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The Grumpy Gamer Speaks
Ron Gilbert, well-known for his work during the golden age of LucasArts adventure games, is also well known as The Grumpy Gamer. Gamasutra has up an interview with Gilbert, discussing his career in the post-Threepwood period of his life. From the article: "It's actually kind of frightening, you know. You sit down with a publisher and the minute you mention anything like an adventure game or something story-based or adventure-game-like in any way, the meeting's basically over. So the publishers do have a huge resistance to this. And I think a lot of it is that they cannot point to anything like this that is successful in the market today. So it's very difficult for them to put anything behind it. It's a very difficult process."
Some of the best gaming moments I ever had were from the Monkey Island/Sam and Max/Day of the Tentacle days. Never played them but from what I know Full Throttle and Grim fandango did extremely well critically too - I should also include Psychonauts here too, a game which I have absolutely caned recently?. For contrast I have had many other great gaming moments RE4, Bubble Bobble, Gradius etc.. You know what I'm trying to say. Fuck the publishers they really ought to look further than the balance sheet if they want their (read:our) industry to survive past PacManBisexual.
Pointing out that GTA-style games aren't very good at storytelling isn't 'GTA-bashing'. It's obvious to anyone who knows anything about game design. I don't see any comments in the article by Gilbert that remotely qualify as GTA-bashing.
Of course, you probably didn't read the article...
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games today are lacking in story and adventure when compared to games of old. Sure they look great, but they lack that compelling factor.
That isn't a problem for everyone. If I am playing a game with cutscenes, stories, etc. I always skip them. Is the idea that I am supposed to "pretend" to be the character and become engrossed in pathetically scripted storylines? Please. Most people have trouble enough distinguishing reality in the first place. It is important to distinguish in your mind that your "desktop" is a virtual space that is created through signs and symbols but the reality is that you are staring at a computer monitor.
Personally I would worry about someone who became engrossed by moving images to such an extent and "preferred" these "story and adventure" games... television and the internet are isolating mediums which create illusions of engagement with society. There is a famous argument that the Gulf War never happened for the reason that the real "war" as it was understood was a series of moving images on a TV screen.
I have to say that's really why I was dissapointed in HalfLife2... the story simply didn't do it for me.
HL was a journey. You started off with nothing and the character learned along the way... the bad guys changed and the demands on the player's abilities grew as well (this isn't a book it's a game. I want to learn stuff, even if it's how to take out the giant gorilla thing with the buzzy bee gun). By the end of the game I felt I'd done something.
HL2 looked way cooler but really, where was the story? It was hit and run, shoot everything and then, THEN, just as you get to the big Boss fight at the end... we get the Matrix effect and you're away with the fairies. There was no upgrading of the bad guys along the way, no new skills (notice how the boat and the dune buggy handled the same way? Learn it once, use it again and again) and OK, I enjoyed sending the sand lions in to fight on my behalf but really, that was the high point.
I'm not talking about the look (which was excellent) or the "feel" of the game (which I enjoyed) but the story line itself.
I am a leaf on the wind
Yes, the adventure genre had its golden hour back in the Sam and Max/Monkey Island days, but there are still companies that are dedicated to the genre. For example, I can't wait for the guys at TellTale to release their first Sam and Max episode. (This is the company that was formed by those who were on the Sam and Max sequel team when LucasArts idiotically abandoned their Sam and Max development when it was estimated to be 90% finished.)
You're not going to make a successful adventure game for $10 million. But you can certainly make successful one for one or $2 million.
This really sums up the problem with the current video game industry. The big wigs apparently have this ridiculous attitude that spending more will mean earning more, but only with certain genres. Otherwise, it's just not worth it because they apparently believe that they "have" to spend big bucks. Look at how many licenses are purchased every year, particularly from sports organizations. You can't tell me that in all circumstances changing the offical logos, changing the names of the players, getting very talented voice actors who sound like the real announcers but cost 1/10th a much, but keeping the exact same game play suddenly means death for the game. People want games that they can play and enjoy. Changing a name from NFL to "Pro-Football" thereby saving who knows how many millions in licensing costs might turn a few narrow-minded morons away, but if the game is really good, people will buy it. History has shown that time and time again. A probably-now-forgotten company originally called "Apogee" comes to mind.
And that brings up another question. Does he really need a publisher? With electronic distributions as popular as they are, the increase in the number of people who have broadband, and the increasing popularity of delivery methods like Steam, does any game company really need a distributor to hold them back from at least an initial release - just enough to get the word spreading about the games that he releases? Again, look at Apgoee and its associated company iD, both of which were very popular from the electronic/shareware release method. No, it won't work with all types of games, but in this world of broadband and the Internet, where we only had dial-up and BBSes, I think that electronic distributin has a much better opportunity for success than ever.
Just my two cents.
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One of the things that made adventure games good back in the day is that if you got stuck on a puzzle, you really had to nut it out. Walkthroughs and hints were not as easy to come by. Much of the gameplay in an adventure game is the solving of the puzzles, if you can easily get help when you get stuck, there isn't that much gameplay in such games. I think this is why games like Psychonauts are the next logical step, they have similar elements but more elements to them than the old adventure games that are purely problem solving.
Blessed are the 1337, for they shall pwn the earth.
Huh? No successful story-based games? What about (off the top of my head) ...
- Baldur's Gate 2
- Planescape: Torment
- Star Wars: KOTOR 1
- Oblivion
- Neverwinter Nights
- Diablo 2
- Day of the Tentacle
Not only do each of these games feature great stories, they are among the top-rated PC games of all time on sites like Metacritic. The raison d'etre for these games are their stories, and all of them were highly successful in stores.
Over reliance on cut scenes and expositive narrative techniques are a sign of weak story telling in the game genre. A good game that tells a good story needn't depend on these. In fact (I think you'd agree from what you're telling me) they get in the way.
Perhaps what Game companies need to do is hire a dramaturge.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
No, terrible localisations full of "clever" jokes, and lead voice-actors they'd literally pulled off the street are what killed Working Designs.
Wow. 130k a year, and you still missed the point of what he's talking about
1) Why do you need a new engine? 8-10 people? Cripes. Network code? It's a frickin adventure game. License the SCUMM engine or something similar.
2) Yes, the assets are the biggest expense. No, they're still not 500k. We're talking a pretty basic game - especially if you have a old engine, support should be minimal (game help lines don't count). Assets are pretty simple - you're not doing 2d/3d modelling, you're doing old SCUMM 2D graphics. Audio, soundtrack - these can be outsourced. Honestly, I'd say you need 3-5 people, 1 year development time. And not all of them need to be paid 130k a year. I'd be surprised if any did, really.
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
It's "when".
And the answer is: somewhere around 1999.
From TFA, Gilbert describing what he would want to do with a game: You've got the action, some light combat, you know, Diablo-style combat going on with it, but it is also infused with really good adventure-game-style puzzles and adventure-style sensibilities to the storytelling. So what you can do there is take those puzzles and that storytelling that really appeal to people on a certain level, but you can fuse it with the kind of action and mindless play mixed in.
While I pretty much like what Gilbert says in TFA, here is going completely in the wrong direction. He does not seem to realise that the people who want stories and adventure-style puzzles are turned off by mindless action sequences. Mixing up different styles is a surefire way to make a game fail miserably. Try to please all, and you wll please none.