Typical: you wait many years for a launch of Westwood’s Blade Runner game then two come alongside without delay. The unique 1997 journey game popped up on GOG in December, powered by ScummVM, and now Nightdive Studios have introduced an Enhanced Edition. They say they’ll replace character fashions, upscale cutscenes, and enhance the technical trimmings.
Westwood’s Blade Runner is an effective’un, an journey game working parallel to the movie however not primarily based on it, with a complete new rookie Blade Runner asking probing questions, getting chased via alleys, and doing magic on pictures. Certain characters and places from the movie pop up however it’s its personal separate factor, and positively higher for that. I’ve written earlier than about my fondness for it, and particularly how one can stand in your flat’s balcony and simply drink within the temper:
That’s all being fancied up by Nightdive Studios, the gang behind System Shock’s Enhanced Edition and its upcoming remake. Nightdive say that Blade Runner: Enhanced Edition “will feature updated character models and animations, upscaled cutscenes using machine learning algorithms, widescreen resolution support, keyboard and controller customisation, and much more.”
I’m typically cautious of making use of AI upscaling to outdated games as a result of limitations meant artists have been implying issues reasonably than portraying them, and AI makes all of it bizarre by dragging issues from the creativeness to boring actuality, nevertheless it is likely to be okay right here. The type of Blade Runner’s cutscenes is pretty clear and literal, and needs to be grand if it doesn’t attempt to make them ‘realistic’. I’m extra cautious of the adjustments to character fashions. Yes, persons are at the moment shifting blobs of pixels, however no less than they’re the supposed kind of bizarre. Nightdive insist that “fans will be pleased to learn that the original look and feel of the game is being preserved” so I’ll reserve judgement till they really present it (every thing on this put up is from the unique).
Sadly, that is the best way it needs to be, as Westwood misplaced the unique code and belongings years in the past (and haven’t existed in practically as lengthy), so that you’d want to start out from scratch when you needed to completely rebuild it.
“It’s true that the original Blade Runner source code was lost,” Nightdive’s Larry Kuperman told The Hollywood Reporter. “We painstakingly reverse-engineered the code, importing it into our own KEX engine, a powerful tool that allows us to do console ports of classic titles, even in the face of quite challenging situations.”
Huh! So it’s fairly separate to the recent ScummVM effort fuelling GOG’s launch.
Blade Runner: Enhanced Edition will is because of hit Steam later this yr. It’s additionally coming to PlayStation, Xbox, and Switch. In the meantime, the unique is £8 on GOG.
At least Nightdive, in contrast to Ridley Scott, can’t preserve messing with Blade Runner’s story to make our boy Ray McCoy a replicant. He, like a number of different key characters, is already randomly picked to be a replicant or not each time you begin a save.
