Adventure Games Design Research Project - Need Opinions - Thanks ;)

[virtualpsycho]

Brilliant and interesting points,

Keep it up.

Thanks. 

[Wonkyth]

Having spent most of my early life reading(Home Education all the Way), I have always loved a good story.
I suck at action. Every time it gets tense, I get tense. Very tense.
Because I suck at action, and it's normally impossible to lose in an adventure game, they are good for my ego.

Therefore I put forward a very farfech'd(excuse PokePun) theory:
       -People these days spend more time playing video games than they used to.
       -Proportionally they spend less time reading a good book.
       -Because they spend less time  slowly reading through the story, they learn to want ACTION!!!
       -Because they want "ACTION!!!" they have less patience for the slow Action that comes in your typical AG.
       -When they get restless in the early parts of the game, they think they don't like the game.
       -.....And that's as far as I've got so far...

Anyway, I like action too, I just can complete Half-Life on easy...

[Mr Flibble]

As much as I'm a youngling with an itchy trigger finger, if a game has a rich environment WORTH exploring then I think a lot of people would enjoy it, even if it was slow paced.

Take The Neverhood, an adventure game I played recently. I loved that world. I read the 38 screen in-game backstory and interacted with everything. Everything about it just pulled me in and I was happy to spend time just enjoying where I was.

Slow games are fine if there's something worth sticking around for.

[Wonkyth]

I'm not disagreeing.

[Mr Flibble]

I wasn't challenging you, just giving my 2 cents

I may be biased though, since I preferred the non-combat sections of Half Life and its sequel.

[Greg Squire]

There are many factors for the decline to be sure, but there's two big factors the way I see it

First, The rise of the First Person Shooter (FPS)
Adventure games were in their heyday when Doom came on the scene.  People were just "wowed" by it (and Castle Wolfenstein); nothing like it existed.  This was the first time you quickly move about in a 3D enviroment, and people were taken in by the "eye candy" and "3D ness" (for lack of a good word). It was revolutionary.  This led the way to more and more FPS games, and the market just shifted to making these instead of adventure games. Game makers felt that this is what people wanted.

Second, The rise of the cheap PC (spurred by the rise of the internet)
People need to realize that during the heyday of adventure games, PCs were not as common place.  Nearly everyone has a PC (or Mac) in their home today, but back then only those that really needed to have a PC had one. People didn't buy PCs specifically for gaming as much as they do today. People that had them were largely were for running a business or something related to business.  My opinion is that this subset (those that had a PC) of the population was more educated than the population at large.  In other words, the PC game market then was made up of more "cerebral" people; the same kind of people that would enjoy "puzzles" more.  As PCs got cheaper, and as the internet came about, more and more people started buying and using PCs.  Thus the PC game market grew, but now the industry was focused on making more FPSes now.  Adventure Games never went completely away, as that same "cerebrial" group was still there, it just accounted for a smaller percentage of the market now.  I think many publishers mistakenly viewed this as a decline in interest in adventure games, so they made less and less of them as a result.

There has been a resurgence of Adventure games in the past several years, which I have been grateful for.  I think the industry is finally starting to realise that the interest in them never really left.

Here's some other articles that may help you.

http://www.nowgamer.com/news/305/playstation-blamed-for-adventure-game-decline
http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/NelsAnderson/20090505/1307/Without_Readability__The_Decline_of_Adventure_Games.php
http://thenewgamer.com/content/archives/the_decline_of_adventure_civilization
http://www.adventuregamers.com/article/id,318

[virtualpsycho]

Absolutely brilliant, thank you for all useful information and articles. :o

All contributions and help are invaluable.

Thank you.

Appreciated, keep 'em com in'   

[MrColossal]

My opinion is that this subset (those that had a PC) of the population was more educated than the population at large.

Not to call you out specifically but I never understood this mentality. In fact I hate it.

When I played adventure games, I was a little kid. My dad had a PC because he was interested in technology and he was certainly not anymore "cerebral" than any other middle class father out there.

My brother and I played Space Quest games, King's Quest games, all Lucasarts Games, Under a Killing Moon series, Gobliiins series, etc etc

When Quake came out I was obsessed with it. I played it all the time along with Mega Team Fortress, holy crap did I love that game. Then I started playing other FPS games like Blood and Duke Nukem 3D and loved them too. I also played a LOT of Nintendo and SNES games like Mario World and Street Fighter.

