Gabriel Knight 4 - blog

Another estimable language has been added to our campaign site - Norwegian.

Thanks to the FANTASTIC work of Torgrim Mellum Stene, the site’s main pages can now be read in Norwegian, a Germanic language that contains striking echoes of its earlier Germanic origins. English speakers, by the way, are often not aware that linguistically English itself is a Germanic language. It holds within it very strong remains of those roots, although of course it’s been subjected to the strong influence of French - and Latin, and Greek.

This means that, if you’re an English speaker, you may find some Norwegian words and sentence structures hold an uncanny familiarity for you. Try it - check through the home page, the Why We Need GK4 page, the Who IS Gabe Knight? page, the How You Can Help page, the Our Aim page, and more - to enjoy this latest translation.

And don’t forget to brush up your Greek, your Italian, your French, your German, your Spanish, your Portuguese, your Hebrew, your Czech and your Russian by reading through our site’s translations, courtesy of our admirable volunteer international translators who also have a deep love for the Gabriel Knight series.

The Bavaria article is now up. I’ve focused on its history which has led to its current unique position in Germany, and in particular what led up to the formation of the monarchy in Bavaria. It’s an interesting thought that part of what may truly have led Ludwig II to withdraw from the political aspects of his position was that Bavaria was manoeuvred into a position without power, a throne without authority, a crown without the ability to decide.
In Ludwig’s time, Prussia’s desire to rule a united Deutschland had a disastrous effect upon Ludwig himself, I think… and perhaps this is what spurred Ludwig’s propensity for romantic imaginings into unacceptably eccentric behaviour.
Have fun finding the bits and pieces of Bavaria that provide a real backdrop to the story of Gabriel Knight 2: The Beast Within.

Thanks to the hard work, dedication and language skills of several GK fans, the campaign site is now available in Czech, Greek and Spanish. Please check the acknowledgements page to see who’s done what.

The international response has been wonderful. We can be proud of a site that offers significant portions of its content to fans of many different languages and many different backgrounds. We’re united in our love of a really good story and the adventure game genre - particularly of Gabriel Knight.

I’m just waiting for someone to offer to translate the site into Latin…

GK4Campaign’s Ingrid Heyn: I had the privilege and fun of interviewing Robert Holmes, well-known musician and composer of the music for the GK series. While many of you will already have read the article based on that interview, we’ve got something special for you now - the FULL INTERVIEW with Robert Holmes, published for the first time.

Enjoy!

You’ll notice that the Gabriel Knight 4 Campaign website now offers an Italian translation. This is incredibly exciting… and how fitting, too, with the news that Gabriel Knight 2 is now available in DVD format, ready to play right now for all Italian speakers.

What, you say? You don’t speak Italian? Then think of it as an opportunity to replay the game and learn Italian as you go.

Spanish speakers can look forward to the Spanish translation being uploaded within the next few days. The Hebrew translation is proceeding apace, too - you may have noticed some more pages becoming available in Hebrew.

Thank you to all our hard-working and wonderful translators.

Italian company Adventure’s Planet announced that it has reached an agreement with Vivendi to re-release The Beast Within before the end of December 2006 (this was changed to February 2007). The re-edition of the Italian version of the game will be Windows XP compatible and will bring all the game on a single DVD instead of 6 separate CDs.

Perhaps this is a sign that something started to move; perhaps it is just a fair contribution to our cause. One think I know for sure: I will buy it.

UPDATE!

You’ll find the link for the new game RIGHT HERE.

FEATURES

- Windows XP
- Pentium or Amd Athlon
- 32 Mb Ram
- SVGA video card
- Soundblaster compatible audio card
- DVD drive

THE GAME WILL AVAILABLE FROM FEBRUARY 2007. IF YOU BUY THE GAME IN PREORDER YOU WILL PAY THE DISCOUNT PRICE OF 17.90

From the darkly prolific mind of creator Jane Jensen comes the next Gabriel Knight Mystery: The Beast Within. Now we find Schattenjager, or Shadow Hunter, Gabriel and his assistant Grace Nakimura deeply embroiled in a murderous mystery that unravels half a world away.
lay as both Gabriel and Grace as they are dispatched to Munich to solve a series of mutilation murders thought to be the work of werewolves. Gabriel confronts his own demons while Grace traces an historical mystery, that of the strange demise of Mad King Ludwig II. The hunters become the hunted, and the only hope for deliverance lies in the most desperate of schemes…

This transcript is an as-faithful-as-possible rendition of what Jane Jensen had to say at the recent conference in Leipzig (24th August 2006) concerning Gray Matter. I was unable to make out several portions of what was said, due to either noise effects or very low volume of particular words. Anyone who is able to “fill in the blanks” will be highly welcome!

