The Making of The Longest Journey

Rock, Paper, Shotgun is hosting an interview/retrospective with Ragnar Tørnquist talking about the classic point-and-click adventure game The Longest Journey. The piece starts off with a surprise: the game was originally intended to be a platformer. "I wanted to tell a story, a specific story - and that's why we ended up making an adventure rather than an RPG or an action game ... We were all fans of the classic adventures from LucasArts and Sierra, and I'd made a bunch of text adventures on the Commodore 64 back in the day, so the genre was a natural match. But in the end it was all about the story, and finding the gameplay mechanics to suit that."

Comments

Why dreamfall ain't as great

[SmallFurryCreature]

The longest journey was an adventure. Dreamfall isn't. It is half adventure, half fighting game. What is worse, the fighting game is extremely bad, you wouldn't accept this kinda fighting game in a flash format that PAYED you to play it.

That is what killed adventures, the constant insistance of adding things onto it to make it appeal to more people. Adventures were ALWAYS good sellers, but that wasn't enough, so lucasarts went 3D, and killed the adventure. Broken Sword added sneaking and platforming, and the series nearly died from it. Dreamfall added combat and we only forgave it because so few other adventures exist.

STOP ADDING ELEMENTS TO GAMES JUST FOR THE SAKE OF IT.

Platformers don't suddenly add a long story segment to appeal to adventures, so why add platform gaming to adventures. Combat games don't suddenly get a rich plot to appeal to adventures, so why add combat to adventures. Action games don't suddenly add character development to their heroes, so why add action to adventures.

It ain't nothing new, leisure suit larry had a segment in it were you had to navigate down a river and avoid pigs on logs (don't ask), it was a very bad minigame. It played in a tiny window, was crap, hard to control, looked far more primitive then the main game, and just basically wasn't fun.

I don't mind mixed genre's where a game really focusses on combing two different game styles together. BUT in adventure land this doesn't happen, what happens that an extremely poor version of another game format is tacked on top. I don't mind combat in dreamfall. I mind that it is an extremely poor combat engine. It responds slowly, you have no special moves, it is just crap.

Put in a full copy of even streetfighter and I wouldn't mind, but not this 3rd rate reject of a fighting game roughly inserted in my adventure.

A fine dinner, deserves a fine wine. BUT just because I am eating dinner, does not mean you got to shove any rotted grape juice down my throat and expect me to like it.

Re:Why dreamfall ain't as great

[nine-times]

I agree. In fact, I generally don't want even a great fighting game put into an adventure game. If I'm playing an adventure game, it's specifically because I want a story-driven game that is paying attention to the story and figuring things out. If I'm getting into an adventure game, I don't want to get held up with something requiring button-mashing to twich reflexes.

Every now and then, some game melds different game styles together successfully. For an old-school example, Hero's Quest (aka Quest for Glory) was a decent blend of adventure and RPG. Part of the reason it worked was because the RPG elements weren't too hard and didn't lead to too much grinding. Improving your stats was basically automatic and played into the story. You just couldn't do certain things unless you had a certain amount of skill, but if those tasks were mandatory, you usually had enough skill by the time you needed to perform that task anyway.

Re:Why dreamfall ain't as great

[westlake]

so lucasarts went 3D, and killed the adventure.

If 3D killed Grim Fandango I can't think of a better way to die.

Great Games

[immcintosh]

I found both The Longest Journey and Dreamfall to be fantastic computer games--some of the best I have ever played to be honest. TLJ was more or less just your classic old school adventure. Dreamfall, on the other hand, while maintaining all of those adventure elements, had such minimalist "gameplay" that I would almost describe it as more of an interactive book than anything. This is not necessarily a bad thing like it might sound to some; the strength of the game just has to revolve entirely around exposition and development of its plot, and for Dreamfall that made for a fantastic experience. I would agree with one of the other posters that the fighting elements were kinda lame and out of place, but fortunately they were pretty few and far between, so easily ignored in the greater context.

Overall, a couple of games I'd highly recommend to anybody with a penchant for plots who hasn't played them already.

Re:If you want to play it now

[AuMatar]

Valve goes out of business- oh wow, I used to have games. Valve decides to cut you off/loses your data/etc- same thing. Someone else hacks your account and Valve thinks you're already playing- can't use your games. Nope, DRM is still evil.

Quest for Glory...

[DrYak]

...was a very successful melange of genres :
Mainly adventure game, but with stats and inventory management inspired by RPGs, and real-time fighting system (although I liked less the mouse-driven fighting system in the 3rd installement).

Lucas art's Indiana Jones and the Last Cursade also had a fighting system that didn't suck... ...mainly because you always had another - and usually rather complicated - solution to walk around or talk through.
Which in itself embodies the principle of adventure games : Use your brain rather than your character's muscle and you twiching on the gamepad (... yes that. And a Diogenes syndrome helps, too).

Although the price for the best fighting-system-in-an-Adventure-game goes for Monkey Island.

(And some may argue that "The Loom" was nothing more than a glorified and overblown Simon game. Thus also mixing genre but still managing to achieve success :-P )

Adventure games can get melded with other genre, but that requires very thorough planning of it and trying to do a nice system that does interact nicely with the rest, and that bring some original new twist to the genre. Not some pale copy cat quickly tackled in.