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A Critique of The State of Adventure Gaming
Erwin Broekhuis writes "The fourth and last installment of Beiddie Rafól's The Cold Hotspot: A Critique of the State of Adventure Games, has been published at Adventure Developers. The series explores some of the key points and contradictions of the stagnation and lack of direction within the adventure game genre." From the first article: "The truth is, the adventure game genre, as we all know it, has long been suffering from obscurity, lack of progress, sheer banality, isolation (surprise!), and, simply, from the garden variety of dullness. And everyone - developers, publishers, the media, and yes, we gamers ourselves - is guilty of creating and fueling this suffering."
There was no better time in PC gaming than when Sierra was actively developing their Quest games.
Kings Quest (at least KQ 1 - 7)
Space Quest (This NEEDS a 7)
Quest for Glory
These are what made gaming great. I absolutely loved their Robin Hood game, Conquests of the Longbow.
The only other game that was remotely as fun (though perhaps not as involving) as these was Grim Fandango from LucasArts.
Wonder what the Williams' (Ken & Roberta, the founders of Sierra) are up to these days, anyway. They need to get the old team back together and remind people why they were the powerhouse of PC gaming in its day.
[DISCLAIMER: This post is a work of satire and should not be misconstrued as a holy text upon which to base a religion.]
Adventure gaming is dead. Editorialists speculate it killed itself.
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I loved Beyond Good and Evil. The Zelda series also qualifies as action/adventure.
I really miss the old Sierra/Lucasarts games though.
I actually still play them. Sam and Max, Day of the Tentacle, Space Quest, The Dig, etc. etc.
Great games with a sense of humor. Each one different. There used to be a whole slew of them every year. Then came the great 3D transition and away they went. They survived the transition from text to graphics, but couldn't cope with the 3D.
Even Grim Fandango was tough to control, and I don't think it benefitted much from 3D gameplay.
Almost no more 2D games outside of portables, next to no new adventure games... sigh. It's really rather sad actually. The playstation and quake mark the death of whole genres that really never should've died.
The key to the enjoyment of pop music is to replace any instance of "love" with "C.H.U.D."
You know, one of the worst things about adventure games was the inane logic. In some games, it was alright. Mostly the LucasArts and DiscWorld games, because they were set in pretty wacky premises to begin with. The Dig is a notable exception from LucasArts' other games, as the puzzles are much more realistic in terms of solvability.
I remember in Day of the Tentacle there was a point where you had to wash a wagon (in the late 1700s) to make it rain so that you could get Ben Franklin struck by lightning. Why would washing a wagon make it rain? Because if you have Bernard Bernouli look at the car parked outside the mansion in the present, he says it always rains when he washes his car.
That's the kind of weird logic I'm talking about. And one of the other comments had a link to something even more stupid and drawn out, in Gabriel Knight 3 (a game that is supposed to be relatively realistic) where you have to make a fake mustache so that you can disguise yourself as a person who doesn't even HAVE a mustache. You steal his passport and draw the mustache on with a marker. WTF? Why did I bother doing all that crap with the cat, the spray bottle, the candy, the syrup, and the masking tape when he doesn't have a mustache to begin with?
If developers could figure out that shit like that isn't fun, then maybe adventure games would come back.
While playing the game, I noticed differences, such as the fact that I never had to take a side-track from the story for the exclusive purpose of boosting stats. I cruised along at a relatively quick pace through the story. But I did notice the culmination of a trend in my reactions to RPGs over the years. Random encounters have become increasingly annoying to me, because they slow down progression of the story. If FFX had had many more random encounters than it did, or if I'd had to go on stat-boosting side-tracks from the story, I would probably not have finished the game. Furthermore, the game felt short. It wasn't particularly short, but it felt like it was. In a way this was nice, because I knew the missing time was just the annoying grinding. But it left me wishing there had been a bit "more", though more of what, I didn't know.
I ruminated on this for a while after finishing the game. I liked it a lot, but I knew it wasn't as good as it could have been. So I thought to myself, "What would have made this more enjoyable for me?" I decided that random encounters could probably be removed from the game. Monsters provide a nice story element, but let's face it-- In most every RPG every made, the use of monsters causes a trade-off between reliable plot-driver and a consistent world. If these worlds really had as many monsters as random battles would imply, then there'd be no way a regular person could survive in it.
With random encounters removed, a lot of what makes an RPG an RPG is gone. So I thought this idea was a failure. But what I didn't realize is that what we have left is much closer to "Adventure". With a few more modifications, we'd have a full-fledged Adventure game.
In short, I think that if the Adventure genre and the RPG genre took a look at each other they could learn a few good lessons from each other and join to become an improved amalgamation genre that would be even better than the originals. RPG, ease back on the stat-obsession, and cut the random encounters. Adventure, get used to 3D, develop more robust motion control, and don't shy away from multi- or many-use items and abilities.
Imagine how great it would be. A truly dynamic, interactive, maybe even open-ended, player-driven story. At the same time it could be audiovisually immersive (not just pretty), and avoid unrealistic grinding and stat-obsession that require constant "suspension of disbelief".