HAPPY ASPRIATION DAY
We're proud to make Patch #3 Beyond A Steel Sky's biggest content update yet!
- Achievements
- French Voiceover
- German Voiceover
- 20% OFF: Return of the Launch Sale!
The Aspiration Day Bundle Releases with brand new goodies:
- -10% Discount
- a "Complete The Set" Option
- Original Soundtrack of Beyond A Steel Sky
- FREE Comics!!!
And of course as always
- Bug Fixes & Improvements
EXCITED? US TOO! LET'S DIVE IN!
ACHIEVEMENTS
Rudeness? Spying?? Stealing?! - Yup, there is an achievement for all those and more!
We heard your cries! 32 Achievements are now activated and encourage you all to play the game in ways you might not have considered before..
Already played the game?
In order for Achievements to show up as earned, you have to play the game and actively unlock them.
FULL FRENCH & GERMAN SPEECH NOW AVAILABLE
Ah.. Paris in the fall.. WAIT, WRONG GAME!
Ah.. Union City in the fall.. Better.
You can now treat yourself to an artisanal café crème as you enjoy a freshly baked baguette in the Bistro, or slap on some lederhosen and Schuhplattler down to the October festivities where we serve up some Brezel & Lager!
German Trailer:
French Trailer:
No that's all nonsense, but you get to now play the game with native French and native German voiceovers!
We went above and beyond casting voices that we felt really fit Foster, Joey, and the rest of our wonderful characters, and we can't wait for you to experience them
Revolution is humbled by the passion of its German-speaking community. Whilst other companies were using text translators to localise into German, Revolution has always sought out talented German translators, and insisted on high quality voice recording. This time around, the COVID pandemic delayed German voice recording - which meant that Beyond a Steel Sky was released with German subtitles but no German speech. We are delighted to now be able to remedy this with the release of an update which now includes full German speech.
- Charles Cecil
Want to hear more? Join us for today's stream at 6PM (British Time) over on YouTube Live where Charles sits down with his old friend Jochen. Lots of Broken Sword talk, it'll be sweet :)
Bonne chance, habt Spaß!
20% OFF: RETURN OF THE LAUNCH SALE
We understand that many of you have been waiting to get this game for multiple reasons:
- For the German & French VO
- For Achievements
- For the game to be more stable
Well, those are all good reasons, and you shouldn't feel like you missed out on our launch sale, so just for you, we're bringing it back for a full week! Thank you all for being so passionate.
INTRODUCING: THE ASPIRATION BUNDLE!
As a big surprise drop we present to you Beyond A Steel Sky's Aspiration Bundle:
What's in the bundle?
- Beyond A Steel Sky Shocking, right?
- The Original Soundtrack For the first time ever on Steam!
- FREE Beneath A Steel Sky & Beyond A Steel Sky comics High resolution PDFs illustrated by Dave Gibbons! Absolutely Free. Our treat because we love you!
- A "Complete the Set" option Already paid for some of this stuff without the Bundle? Upgrading to the bundle will get you the exact same saving as buying it whole! Pretty neat!
- -10% Oh yeah and the entire thing is 10% OFF (if you buy it this week, that's on top of the -20% discount on Beyond A Steel Sky, so that's a damn good offer!)
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1146310/Beyond_a_Steel_Sky/
BUG FIXES & IMPROVEMENTS
Here we go, what you're all here for. Some classic Beyond A Steel Sky Patch Notes:
GAMEPLAY
NOBODY'S PERFECT
Songbird round 3: Fight! - This stubbourn NPC has truly bamboozled our poor QA team. Appearing fixed each time we ship, just to then misbehave. We can now with confidence say that "Yeah, Songbird definitely improved since the last update but-"
DESERTED NO MORE
When sliding against a specific wall, you could, against all reason whatsoever, wiggle your way between collision geometry just long enough to push through into the vast expanding desert and glitch through dunes to your hearts content. But no more! We think it best if you didn't wiggle into the desert to die.
SAUSAGES IN ODD PLACES
Please proceed with care, as you can never look at sausages the same way. There is no going back from here:
There is a sausage at the centre of the universe
No, really. There is only one sausage per level and it teleports around on demand. If not needed it is set to return to 0/0/0 and go invisible... Something that did not happen if you saw it lying around randomly in moats.
"If Foster doesn't have his sausage out it should be hidden from the level, but yes there is always a sausage. You just can't see it sometimes." - Matt, Sausage Scripter, numb to jokes
The sausage has now been realigned with reality.
GRETA SEE YA
If a character is in dialogue they are coded to look at the character they are in dialogue with. They will move their eyes a little, sometimes adjust their head when they're sitting. Nothing crazy, just enough to keep immersion.
So.. turns out kneeling is a little too crazy.
Made Greta go all Rosemary's Baby trying to kneel AND look at Foster.
It was all sorts of horrible - Matt
Y I K E S - Wendy
RECYCLING CRUSHER
You could re-activate the Security Droid whist he was in the crusher.
He didn't mind and stayed quite chipper but it almost made it worse. - Luke
JOEY BEING DIFFICULT
What else is new?
