Broken Sword fans and fan sites have always wanted
to get their hands on some left overs from the production of
the series. Revolution Software Ltd. isn't keen on releasing
any of such information, so besides few concept art images the
fan community has seen nothing. Tony Warriner, director and
programmer for Revolution Software, once said that they aren't
happy about releasing even demos - they want to concentarte only
on the game. After all, that is what a developer should do.
In fact - nothing much is actually left out. I once asked
Charles Cecil, the managing director of the company, if they
had any unused background art or somthing like that, but
nothing. Charles said that everything is produced with
purpose - they have thurally worked out ideas and story
so there is no time nor point to do something for leaving out.
But there is one thing left over - miles and miles
of voice acting tapes. In one chat with ex-employee of
Revolution Software, Dave Cummins, who among other things
directed the voice recording for both of the games, mentioned,
that quite few dialogues were left out from the final release.
He also said that while recording Rolf Saxon and all the other
actors used to make a lot of jokes which didnt suit for the
game and got cut out. Well, I guess some of it was left in
after all. The goat easter egg in Broken Sword II features
quite wierd dialogue narrated only by Rolf Saxon himself -
did YOU guess it was him?
Anyways, getting hands on the actual voice
recordings is probably impossible and I guess we will
never see the day when some other stuff from Broken Swords
production is released. But I found something interesting
in one of the Broken Sword II resource files - two left out
dialogues. Many people have tried to decompile Revolution
resource files to get images and audio out from them.
Today audio can be accessed and all the voice acting can
be converted to wav files, but nobody has managed to
extract any images yet. OK, back to the dialogues... I
was looking through the text.clu file of Broken Sword II -
this file conatins all the subtitle lines of the game - and
I found two left out dialogues between George and Miguel in
Quaramonte City jail. Unfortunately the corresponding voice
files have been removed, but at least we can read what they
were supposed to say :)
I've restored how things might have happened. This is my
theory - the dialogues were meant to take place just after George
managed to get into the city jail and when he saw Miguel in there sadly staring
at a noose hanging from the jail bars.
George: Hey! Don’t do it, pal!
Miguel: Huh? Why not?
George: If you hang yourself you’ll regret it.
Miguel: Give me one reason why I shouldn’t.
It seems that at this point the player was supposed to get to
choose between three replies. They are as follows.
The first -
George: Do you have a family?
Miguel: My wife left me and took the children.
There was another woman.
George: Maybe she'll forgive you?
Miguel: You don't understand...
They seem very happy together.
The second -
George: The rest of the band need you.
Miguel: They'll be better off without me.
Everyone knows musicians make more money when
they're dead...
The third -
George: Because there's more to this than just you.
Something bad's going down in Quaramonte and it
involves the general...
Miguel: What doesn't around here?
George: ...and Karzac.
Miguel: KARZAC? Don't even mention that devil's name!
I wonder why this was cut out - I actually think it would
have given some better atmosphere to the jail scene. But one thing is
for sure - Miguels wife left him for another woman, what a bummer.
The second dialogue is not that long, but is quite staright
forward, and funny IMHO. I can't quite say when exactly this was
supposed to take place, but the noose was still hanging...
George: I need that rope.
Miguel: Wait your turn.
:)
You can see if the dialogues are actually in text.clu yourself.
Open the file in Notepad or any other text editor and search for a string
'NOT USED'. There are few other 'outcast' lines besides the two above
dialogues, but some of them only contain word 'DELETE' and others are
only random lines and too fuzzy to make out - I have no clue who said
them and to who. Every left out line contains string '(see ds)'. It is
mystery to me what that means, but I plan to look into that as well.
The game could very likely contain other left out dialgues,
voice acting files, images that were just forgotten there, but it takes
a lot of time and patiance to scan it all through or to even get access
to them. This could be only the tip of the iceberg.
So, happy discovering to everyone!
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