The Future Of Adventure Games Discussed

Thanks to AdventureGamers.com for the first part of their continuing feature article discussing what the future holds for the adventure game as a genre. The author shrewdly points out: "The death of adventure games is a topic that's been... well, done to death", and goes on to muse: "We can restlessly theorize about the genre's supposed 'death' forever, but it won't really get us anywhere. Instead, we need to take a closer look at the stuff (adventure) games are made of." He then points out: "Syberia or Jak & Daxter - ask anyone on the forums which one is the adventure game and everyone will reply the former. It's a no-brainer. However, things get difficult when you try to define exactly why Syberia is the adventure game." It's then claimed that "...the most visible characteristic of adventure games is that they offer a departure from action-and-reaction gameplay and manual dexterity" - but do games in this genre still appeal?

Comments

Re:Puzzle games

[SmallFurryCreature]

Myst is of the school of "The 7th guest". This had a story but in order to progress you had to solve puzzles. These puzzles had little today with the story but were classic braintwisters. Simple things like moving pieces on chessboard or answering riddles.

The other style of adventure is the Sierra or Lucasarts adventure. Here the puzzles are usually based in items you collected and combinging them with other items to move along. Think MacGuyver. For instance in the recent adventure "Runaway a road adventure" you have problem. You need to convince some killers that your love intrest is in another bed. How? Well there is a card with her name on it at the bottom of the bed and an empty bed next to it. So locate some cushions a dummy head a wig and a sheet and you got a nice target. Now to do the medical chart. You found a marker pen but it is dry. You also found some alcohol and a syringe. Hmmm, can you figure out what to do next? Probably. Do you like figuring it out or do you go, why don't I just shoot the killers?

Some of use like adventures and puzzles like this. Some like myst style puzzels. You like patformers and rpgs en shooters with a few puzzles. Genre mixing doesn't work for everyone. Adventure gaming isn't dead but people sure keep trying to kill it.

No recent titles ?

[DrSkwid]

What about Pokemon?

It's a classic adventure game, running round collecting bits you need to open the door to get more bits to open the door ....

oh and we also loved the 'Tombi' series on PS1

Whacky Japanese nonsense, run round collecting feathers and leaves and stupid stuff to take to the old man to get the magic mushroom to .....

The genre isn't dead by a long stretch, we are out here playing and enjoying them games it's just a trip to the games shop will show you 500 fps/driving/sim X games for the brutes.

Re:Adventure is not a True Genre

[PainKilleR-CE]

I know, this is Slashdot, but you didn't even read the first page or two of the article, did you? They go through a lot of hoops to try to come up with a coherent definition of the genre despite most fans of the genre being more capable of identifying the genre of the games by playing them than describing the genre.

In the 2D console days, most side-scrolling games could be considered an adventure game.

No, the Adventure genre actually takes it's name primarily from the console game Adventure, which is, of course, a text-based adventure game. Side-scrolling games tend to fall into either platformers or shooters. In the days of the NES, Nintendo liked to try to label the content of the games (Action, Adventure, etc), but they weren't very concerned with genre. The only time they really bowed to genre labels was when they couldn't easily use their descriptions.

Once the PC gained popularity, most of your point and click games, like Myst, were classified as adventure.

Myst wasn't classified as an adventure until quite a while after it's release, as it didn't fit the conventional genre label. It was considered a puzzle game when it was released.

Now, the adventure genre disintegrated into various other genres.

The adventure genre was (is) probably one of the stodgiest genres in terms of keeping out change. This has pretty much driven it to smaller publishers, as the larger publishers had a hard time selling titles that were either highly derivative or changed too much (3D especially). Other genres, as they've matured, have co-opted various features from adventure games, but this is inevitable as adventure games are more or less story-telling puzzle games, and most mature genres will eventually incorporate both strong stories and puzzles.

Most titles could be considered adventurous, whether they be first-person, third-person, side-scrolling, RPG, point and click, etc. I don't think that the adventure genre should really be considered a genre in which you classify games at all, because the term adventure covers so much ground. In fact, I would even go as far to say that past games shouldn't have been called adventure games, either.

Genres named after generic terms often have these kinds of problems, but frankly the problem is not with the genre, it is simply your lack of understanding of what the genre is. Adventure games don't even have to be adventurous at their core, and a game is not a part of the genre (or even incorporating genre elements) just because it contains adventure or is adventurous.