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Adventure Gaming: Rest In Peace?
"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."
Now the same thrill we got killing monsters or solving quests, we can get by killing an opponent that thinks and reasons just as fast as we do. Its a lot more challanging to kill a real person in game then a scripted bot. :)
No I didnt spell check this post...
I'm calling BS on that. Just because no one's thought to make a 3d Sierra-type adventure game, doesn't mean it's not possible. I can see something like a third-person game that used a point-click-menu-select interface, with cinematics, celebrity voice-overs, and one hell of a plot. You could combine free character movement like evercrack or any of the recent Zelda games, with Myst-like puzzles, and don't forget to throw in some action. Oh yeah, and make sure it runs on linux.
Despite millions of years of evolution, human beings, taken as a group, are still stupid, panicky animals.
..at least, that's how it was for me.
Lucasarts didn't bother to even ask creator Ron Gilbert if he had any input in Monkey Island 3, since they owned the rights to the games. The result was a quite poor followup to a supurb series which would have hooked in many new gamers to the genre. Lucasarts attempted to continue Gilberts' story and ended up tarnishing the story with countless plotholes.
New gamers seem to be looking for the violent and flashier games while adventure game lovers look for the trickier and humourous.
Feed me a stray cat.
I'm aware of many reasons adventure games have passed on, but I'm not sure which one I want to put stake in. One thing I do know is Space Shooting games like Gradius, RaidenIII, R-TYPE, etc. and why they died. This might provide some insight into gaming genres as a whole.
Back in the day there were lots of space shooters. 1942 series, ZAXON, Galaga, Galaxian, Space Invaders, Asteroids, Defender. They all fit in somewhere. But around the time of Gradius, Life Force, and definitely by R-TYPE3, Gradius 3, Raptor:COTS the genre had been perfected. There was no more new ways to innovate and make the game better.
They put more bullets on the screen to dodge. They gave you a wide variety of weapons and defenses. They made really flashy big bosses. They provided environments that were difficult to navigate along with bad guys simultaneously. They did everything to make the games awesome. They had a lot of practice making shooters and they had perfected the art. So the genre died. Every new space shooter had to be perfect. If it wasn't then it was crap compared to the 10 or so perfect shooters. So we get Einhander, G-Darius, and now Ikaruga. There are still new games in the genre, but each one is simply a new perfect game. They each add a new gameplay gimmick to separate them from the rest. G-Darius let you grap enemies and make them join you. Ikaruga has the color change shield thing.
These aren't bad games. In fact, they are about as good as they can be. This is the problem. Because there is no innovation in the genre nobody is buying the games. Why would I buy spaceshootX if it is the same game as spaceshootY, it only adds new sprites to look at?
This is the same reason a lot of PC gaming is going downhill and console gaming is really kicking it. The genres which play well on a PC are lacking innovation. The RTS, the FPS, the simulation. All of these haven't seen any major advances. New games just have better graphics and physics. Tribes 2 was the last great advance in fps gameplay, and they fucked it up. Unreal Tournamet 2k3 and Unreal 2 are just more of the same, but shinier. When a genre doesn't innovate it dies. There is no reason to buy a new RTS if the RTS you already have it perfect. This is why Counter-Strike and other Half-Life mods are still #1. Nobody has come up with anything better.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Way back in the day, I was an avid adventure gamer. I played through all the Police Quest, Space Quest, King's Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, and Monkey Island games... plus any others that I could get my hands on. I still play a lot of games, and that's why I think I'm a pretty good person to ask why I'm not as interested in adventure games anymore.
First, I don't think the main reason is graphics. In fact, I don't agree with the statement that graphics have moved beyond what adventure games can possibly offer. A couple years ago, an adventure game called the Longest Journey came out. It was a great game with fantastic graphics. It didn't do so well, commerically. Why not?
Second, I don't think the reason has to do with adventure games being linear. Final Fantasy X was linear, yet it was fantastically successful. Before someone decides to flame me for my opinion of what concepts define whether a game is "linear", I should point out that technically speaking, a linear game only has 1 primary path to its conclusion. Thus, almost every RPG ever made is completely linear, only deviating from the primary path every now and then, and always to return to it. Note: ALMOST every RPG... Morrowind, and games like it, are exceptions.
I would certainly agree that elements from adventure games are found everywhere. Goal-oriented puzzles are found in many, many types of games, from RPG's (obviously) to FPS's.
The main reason I don't think adventure games do well anymore is because of our growing expectations. If a game was released in 1991 and sold 100,000 copies, it was considered a resounding success. 10 years later, if a game sells 100,000 copies, it's still a relative success, but since games no longer take only 6 months to create, there's much more of an investment, and $5 million (100,000 x $50) just doesn't go as far as it used to. Keep in mind that Final Fantasy X-2 sold 1.2 million copies in the first week of its release in Japan. 10 years ago, when King's Quest 5 was just coming out (I don't remember the actual year, so don't get all anal on this point), selling 1.2 million copies of any game would be incredible, even throughout the game's entire run.
It might be me, but lately, I've noticed that most adventure games are based on licenses from TV shows or movies (eg. Law & Order, or CSI). I think it's still pretty safe to say that most games based on movie or TV licenses suck in the most disturbing ways.