JANE JENSEN at the LEIPZIG CONFERENCE with ANACONDA

Well, first I’d like to really thank you all for coming to this press conference. I know it’s very early days in this production, and I appreciate your interest in this game, so… thank you for coming. As you can see from the opening cut-scene, we are in the art concepting phase of this project, and also working on the engine. It is a rare opportunity to be able to start a brand new computer game series. In fact, I’ve only had that opportunity one other time in my career, which you’re probably familiar with. It probably follows that it would be a paranormal mystery series, since I can’t seem to get away from doing that, even when I write books. But almost 14 years after Gabriel Knight was first concepted, there have been many TV series about the paranormal, many movies about the paranormal, many game series about the paranormal. So the challenge was to try to figure out what would be a fresh approach, something new that you haven’t seen before on this theme. So Gray Matter really takes a much more philosophical point of view. It’s a much more subtle and realistic and scientific approach to the paranormal. It asks questions such as “What is the nature of reality?” “How do our perceptions and prejudices… how do they affect how we perceive the physical world?” and “What powers might lie untapped in the human mind?” It’s more… It says that it’s more Matrix than Van Helsing, so you won’t be chasing a lot of werewolves and vampires in this series.

One of the main characters is Samantha Everett (Sam), whom you saw in the opening sequence. She is a very talented stage musician, very adept at sleight-of-hand, and she’s been bumming around Europe for the last few years, getting by as a street performer. But at the opening of our story, she is out of money and out of luck, and stranded in the middle of nowhere, as you saw in that opening sequence.

She finds herself through a series of coincidences (or maybe they’re not coincidences) volunteering to be the assistant for Doctor David Styles… This is a really rough really pre-model [in reference to the image shown]. Styles is an Oxford neurobiologist and he had a brilliant career at one point, but five years ago, there was a horrific car accident that killed his wife in the fire and disfigured him partially. Since that time he has been a recluse in his house, which is another character meaning Dread Hill House, conducting unknown experiments in his basement. It is possible that he’s half-crazy, or so his peers think, because he’s developed some very strange ideas about the potential of the human body.

This first game in the series, and I want to make it clear that it’s not an episodic series as much as it is a planned continuing series, hopefully, just like Gabriel Knight… So this first game brings the characters together and gives you an introduction to the series’ themes. This first game is called Such stuff as dreams are made of, and in the game, Sam is challenged to find six students to volunteer for Doctor Styles’ new experiment – and this is your first quest, okay? And that’s quite a challenge, because he has a very unsavoury reputation on campus, to say the least. But Sam does manage, hopefully, if you’re playing correctly, to find six students to volunteer. The students are called the Lambs’ Club, as in “sacrificial”. And at first the experiment that Dr Styles has in mind seems harmless enough. The game will use real neurobiology in the way that CSI, the TV series, uses forensics, as a kind of grounding wire in reality. An experiment that he’s doing is to map the brain wave patterns of the students as they visualise various physical exercises, and this is actually a cutting-edge area of research in real-life neurobiology. It turns out that, if you visualise an exercise like jogging in great detail, your muscles and cardiovascular system get 60 to 70 percent of the benefit that they would if you actually went out [impossible to hear over the groan of the camera’s movements]… Talk about the powers of the mind. So this is the experiment that he’s running, and at first it seems like a pretty normal neurobiology experiment, but before long, there are bizarre events that start happening on campus that seem to mirror the exercises and visualisation that the students are performing every night.

Meanwhile, in another sub-plot, David is receiving visits in Dread Hill House
from his late wife.

So as a player, you will need to uncover the mystery of exactly what is going on in the house and in the experiments on the Oxford campus.

As a player, you play as both Sam and David. A lot of the puzzles are traditional inventory / dialogue puzzles – inventory-based puzzles, logic puzzles, riddles. Sam is involved with a magic club called the Daedalus Club which has some really interesting scavenger-hunt type riddles in the game. In addition as Sam, she will have an interface to do sleight-of-hand magic, which she has a tendency to use to get her own way in just about any real-life situation. As David, you’ll have an opportunity to do some puzzles that are involved with neurobiology, such as hypnosis and memory recall.

