Freedom and Realism in Adventure Games

[Alun]

Okay, we've had two separate threads now--one by Goldmund and one by Pstonie--both arguing essentially (as I understand them) that adventure games need to open up the gameworld more, give the player more freedom of action, and build a more dynamic and realistic gameworld.Ã,  They've chosen different ways to illustrate their arguments--Goldmund by comparing the adventure game with RPGs, and Pstonie by comparing it to FPS games--but it seems to me that what they envision for the progress of adventure games is pretty much the same.

Now, it seems to me that this sort of thing isn't necessary for the future of adventure games.Ã,  In fact, it wouldn't represent so much the evolution of the genre as it would be the creation of a whole new subgenre.Ã,  But...on the other hand, it's a subgenre that I think could be worth creating.Ã,  While I don't think it should replace traditional adventure games, I admit that I'd love to see a game like that.Ã,  It would mean a whole heck of a lot of more work for the game creators, of course, but it would make for a new type of gaming experience that might be worth the effort.

So...I've created this thread for a discussion of how it could be done.Ã,  Let's leave off with dubious comparisons with RPGs or FPS games, and let's please not argue any further about whether the adventure game has to progress along these lines to survive... let's just use this thread to discuss what could be done along these lines, and what innovations in this direction may be worth trying out.

Comments, anyone?

[MrColossal]

Well, when comparing adventure games to First Person Shooters and then comparing that to RPGs you can clearly see... Ok, I kid...

I don't quite agree that adding a more dynamic or realistic game world would create a new sub genre really. But what annoys me is that all these awesome physics engines are being created just to make it look cooler when you blow a nazi's eyes out the back of his head from 200 yards.

Physics based puzzles I feel would take the prescriptedness of adventure games away in many ways. Granted it's totally up to the designer on how they impliment this but let's be optimistic and say that they did it right.

I'm a fan of puzzles that aren't necessarily hard or brain taxing and sometimes you don't even know you just solved one. In an adventure game you usually know when you've come to a puzzle because it acts as a huge screeching road block that usually means you'll have to retrace your steps and pick up all that stuff you saw in the room before. I feel physics based puzzles could open this up, take out the roadblock and instead of feeling that the game has come to a halt you just slide into the puzzle and slide out again.

To try and make more sense let me bring up Yoshi's Island again. You could toss eggs around the level and they ricochetd around the room in predictable ways. There's this one point where there's a river of lava you need to get across and there's a bucket on a hook high above you. As we learned in later levels buckets float and you can get in them so you aim and fire an egg at the bucket and you've got it, just push it into the lava and jump in.

I loved that so much because if it was an adventure game I would have to do like 30 sub quests just to get that damned bucket down when I could have just thrown something at it.

Again, granted this can be done in traditional adventure games with a point and click interface but it's just a simple example.

I saw the bucket, I couldn't jump to it, I had an egg, I threw it, I win. Slid into the puzzle and slid out again.

There are only so many times you can have an object on a shelf before the player starts to see that you're a one trick pony and I'm not really trying my hardest to think of a new puzzle... For examples from other games: Knocking the Nazi out [well probably killing him..] in FOA with the stalactite and shooting the green lamp in Out of This World so it crashes on the guard below.

I seem to only be able to think of examples where things fall on other things.

I'm gonna stop now, I hope I didn't misunderstand what you meant.

eric

[DG from work]

Again, granted this can be done in traditional adventure games with a point and click interface but it's just a simple example.

I saw the bucket, I couldn't jump to it, I had an egg, I threw it, I win. Slid into the puzzle and slid out again.

Aye, I think this sort of thing could be done in point and clicks by incorperating puzzles similar to The Incredible Machine. The point and click interface there worked extremely well with the physics engine and could easily adapt into an adventure game engine.

[DG from work]

Forgive the double-post, but I had an interesting idea for a plug-in. Call it a "gravity plug-in", where you can define the gravity of a walkable area. For example, you could define gravity as anywhere between normal to sub-zero. Have normal gravity and the main character can fall off cliffs realistically. Have zero gravity and the main character can fly around. Have below-zero gravity and the main character lifts-off into the air like a helium balloon.

Perhaps this could be easily scripted into your game, but it might be easier to have a plug-in. Who knows? Maybe incorperate it into a "physics plug-in", with other physics actions, like bouncing and jumping.

[Alun]

I'm gonna stop now, I hope I didn't misunderstand what you meant.

Well... I think you did, slightly.  But that's OK. 

