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The Random Adventure Game News Thread
- Thread starter Jaesun
- Start date
DeepOcean
Arcane
- Joined
- Nov 8, 2012
- Messages
- 7,404
Man, Gabriel Knight Moba and Quest for Glory FPS, I can't wait!
There is NO fucking way they will ever revive any "like" Sierra game, due to the difficulty of those games.
Unless they are going to completely dumb them down for consoletards.
It will be shit anyways. /edgy
Unless they are going to completely dumb them down for consoletards.
It will be shit anyways. /edgy
- Joined
- Mar 2, 2010
- Messages
- 10,881
Meh, it can't be a worse bust than Box Office Bust.
Besides I doubt they'll touch SQ or QFG or LSL again. They must've seen how much money SpaceVenture and QFI made on KS, and it's the kind of peanuts they're not interested in. They might try to make a sequel to KQ8, or remake Gold Rush as an iphone ap, but it's not even going to be something worth raging about.
Actually, AFAIK, Activision doesn't own the rights to Gold Rush! since it's not listed as a publisher on the game's Steam page nor on the developer's site
And then there's this.
https://twitter.com/geoffkeighley/status/497872149403930624
"The Odd Gentlemen" appear to be making King's Quest.
Bt
https://twitter.com/geoffkeighley/status/497872149403930624
"The Odd Gentlemen" appear to be making King's Quest.
Bt
In before complete KQ Franchise RAPE.
Worse than Mask of Eternity?
Redlands
Arcane
- Joined
- Mar 23, 2008
- Messages
- 983
Interesting...
Let's hope they manage to capture the essence of the original King's Quest games. Also, no 3D graphics would be nice, adventures play better with pixels, imho.
Anyone who's played this game will know what this video refers to :D
iqzulk
Augur
- Joined
- Apr 24, 2012
- Messages
- 294
Dunno if you are already aware of that, but here goes.
Ivan Maximov's "Full Pipe" is officially freeware now (well, rather "for quite some time now").
I can't recommend this game enough.
Be also sure to check out this video (contains both content that you won't find in the game itself, and, in its description, some trivia about the game and some useful links to the related materials).
Ivan Maximov's "Full Pipe" is officially freeware now (well, rather "for quite some time now").
I can't recommend this game enough.
Be also sure to check out this video (contains both content that you won't find in the game itself, and, in its description, some trivia about the game and some useful links to the related materials).
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- Joined
- Jan 28, 2011
- Messages
- 99,696
The Digital Antiquarian on Access Software! http://www.filfre.net/2014/08/access-software/
(this being the Digital Antiquarian, he touches only on the company's very early 80s history, before Mean Streets)
(this being the Digital Antiquarian, he touches only on the company's very early 80s history, before Mean Streets)
US Gamer has been doing some good retro content lately. Aside from the Curse of Azure Bonds and Drakkhen retrospectives, they also have an interview with the Zork writer Dave Lebling - about Zork, Infocom, and interactive fiction:
http://www.usgamer.net/articles/dave-lebling-interview
http://www.usgamer.net/articles/dave-lebling-interview
- Joined
- Mar 2, 2010
- Messages
- 10,881
After the incline brought by Infinitron and Bee, why not have some decline article that makes the Old Man Murray one look good?
http://www.theastronauts.com/2014/04/seven-deadly-sins-adventure-games/
http://www.theastronauts.com/2014/04/seven-deadly-sins-adventure-games/
MRY
Wormwood Studios
The flaws that the article identifies aren't crazy, but there is a lot that's weird about the piece -- perhaps most notably that he would pick out a designer famously mocked for illogical puzzles (in an article to which he links!) as one of the "few [wo] can make a good adventure game." Also, the walkthroughs for TeenAgent suggests that his design was not unlike what he's criticizing, down to one puzzle in which you glue together two pieces of wood for use in water, which is almost exactly the specific (lame sounding) puzzle he criticizes in Mobius. (Interestingly, the same seems to be true of level design. For example, he criticizes the narrow-path-to-striking-vista trope in FPS games, but then the gameplay trailer for his game starts with exactly that!)
(I also wonder whether he was being mean-spirited in picking out a screenshot in which Dave misspelled "memento" as an example of the writing in Blackwell.)
What I disagree with is his contention that the core mechanics of adventure games are not fun. His seven deadly sins are largely absent from the best adventure games (Monkey Island 2, Loom, QFG, a few others), or present only occasionally. Several examples of what he describes as inherently lame core features either aren't core features or aren't inherently lame:
* "Inventory management" is bizarre. I can't think of any adventure game inventory I managed; some of the very old games had maybe a couple dozen items to track, but they were all easy to see at a glance and -- setting aside text adventures -- I don't think you ever had to manage encumbrance or anything like that).
