Photo: Nightdive Studios.
The release of Blade Runner: Enhanced Edition on the Nintendo Switch in June should’ve been celebrated. The team decided to live in the Nightdive studio to become a live nightmare.
Recently, in a recent interview with PCGamesNthe company’s director of business development, Larry Kuperman, explained how the “point and click adventure” game, originally released in 1997 by Westwood, turned into chaos.
I fully owe the responsibility for the date and if, in retrospect, failure to change the date of the ship landed entirely on me. The ship date was chosen because it was based on the 40th anniversary of the film which seems to be something that would be truly cool for the fans.
When the studio opened, he described the reality of the game as a completely incredible storm of challenges. Several members of the QA team were on a break, others were regaining from Covid, and others were moving. He believes this human aspect made the studio better.
If anyone thinks there was a decision, we sat around a table saying we were going to ship a game that doesn’t meet our Nightdive standards because of economic reasons, because of indifference, or anything that didn’t happenThe root causes of this going out were in very large part because of human issues. And I can’t say that I would’ve been better if we had pushed it off for a couple of months. We could’ve had a pox-shattered monkey epidemic. These are only those things that happen.
The lead producer at Enhanced Editions, Dimitris Giannakis, described the launch as death by a thousand cuts.
We had many small things that were causing an upset or worry about the game. I don’t think there was one major showkeeper we heard feedback about – we don’t like the border you have, can we turn it off? Do you have any brightness settings in the game, do we have that?
The studio is preparing the original version and retouching it. After a bad reception from the remaster, Nightdive has been working tirelessly to improve the game’s progress. The game has also received a large patch to fix multiple options and add several improvements.
Another piece is currently being implemented, with Nightdive aiming to add a toggle option for the original and enhanced video, but also add menus and more.
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Have you been revisiting Blade Runner: Enhanced Edition? How have you found it?