You can ask a robot to clean, but will he do it?
The answer is yes, he should, and thanks to a very elegant fix he now also will.
EMBER & THE DEET
When Ember is trying to help you on her test bench odds are that you want to see what she's doing and block her from accessing where she needs to go, so Ember gets confused and stops.
This was very bad news because her accessing the work bench is needed to progress organically.
We fixed it by slapping a cutscene on it. You would have never noticed. Smooth ;)
FOSTER GLITCHING INTO MUSEUM FLOOR
We talked about Unreal Engine's NavMesh before.
All across the world, invisibly, is a NavMesh, and on it we mark locators that tell an object (like Foster) to walk there. These locators are also used for cutscenes.
Most times the command checks for a floor, and then aligns the object to be placed on said floor. Not this time. For some reason Foster got stuck abs first in the Museum floor.
"It was definitely not an issue with someone getting the coordinate numbers wrong again." - Andy, programmer, innocent angel whomst we love
Foster has lost all automation privileges for this level and is now made to walk to the location manually. That'll teach him.
JOEY INTENSIFIES
Some of you mentioned they saw Joey vibrating. We found the issue!
There were 2 commands Joey was trying to observe:
1) Move [somewhere]
2) Turn around and look at Foster
Joey, despite wanting to, went to the marked location, but kept vibrating in disgust as he was made to consistently look back at Foster.
We've told him to never look back in anger.
PIAZZA NPCS ON LOWER LEVELS
Where no player must ever go, the NPCs are roaming free of the bounds and rules of mortal society.
In fact too free..
In fact oh no...
It won't have affected you at all, but it was a massive renovation of realigning the NavMesh, cleaning up and redesigning collisions, and overall revamp of the environment. No wonder the NPCs were confused. We hope they will love their new Piazza levels!
EPIC SCRIPTING VS ANIMATION SHOWDOWN
Charming as can be, Reginald often moves his tablet from hand to hand to scratch his head and wave his arms enthusiastically. This action would often lead to his tablet glitching out and acting possessed.
To not have to add movement to the tablet itself, it is common practice to "socket" items into character hands, meaning the item adjusts to wherever the hand goes. Easy! Except when both the Scripting team and the Animation team had commands for Reginald's tablet. Then it would, understandably, become possessed.
We had to remove one and you might wonder who won:
"No one won, I think we just picked the one that worked better" - Sooch, Technical Artist & Animation Lead
"Animation won big time! I'm not a sore loser but I did lose" - Matt, Scripter
GAME CRASHED AT SPECIFIC ENDING
Surprisingly had nothing to do with the ending itself.
Blueprints works through visually displaying text boxes that are tied together by a string. If you move them around, they will still stay attached.
Now, imagine you tried to switch 2 boxes around. You'd need to visually change their position, and then properly retie them so they wouldn't just be dragged out of place, strings still attached!
You should definitely not do that and then create a NEW string link to the box you just changed places with.
That would create an infinite loop. :)
And we all know what computers think of infinite loops (:
INTERFACE
KEYBOARD MAPPING HAS ARRIVED
Sick of the WASD tyranny???
Due to popular demand you can now just change it.
Nothing too fancy, but a little can mean a lot to some of you. Take it for a spin, see what you think!
MORE RESOLUTIONS!! COMPUTER! ENHANCE!!
This one goes out to all you wide screen users!
The game's default range is set to 85 degrees, and now lets you adjust the ranges anywhere between 80 - 110 degrees! We hope this will work for up to 21:9 displays.
Please note that this affect the game & player controlled camera only. Our cutscenes will be played with black bars to suit the range they were recorded in originally. But it has a very western feel to it, so there is that!
UNDER CONTROLL
All elements should now be smoothly interactable with controllers alone. No more backup mouse. Get outa here mouse!!
We also tidied up a lot of issues UI related surrounding the controller, but all you need to really know is that it should work smoothly now!
MINOS TERMINAL
The Bonsai App now responds appropriately
There was a weird conflict involving Bluetooth controllers and navigating the MINOS interfaces around Graham's Apartment, but they have all been addressed and fixed.
SHADERS
Smoother than ever! Heck yes!
CELEBRATING THE GERMAN & FRENCH COMMUNITIES
We can not overstate how important these markets and communities are to adventure games. We should know. We have 30 years of experience in appreciating them.
Please join us for a wonderful stream today as we focus on the German communities, and touch on all things Revolution, including a bunch of Broken Sword stories! Charles is a wonderful story teller, and we'd love to have you chat to us on stream.
6PM UK time (BST) over on our YouTube Channel via the Live feature! You can turn notifications on, or follow us on Social Media where we will throw out reminders:
AND AS ALWAYS: JOIN OUR DISCORD:
No.. really! We’re there all the time!
We help with puzzles, troubleshoot obscure system errors with you, and generally like to feel closer with people who play our games.
We’re so grateful to have such a strong, vocal, and passionate community around our games, and we know we can not ever say it enough, but we deeply appreciate every single person who has reached out and been in touch with us.