* "Dialogue repetition" seems off too. I don't remember repeating dialogue, though of course "dialogue exhaustion" was (and is) a problem in any game with consequence-free dialogue trees.
* "Pixel hunting" has always been oversold. (Maybe I'm just touchy on this because of Primordia.) With a few exceptions, you weren't hunting "pixels," you were hunting objects. And while hunting objects isn't my favorite thing in the world, it's not self-evidently "anything but fun." An entire genre of games is based solely around that mechanic, as is a genre of books (Where's Waldo being the most famous).
(I tend to agree that "back tracking" and "option exhausting" are problems in adventure games.)
Really, the core pleasure of adventure games was the flash of understanding when you discovered how to solve a puzzle. Certainly this is best when the flash of understanding precedes the solution ("Oh, I know how to get past this!"), but it actually works even when you arrive at the puzzle through brute force ("Oh, so that's what I was missing!"). As long as the player didn't respond with, "I would never have gotten that, it's stupid," the puzzles worked. And for the most part, I would say that adventure game puzzles did work, particularly in Lucas games but also in Sierra ones.
For what it's worth, I think a major cause of the genre's death was simply exploding costs. Adventure games are perhaps the least amenable to reused content. Unlike in an RPG (or an FPS or a platformer), where graphics, enemies, mechanics, etc. could be used over and over again, typically each element of an adventure game was once-off and handcrafted. The article is right that adventure games had developed a reputation for cutting edge graphics and sound, and when that standard keeps going and up and up, the cost of handcrafted content goes up too. At some point, in a genre that doesn't sell to as large a demographic, costs can get too high for the product to be sustainable. The AGS renaissance is based on a bunch of factors that push costs down: a fondness for low-res retro graphics; low-budget voice acting; and mostly volunteer developers working purely for back-end profits. Primordia "cost" almost nothing to make -- the only out of pocket expenses were a couple thousand bucks Dave spent on voice actors and marketing. Same for Heroine's Quest and, I suspect, for QFI. I know it's mostly true of Resonance. While Dave pays the artists who make his game rather than giving them back-end, they aren't paid market rates -- maybe now they are, but certainly they weren't prior to Epiphany.
So classic adventure games died because they cost too much for their niche market to bear; retro adventure games thrive because they cost much less to make; and modern adventure games thrive because they market to a different, much larger audience. (Typically by incorporating either action elements or an established IP, sometimes both.) I certainly don't begrudge those games their success, but it seems a little bit silly to assume that every game needs to be made in that model. In fact, bad developers trying to make the next Gone Home are unlikely to do much better than bad developers trying to make the next Monkey Island.
That said, I think The Haunting of Ethan Carter looks neat, and I'll probably pick it up. And I am a sucker for designers who post about their design thoughts, because I shamelessly copy their ideas!
(I also wonder whether he was being mean-spirited in picking out a screenshot in which Dave misspelled "memento" as an example of the writing in Blackwell.)
What I disagree with is his contention that the core mechanics of adventure games are not fun. His seven deadly sins are largely absent from the best adventure games (Monkey Island 2, Loom, QFG, a few others), or present only occasionally. Several examples of what he describes as inherently lame core features either aren't core features or aren't inherently lame:
* "Inventory management" is bizarre. I can't think of any adventure game inventory I managed; some of the very old games had maybe a couple dozen items to track, but they were all easy to see at a glance and -- setting aside text adventures -- I don't think you ever had to manage encumbrance or anything like that).
* "Dialogue repetition" seems off too. I don't remember repeating dialogue, though of course "dialogue exhaustion" was (and is) a problem in any game with consequence-free dialogue trees.
* "Pixel hunting" has always been oversold. (Maybe I'm just touchy on this because of Primordia.) With a few exceptions, you weren't hunting "pixels," you were hunting objects. And while hunting objects isn't my favorite thing in the world, it's not self-evidently "anything but fun." An entire genre of games is based solely around that mechanic, as is a genre of books (Where's Waldo being the most famous).
(I tend to agree that "back tracking" and "option exhausting" are problems in adventure games.)
Really, the core pleasure of adventure games was the flash of understanding when you discovered how to solve a puzzle. Certainly this is best when the flash of understanding precedes the solution ("Oh, I know how to get past this!"), but it actually works even when you arrive at the puzzle through brute force ("Oh, so that's what I was missing!"). As long as the player didn't respond with, "I would never have gotten that, it's stupid," the puzzles worked. And for the most part, I would say that adventure game puzzles did work, particularly in Lucas games but also in Sierra ones.
