If they aren’t working on an updated X-Wing, Tie Fighter, or X-Wing vs Tie Fighter I don’t give a holy hell what they are doing.
QFT
Heck ya!
One of the problem with the SWG MMO was the lore.** You can’t really have hundreds of Jedi running around in the Star Wars universe of the first trilogy and yet a large percentage of the people wanted to play Jedi. KOTOR allows for some really cool concepts without breaking lore. Now comes the challenge of making non-jedi characters compete as well as figuring out how to allow for evil Sith and PvP.
**Another problem with the SWG MMO was an amazing lack of content at release. Huge worlds with randoms spawns does not a compelling game make. It would have been cool if they had robust content sprinkeled within those huge worlds. I went back and played around with SWG a couple years ago after they had added some quests and a small amount of content and when you combined it with the space combat game I could see the seeds of a great game. Too bad those seeds were 3 or more years after release when the game was essentially dead.
No, but most of the developers may as well be*. Adventures were once one of the main genres that pushed technology and innovative ideas. The ones we see now are almost all content to be mere shadows of that, serving up the bare minimum of innovation in an attempt to avoid scaring the niche market. You could still make an excellent adventure that sold. The problem is that most of the companies trying don’t deserve to succeed - they’re just making the old stuff look a little better and clinging on to memories of games like Monkey Island and Broken Sword.
Goddamn, Frogwares especially makes me cross. So many games under their belts, and they still make the most rookie mistakes…
(* No, I’m not including Telltale in that. They’re doing some cool stuff, even if I have issues with some of their games)
There are people trying to clone successful RTS games and getting nowhere, too, but that doesn’t mean that the market doesn’t really want RTS games. It just means that the market doesn’t want shitty RTS games.
How many of the adventure games getting made today even approach the quality of the Monkey Island games, or the Dig, or Grim Fandango? Almost none of them. Every year or two, there is an exception (like Dreamfall, or the Syberia games), and those games generally do a lot better. I think the reason the market doesn’t buy many adventure games these days is the same reason that caused that genre to tank in the first place: most of the games getting made are awful. Solution: make better games.
Do a lot better? You mean in sales or reviews? I generally think the adventure market is much smaller than the more mainstream action adventure market (God of War and its clones).
Many current adventures surpass The Dig, but it wasn’t one of LA’s best achievements. But your argument isn’t really very sound, anyway. How many movies are Casablanca or Star Wars? (Wow, did I just put those two in the same comparison?)
There are still several very, very good adventure games that are released every year. True, they haven’t “innovated” beyond making things prettier - but, and this is the tricky part, I guess - people like them as they are.
Look at virtually any classic adventure game, and they all look and feel pretty much the same. That’s because the adventure game, as a genre, reached its zenith with the introduction of the mouse-driven, icon-based interface, so all of the “great classic” adventure games played pretty much the same. What separated them from each were the stories being told, the art style they were presented in, and the quality of their puzzles and dialog. Just like today.
Only today, you don’t have a dozen adventure games coming out every month like you did when the genre was in its glory days. People forget just how much garbage was released alongside the classics. That lack of volume is cited as support for “the genre is dead” argument, when it really isn’t. True, there’s only one Tim Shaffer and one Ron Gilbert and they’re not making traditional adventure games anymore. So we won’t get another point-and-click Monkey Island or a semi-painful-to-navigate Grim Fandango.
However, we’re getting a lot of great games that just aren’t by those two guys. There’s also a much more favorable hit to miss ratio within the genre today. With the market being niche, I suspect a lot more time and effort is put into each title, to help keep the misses down and the hits up. So yeah, there aren’t going to be a hundred adventure games released in the next year, but the dozen or so that are will likely be very good. You know, a lot like how it was back when there were 100 adventures released in a year, but out of that 100, maybe only 12 were any good.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
oh no you di’int!
Dreamfall I’ll give you, but Syberia was such an awful example of adventure gameplay. The visuals and world are amazing, absolutely top-notch – but the actual design of the actual game was just unredeemably horrible.
Someone forgot to tell Final Fantasy XI too.
If I was in charge of TT: Young Indiana Jones could be mined for the first story line; create an original story from the time period on the first three movies for the second; and finish off with the Crystal Skull.
Actually, they’re already working on a series of episodic Dreamfall games.
The Syberia games were entirely mediocre. The overall story holds together, but the gameplay is awful, mostly due to poor puzzle design and a lack of interactivity.
- Alan
Look at virtually any classic adventure game, and they all look and feel pretty much the same. That’s because the adventure game, as a genre, reached its zenith with the introduction of the mouse-driven, icon-based interface, so all of the “great classic” adventure games played pretty much the same. What separated them from each were the stories being told, the art style they were presented in, and the quality of their puzzles and dialog. Just like today.
That’s really not true. You can break it down into gameplay elements like ‘uses point and click’, but the best adventure games were focused on creating unique experiences rather than anything so specific. Modern ones are more akin to a sculptor trying to create a classic sculpture. A completely different creative experience.
Just look at Lucasarts’ games and try to find modern adventures that have the guts to try anything close to innovating something like Day of the Tentacle’s time-spanning puzzle chains, or opening up the gameworld like the second act of Monkey Island 2. Where are the games that spin off into new territory like Full Throttle did when it brought a harder edge to puzzle solving (as seen in the old comparison anecdote Schafer did about the sandwich) or made the same leap as Sam and Max to become an interactive cartoon that was as much fun to watch as they were to play?
They’re not out there.
