The place of Retro and Modern design.

[SurplusGamer]

I'm fresh from making a 2-room 'learning' game in AGS which I used to teach myself the basic concepts in a few short but fun days (I'll stick this up for people to look at in the appropriate forum, later on). Now, of course, I'm inevitably wondering where to take my new found prowess. I started by looking at what other people are doing, and have some thoughts about what I've seen so far.

My initial thought was that there is an awful lot of retro-styled content created by AGS. I think this is all fine and good because I love a bit of that but it got me to thinking whether adventures (and adventure gamers) in general are stuck in that sort of mindset. Certainly in my little test game the main puzzle was extremely traditional lucasarts-esque fare, and I haven't seen a whole lot of variation from that or similar formulae (except where people have created something in a different genre, like Art of Theft).

I think that there's a place for games that are retro, visually, and also a place for ones with traditional style puzzles. But I think there's also a place for people who are trying to be aggressively modern with their designs, thinking of new ways of doing puzzles - and not just for the sake of being different, but because they hit upon something new that works.

I think one of the main reasons adventure games suffered as a genre around the turn of the century was that there were not really many successful attempts at doing something innovative (although Westwood's underrated Blade Runner springs to mind) and so there was a lot of lost interest. One of the reasons they're starting to sell again, aside from new business models like Telltale's, might be simply that people are nostalgic about the old days, rather than the games offering anything particularly new (except perhaps an episodic structure, for example - and that was initially greeted with suspicion).

I don't know what my first 'real' project will be but I do know that I am likely to have these thoughts in the back of my mind when I start it, and I wonder if other people have thought similar things.

Discuss...

[Matti]

I think the main reason why most people make adventures in retro-style, with traditional (MI-) puzzles and plots is, that they have those adventures in mind when making their own. It's just - like you said - that there weren't much good adventures coming AFTER those old classics.

As for the "death" of the adventure-genre: In addition to the last point I think the reason is the gameteams, who want to basically make hi-res-3d-shooters and RTS-games with lots of action and lots of specialeffects. I think since 10 years there's a trend in the  gameindustry to 1) better graphics and 2) less creativity. In fact I didn't get me any new game since 7 years or so, cause most games are just boring (and regardless of the quality often ugly) and the only thing you get offered is strategy and shooters. I'm afraid most game-designers just find it easier to use given graphic-engines (and enhance them) to just give old games a modern and pseudo-innovative touch instead of being creative and create a nice plot with cool ideas...

That's why I'm so happy about AGS, which brings up interesting stuff from time to time..

[SurplusGamer]

Mm, though I suppose my point was that the lack of decent adventure games was less to do with people forgetting how to make good ones (Escape from Monkey Island was something of a blip, I think, considering it didn't come that long after GF, which a lot of people consider LucasArts' best) and more to do with the fact that the sample itself became a lot smaller, which was the result of dwindling sales - lack of innovation perhaps being a contributing factor.

Adventure games aren't the only genre to see this phenomenon. People tend to get much less excited about RTS games than in their heydey - because you didn't see a lot of innovation there after a time, either. I hear the latest Unreal game did very poorly too, and each successive Quake has been less well received, I think.

But of course in the indie community we don't need to worry about that because we can make what we like, and what we discover is of course that when not under pressure from publishers people actually really like brand new ideas - ones which work.

So, to sum up my point, I think there's definitely a big place for retro graphics and puzzles and gameplay. But I think the potential for positive innovation is as yet (relatively) untapped.

EDIT: It occurs to me that an obvious reply would be 'Well, go on then, do it!' Certainly, when I make a game I'll have this stuff in my mind, but it's very rare that a single game can completely open up a whole new world of undiscovered gameplay. Changes usually come in smaller steps and I don't pretend to believe that when I make a game it'll be unlike anything anyone has seen. I just mean that I want to approach it with a broader design manifesto than 'Monkey Island, but with <insert unique 'selling' point here>' even if that just means throwing in some unorthodox puzzles here and there, at first.