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

[westlake]

so lucasarts went 3D, and killed the adventure.

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

Re:If you want to play it now

[Brian Gordon]

Who modded that insightful?!

• If valve goes out of business, they will unlock all content control for all games. See this official forum post.
• If valve cuts off your access to data and you're stuck without a CD, you can just back it up. Steam includes a handy feature that lets you burn a DVD or set of CDs (or just keep the archive files on a hard drive) from any steam game. If you lose your data then just pop in the DVD and it automatically copies the game data. Since it's steam, and games are downloaded as big archives requiring no 'installation' (all settings and cache and things are mapped to the filesystem, and game files have their own virtual filesystem within the archives), it just instantly works after copying. You still need to decrypt it with a key from the server but again see the above post, they can just disable the authentication.
• You can install any purchased game on an unlimited number of machines. A lot of people give out their steam information to their friends, because everyone can play! You're limited to 1 multiplayer game at a time, but you could all be playing a single player game offline and steam doesn't even care.

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.