Finally, I would say that adventure gaming isn't dead. It's always had the same number of fans as it always has... but other genres have long surpassed it. I know I enjoyed The Longest Journey, Schizm, Myst 3, The Omega Stone, etc. just as much as I enjoyed Police Quest 3 when it came out. So, in the end, I'd say that adventure gaming isn't dead, it just isn't nearly as popular as a lot of other genres. Why don't we talk about how puzzle games are dead? They don't sell very well either...
"It's better to have a gun and not need it than need a gun and not have it." ~ Christian Slater, True Romance
I think that adventure games died because everyone attempted to copy the success of Myst, and, ultimately, the consumer didn't want another Myst. Certainly not the consumers who were providing the base for adventure games. So, to corporate thought, it went "Hey! Myst is the adventure game everyone loves! We should make all our adventure games like Myst!" Followed by "No one likes adventure games anymore, because none of ours sell. Let's stop making them."
Though the adventure game is arguably alive and well as a niche market now, and it seems to be doing well enough to keep existing as a niche.
Philip Sandifer's academic website
I personally have a completely different reason why this genre died.
One of the most important aspects of the games like King's Quest was the user's imagination. Why not type "kick the cat"? It wasn't necessarily the immediate response we enjoyed, it was that the action actually affected the game at a later point in time (remember if you kick the cat, he'll later trip you at the top of the stairs and you die). Sure, it required imagination to come up with some of the statements you had to type, but the programmers showed that they out-thought you most of the time and some of the reactions to your typed statements would make you fall out of your chair laughing. I know I remember doing that several times.
However, imagination is what is becoming a dying art. Why do games have to *look* more and more real? Because if it looks fake, you have to pretend in your mind that you are *in* the game.
People don't want to use their imagination anymore. Just look at the movies and TV. It's so much easier to just be forcefed the stuff instead of picturing it in your mind as you read a book or play a game.
Remember that once we got to King's Quest 5, we were no longer typing phrases in. The game was also looking less cartoony. I personally was disappointed at the new mouse interface because I missed typing in the phrases that got the funny responses.
In my opinion, the genre died because we're getting too lazy to use our own imagination and the market saw this trend and let the games pass away.
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Charles Martin
Database Developer IV @ Santander Consumer USA
This is true. I think when people hear 'adventure game', they think automatically text or 2-d. Obviously, the genre has evolved with the technology. It could quite possibly become huge again, should some developer with good ideas decide to throw all their resources at it.
As many have said already, the adventure game genre is not dead at all. Additionally, a lot of features of adventures games have been incorporated inside other genres. For instance, rpg's like Baldur's Gate (or, better, Planescape Torment) have plenty of features which come straight from adventure games. Even some shooters incorporate adventure game features (puzzles, npcs, discussions, etc). I think that far from being dead, the adventure game is ever-present! Nowadays almost every game, no matter its genre, has a bit of adventure gaming sprinkled on top of it, if only to make the bits between the action scenes more interesting.
Daniel
Carpe Diem
Now, take out your hardcore MMORPG. Remove the FPS which is just about killing and more killing.
What do you have? Resident Evil types. Zelda:WindWaker types. Genre busters (a la the "Theif" series, Deus Ex, System Shock 1&2). Those are all evolved Adventure games.
And, yes, I was (and still am) a HUGE fan of the adventure genre. Quest for Glory (formerly "Hero's Quest") lured me in, Monkey Island kept me from leaving.
Seriously, go buy Thief 2, System Shock 2, or Deus Ex. Yes, they are a First Person perspective, but they are very much an adventure genre.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
The adventure games are almost dead, but they also evolved. Take the Shen Mue saga. The Shen Mue games are adventure games, moved to 3D graphics the right way, not like the Lucasarts failures such as Monkey 4 (crap all around) and Grim Fandango (good story, but crappy control).
In Shen Mue there is a great story, lot of objects, lot of people, lot of interaction. I think that if the real adventure creators (Steve Purcell/Ron Gilbert) had worked with current hardware, they would have created something similar (probably with their twisted humor).
but at the time I was in grade school / jr. high, so maybe I just remember wrong
No, you're absolutely correct. The current run of games typically have quests that involve one screen...ie, you walk into a room and have to figure out how to get up the staircase by jumping or pushing blocks. There's not a lot of multi screen puzzles unless you count having to retrieve item X in order to solve puzzle A.
I remember King's Quest and Police Quest...I don't think I EVER got all the points in PQ1. I kept trying this, that, the other, never happened. What a great game. That's what gave it great replayability. That, and you could die instantly with no warning (like a police officer can). There wasn't a lot of hand holding, if you couldn't figure out the solution you had to wait until the guide book came out or call the Sierra BBS and read message posts.
The genre has certainly changed, and not for the better. I want a good puzzle game like PQ where there' relatively no action, ie I don't have to kill things right and left and prove my manual dexterity and reflexes are up to par.