And these are some additional early concept sketches for the game.

This is not final… with the art.

Questions and Answers

What will Gray Matter be – a point and click adventure, or will it use 3D? How will I [garbled], how will I see Gray Matter?

JANE: Well, we did Gabriel Knight 3 in real-time 3D, and I think in general the adventure game audience does not enjoy navigating in real-time 3D. So for this game, we’re planning 2 ½ D, basically full 3D backgrounds that are pre-rendered, and then 3D characters on top of that. It will be mostly point-and-click, but there will be a context-sensitive cursor, and also in some instances, like when you’re doing the magic with Sam, there will be a small menu that pops up where you select your options.

A couple of years ago, Gray Matter had already been in development with another publisher. Has the game changed in the last years… have your plans changed? Yes, it was announced in 2003 that we would be publishing Gray Matter with Dreamcatcher. The game at that point did not have a developer, and we spent some months searching for the right development team, but in the end, Dreamcatcher would not come up with the funding for the game, so it was cancelled. So this is an opportunity for Gray Matter to finally find a realisation, and hopefully, I think we’re much farther along now than we were at the time of that [too soft to hear]. But the game itself, the game bible, is identical. [too soft to hear].

QUESTION ABOUT PUZZLES: Well, having worked in the casual game for the last few years, I think I’m… I’m definitely much more in favour of having a game that is very accessible to the mass market, and providing a very seamless entertainment experience with not a lot of road-blocks that come up, especially early in the game, where you’re not, you know, invested enough yet to not just give up and decide to play something else. So I think that there will definitely be some challenging puzzles in Gray Matter, and some, you know, I can’t resist writing riddles… some people find those very hard to solve. But in general, I’d like to make it more of a seamless flow… You can get into the story and not be too disrupted by very difficult puzzles.

Question about integrating action into the game, such as in Dreamfall: I think it can be done successfully. Even the old Sierra games that I grew up on had action sequences and… in fact, Gabriel Knight has always had a little bit of that. I think it just makes a nice variety in gameplay, but there really isn’t actually much in Gray Matter because it didn’t really go with the theme. In general, I’m not in favour of sort-of hardcore action adventure with a big mix of fighting and adventure, because I think that these traditional adventure audiences really don’t like fighting, so it’s sort-of an interesting mix.

I think it can work; it just depends on the game and if it can be incorporated really well into the story. As I said, be accessible enough to the adventure audience.

CAN YOU DIE IN GRAY MATTER?: I think the only place that can happen is at the very end because, you know, some choices you can make that will lead to you, but not through most of the game. Again, there’s not really any… you’re not fighting rebels in this game, so there’s less opportunity for you to get hacked and slashed.

ABOUT THE MUSIC: No, but we’re in discussions with Robert Holmes, who happens to be my husband, so maybe I can persuade him to do some themes for us this time around.

ABOUT GAMES JANE HAS LIKED OVER THE LAST COUPLE OF YEARS: I really liked Syberia, and Longest Dream, quite a lot. Syberia in particular really impressed me with just how much of a seamless experience it was, and that it was very cinematic.

ABOUT ADVENTURE GAMES AND TRADITIONAL STORY-TELLING FINDING ITS AUDIENCE: Well, I think what happened was, when I joined Sierra Online back in 1989, it really was a family game company, and at that time PCs were not fast enough, processors were not fast enough to run action and arcade games; those were reserved for the big machines in the malls. So we had a lot of adventure games at the time, and other games that were slower-paced kind of product, but once processors got fast enough to run action games well, then those essentially took over the market entirely, and I think that’s still the case in North America, unfortunately. I mean, there hasn’t been a big budget adventure game developed in North America really since Gabriel Knight 3, since 1999. So… I think it’s really unfortunate, because I think the industry has disenfranchised a lot of users who are just not attracted to that kind of product. And I’ve never been of the mind that there was ever anything really wrong with adventure games as they were done; I think that… that’s not to say that we can’t improve it, and, you know, that ten years later we’re not going to do things differently, as I said. I think that there are many things about the really old-school classic adventure games that don’t need to come back, like pixel-hunting or some of the really obscure, you know, bubble-gum on the horse-hair, you know, to pick a lock. I think some of that stuff is kind of passé at this point, but I still really believe in the idea of playing a character in a story and actually going through the story yourself manually as opposed to just reading it. And I think there is an audience for adventure games. I think the big challenge in North America has been to find that demographic, because what’s happened is that the perception of games has hardened into all these action games with big breasts and therefore they’re for my sixteen-year-old son and not for me. So people who might like adventure games tend to simply not go into computer game stores at all. So it has a role right now very much like the comic book industry where there’s just a very limited demographic that’s even going to try it, so… I think the challenge for us has always been to reach the people who would like this kind of game, and there are some things that we can do this that. One of them is to approach the online market, which is a much older demographic. And also, as we’ve seen, games have really come back in Europe, which… I think, even for Gabriel Knight, I used to get a lot of letters from Denmark and Germany and Austria and France. So I think there’s always been more of a stronghold in Europe for intelligent story-based games.