I think you'd find it a tough argument to suggest that I got less intelligent as my gaming got more broad. I'd still rather play an average shooter or platforming game than an average adventure game.

I'm not suggesting you feel this way but through talking to other people it seems they usually put the "blame" for the downsizing of what we consider adventure games on other genres. Imagine if puzzle games "killed" the adventure genre, what would the argument be then? "Cerebral people got too smart and killed the genre!" It's easy to look at a shooting game and just demonize it as a lower class of a game but that's so unfair as to be insulting.

[Galen]

Adventure games also have serious problems "melting" into other games, you occasionally see lone features from adventure games in today's blockbusters but never any true hybrids or evolutions of the genre.

For example, I can't say I've ever seen an adventure game that had an action sequence that wasn't, well, shit...
Point-and-click just becomes incredibly finicky when trying to quickly escape from somewhere or when trying to interact with a moving object.

Dialog trees require extensive testing and designing in order to work with all possible circumstances (has the player already said something, has he retrieved a valuable item or performed an interaction that warrants a change in dialog options etc) plus they end up being static, although from what I've seen of the game Mass Effect it does appear to have created the true successor: real-time dialog options.

Basically, like the older number-crunching RPGs of yesteryear, their time has come. They'll probably live on for years, maybe even decades, as a niche market but I can't imagine them ever truely taking off again.

[virtualpsycho]

Cheers 

Keep em rollin' in.

[Greg Squire]

My opinion is that this subset (those that had a PC) of the population was more educated than the population at large.

Not to call you out specifically but I never understood this mentality. In fact I hate it. ... I think you'd find it a tough argument to suggest that I got less intelligent as my gaming got more broad. I'd still rather play an average shooter or platforming game than an average adventure game.

I don't mind being called out on this.  I figured someone would.    First I must say that I don't think any one person became less intelligent as gaming got more broad.  Individuals don't usually get dumber as time goes on.  My opinion is that the "average education" of computer users "as a whole" went down, because computers became cheaper and easier to use.  In other words the computer was now usable by less educated individuals.  People sometimes forget how hard it was to use a PC back then.  If you've ever used DOS extensively, then you'll know what I'm talking about.  With DOS (by itself) there was no point-n-click interface, it was all command line driven.  Ever tried to get a soundblaster card working in DOS?  It was a pain. This was not a computer for the masses yet.  Installing programs wasn't as easy then as it is now.  There was a lot more training involved in using a computer back then.  The classic LucasArts adventure games were DOS based (though they may have been launched from Windows 2 or 3, which was a "shell" on top of DOS).  So that's why I have that opinion.  Now with that said, I do believe that the bigger factor was the genre change to FPSes. (That's why I listed it first).

[MrColossal]

Still, the Commodore was a huge success as far as personal computing goes and my family had one of them, I played many games on it, mostly arcade games, mostly pirated games and mostly bad games. I also played Zak McKracken on it. My father salvaged a PC out of the throw away pile at his office and brought it home and then we had a PC. I remember DOS and I remember the Commodore and I played every adventure game I could get my hands on and I was a kid that could not understand what Load "*",8,1 meant, all I knew was it loaded the game.

I just can't understand this reasoning I guess. It's too... Elitist for me and it passes the blame so easily. The idea that smart people played games until dumb people ruined it for the smart people just doesn't sit well.

Oh well, I'll end it here!

eric

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

I don't think that's what Greg means, and personally, I see the merit in what he's saying.  Back when computing was far more complicated, people were learning in order to use these machines, coding things that are considered simple by today's standards but were highly complex and very select back then.  The industry had little competition, few people were really, really talented with programming...I could go on.  The simplification of the pc and the enrichment of its user interface allowed a greater audience to get up to speed with technology that, before, was overly complicated to many people and not worth the bother.  One way to look at it is that the average person can sit down at a windows 98 and figure out quite a lot in a short time without help (ooh, start button - what's that do?) but many people today would sit down at a Commodore 64 and be completely lost at the blue screen.  You could argue that this is only a matter of user interfaces evolving, but then you'd have to admit that user interfaces reduce the complexity of operating the machine by providing shortcuts and pre-made applications to do things you used to have to code (or boot up) yourself.  DirectX is the single greatest example of a software that simplified computing, both for developers and end users.  Imagine having to code your own joystick driver in assembly (I've done it, it's a pain); now imagine having to code one for every popular joystick on the market and then add to that having to make a sound driver for every popular brand just so your game works for most people.  Or all the crap you used to have to finagle in the DOS setup for games with sound channels and IRQs that kids today don't even think or worry about!

