Amen, great scene and a game with some great moments.
Also, for traditional adventures, I’d rather play Dave Gilbert’s next game over almost any of the big releases (the major exception being A Vampyre Story, which I still have my fingers crossed over). The Blackwell games don’t do anything desperately ambitious for the genre as a whole, but he squeezes so much character into them…
They’re still working on A Vampyre Story? It was taking so long I thought it had been binned.
Yeah, it’s still coming.
Agreed, but most of them probably never heard of it because it was so underpromoted. The episodic Sam & Max games are pretty good, too.
I don’t want to speak for Andrew, but I can understand someone’s believing that games like BioShock and Half-Life 2 have rendered adventure games obsolete. I used to believe the same thing. Back when Dark Forces and then Half-Life and Jedi Knight were released, I thought, “Well, that’s it for point-and-click adventures.”
It’s not the actual mechanics, it’s the overall presentation. When I first got into videogames, you had to choose between SCUMM games if you wanted story, character development, and atmosphere; and then DOOM if you wanted to play something that was actually fun. I’ve always hated ridiculously obscure adventure game puzzles, but I did want to be doing something more interesting than “use the red key on the red door.” When it looked like FPS games were headed in the direction of real characters and real dialogue and genuinely interesting worlds, I assumed that they’d eventually evolve into super-immersive adventure/shooter hybrid uber-games.
The problem is that it’s 10 years later and they still haven’t evolved that much; you’re still going from objective to objective and rarely if ever get that satisfying “a-ha!” moment when you’ve figured something out. Half-Life 2 and BioShock are two of my favorite games, but neither has had a single moment where story and gameplay came together perfectly for me, where I suddenly realized I knew exactly what to do next, and I’d figured it out on my own, and I was rewarded for it. Day of the Tentacle had like a dozen of those.
On the Lucasarts new: If they want to do an MMO set in the time of KotOR that’s fine. Since Bioware is involved I’d be more that happen to check it out. However, I’d rather see KotOR 3 as a single player game.
On the adventure game discussion: I see three real problems with the adventure game genre. First, its a matter of taste. It seems like most gamers are more interested in faster paced action - adventure games. Fighting dragons and chasing spies are so much more fun than lots of talking and puzzle solving.
Second, development of a good adventure game seems to go against the standard design ideas. With an adventure game the story is everything where is most games the story is a set piece at best.
Third, there is no real advertisement for these games. According to PC Gamer The Sims recently broke 100 million copies sold. The people who play this game seem to be the ideal market of classic adventures. How can any of them even check out these kinds of titles when there is no one get the word out about them.