AGE-GROUP: Yeah, I would say 16 and up. I mean, you know, if you’re an intelligent 13 or 14-year-old… It’s not any more mature than Gabriel Knight, and there were certainly people in that younger age that played Gabriel Knight.

HOW LONG TO PLAY: Well, you know, I can’t write a simple story; it’s just not within my capacity to do a 20-hour game, so… It’ll probably be about the same as Gabriel Knight, probably about 40 hours.

I have kind-of a love-hate affair with the word “linear”. I’m a storyteller, and I’m a big believer in the fact that there is “a” story… and… even when you write a story, you find as you slowly uncover it that you’re uncovering “a” story that has almost really existed long before you thought of it… With Gabriel Knight, we had two endings, and people would write to me, saying, “Well, I got the bad ending first, and then I found the right ending”, so I think people know when they’ve uncovered the right story, in a strange sort of way. The way I try to approach non-linearity in a game is that at the beginning of a chapter, there’s a story sequence, and I know exactly what the player knows, at that moment in time. But then, as the chapter progresses, there are a lot of things that you uncover in the story, and you can uncover those things in any order, and… as a designer it’s my job to make sure that if you talk to Mr Snowball before you’ve seen the red shoes and after you’ve gotten the green cloak, then you get the appropriate response. But… so it gets very broad in the middle of the chapter, but when eventually you’ve accomplished all the tasks, at the end of a chapter there’s another cut-scene that brings you back to a single point in the story. So that’s the way I try to approach non-linearity. There is in this particular game two possible endings, actually, because it just worked out thematically, but there won’t necessarily always be that… as it happens.

WOULD YOU BE ABLE TO PLAY SAM AND DAVID SIMULTANEOUSLY OR CHAPTER BY CHAPTER? It’s chapter by chapter in this story. I think it’s something I would really like to do and something I had planned to do for Gabriel Knight 4 is to be able to hop back and forth. But for this particular story, it just worked out better to play chapter by chapter.

In June 2006, Robert Holmes was kind enough to grant us an interview, and from that interview sprang forth this article.

Read about Robert’s current work, his thoughts on composing music for computer games, his musings on what might be in the future for Gabriel Knight 4… and much more.

This is definitely one of the best online magazines available for computer adventure games - Adventure Lantern. The imagery’s nice - a lantern shining in the darkness - and it seems delightfully coincidental that the image which we, the Campaign, chose for the GK4Campaign site features Gabe in that memorable pose, standing beneath the light of a street lantern.

The vivid impression is that of colour, light, dogged determination, courage in the face of the night.

Ah, but enough philosophising… This month’s (September 2006) Adventure Lantern magazine is now available for download, and it includes not one, but TWO features on Gabriel Knight. One is a review of Gabriel Knight 3, written by Thaumaturge who’s a long-time fan of the GK series, a devoted adventure game player, an excellent writer and a semi-recent member of the GK forum.

And the other is an article written by me (Ingrid Heyn) concerning the powerful use by Jane Jensen of similar elements later used by Dan Brown. But whereas Dan Brown’s use isn’t garnering him any LITERARY awards, however popular the Da Vinci Code novel is, Jane Jensen’s outstanding writing is something else again. For the full story, go on… read this month’s Adventure Lantern. You can download it as a pdf file, and print it out if you prefer a hard copy.

It seems almost impossible to believe… but according to this article, Jane Jensen’s Gray Matter is finally going to be made. The publisher is ANACONDA/dtp, a European game company.

For all fans of Gabriel Knight, rejoice… This is wonderful news!

With Gray Matter given the go-ahead, the prospect for GK4 does indeed… seem… even brighter.

Gray Matter is mentioned as being intended for release in the fourth quarter of 2007. All GK fans are urged to keep an eye out for this.