Adventure Gaming: Rest In Peace?

cordsie asks: "I've been doing a bit of research lately on the past and present states of the story-based adventure game market. I'm talking about the old Sierra and Lucasarts games, e.g. King's Quest or Zak McKracken. Generally, (and this is fairly obvious from the titles that have been appearing over the past couple of years), the consensus is that the genre is dead, at least commercially. But there seems to be a bit of disagreement when it comes to the reasons the genre died. Why did the genre die, and is it worth resurrecting?"

"From research in newsgroups and articles on various gaming sites (by no means supposed to be academically exhaustive) it seems to me that there are all sorts of idea and opinions on the subject floating around, most, as you might guess, contradictory. Here are a few examples of the kinds of statement that you can find, some from old time game designers, and others from random punters on newsgroups:

- the technology has simply moved on, and adventure games don't allow for the kind of flashy graphics and big bangs that sell video cards.

- the genre isn't dead, it just evolved. Elements that we loved from adventure gaming have been incorporated into the current genres.

- the games weren't really THAT good, we just remember the effect they had on us with rose coloured lenses. We should remember the good times and let it die. After all, who wants to play 'guess the verb' or 'click every item in your inventory on every other item'? We've moved on.

- they were too linear, and offered too little replay value.

Personally, I cherish the memories and the stories from this era of gaming, and would love to see the genre resurrected."

Comments

Genre isn't dead

[Peachy]

Or at least LucasArts hope it isn't. They've got a sequel to the great Sam & Max + Full Throttle adventures.

Point & Clickys Are not Dead!

[erinacht]

Take last year's Syberia as a prime example - won a lot of awards (was a bit easy if you ask me) - just walk into your local Game (UK) and pick up a copy.

The problem with the point&click adventures growing into 3D is that no is that one has managed to pull it off quite right yet they are all a bit samey - they fear text on the screen I think and the walk/talk/use type interfaces that are ideally suited to this game type.

Lets hope the up and coming offerings from LucasArts can reignite the *real* games.

failing that I might be forced to write one myself!

I'm not dead yet! I feel happy!

[Joe the Lesser]

While I may not play adventure games, this is the same sort of 'shock' journalism that we always see. Someone says something is dead because it's not as popular as it once was, and two years later, it still is alive, just in it's own niche, as it was before.

It's like those guys who keep saying puzzle games are dead, despite the fact that puzzle games may actually be the most popular on the planet with their inclusion into cell phones and whatnot.

SCUMM!

[MrHanky]

The old adventure games aren't dead, they're just getting old. Recently, I played through Day of the Tentacle and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, and started playing Sam & Max. These games are still great fun (although I cheat a lot when I'm stuck, being more impatient now in the future than I was back in the present), and the best thing is you can play them in Linux, FreeBSD or on your old SGI through ScummVM.

I actually portupgraded my laptop (a 133 MHz/40 MB antique) from FreeBSD 4.7 to 4.8 just to get speech in Sam & Max. Those games are such a waste of time!

Re:MMORPG's took over

[RobotWisdom]

The classic text-adventure was alive and living on rec.arts.int-fiction last I looked. The emphasis has shifted away from puzzles to more artistic writing, I think, but there will always be new ideas that can work within the original zork-style format.

Shifting the emphasis to graphics has always been risky because 1) it's expensive 2) the author has less artistic control 3) puzzles are harder to implement. And because there's no replay-value, it's just not cost-effective.

I had great hopes for Chris Crawford's Erasmatron engine as a way to allow multiple story-paths, but it was a huge disappointment. Someday Chris or someone else may yet get it right-- ie, an authoring toolkit that allows more freeform interactive-fictions without an enormous investment of authoring-effort.

The Longest Journey

[DavidLeblond]

One of my favorite games of all time, The Longest Journey, has just announced they are working on at least one, maybe two more games in the series. It seems to me that this whole "adventure games are dead" stuff started when Sierra got bought out and stopped making adventure games. But companies like Revolution are still going strong, and now are trying to get adventure games out to the consoles.

I don't think the genre will ever be truely "dead".

Re:Far from dead

[frenchgates]

You are talking about a role playing game. It really isn't the genre under discussion.

In a classic adventure game you don't "make a character", you don't improve your character's stats in the D&D way, and you generally don't slay things by force of arms, you do it instead by puzzle solving.

There are isolated exceptions to these, but not all together.

Re:Turn on the lights.

[vegetablespork]

I think that exact wording is from Zork I.

Re:Far from dead

[frenchgates]

"I'll don my asbestos pants now."
That won't be necessary.

Basically Adventure and RPGs share enough in common to sit under the same heading in a game taxonomy, but there are enough differences that that they certainly require their own sub-genre classifications.

Classic adventure: Zorks, Grim Fandango, etc. NWN may have modules with no combat, but they are certainly not what the game was primarily intended for or the producers would not have spent so much time on the underlying leveling/monster menagerie/combat systems.

I don't think I'm saying anything particularly radical here. Most game sites differentiate between adventures and RPGs in their own navigation, for example.