Braid, the original Xbox Live Arcade game indie hit, is coming to current and next-gen consoles plus PC. Braid Anniversary Edition remasters the time-bending platformer with new art and higher resolution graphics. This was revealed at the August 2020 State Of Play.
It’s interesting, because you would think that the hand-drawn graphics would still have hold up today. Not quite.
Back in 2008, developer Jonathan Blow wanted to “future-proof” the game by drawing the art at twice of 720p resolution, but reduce it to 720p for the Xbox 360 and PS3 release.
“We just didn’t think far enough ahead, I guess,” Blow said on the Braid website.
“Before too long, 4k monitors became available, some folks are using 5k monitors, and 8k is on the horizon (though that seems pretty excessive to me, right now!)
“If you play original Braid on a 4k monitor, the result is blurry and unpleasant to look at. The original double-scale art that we had archived for Braid would still be blurry at 4k, and anyway it was never really meant to be seen at that level of detail.“
Alongside the improved graphics is also an in-depth commentary. You can enable this to see development commentary on the making of Braid. And you can even pick what aspects of development you want to hear: art, programming, game design, and other categories.
If the dev commentary is anything like the quote from Blow we have here from the lengthy announcement post, it should be a great insight for aspiring developers, or those curious on how the sausage is made.
Braid Anniversary Edition is set to launch in Q1 2021 for the PS4, PS5, PC, Mac, Linux, Xbox One, Xbox Series X and Nintendo Switch.