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

Smart thing to do

[vertinox]

If your game's selling point is the story rather than the engine, you don't have to make a new game engine each time you want to make a release.

Just hopefully a good plot.

More power to them

[fujiman]

... However, putting together a good adventure is wicked hard. Telling a good story is (partially) about pacing. But how do you control pacing when the player is stuck on a puzzle for 3 hours? So the story needs to be in sync with the puzzles, with just enough difficulty to keep the game and story in line.

Day of the Tentacle did an amazing job at this, as did some other LA titles, but I do remember wondering about Sierra adventures ... non-sequitors, die-before-you-try puzzles, bleeecch. I count Ms. Williams' adventures as some of my most frustrating experiences in gaming.

Anyway, go to it guys. Do something great. I'll buy it.

Re:Huh?

[dommer2029]

Interesting. Designing the adventure engine is not the hard part in making a good adventure game, it's the scripting of the story itself. If these guys don't have that experience, it would explain the negative Bone reviews.

I was excited at first, but maybe there's nothing to see here, and I should go about my business.

Re:Their first adventure game

[WidescreenFreak]

I'm sorry, but I have to chime in on this.

Please define "bad graphics". You apparently are of the mindset that you have to have jaw-dropping renders with full shaders, light sources, fogging, and so forth. That's exactly what Telltale has been getting away from because to what feels like a majority of game comapnies the story comes second to the graphics so that the gaming company can partner with ATI or NVidia. Bone and Telltale in general are trying to get people back to the thought that you don't have to have lens flares, rippling waters, and hundreds of particle algorithms in order to have a great game.

This was their first attempt to recapture what adventure gaming used to be and I'll confess that it's a bit weak. But they get a lot of constructive feedback on their forums, which I'm sure is taken seriously since many of the forum members have been around since the company was first created.

As for your Sam and Max concerns, you apparently are unaware that most of the team who was working on LucasArts' Sam and Max: Freelance Police went on to form Telltale after Lucas scrapped the project when it was about 90% completed. So, not only were they the people who were writing and developing it, they've gotten the blessing from Steve Purcell himself who said that he can't imagine a better group to make the game.

As long as I'm preaching, look at how many other games out there rake in a lot of money with relatively simplistic graphics -- Zuma, Bejewelled, and a ton of others. Gameplay without graphics does matter to a lot of people. Apparently, you're not one of them -- and that's fine. But there are a lot of us who look to companies like Telltale to give us something different from the latest barrage of "graphics first, story second" games that have comprised the majority of releases in the past several years.

Disclaimer: No, I don't work for Telltale. I just like supporting the underdog and protecting them from undue criticism when I can. I guess that's why I also love *nix. :)