--trb
I am an avid adventure game fan. I have been playing adventure games and loving them as long as I can remember. My first computer games I played and loved were adventure games: Below the Root (if that counts), Adventure, Zork, King's Quest, Space Quest, Monkey Island, and so forth and so on.
I have lots of reactions to what is implied and asked by this story:
Most importantly, it has to be emphasized that adventure games are not dead. The original submitter was careful to note not dead "commercially", but the connotations of the story is the same--that adventure gaming is a dead genre.
Why am I picking at this point? Because many fans of text adventure games will note that whether or not adventure games are commercially dead is a moot point. They are very much alive in the open-source and independent gaming community. I really am not saddened by this--in fact, I am gladdened by this! It's one of the few--if only--vibrant gaming communities that are populated primarily by independent developers, typically individuals writing games for a hobby, but less frequently, as a secondary vocation. It's almost irrelevant that they're not a large source of commercial income, because good games are still being written and produced--and that's all that really matters.
So that's actually text adventure games--or interactive fiction. What about graphic adventure games? Well, putting aside quibbles about games like The Longest Journey, I would admit that there is a dearth of graphical adventure games, even in the independent gaming community. There are numerous explanations for this problem.
First, I think there's something to be said about the typical computer gaming population or audience. Just as the typical internet user has become more representative of the general population as time has gone on, so too has the typical computer user. Let's face it: adventure games put an emphasis on thinking and puzzle solving, and are not sensational or viscerally exciting. This is not a criticism necessarily, as books aren't either, and I'm not about to say that books are bad. But it is to say that most of the population doesn't like to play a computer game that requires sitting around and thinking about a problem. Think of Grand Theft Auto, for example. As the market has changed, and game development has become more corporate and commericalized, more effort is placed on genres that deliver sensational, exciting, extravagant stimuli.
Second, adventure games really did fall behind technologically. This is definitely true of graphics, games like The Longest Journey aside, but it's true of a whole host of other things. Even with text adventure gaming--with all the advances in natural language processing and AI, it's amazing someone hasn't done anything more with parsers, dialogue generators, and plot flow. Adventure games remained remarkably linear in plot and related factors. For a long time, first person adventure games were horrible in their interface--ridiculously restrictive movements, limited world interaction--absolutely horrible. Many of them still are.
Third, on a related note, the gameplay of adventure games never really advanced, and to the extent they did, it was because of the introduction of new genres from outside adventure gaming. For example, adventure games could have branched into first-person action, but the impetus never came from within adventure gaming. So you got games like Half-Life and System Shock, from the action gaming community, to create a new hybrid action-adventure genre. Note that it's generally action-adventure, not adventure-action. Role playing is another example of this--character attributes, and nonlinearity, never got any attention from the adventure gaming community. It was, however, taken up by games like Baldur's Gate, revitalizing adventure gaming in the form of role-playing. Thus a resurgence of role-playing, even though it resembled adventure gaming in a big way.
Finally, I think it's important to point out that adventure gaming isn't necessa
Go back about two years and you magazines regularly ran articles saying, "Flight Sims Are Dead".
Sure, you could find a few examples like Microsoft Flight Sim but they were dismissed and the genre was considered dead. Then the stunning IL2 came out, Combat Flight Sim 3, B17, Project One and a whole slew of others while Lawrence Holland, one of the biggest names in the classic era of PC flight sims is coming out with another in the Secret Weapons line.
Basically, the genre was in hibernation until several different sources came up with new tricks and new technologies to exploit and then, once there was something new to offer, it was back with a vengence.
Currently, adventure games are considered dead. There are examples of the genre that are still getting rave reviews such as American McGee's Strawberry... uh, I mean Alice, Syberia, Anacronox (or whatever it was called), etc. but they, just like the examples with flight sims before them, are getting dismissed.
Go in to other fields entirely... Guitar was "dead" during the dance music era, guitar soloing was "dead" a couple of years ago. Yet it all strangely comes back as soon as a couple of inovators coincide at the same time.
Declaring a game (or indeed any) genre dead generally proves one of two things:
1) You're a magazine after a sensational article title.
2) You've just not been in the field long enough to recognise a cycle when it hits you.
Adventure games may currently be in hibernation but they'll almost certainly return. Maybe it'll be through realtime Myst style graphics on modern cards (look at Links now compared to what it was like 10 years ago). Maybe it'll be in an FPS engine - ultimately, other than Counterstrike, what's made Halflife so popular is that fact it was the most Adventure Game like FPS out there and still is. Maybe, with the capacity of DVDs, someone'll figure out how to make the old CD-ROM interactive movies in to something that's actually any good. Maybe it'll be a new approach entirely. It'll almost certainly be a combination of several. However it happens though, it almost certainly will happen.
Then they can start writing about the Post Doom III death of the FPS genre or whatever it may be.
Defiantly not dead. There have been many good-decent adventure games released and more to come (the new S+M is scheduled for Q1 2004).
Just because these are not getting as much press as Doom 3, doesn't mean they are not being made any more. I'd say the main reason people aren't looking at these very much is because of the horror that was in the mid '90s using FMV (Full Motion Video).
Now those were bad...and have been burned into reviewers brains forever
"Some things have to be believed to be seen." - Ralph Hodgson