For what it's worth, I think a major cause of the genre's death was simply exploding costs. Adventure games are perhaps the least amenable to reused content. Unlike in an RPG (or an FPS or a platformer), where graphics, enemies, mechanics, etc. could be used over and over again, typically each element of an adventure game was once-off and handcrafted. The article is right that adventure games had developed a reputation for cutting edge graphics and sound, and when that standard keeps going and up and up, the cost of handcrafted content goes up too. At some point, in a genre that doesn't sell to as large a demographic, costs can get too high for the product to be sustainable. The AGS renaissance is based on a bunch of factors that push costs down: a fondness for low-res retro graphics; low-budget voice acting; and mostly volunteer developers working purely for back-end profits. Primordia "cost" almost nothing to make -- the only out of pocket expenses were a couple thousand bucks Dave spent on voice actors and marketing. Same for Heroine's Quest and, I suspect, for QFI. I know it's mostly true of Resonance. While Dave pays the artists who make his game rather than giving them back-end, they aren't paid market rates -- maybe now they are, but certainly they weren't prior to Epiphany.
So classic adventure games died because they cost too much for their niche market to bear; retro adventure games thrive because they cost much less to make; and modern adventure games thrive because they market to a different, much larger audience. (Typically by incorporating either action elements or an established IP, sometimes both.) I certainly don't begrudge those games their success, but it seems a little bit silly to assume that every game needs to be made in that model. In fact, bad developers trying to make the next Gone Home are unlikely to do much better than bad developers trying to make the next Monkey Island.
That said, I think The Haunting of Ethan Carter looks neat, and I'll probably pick it up. And I am a sucker for designers who post about their design thoughts, because I shamelessly copy their ideas!
tuluse
Arcane
- Joined
- Jul 20, 2008
- Messages
- 11,400
Great post MRY
I only have one bone to pick. Adventure games didn't die because they weren't making a profit, but because they weren't making *enough* of a profit. The famous example is Grim Fandango. It sold 500k copies and was profitable. However, other games with similar accolades were selling 1 million+ at the same time. So Lucas Arts decided they wanted the market that sells 1 million copies per game. Instead of trying to control costs to keep 500k market viable, they just tried to cash in on the Star Wars name (to be fair this worked for a long time).
This is basically, why I think the codex exists. To show there is a market for small to mid budget games that appeal to people who like--for lack of a better term--hardcore mechanics. We're not scared of difficulty. We don't mind having to spend time to learn how a game works. We aren't even that worried about not finishing game. Which probably makes most modern producers recoil in horror.
Like isometric roleplaying games, I think the genre "died" because people stopped making them more than people stopped wanting them. Also, to be frank even the better adventure games these days lack some spit and polish that Lucas Arts was able to provide in about 1990. I love Primorida, but it still feels short compared to The Secret of Monkey Island. It has less and worse voice acting than the talkie Lucas Arts games. And this one hurts the most to say--while the art is good, it's not quite on par with the VGA stage of Lucas Arts either. I bet if you had the art, voice acting, and marketing of say The Longest Journey (popular enough to "earn" a sequel with action elements and other assorted "fun"), Primordia would have sold much better.
As a final note, I'm not convinced backtracking is bad, it depends how it's handled.
I only have one bone to pick. Adventure games didn't die because they weren't making a profit, but because they weren't making *enough* of a profit. The famous example is Grim Fandango. It sold 500k copies and was profitable. However, other games with similar accolades were selling 1 million+ at the same time. So Lucas Arts decided they wanted the market that sells 1 million copies per game. Instead of trying to control costs to keep 500k market viable, they just tried to cash in on the Star Wars name (to be fair this worked for a long time).
This is basically, why I think the codex exists. To show there is a market for small to mid budget games that appeal to people who like--for lack of a better term--hardcore mechanics. We're not scared of difficulty. We don't mind having to spend time to learn how a game works. We aren't even that worried about not finishing game. Which probably makes most modern producers recoil in horror.
Like isometric roleplaying games, I think the genre "died" because people stopped making them more than people stopped wanting them. Also, to be frank even the better adventure games these days lack some spit and polish that Lucas Arts was able to provide in about 1990. I love Primorida, but it still feels short compared to The Secret of Monkey Island. It has less and worse voice acting than the talkie Lucas Arts games. And this one hurts the most to say--while the art is good, it's not quite on par with the VGA stage of Lucas Arts either. I bet if you had the art, voice acting, and marketing of say The Longest Journey (popular enough to "earn" a sequel with action elements and other assorted "fun"), Primordia would have sold much better.