[MrColossal]

Yes but I don't see how that equates to people being more cerebral and wanting to play adventure games. Computers used to be annoying to use therefore adventure games were popular?

[Fireball16]

I quote' After  a while of clicking around it can get boring thats where 3d games come in'

If used mention me

[Wonkyth]

I'd say that the simplest answer would be that because adventure games were the only worthwhile games around for many years, by the time a new kind of good game came in, people were ready for a change.
Unfortunately, that change lasted long enough for allot of people to forget about the ancestral genre of point-and-click.
I'd say that for a long time, the "3D-change" was a very welcome option to most gamers.

[virtualpsycho]

All submissions will be referenced to their respective owners and a link will be added to the discussion submissions from this community and others.

Great submissions and intel keep 'em coming.

Cheers 

[Jared]

As with most things, I think there are a lot of factors that need to be taken into consideration, although simple explanations can be given...

Changing market - Obviously there are more PCs around, more people using them and broader range of interests - with the game industry targetting an exponentially larger customer base they aim firmly for what they see as middle-ground options and safe tactics by following genres that, by median, sell the best.

Ironically, the larger market is also the exact same thing helping AGs come out of the doldrums now, because as the market grows larger, smaller niche markets emerge within that become very profitable, and so a company like TellTale can be feasible.


Difficult to design - Adventure games, in spite of being seen sometimes as a lesser genre because of the passive gameplay, are in general harder to make than a lot of games from a design point of view. They contain by far more dialogue than any genre aside from RPGs, the spotlight is right there on the story, a feasible reason is needed to resolve most conflict peaceably and work out alternatives where necessary, there aren't any hard-and-fast conventions for interfaces and structure, and lot of thought needs to go into those damn puzzles. And if you want the user immersed into a game you need to program for a lot of possibilities.

With all the factors in design it's very easy to make a poor adventure game, as shown by a lot of people who have managed it. This goes hand in hand with the fact that these factors also make adventure games costlier than most other games - because players will have a lot of time to sit there and look at it graphics and music are meant to be brilliant, you need a good voice cast to perform the 10,000 odd+ lines of dialogue and other such diversions to create a true classic.  It's telling, for example, that Blizzard, one of the richest and most successful studios around, decided simply to cancel their near-finished game than release it at a time when they didn't sell. Whatever AGs are, they are not cheap.

(Combined with this is a lot of blunders trying to translate all of this into a 3D environment at a time when the PC technology to do so was quite limited, which set the AG back a long way in the eyes of publishers..)


Personality driven - With their emphasis on plot and character, adventure games are highly personality-driven products. When people talk of the 'golden age' games, odds are they know the designer. We all know Monkey Island was Ron Gilbert's baby, that Leisure Suit Larry was driven by Al Lowe's unique brain and that nobody but Tim Schafer could create Day of the Tentacle. However, PC gaming was becoming big business at the time, and big business men and philosophies took over, to whom the individual is often of lesser importance - this had some bad effects on ongoing series.

Space Quest V and VI are widely seen as inferior entrants in the series - one was made without the knowledge of co-creator Scott Adams, and the latter he was brought in purely to straighten out the disaster left behind after a co-worker quit the project. Plenty of other series have had similar controversies, especially since game companies themselves retain the rights to a series and the characters within rather than the actual creator. Notably the recent Leisure Suit Larry games have proven unpopular with... virtually everyone.


So I guess I agree with most people. Expensive games mishandled by executive bungling in a constantly changing marketplace - which gets misinterpreted by a overly sensationilist press as a 'dead genre' and becomes a sort of self-perpetuating myth for a good six years creating financial poison.

[oceancrafts]

I think AGs is a genre where all departments need equal attention to detail and funding. You can't cut back on anything, which makes them expensive to develop. Every aspect of the game is important. I've played tons of Adventures where parts of it just didn't cut it and made the game less joyful to play, because I was constantly thinking: the animation is bad, the voice acting sucks etc.
Everything needs to be brilliant for the game to shine. There's a lot of time for the player to notice it's flaws. A fast paced FPS can get away with a lot in my opinion.

In the days of yore there was no particular need for a game to include speech, ultra-high resolution or surround sound, no-one knew about these things. And in my opinion that was a good thing, because the player had to use their own imagination to fill in the blanks.
Perhaps that made those games even better than many of todays modern efforts.

[virtualpsycho]

Cheers, great stuff.  :o

Keep 'em rollin'