Worse, even treated as competitors to the old adventures, they’re terrible. The writing in modern adventures is almost invariably dire, the puzzles poorly designed/paced/written (just look at something like the escape sequence in Jack Keane, or the graveyard sequence at the start of Dracula: Origin) and if they succeed anywhere, it’s in having enough technological clout to look pretty and have nice background music.
That’s not good enough. These games suck, and the companies like House of Tales and Frogwares and Deck 13 and the others who want to keep the genre alive are doing themselves and their players a disservice by constantly releasing the miserable stream of piss that they call new games. There is so much potential in the genre that they’re absolutely wasting, and it makes me cross. In the last few years, only Fahrenheit, Dreamfall and the Sam and Max games deserve any praise for making good use of the genre.
The rest wouldn’t simply not have stood out back in the day, they’d have been buried alive and forgotten. And deservedly so.
I’m speaking in relative terms. Compared to most of the adventure games that come out these days, Syberia is a masterpiece. It’s an adventure that very easily could have come out in, say, 1994, and held its own with other adventures of that time. I very much agree that it had a lot of problems, many of them common to the genre, but it also had good production values and writing and a great concept, which is something that most adventures these days lack.
The problem with the adventure game is not that it’s dead, it’s that the fundamental elements of the adventure genre have been totally co-opted by other types of games. So much so that you don’t need the point and click adventures anymore.
Instead of clicking to unlock story, character, and items, you’re doing other things like jumping, or fighting, or playing mini-games.
The DS especially has tons of great “adventure” games from Professor Layton and Pheonix Wright, to Elite Beat Agents. But for all intents and purposes Bioshock can be considered to have inherited the mantle of the classic adventure game.
From a gameplay perspective the only thing we’ve truly lost us the “hunt the needle” dynamic, and I say that’s great.
Wow, you really have a hate on for new adventure games, yet you seem to know at least a couple of the “bigger” titles to hit recently. So are you playing through the games, gritting your teeth and hating the experience? Or are you trying demos, or reading about them? I’m curious, because you seem knowledgeable of the current state of the genre, which conflicts with how much you seem to hate it.
What about a game like Runaway? Surely you didn’t hate it, did you? There were a lot of absurd puzzles, but it was a fun enough time. Also, I think it bears mentioning that so many of the adventures are not being created in English. Since you seem to prefer comedy to drama in your adventures, then I’d be more angry that more time, money, and effort isn’t spent in localization than I would at the developers for making an unfunny game. Humor is a tricky thing to get correct in your native language, and even more difficult to translate properly and still be funny. I cut games like that a break in that regard, because they don’t have AAA Title budgets and, as such, I shouldn’t hold them to that standard of voice talent and localization.
The funny thing is that Syberia was below par for all the adventure games I’ve played in recent years, with several better games each year. On average, I think adventure games today are quite a bit better than days of yore, even though Monkey Island 3 and Grim Fandango are still some of my favorite adventures.
Wow, you really have a hate on for new adventure games, yet you seem to know at least a couple of the “bigger” titles to hit recently. So are you playing through the games, gritting your teeth and hating the experience? Or are you trying demos, or reading about them? I’m curious, because you seem knowledgeable of the current state of the genre, which conflicts with how much you seem to hate it.
I’ve played almost all of them, some for review, some in the hope of finding a gem. I’m on the press list for just about everyone releasing them. Would you rather I hated it out of igorance? Not that hated is the right word. I’m annoyed, every time I see another wasted opportunity, but mostly I’m just disappointed. I long to find genuinely good games that bring back some of the old magic, and it’s absolutely not impossible to do so. It’s not the rose-tinted glasses of ‘wanting another Monkey Island’, it’s ‘I want this genre to be treated with proper respect’.
Since you seem to prefer comedy to drama in your adventures, then I’d be more angry that more time, money, and effort isn’t spent in localization than I would at the developers for making an unfunny game.
Where did I say anything about making unfunny games?
What about a game like Runaway? Surely you didn’t hate it, did you?
The Runaway games are terrible. Beautiful, but terrible. The puzzles are badly designed, stuffed to the guts with worthless filler to pad out the incredibly small amount of story, and prone to just about every blooper in the book - especially when it comes to the consistency of hotspots and the laws of its scenario. Peanut butter, anyone?
The cast is poorly used (notably Gina being out of action for 99.% of the first game, and 100% of the second, despite being held up as the star). Oh, and both games feature some truly insufferable characters, from Brian boffing Lokelani not an hour after losing the love of his life or Joshua, the hateful, racist Japanese stereotype the writers thought was really funny.
Hell, the stories are so badly paced that the sequel has the sheer balls to finish without resolving anything.
Both games look great, but no. They’re rubbish.
I’m sorry… but WTF? Bioshock, the game that had you go from start of level to end of level then sent you on a hunt and gather quest before returning to the end of the level. This is how you see the point & click genre?
I have to back Richard on this, the standard of adventure games has really dropped. I don’t think the numbers have, but the big guns are gone and now distinctly average games are considered great because they have no competition.
To be fair, that description mostly fits Sierra titles.
Which is why they were, for the most part, considered 2nd tier while Lucasarts made those sort of titles. Sierra had games which killed you every chance they got, they would certainly not be my shining example of point & click across the board.
However, I would disagree with you anyway, because if you collect an item in a point & click you then proceed to figure out what to do with it. Not so in Bioshock. In fact Bioshock is so far removed from point & click I really would appreciate you explaining that one.
The opening restaurant scene in Fahrenheit is closer to inheriting the mantle than anything else. The rest of the game… eh, not so much. But if there’s one thing that should have grabbed adventure developers by the throat in recent years, that was it.