When I mentioned a more dynamic and realistic gameworld, I wasn't referring mainly to physics engines.  Heck, I agree that just adding a better physics engine to an adventure game wouldn't make for a new subgenre.  But I was mostly referring to opening up the player's options, and to having the gameworld respond more to what the player does.  As it is, in the typical adventure game, the player's options are very limited; things that would have the potential to derail the story are usually completely disallowed.  Allowing the player to do pretty much whatever the heck he wanted (well, within reason; obviously it wouldn't be possible to account for everything) would make for a very different sort of game.  It would necessarily, I think, take the focus somewhat away from traditional puzzles, since they'd be quite difficult to do fairly in such a game... there are too many possible actions that would lead to dead ends, and leaving too many options open would make it far more difficult to figure out what you're supposed to do... the restricted options of conventional adventure games generally play an important role in clueing the solutions to the puzzles.  That's why I said this would make up a different subgenre, since the traditional kind of puzzle that seems to be the central concept of the traditional adventure game would be less prevalent, if not entirely non-existent, in such open-ended games.

But I realize that what does or doesn't constitute a separate subgenre is somewhat subjective, so I won't further argue that point.  (Well, not right now... I reserve the right to argue it later. )  Regardless of whether or not it would really make for a separate subgenre, I just wanted to open up some discussion of how such freedom of action could be implemented in an adventure game, and what kinds of games it could lead to.

[DG from work]

Alun, did you mean similar to Deus Ex, where you can choose to kill such and such character and it affects certain aspects of the game's future?

I think that sort of thing is really good for allowing more options. I remember there were things that I could choose to do and not forced to do, and yet the story managed to stay on track.

[Moox]

I just noticed something, Platformers are also adventure game children, they allow the player to try a veriety of things to solve a task. How is it that adventures work in film yet they are decreasing in video game popularity?

EDIT: Sorry for this crappy post, just ignore it!

[loominous]

In an adventure game you usually know when you've come to a puzzle because it acts as a huge screeching road block that usually means you'll have to retrace your steps and pick up all that stuff you saw in the room before.

I d blame this on the standard point n click interface which narrows the puzzletypes down to almost exclusively inventorypuzzles, which in turn forces people to constantly backtrack to search for pointless objects to pick up, which in turn kills all flow.

Textinterfaces or hybrids, while suffering from other problems, evades this. So a step backwards in the interface would be a leap forward for the games as far as I can tell.

[TerranRich]

Do you mean like an open-ended type of game? Where you're free to do whatever you want, but the game only ends when the "quest" is complete? Because if so, that would be useless and overkill.

If you just mean adding some freedom, I think the best ways to do so are with multiple gameplay paths and multiple endings (like The Pandora Directive) and the ability to do mini-quests, if any, out of order, or even the ability to omit some and have it affect the outcome of the game. Like if you forgot to kill off a bad guy NPC earlier in the game, he comes back and causes trouble...meaning extra puzzles, action, dialog, etc.

As for the hybrid idea, I highly support this. The game, however, would have to be based around this. I was thinking something along the lines of, if you clck the ambiguous Hand icon, you can choose from a menu, AND/OR, if you talk to somebody, you can ask them about things using typed-in text, so that knowledge triggers aren't needed. Whatever the player remembers, the character remembers. I had another use for the hybrid interface, but I forgot it.

Maybe a blank command option, like a generic icon that, when clicked on something, allows the player to specify a verb using text?

[MrColossal]

DG: that's why I said that particular puzzle could be done in a traditional point and click... But a more complex puzzle, if I spent the time to think one up, would not.

Alun: Woops my bad. I think parts of what I said could be salvaged though. A physics engine could allow for a more open ended experience, allowing for the player to do more with what you give them.

Tresspasser comes to mind [and then is quickly ejected again for being bad.] It's not the best example but you could stack boxes to get over a fence or you could work out a way to open the fence. Well just keep adding onto that. Get in a car and drive through the fence. Climb a tree and jump over the fence. Knock a tree down onto the fence destroying it.

This is kinda what I was getting at with my first post. In an average and traditional point and click game the designer gives you 1 rule "play my way." Not a lot of choices other than play the game how the designer wants you to play it. There is NOTHING wrong with that, I like it very much sometimes. But for what you ask:

The easiest way to do this, I feel, would probably be to develop 50 rules that the player must follow [things fall down, wood floats rocks don't, thin walls can be broken, wood burns, water puts out fire, you can talk to people, you can pick up only things that are reasonable, etc etc] and then presenting the player with situations where they have to use these rules [knowledge of the game world] to get past the situations.

