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.

Their first adventure game

[Kazzahdrane]

Was "Bone: Out of Boneville", based on the Bone series of graphic novels/comics. I didn't buy the full $20 game, but I played the demo and I'm sorry but these guys have experience in making games like this and that demo is not a good example of an adventure title. I don't mind 3D, I don't mind action sequences. I do mind terrible voice-acting and bad graphics. They may have been going for a simplistic look, but....see for yourselfs at http://www.telltalegames.com/products?pc=bn0102&CI D=0&dlact=1 I'm a little worried about these guys having the Sam 'n' Max license to be honest, I hope their later attempts are better than the first Bone game. Or that the later demo versions better show what good games they are, if that's the case.

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. :)

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.

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.

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.