Why Blade Runner: Enhanced Edition was a mess when it launched
Nightdive Studios talks about the mistakes that led to the botched launch of Blade Runner: Enhanced Edition, and what it's doing to fix it
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We spoke with Nightdive's director of business development, Larry Kuperman, and Dimitris Giannakis, the lead producer on Blade Runner: Enhanced Edition, about why this latest remaster launched in the state it did, and what they're doing to fix it.
"The responsibility for the ship date and, in retrospect, the failure to change the ship date resides 100% with me," Kuperman tells us flatly. "The ship date was picked because it aligned with the 40th anniversary of the movie – that seemed that it would be something that would be a really cool thing to do for the fans."
At launch, Blade Runner: Enhanced Edition was plagued with a host of minor but nonetheless disruptive issues. PC players in particular balked at some of the AI-assisted smoothing used to render old FMV cutscenes in 60 fps, and at the lack of a 16:9 aspect ratio.
"I think it was more of a death by a thousand cuts," Giannakis says. "We had a lot of small things that were kind of upsetting people or bothering people about the game. I wouldn't say there was any one major showstopper – we heard feedback about things like, 'we don't like the border that you have, can we turn that off?' Or 'there's no brightness settings in the game, can we have that?'"
The day after launch, Nightdive added two classic ScummVM-powered versions of Blade Runner to the Enhanced Edition – the original version, and one that included some unused content that had been cut from the Westwood release. Kuperman points out that this made the original Blade Runner available on consoles for the first time.
The new Enhanced Edition itself, however, was woefully unfinished, and Kuperman says this was the result of a "perfect storm" of challenges the studio faced during development, particularly in the period leading up to the release date.
Westwood's Blade Runner is a point-and-click adventure game, but creating the Enhanced Edition presented some significant challenges over games like Quake, where there's usable source code. For Blade Runner, Nightdive had to reverse-engineer the game and rebuild it from the ground up. It's a process that Giannakis says took thousands of hours.
The original game used some cutting-edge technology for 1997 – while the scenes all look two-dimensional, they're often rendered as 3D spaces.
"Everything's done in a 3D world, even though it looks like a 2D adventure game," Giannakis explains. "There's lighting in there, there's shadows, there's depth of field – all sorts of 3D concepts before 3D became the norm."
