That's also a point i quite don't understand. Which TTG production exactly has a great story telling? If i would be asked for great story telling i could name some text adventures, action adventures and point&click adventures but none of them would be a TTG adventure. I guess Bone would be the best one, so i still vote for a Bone3.
I think that Back to the Future: The Game had a very good story, in spite of all of its other problems. I also feel that Tales of Monkey Island had a good story, and introduced some memorable characters to the series.
I think that Back to the Future: The Game had a very good story, in spite of all of its other problems. I also feel that Tales of Monkey Island had a good story, and introduced some memorable characters to the series.
Untill the very end, the ending was bad, I mean it was really poor. Honestly, it may as well have all been a dream or something, i'd have accepted that quicker. And TOMI is one of my favourite TTG's.
Tales is the closest to "storytelling", I think, and it does "okay". There are major holes in it but it mostly works I guess. When people say "storytelling" in regards to Telltale, though, they mean that Telltale is fairly good at getting the moment-to-moment emotional stuff right. Drama feels dramatic, humorous delivery is solid, twists are twist-y, etc. If someone's standards are really low, the story itself doesn't have to avoid being a shitty story as long as the moment-to-moment stuff works. That's where Telltale shines, at impressing people with very low, very shallow expectations.
@Rather Dashing
I agree TOMI was satisfying and good but was it great?
I think the episodic approach especially hurt TOMI. If designed as one game it could have been a lot better. But it was good enough so that i would buy a new TOMI, especially with nice controls.
@GuybrushWilco
I think the whole story of BTTF wasn't good and especially the ending was just horrible and felt out of place. That's not great story telling either.
[And just to put things straight. I'm not trying to bash things here. I'm just honest and want to explain my frustration with TTG and why i'm so excited about Tim's project.]
@Rather Dashing
I agree TOMI was satisfying but was it really great?
From what perspective?
In terms of storytelling, I think it was better than it had any reason to be. I am a person who hates Curse of Monkey Island. I mean, you're talking to a person who:
-Hates the story of Curse
-Doesn't like the tonal shift of Curse
-Doesn't like Earl Boen's performance in Curse
-Doesn't like Stan in Curse or Escape
-Doesn't like the art style of Curse
Etc etc and so forth. I felt like the Tales story did stuff for Monkey Island storytelling that really helped it. We:
-Got new characters who stood up to and fit with the existing cast
-Redeemed LeChuck as a truly badass villain
-Redeems Stan and gives him an awesome voice and a jacket that works in 3D
-Gave us solid mysteries and intrigue
-Had solid emotional hooks
The "story" of Monkey Island has always been a bit cartoony and silly, and it's never been an "epic" of any sort. Considering this game, in my mind, made something I could enjoy experiencing despite my MAJOR misgivings about Curse is a pretty big improvement as far as I'm concerned. It's not "a great story", but it's "the closest to a great story" that Telltale has ever produced. Unlike Back to the Future, it doesn't flippantly handwave previous episodes' plot points, and unlike Sam and Max it has a story that exists in a way that isn't just being a vehicle for jokes and parody.
@MusicallyInspired
Now whilst i also did play the Infocom adventures, text adventures or graphical text adventure never were great from their interfaces and many people complained and sweared in front of their screens because they struggled to communicate their ideas to the game and this was even more true when your native language wasn't english.
Untill the very end, the ending was bad, I mean it was really poor. Honestly, it may as well have all been a dream or something, i'd have accepted that quicker. And TOMI is one of my favourite TTG's.
BTTF had a great setup, but was executed extremely poorly. They led you on with expectations that were never satisfied (or satisfied very poorly).
I don't consider much of anything Telltale does to be all that funny. Chuckle worthy every now and then maybe. But not near as funny as Ron or Tim's stuff. Stories as a whole are lackluster as well. It's kind of like Steven Spielburg's movies to me. The idea is awesome and they're good to a point but they just don't reach the peak of what they're capable of which always leaves you disappointed in the end.
@Rather Dashing
I guess i agree, the overall story was better than you could have expected it to be but it had some weak spots as well. What i didn't like about Curse was the art direction, although i love Tiller's work on The DIG and AVST, and generally everything which drags you out of the pirate mood, like for instance Stan, the drinks machine. Pirates of the Caribbean did a much better job on being funny and still staying in the right mood.
With Morgan in some scenes TTG for the first time was able to trigger some emotions like that you actually started to care about a character but it wasn't there all the time. So yeah it was a good start but never used its full potential. Alone with Morgan you could have evolved such a strong story.
I still wish at the end Guybrush would have ditched Elaine for Morgan, but seeing the way they developed the characters you don't really feel that way by the end. Could have gone a very different route.
Me too, Morgan was hot, more interesting and i cared for her, contrary to Elaine, not talking about The Gradute's Elaine of course. It also didn't make much sense how Guybrush dealt with the situation, it more felt like, oh, no matter how it feels like, if it's logic or not, lets bend it back this way towards the end. They didn't dare to risk something here. Maybe they wanted to but were restricted by Lucas Arts.
