Star Wars: Dark Forces Remaster devs on the challenge of handling the game's cut-scenes
A long time ago, in a galaxy with inferior tech...
Later this week, you’ll be able to relive your childhood memories with Star Wars: Dark Forces Remaster, a revamp of the 1995 PC classic. While you can still play Star Wars: Dark Forces in all of its retro glory in this re-release, Star Wars: Dark Forces Remaster also completely overhauls the audio/visual experience to give everything a more modern-day feel.
The team at Nightdive are the technical wizards behind Star Wars: Dark Forces Remaster, and they’ve once again worked their magic here. That doesn’t mean Star Wars: Dark Forces Remaster wasn’t without its challenges, with the handling of cut-scenes needing quite a bit of time and effort. In an interview with PlayStation, Nightdive’s Project Lead and Producer, Max Waine explains the process.
Due to the original cutscenes blending of different types of assets, the process of updating the cutscenes proved difficult. Initially the approach was to try to recreate the same cutscenes at a higher resolution, but this resulted in greater scrutiny being drawn to the differences in the disparate types of assets that could be provided in a cutscene.
The approach that was ultimately taken was to embrace the mixed medium spirit of the originals while still narrowing the divide so that, even at higher resolution, everything fit comfortably together.
This is where Ben Chandler came in, doing painted versions of characters like Crix Madine and Jabba, who were based on or fully taken from stills of the films respectively for their depiction in the original. Brendan recreated the environments in 3D, painting over them afterward to bring the composition nearer to Ben’s character work. The space sequences were approached with the intent to keep things simple, matching the feel of the original work.
This sentiment was echoed by Brendan McKinney, a cinematic artist on the remaster, in an interview with Kotaku.
“We found out pretty quickly that just recreating the scenes at a higher resolution only pulled more attention to how different each of these pieces felt. With Lucasfilm Games, we really pushed to embrace the mixed-medium spirit of the originals but also to narrow the divide so that even at higher resolution, everything fit comfortably together.”
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