What makes an awful adventure game?

[DazJ]

I hate games where the very beginning is just an endless amount of exits leading off to rooms full up with too much inventory all the time not knowing what your mission is.

Any game examples?

The Longest Journey, although it turned out ok in the end.

[GarageGothic]

The Longest Journey, although it turned out ok in the end.

Well, except for Ragnar Tørnquist's ...

Logorrhea.

[Mr Flibble]

Games with more than 3 lines of dialogue without the player being able to participate (Ron Gilbert set the magic number at 3 and I don't feel worthy to displace him).

Looking at you, Discworld.

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

I actually enjoy games with lots of dialog, so long as what is being said is interesting/funny.  Each to his/her own!

[Mr Flibble]

so long as what is being said is interesting/funny

Tossing the 3 lines rule out of the window and STILL looking at Discworld.

(I love Discworld more than I'd love a child of my own but the dialogue exchanges still pissed me off.)

And since I'm here, to borrow something from the ToMI thread, puzzles that make sense after you do them. Again, Discworld. The shenanagins you go through to get that black cloak which involve time travel and weather manipulation and never asking or stealing.

Edit: Long dialogue/cutscenes which you can't skip (at least on the second hearing/viewing) for some reason are going to annoy me no matter how much I enjoyed it the first time I heard/saw it.

[Igor Hardy]

Usually I hate walking deads and real time, but somehow I really liked Darkseed, also in terms of the gameplay. Practically you replay the game repeating actions until you do everything all right and on time.

[TerranRich]

As for walking deads, the different types of them are nicely summarized here: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Unwinnable

[Galen]

Hmm. While not complete deal breakers:

Pixel sized hotspots for room to room movement:
Made finding new locales in The Reposessor quite painful. Make them nice and roomy people, having an arrow flash up to indicate that that location can be travelled to is also quite helpful.

Unexpected death:
ProgZ's otherwise brilliant Limey Lizard suffered from a room that if you went in (and hadn't visited the other rooms first) you would die. Killing the player is fine but atleast give them some prior warning.

[Jared]

* Segregation of plot and gameplay - "I will tell you everything you need to know about your father - if you find me this potion". The player should follow clues to find out about their father - not just play their way from one info-dump to the other.

* Main characters who are idiots - when the player comes up with a brilliant puzzle solution and the main character screws it up, this is annoying. Not necessarily a deal-breaker, I guess, because Guybrush pulls it off, but Brian Basco from Runaway is a very bad example. I can't remember the exact puzzle but he assembles something incorrectly so then you need to find a tool to take it apart so it'll actually work. What makes this even worse is the player can try to do it the right way in the first place - prompting Brian to say that way would be a waste of time. AAARGH!

* Items that come from completely illogical puzzles - the player should know what they're setting out to accomplish. If you break into a tower that's meant to be filled with gold and all you find is a crowbar that you need to open the boarded up door to the plague house but didn't know where to get one then your game is plain retarded. The player will stop thinking and just try anything, it makes the world seem less real and so the story suffers. Or, another Runaway example, I didn't mind-wipe that guy to get three magical marbles. What the hell?

* Big puzzles for mundane items - why the hell can you only get one broom when you walk all over the entire world in Discworld?

*Bad writing - obviously. So subjective it's hard to go into detail. But it's cousin is:

*Bad translation. I take pride in my English skills and I wince everytime I see dialogue like this, from a game I downloaded - "Ok so maybe its true my life is a shit". Or any line of dialogue from the game The Treasure of Lost Island - I actually felt myself getting a headache trying to work out what the characters were meant to be saying. This isn't a racist thing - how can you expect people do be immersed in a story where nobody can talk properly? Unless the game's set in a remedial class or an asylum, it isn't going to work.

* Lack of hints

* Too many flags - you can't do x until you've done arbitrary thing y. Also one that Runaway has a reputation for, although commonplace. Not inherently bad but massively annoying if used too often. It isn't fun wandering around to find out what may have been unlocked, after you've done/seen something.

* Lack of direction - at the start of a game you should know what you're doing. This doesn't have to be anything major - some games it's just going to a place. Monkey Island - you need to talk to the pirates in the SCUMM Bar and the game unfolds from there. And the game should use scope to keep this interesting. Maybe you need to avenge your father, but to begin with you don't know who killed him so you need to find out?

* Excessive cutscenes - ... okay I'm ragging on Runaway a lot but COME ON! The game can't keep anything mysterious for over a minute. Whenever the player is uncertain about what's happened to Brian we're sure to be treated to a ten-minute cutscene explaining everything that was going on - with thrilling scenes such as one of his friends talking to a librarian for a minute. A lot of European games seem to have this flaw as well, I've noticed.

* Taking the player out of the moment - Connected to the above and the segragation of gameplay and story. Escape from Monkey Island was one of the worst examples for me - hey! I've finished the game. Now all the badguys kill one another without me having done anything to stop them. WTF?

* Compulsory minigames - unless they're both fun and easy, like the ones in Sam & Max and some of the Sierra games, these are always a bad idea as noted many times in this thread already. I think these are especially problematic because adventure game designers traditionally haven't had much to do with other types of games, so may tend to produce minigames that are quite lacking. Stooge Fighter in Space Quest 6, for example, is incredibly un-fun.


That's the main ones off the top of my head at the moment.

[TheJBurger]

Great list, Jared.

I think your first point is really critical, particularly in adventure games. Whenever I'm a player I want to feel like the puzzles I'm completing are actually contributing to the game world and story. I don't want them to just exist as independent obstacles that could pop up in any context.

[Dualnames]

As for walking deads, the different types of them are nicely summarized here: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Unwinnable

Leaked design notes for the unfinished Hitchhiker's Guide 2 game suggest including a puzzle whose solution causes the game to become essentially Unwinnable (ignoring a one-in-a-million random chance). Only by not solving the puzzle and losing the points could the player have won the game. This is just how the people at Infocom used to think

Goot to know I've implemented that..poof. That might give me some sleep..

[Radiant]

In an counterculture action I was wondering what makes a bad, or downright awful, adventure game.

(1) long unskippable cutscenes. I'm looking at you, KQV.
(2) pixel hunts
(3) atorsiouc spleggin
(4) items that can only be picked up once your character knows he'll need it, despite the fact that your character happily picks up everything else, and picking stuff up is a fundamental strategy in adventure games