BTTF had a great setup, but was executed extremely poorly. They led you on with expectations that were never satisfied (or satisfied very poorly).
I don't consider much of anything Telltale does to be all that funny. Chuckle worthy every now and then maybe. But not near as funny as Ron or Tim's stuff. Stories as a whole are lackluster as well. It's kind of like Steven Spielburg's movies to me. The idea is awesome and they're good to a point but they just don't reach the peak of what they're capable of which always leaves you disappointed in the end.
You were disappointed by Raiders of the Lost Ark? I guess this is all a matter of personal taste, as I was sufficiently entertained by the story of BTTF:TG and I felt that the story of TMI was right up there with the rest of the series. Then again, CMI is my favorite Monkey Island game
Raiders was a great movie, but not infallible. Also, he had help from Lucas. Seems like either one on their own can't do anything exactly perfect. Kind of makes me wish Lucas would have taken Spielburg up on his offer to direct the prequels.
Never liked Jaws at all, for instance, yet it's revered as a classic somehow. A lot of Spielburg's movies had great premises and the journey was spectacular, however the final climax was either lackluster or turned an extremely strange turn. Like Explorers and The Goonies. Both movies I love. Not even Jurassic Park is THAT good.
The good thing about 2D is that it enables rich&nice gfx also on not this powerful systems, like the iOS devices. I wonder if they'll use 3D for the characters though.
That's true, although there also exists timeless 3D if you use it with care and a certain style but the typical 2D ages a lot better than the typical 3D. As for resolutions, this shouldn't be much of an issue today as you could think of a system which supports several resolutions packs and just use the one you need now and later on maybe activate a higher res version.
Except for the resolution, you can play, for example, Broken Sword right now and you can't say when was it made, cause 2D is timeless.
You might notice the quality of the character sprites but you are right. 2D will always look better / be more timeless than 3D. At least after a certan point in graphics was reached.:D
For example I still enjoy the graphics of Curse but all 3D-games from that time just give me a big headache.
I think that's mainly becuase they're directly handmade...
I do see a kind of defferance between Vector 2D graphics and Handmade ones.. If only non-vector 3D was possible. That's actually what I've been thinking for a while.. Non Vector/Polygon 3D... Like Bitmap-3D or something..
You mean Voxels? Things improve significantly with hardware tessellation. And don't blame vectors, they are cool and there wouldn't be a lot of movement without them.
I think that's mainly becuase they're directly handmade...
I do see a kind of defferance between Vector 2D graphics and Handmade ones.. If only non-vector 3D was possible. That's actually what I've been thinking for a while.. Non Vector/Polygon 3D... Like Bitmap-3D or something..
You mean like voxels? Those have been played with on and off for years, but they're computationally intensive. I think the game Outcast used voxels for it's environment.
No no no... I shouldn't have made that example. That was a bad eample for what I was saying... Hmm, Well, I was saying thathand drawn 2D art feels superiour to vector/polygon 2D art. Our current 3D doesn't feel handmade...
I'm suggesting theres a thing with 3D - something I can't quite put my finger on, proven by my poor attempt earlier - that doesnt feel natural. And I was suggesting that's probably why 3D isn't timeless...
@Jon NA
As i wrote there are a number of techniques which work different than the traditional approach you're used to from a typical 3D game and which provide a more natural sculpted look&feel. Voxels were the first being introduced many years ago in games like Outcast or Comanche and are still being used for certain functionality in more modern games like Crysis which uses it for instance for their caves. Or you could take a look at a tool like zBrush which uses another version of a 3D Pixel, they call Pixol.
There are a number of different approaches for volumetric pixels and all have their pros and cons but as speed matters and you best utalise the hardware computers and consoles offer in a efficient way, you'll most probably see a lot of hardware tessellation in the future because that's what DX11 GPUs offer in order to enhance the flat angular look. You can find some nice examples about these things on YouTube, like the heaven benchmark for DX11.
Thanks for your post Taumel. I understand what you're saying.
I suppose sculpting and/or volumetric pixels do the trick. But still, that's not exactly what I'm getting at.
OK, I found a good example. You can identify purely digital art vs. hand drawn scanned art, don't you?
Now, we can't scan a clay sculpture can we? Even if we could (I think there are some expensive laser aided methods actually) the resulting end output does not feel like clay, does it? That's different in 2D. You can keep the feeling of a hand drawn painting even if you scanned it.
@Jon NA
It's all just a matter of resolution. For instance polygons and a traditional rasterization process, as long as the provided data is complex enough, are also fine if you use one polygon per pixel because in the end it's just a colour value, right?! It was Eric Chahi (Another World) who also talked about this idea at GDC, i guess he called it pixigon. And it's the same with all the other techniques, the higher the resolution, the better it will look but the more performance&memory they will need. Due to this some approaches make more sense in use cases like medical visualisation and others in computer games. And as long as the image data will be calculated by a client like your computer or your console, you'll use whatever's available in there.
I think you can do pretty amazing stuff with zBrush and do very different styles. Now the problem is how to get as much of this look into the engine of a video game. You'll need a good rendering engine and best a technique like hardware tessellation. And of course great artists. Never forget that great art can compensate a lot of deficiency on the technical side but hey if both comes together, why not.