As a final note, I'm not convinced backtracking is bad, it depends how it's handled.
- Joined
- Mar 2, 2010
- Messages
- 10,881
Thanks MRY, I was hoping this would sprout an interesting discussion but was too lazy to kickstart it myself 
The biggest problem with the article's credibility is exactly this. He's coming in all high and mighty, yet every single one of his games contains MAJOR flaws that detract from the genres (both his adventures and his FPS), some of which are much more serious than his stated sins. Which raises two problems: either he knows the flaws yet was himself too incompetent or lazy to fix them.... or worse, he's harping on these sins because he's unable to identify problems that are even worse. I just finished Moebius. It was not a good game or a good adventure, for reasons that I don't want to elaborate on just now. But the point is that the game's major flaws are not the ones he lists (he instead lists stuff that's either trivial or just plain false - more on this later), and more importantly, these flaws are what always characterised bad adventure games. ALWAYS.
Fully agree.
Very few games had encumbrance mechanics. Shivers 2 has some, but they're hardly ever a problem. Myst only let you carry the one page at a time, and while this slightly extends gameplay it is by no means an issue (especially since you don't need to bring out both pages out of each world - even on a blind playthrough). The Kyrandia trilogy is perhaps the most notable example of inventory management, thanks to a large number of red herring items and limited inventory slots, but frankly this wasn't much of a problem in the games; the trial-and-error solution to puzzles was, and quite frankly the inventory management at least made the trial-and-error part a little less mechanical.
I honestly don't see the problem with either repetition or exhaustion. Repetition is there because back in the days you were trusted to keep your own notes, and in-game note-taking technology that ballooned your save game size to 1Mb was not an option when the whole game shipped on a sinle 1Mb floppy. Repetition was there so you could re-access information that you might've missed. Exhaustion is also not a problem. I've talked about something similar with respect to classic CRPGs a year or two ago: the point of manual note-taking is to decide what information the game is giving you is actually useful. The exhaustive dialog of old adventures (and CRPGs) gave you a LOT of extraneous info (sometimes for mood, lore, or just for laughs), and it was up to you to decide what was important. That's fine. It only becomes a problem when, as in Moebius, you HAVE to exhaust the dialog to trigger something completely random and unrelated.... and of course this exsits in less than 1% of all adventure games ever made, so calling it a flaw inherent to the genre and that contributed to ruining it all is just plain dumb.
Again, pixel-hunting was never something that was praised, and it's something that developers got better and better at (see KQ1; the original had some pretty bad instances, but even the SCI EGA remake fixed some of these by moving items to more logical and visible locations, never mind that the series in particular, and Sierra in general, got better about this with the years). Again he's taking a flaw that was always slammed as a bad design decision and that only existed in a minority of adventures and trying to spin it off as a core feature that defines the genre - exactly the same bullshit as Old Man Murray.
They're not. They're a problem in bad adventure games. Very few of the good ones (never mind the classics) had either problem. This is something I've bitched about often in the past, how such "editorials" pick a single feature that's been considered exclusive to bad games then harp on it as if it defined the whole genre. It didn't, it only defined bad games, and nobody cares about these except as a design lesson on what not to do. A small amount of backtracking is fine. Running around Melee Island and revisiting locations was fun. Actually backtracking is one of the few major flaws of Moebius that he does address, except it's worse in Moebius than in any of the classics that I can recall - yet again, turning something the game does badly into something that's supposed to define the genre.
Full agree. I have to add the even better than "that's what I was missing" flash - the "oh GOD why didn't I figure this out sooner!" flash. Lucas were always good at this. Sierra had their ups and downs, but when they were good, they were brilliant (Codename Iceman notwithstanding).
I don't agree. The problem wasn't cost - adventure games are a LOT cheaper to make than COD clones. Bulletstorm cost, what 100M? On the other hand you have Tesla Effect, which didn't even cost 1M. The problem is the expectation you have about return. If Tesla Effect makes 10x its cost that's only a 9M net gain. If Bulletstorm makes double its cost that's a 100M profit. Obviously the smart thing to do would be to make both games and rack in both the big bucks and the smaller bucks. The publisher model doesn't work like this though. Instead of making all kinds of investments big and large and covering as many shares of the market as possible, you just make a bunch of super-expensive projects and hope that one out of 5 is profitable enough to cover the cost of all the failures. Or, as costs spiral out of control, you make a bunch of super-expensive projects and hope that all of them are profitable otherwise you go bankrupt. Hollywood figured out decades ago that making both superproductions and auteur movies couldn't hurt them, but for some reason the game publisher model still hasn't caugh up.