Since there won't be a computer game for a long long time that is completely open and free to do what ever you want in [and if anyone mentions GTA I'll kick faces, you have so few options on what you really can do in GTA and yet everyone says it's so open and free.] the most you can do now is just up the amount of rules.

The same would be for derailing the story, but I'd feel better writing it like "derailing the story" since you can't really do that in a game at the moment without it being a bug [there may be examples I'm not aware of of a game working on a small scale like this]. In QFG 5 you can really only do 1 thing, slay the dragon. You can't torch the city and join the brigands and sail the seas destroying kingdoms. And you can't kill Toro and you can't well... stop the story. For QFG 5 that's a good thing but for a game with a more open story you would have say... 10 ways to start the game which depending on how you play the game [through choices you make and how you progress through the game] you are filtered into another branch of the story to move towards another branch and ultimately ending in let's say 1 of 3 endings. This isn't a new idea obviously but coupled with more open ended puzzles would give a better illusion of freedom. Also replayabilty would go up more [then again on a second playing people would start to see the mechanics of how it all works but eh] [also don't give me an example of Fable cause apparently the choices are so dumbed down and obvious that it's not really interesting "Do you want to help the old lady or kick her spine into her shoes?"]

"But all that's a lot of work!"

HOLY SHIT YEA! But... It's what's on my mind a lot lately. I don't think I'd ever want to play a totally free game where I can do whatever I want. I don't think many people would, at least not for very long. The story, for me, makes a good idea into a great game.

How about now, misunderstanding again? Or just rambling?

eric

[Captain Mostly]

I think that doing a fully freedom game would be tortuours in AGS, not least because it's not Object Oriented.

That said, if you could set up a world of object-like structures (e.g. things called "containers" that had a capacity of objects you could put in them and a name and a standard GUI for putting things in them and taking them out again) you could build puzzles that don't neccessarily have a specific "solution"...

Similar to the way things like Tetris works, you'd have objects with specific atributes that you have to make the most of, and if you can't, then you fail.

A medium length adventure game which gives you a random seriese of objects that are of different sizes and weights, then presents you with piles of boxes, each subject to rules like "if you're very full, and the box supporting your right hand side is empty, collaps that box and fall to the right" which you may or may not be able to negotiate with your resourses would be fun. The trick would be to make the most of what resources you had, and get as far as you can. Rather like the puzzels are a sort of sub-game that is, from the perspective of the GUI, totally indistinct from the dialogue and character interation elements of the game.

Perhaps if it was always possible to get another resourse to help you get a little further (at a serious penalty), it would prevent having to re-start the game each time you screw up, thus making it more interesting to progress.

The idea of boxes with rules, and resources with statistics could be taken a step further by applying the principal to higher level game elements. It'd be a nightmare to work out in your head, but when the player came to the game they'd just see systems that work with a reasonable level of realism, and situations that can be solved in a way that is simply a logical thinking through of what statistics put through what rule systems will get the results they want.

I'm working towards something (based on this principal) which in a way should be bringing my VPET work together with my RL&BAT work.. Although I think I've explained my ideas very baddly here...

It would benefit adventure games though... If you applied freedom to how you solve individual puzzels, it'd mean you could keep the story, but cut out the risk of illogical leaps of faith ("Using the arm with the glue for no reason? But WHY does it work that way?!?!")

[Babar]

I agree that Adventure games would benefit much from more realism. I like Erics's idea about a bunch of rules to follow. For example, that road block that is so obviously a puzzle, why can't we just drive through it, or get out and run through it. And that annoying NPC kid who wont give you the Egg of life until you buy him a lolipop, why can't you just knock him down and take the egg? Why must we buy everything? If I am short of money and I want to get something desperately, why can't I steal it? There were always so many situations in adventure games where there was another so much easier solution that the designer did not think of.

[TerranRich]

There could be, say, three solutions to each puzzle. Each solution contributes to a different path and/or ending of the game. Say the following scenarios:

Problem: Boy has egg of life. Need it. Boy says he wants lollipop.
Solution #1: Give boy lollipop. You did what he wanted. He now thinks he "owns" you and is very bossy toward you.
Solution #2: Kick boy's ass and get lollipop. You got the item by force, for "free" so to speak. Now he is afraid of you, and you can use this to your advantage.
Solution #3: etc., etc.

Each solution branches off into other puzzles (multiple paths), and depending on what you've chosen to do, the game will turn out differently (multiple endings). Isn't that open-ended enough for the adventure genre?

[SSH]

In Dun Darach (80s Spectrum/Amstrad graphical adventure), you could steal things, but I haven't played it enough to discover what the consequences are.