before they sort of could be several options. In the above secret ending you are saving replicants, so you might be sympathizing with them, but if you decide to ultimately kill them, you were not sympathizing, but using them to get them all. It’s ambiguity in interactive form. You need to bring an interpretation to the events to fully make sense of the plot you are deciding to go through (much like the movie, btw), since the game refuses to say what’s what clearly most of the time. You can really decide who that guy is.

In a way, it’s like film editing. A scene changed in place in time or put before a different scene can change meaning even if the content is the same.

Again, I think it’s a brilliant approach to storytelling, at least for me. I can see it’s not for everybody. It was groundbreaking and foretold a lot of the developments in the adventure space to come in the later years, but few other projects have been as complex.

I dived into the code of the scummvm engine, with some help from the authors on discord. The game does have fairly complex system going on behind the scenes - I don’t want to spoil them - but like many complex systems, the final output to the player is minor, or not clearly articulated. This is very reminiscent to me from some of the systems I’ve seen while modding Soldak games – if you create a really complex simulation, but the process and output of that simulation isn’t clear to the player, you’ve wasted a whole lot of time.

So while the variables can change in a particular telling of the BR storyline, that storyline will mostly be the same and the impact will be minor. To me, the big problem is that due to this approach of programming in AI actors who change their actions based on some variables (what I termed ‘randomness’ above before studying the code), you’ve abandoned the notion of creating good scenes with good dialog and interesting interactions (not to mention the puzzles) – all key items of good adventure games. The game cannot measure up to the classics of the genre, whether puzzle-heavy ones like Day of the Tentacle or puzzle-lite ones such as Conquests of the Longbow (which is absolutely marvelous, btw). All it can instill is a ‘feel’ of the movie, while stepping through a personality-less ghost town of AIs performing unknowable actions.

That’s a very well put articulation of the problem, yes, definitely. Still a great game; the depth is under there, but it needed to be more discoverable, particularly with a single playthrough.

Except the ambiguity I think did work for this game. I think what you consider a good dialog and what I do might be different. For me this game (at launch) trascended the gente of adventure games. It was something more, and better, than the classics. It was the first adventure were I had a real sense of agency, even if it was obscure and hard to control. And I did like the obscurity.

But judged from the lens of classic adventure games it’s lacking, yes. I just don’t think that’s what the game wants to do.

After watching some of this again on twitch, I may have to reevaluate my previous assessment. One thing that really helps is having subtitles. The original release did not, and that made a lot of the dialog unintelligible. Another is knowing what’s happening behind the scenes – I really think they should have let you know what they’re doing somehow. Now that I do, I have a lot more appreciation for what this game.

Yeah, just play it through a couple of times with different approaches. I think it’s worth it.

As I said before, it’s opaque and takes a while to land.

This was me at first. I was 15 and while I normally could understand English, not this sort of accented and slang-filled one.

I had to mail in my English disks so they could be substituted with Spanish ones. The dub was ok, but I could at least play.

AND REMASTER ANNOUNCED!!!

I was thinking of doing a couple playthroughs of the GOG version, but I’ll wait for this instead.

I finished the game and really, really disliked how you could so easily die in this game. The only auto-saves are when you finish a chapter. I almost quit the game over this! Hopefully the restored version adds a copious amount of auto-saves.

A VR edition would be great, too!

Uh… a lot of this seems like hype and incorrect statements to me. Pay attention to the details: Nightdive restored Turok and System Shock and ported them. Those games had simplistic 3D (at best). They took the existing textures and models (sprites, in the case of SS) and moved them over to their 3d engine.

Now let’s look at Blade Runner:

  • “They painstakingly reverse engineered it?” Extremely unlikely. Most likely they’re referring to the work done by the ScummVM folks, which will be incorporated in some way.
  • They’ll redo animations and models? Maybe they can use 3D models in-game instead of the voxel-based characters, but they’re definitely not redoing the entire backgrounds, in 3D or otherwise, as that is like making a whole new game.
  • Even the concept of redoing the prerendered animations seems highly unlikely.

It’s far more likely that they’ll improve the graphics slightly using the ScummVM codebase, which is what GOG has already released.

Have you seen Nightdive’s System shock?

Compare to the original and tell me how that’s not a shitload of work and a significant change

If they do the same for Blade Runner I’ll be happy

That’s a fully kickstarted, full budget remake. What they’re talking about is a remaster, similar to this System Shock and Turok. That’s why I’m saying the article is completely unrealistic, given the constraints (namely, it was never a 3D game).

Remaster out tomorrow…

Doesn’t look particularly remastered aside from perhaps the cinematics, but this is one of the best adventure games ever made and well worth a playthrough, and it’s great that it’s easily playable on modern systems.

I bought the original on GOG a few months ago and couldn’t get it to work (which I think was more an issue with Galaxy than the actual game). Wish I’d saved the money, but I’ll be buying this version regardless. Haven’t played it since a school chum loaned me it when I was 14.

Thinking back I think I played this before I saw the actual film…

The game truly nails the look and feel of the original movie. I might have to play this enhanced version. Hopefully they added a “don’t kill me” mode. Why Westwood thought dying in a point-n-click adventure game is a good idea is beyond me.

Roy Batty: I know, right?

fyi If you own Blade Runner on GoG, the enhanced edition is 50% off (you might have to add it to your cart to see the discount).

Fucking hell, and only 10 bucks, too?! I gotta check some reviews tomorrow but I’m cautiously optimistic.