The Return of Storied Adventures?

Next Generation has a talk with Telltale, the maker of interactive stories such as Monkey Island and Grim Fandango. In their opinion, story adventure titles are on their way back. From the article: "We're not trying recapture the LucasArts [adventure game] glory as much as trying to build off of it. We're trying to do something different with episodic content and smaller games ... The big reason most of us went to Lucas in the first place is that we loved games based on story with interesting characters that are presented in artistically interesting ways. So when LucasArts stopped doing that and we'd done our share of Star Wars and Indiana Jones games, we wanted to get back to that. There's only so many Star Wars games you can make."

Comments

Huh?

[Tankko]

Next Generation has a talk with Telltale, the maker of interactive stories such as Monkey Island and Grim Fandango.

Telltale didn't make Grim Fandango or Monkey Island. Thoese were made by LucasArts, and even then, they were designed by Tim Schafer and Ron Gilbert. The people at TaleTell just worked on them.

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Except that Dave Grossman, one of the Telltale guys was a writer on the first two Monkey Islands, and co-designer/writer on Day of the Tentacle... I think some of the others have similar although slightly less illustrious experience, but I couldn't be bothered looking it up.

Adventure genre not as dead as everybody claims

[grumbel]

If you look around the adventure genre is far less dead than many people claim, with AnotherCode/TraceMemory and Phoenix Wright there are two decent ones for the NintendoDS, there also was Fahrenheit recently for PC, XBox and PS2, soon there will be Dreamfall and if you look a bit in the past there was The Moment of Silence, Westerner, Black Mirror, Runaway, Syberia, Still Life and plenty of others. Not all of them might be up to the legendary LucasArts ones, but many of them are still quite good, some, like Fahrenheit, even try something different then classic point&click and succeed at doing so, some other of course not so much (BrokenSword3).

So while the adventure genre has far less games to offer then the first person shooter genre, there are still plenty of gems available that shouldn't be missed and several other on the way. The adventure genre seems to have found it niche to live in.

Re:Adventure genre not as dead as everybody claims

[Kazzahdrane]

In case you didn't know, Revolution had openly said they weren't planning to make another Broken Sword game after The Sleeping Dragon. However, due to immense pressure from the fans, Charles Cecil turned around and said "yeah, ok" and now Broken Sword 4 is in the works. BS3 had its flaws, most of them to do with the annoying crate puzzles and less conversation than the previous games. But some of the best puzzles were only possible thanks to the 3D engine, such as the channeling of the spooky blue light in a big tomb (puzzle with lots of mirrors!). I'm very hopeful that Revolution have taken these critisisms on board and will improve on BS4. If the story is as good as usual I'll still consider it worth the price of admission anyway.

ScummVM

[Boronx]

What I'm doing is just playing through the great Lucas Arts games I never got around to or haven't tried using ScummVM.

Who knows how many hours of gameplay that's worth. Heck, there's two free games to download, I've got four or five more games on the shelf I bought from a friend, including Loom and Sam and Max, still in it's original box. The two I have played, Monkey Island and Full Throttle both are easily good enough to deserve a replay.

Re:Their first adventure game

[MilenCent]

Upon reading your post I went out and download the demo and played it.

The voice acting, it turns out, is quite *good*, and it's obvious that an absurd amount of time went into having characters' mouths and body language match what's said. Considering that most 3D games are content with just changing the facial texture whenever a character has to speak (Ivy's laugh in the SoulCalibur games is unintentionally freaky because of this), and I have to say, Telltale has done a great job on that.

The graphics are 3D, which is very rare for this kind of game, but works fairly well. Although they *are* a bit simplistic, they fit the style of the comic perfectly.

And I was quite impressed with the writing in what I had seen so far. So... I honestly don't see what you don't like about it, I guess.

Re:You mean there's a limit? It'll END?

[MilenCent]

There's only so many Star Wars games you can make.

Would you care to get me a hard number so we can begin the countdown? (KOTOR notwithstanding.)

Sure: ONE.

The original quote is obviously spoken by someone utterly fed up with making movie property games. Lucasfilm used to be known for making some absolutely brilliant things; not only did they make what are regarded by many to be the best graphical adventures, but it was also in their halls where was created what may very well have been the first true graphical virtual world.

To see them reduced to the endless milking of a pair of movie licenses, no matter how culturally significant they may be, is saddening.