I do. "Modern" adventure games are much adventures as Mass Effect 2 is a CRPG. I don't begrudge people making and playing games that I have no interest in, but I do begrudge them trying to call them what they're not. Walking Dead and Heavy Rain and all the crap that he praises aren't adventure games. They're at best interactive movies, at worst just movies with the occasional QTE. Don't call them adventure games, ESPECIALLY not in a blog post about how to fix adventure games.
Please don't copy his though, they're really not that great
Oh God no, it's Adrian Chmielarz
iqzulk
Augur
- Joined
- Apr 24, 2012
- Messages
- 294
I am sorry to intervene, but this is completely and utterly ridiculous. Have you - not even so much as played - actually seen the original EGA version of the "Secret"?
I am sorry, but you must surely be joking. First of all, TLJ "art style" would look too "modern" to let the developers to play any kind of "retro" card, which would mean it would get evaluated from the standpoint of, say, Wintermute Engine games (for example), and lose THE main thing that made the game to actually stand out (with a bunch of other commercial AGS games). Second of all, TLJ, eeeerm, how do I say it, doesn't actually look all that good (even when compared to some other games of its time, such as Nightlong or Worldspiral:Liath - not to mention Riven, Amerzone and Gadget). Just look:
the shittiest Photoshop job ever on dat "majestic" foreground:
(1)
extremely inconsistent level of detail - the "floor" is just eye-gouging (and it holds nearly for the entirety of Stark):
(2)
(3)
(4)
(also, pay attention to the amount of cheap bloom on the above screenshots)
the lighting that is extremely flat: the scenes lack any sort of depth whatsoever:
(5)
(6)
(7)
(8) - dat BLOOM, dat BLUR, so pwetty! Gaem of da millenium!
(9) - pay attention, in the lower left, the background is just a photo, while the upper left is a horrendously blurred Photophop job in an extremely overdone attempt to imitate the "aerial perspective" - compare also to (1) and (8)
(10)
(11)
also, "aerial perspective" strikes again (the upper left):
(12) - notice also the ugly "wall of trees" backdrop in the upper right - also, on a whole, this scene is one of the better looking ones in the game
also the shittiest 3D models ever (see all of the above - not to mention that all the animations of said models, despite being numerous and thorough - are unnatural and slow to the extreme) - which do not fit the the environment in the slightest (due to aliasing first and foremost) - also these:
(13) - notice how the models are completely and utterly unaffected with the mist (which would otherwise be quite successful in providing the actual depth to the scene - again, this is one of the better-looking ones, despite the, again, ugly "floor")
(14)
and the shittiest-looking interface ever (again, see all of the above).
Seriously. Like, seriously seriously. This game looks like an inconsistent flat amateur-level mishmash of everything with everything (both overall, and as an actual collage quality of the particular scenes due to the flatness and level-of-detail factors). And while I DO admire the sheer complexity of some of the scenes, with the gazillion of of lovingly built and stacked together in-game objects, it just doesn't constitute any kind of consistent or particularly aesthetically attractive art style, and for me personally, this game is just downright painful to look upon (which have nothing to do with its date of release, I assure you). And while I do think that Primordia is too low-res, and maybe somewhat too cramped for its own good, I personally wouldn't want it to look anywhere even close to the crapfest from the screens above.
extremely inconsistent level of detail - the "floor" is just eye-gouging (and it holds nearly for the entirety of Stark):
(also, pay attention to the amount of cheap bloom on the above screenshots)
the lighting that is extremely flat: the scenes lack any sort of depth whatsoever:
also, "aerial perspective" strikes again (the upper left):
also the shittiest 3D models ever (see all of the above - not to mention that all the animations of said models, despite being numerous and thorough - are unnatural and slow to the extreme) - which do not fit the the environment in the slightest (due to aliasing first and foremost) - also these:
and the shittiest-looking interface ever (again, see all of the above).
Seriously. Like, seriously seriously. This game looks like an inconsistent flat amateur-level mishmash of everything with everything (both overall, and as an actual collage quality of the particular scenes due to the flatness and level-of-detail factors). And while I DO admire the sheer complexity of some of the scenes, with the gazillion of of lovingly built and stacked together in-game objects, it just doesn't constitute any kind of consistent or particularly aesthetically attractive art style, and for me personally, this game is just downright painful to look upon (which have nothing to do with its date of release, I assure you). And while I do think that Primordia is too low-res, and maybe somewhat too cramped for its own good, I personally wouldn't want it to look anywhere even close to the crapfest from the screens above.
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Qiu222Be
Literate
- Joined
- Aug 21, 2014
- Messages
- 6
It would be better if it is English. Thanks for sharing. ^^
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