The director's cut has a couple of new/changed puzzles and adds a few sequences in which you play as Nico. There are als a few changes in the user interface (menu, inventory, dialogue options) and you now have character portraits pop up when the characters speak.

Personally not a huge fan of the Director's Cut version, although I was looking forward to it at the time. It alters the game in many ways, most importantly it changes the powerful opening sequence with one that's just not nearly as impactful. Gone is the beautiful introductory animation and instead we get a far lower budget intro for the new parts of the game. It's a real shame, as the new parts play really well and the puzzles are fun if I recall correctly, but they don't really add much to the story and instead make Nico's actions and motives quite unjustified and unclear.

As was mentioned above, they also added portraits when speaking to other characters, but the art style is completely different to what's on screen at any given time, I think they clash quite badly. The portraits are mostly static, there's no lip syncing (this would be rectified mostly in the 2nd game's Director's Cut), which creates a really odd mismatch, as George will be talking and moving his mouth in-game, but the portrait will stay static. They even broke many of the other characters, who now don't animate at all when talking.

Besides the story issues, there are some technical ones as well. The original game was a 256 color SVGA DOS game and when bringing it to the new era, Revolution Software decided to touch up the backgrounds with their limited colors and also remaster the audio and add new lines where possible. The backgrounds look nicer and there's no longer any dithering or gradients that look noisy, on the flip side though the entire game looks... off. I don't remember what it is, but there was some sort of filter running across the screen that made everything blurier or something. They also didn't remaster the audio despite intentions, probably because the master tapes are long gone or because the recording studio was pretty bad at the time. Broken Sword 1 has a very distinct effect on each voice line, sounds a little bit echo-y. I guess that even if they found the original masters, it probably wasn't easy to remove said effect. Reminds me of Metal Gear Solid : The Twin Snakes, a remake of the original where they had to redo the entire voice over because they realized the old masters were very noisy. New lines were recorded and sound much cleaner, although they replaced a few very classic lines with them and they don't really fit as great. Also, there's a huge mismatch between the newly recorded ones at 44KHz and the originals which are probably 11KHz or 22KHz at best. They sometimes interchange them between two sentences which makes for an even harsher transition.

They also removed game overs for the game, as far as I recall you just can't die. I also seem to remember people complaining that they removed certain dialogues, but I honestly wouldn't know as I never double checked.

It's still interesting for fans of the series, just a bummer that this is the version that's marketed as the most representative of the game. I personally prefer playing the original using ScummVM.
Sorry for the rant, just a huge fan of the series and was a bit disappointed when this hit the scene. The 2nd game's Director's Cut is a lot better because... it doesn't really change anything and the game was already a bit more advanced with 16bit color thanks to Windows and much higher fidelity audio compared to the first one. The portraits in this one actually lipsync and look okay.

Thank you, that matters most!

GOG's Broken Sword: Director's Cut includes the old version "Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars" and is fixed version.

Cheers,

Garrett W wrote on 2020-08-12, 08:41:

It's a real shame, as the new parts play really well and the puzzles are fun if I recall correctly, but they don't really add much to the story and instead make Nico's actions and motives quite unjustified and unclear.

Interesting. I had heard that one of the big changes was that in the original he didn't have any clear motivation at all. But I never got around to playing the game.

Could be just me since I almost always hate prequels and stories that try to explain events that have been referenced, but the issue is always the same. If you've established a character and shown them doing specific things, perhaps it's best not to go back and show more about them. Their characterization is complete by the end of your original story, unless you've done something wrong, so you have to be very careful in going back and adding more backstory or exploring into detail how specific events took place.
This is where I feel Revolution let me down, there really wasn't anything in the new parts of the Director's Cut that needed to be told and in fact I think it removes part of the mystery and intrigue. Again, maybe it's just me and others love it!