I think it's safe to stay that stylised art'll age quite well in a game, whereas if you strive for realism (which you shouldn't really try to do because it's either gonna be uncanny valley or ridiculously time-intensive like LA Noire) you're gonna look like crap in a few years.
I thought RAGE actually hit a nice mix between the two, god knows it did nothing else particularly well.
This is an interesting technology that I hope takes off at some point. I heard about it ages back but it hasn't gone anywhere yet. It's called "Unlimited Detail Technology". It does not use polygons or voxels/3d pixels. It has perfect round shapes rather than zillions of triangles that have tiny jagged edges by utilizing "point cloud data". He describes it as kind of the same way a search engine works to make the engine interpret shapes or something. This video was made in software rendering, just to show what it's capable of. Unlimited detail rather than being limited by a polygon limit that graphics card developers are constantly trying to increase every year. This technology renders (pardon the pun) that attempt obsolete.
This would also allow for a perfect recreation of a "scanned" clay sculpture, if they have a proper enough method of scanning one. So the potential is there. The problem is we're still using polygons. Polygons need to die. The point is, the more 3D technology evolves, the more humanistic and hand-made it looks. Very similar to 2D. In the same way it took a while for 2D art to look hand-made. We just need more resolution and computing power to display all those pixels. 3D will have its turn as well.
Sure they would work with less polys and a less complex rendering process as well but they also can be tweaked into a direction that they look even better and i think that's less about realism and more about getting a certain style really nailed and so more freedom for the artist.
If my viewpoint wasn't clear: the point'n'click adventure/traditional adventure game died a long time ago, as it should have, and now that it's had a much-needed rest I'm confident that a logical development that is both fun, encourages replayability, and fails to undermine the story is possible, but it requires one hell of a long think regarding how to accomplish it. If this game is just a traditional adventure game, I most likely won't care; Double Fine's failed to impress me in the past with regards to plotline. I'll still enjoy Telltale's style, but I'd appreciate some form of progress in the genre to make it somewhat enjoyable as a game to me.
Also; Back to the Future: The Game had an okay story, but a lot of the last three episodes could and should have been cut, as I was incredibly bored by the end. I'm late to respond to this, but I thought I'd add my two cents.
A way around the problem I personally thought of was de-high-techifise-ing (!) the polygons/vectors. Where the lines of a polygon itself loose quality when zoomed in. The borders. Not the textures.
I think it's safe to stay that stylised art'll age quite well in a game, whereas if you strive for realism (which you shouldn't really try to do because it's either gonna be uncanny valley or ridiculously time-intensive like LA Noire) you're gonna look like crap in a few years.
Yeah, that's the only way to make the eye forgive the non-natural art...
That's why Grim Fandango looks very well compared to EMI. Because the concept is unnatural.
Hmm...
Why do we feel the difference between digital art (3D/2D) vs hand-made? An interesting psychological question...
Maybe we could have a baby live in an augmented reality soon after he's born. Then the baby will prbably see the natural world un-natural when he's realesed... The Matrix!
EDIT: That sounds like something GLaDOS would do... The difference with The Matrix's computers being that she does it for no reason.
@Ribs
I liked peppermint, liquorice and chocolate in my youth and i still like them. Same applies to point&click adventure games.
@gamer247
Obviously they won't do it but i always liked the AdLib sound, it had style and focus and sounded so much better than this Roland MT-32 crap, those sounds always reminded me of some pointless cluttered circus music.
They also could go for some clay or paperboard style like in The Dream Machine or Lume, Lume also had some camera movements.
Obviously they won't do it but i always like the AdLib sound, it had style and focus and sounded so much better than this Roland MT-32 crap, those sounds always reminded me of some pointless cluttered circus music.
:eek:
You obviously don't understand how far ahead of other music modules the MT-32 was at the time. And I hope you're not basing that opinion on the older crappy MT-32 emulator.
Comments
I think that Back to the Future: The Game had a very good story, in spite of all of its other problems. I also feel that Tales of Monkey Island had a good story, and introduced some memorable characters to the series.
Untill the very end, the ending was bad, I mean it was really poor. Honestly, it may as well have all been a dream or something, i'd have accepted that quicker. And TOMI is one of my favourite TTG's.
I agree TOMI was satisfying and good but was it great?
I think the episodic approach especially hurt TOMI. If designed as one game it could have been a lot better. But it was good enough so that i would buy a new TOMI, especially with nice controls.
@GuybrushWilco
I think the whole story of BTTF wasn't good and especially the ending was just horrible and felt out of place. That's not great story telling either.
[And just to put things straight. I'm not trying to bash things here. I'm just honest and want to explain my frustration with TTG and why i'm so excited about Tim's project.]
In terms of storytelling, I think it was better than it had any reason to be. I am a person who hates Curse of Monkey Island. I mean, you're talking to a person who:
-Hates the story of Curse
-Doesn't like the tonal shift of Curse
-Doesn't like Earl Boen's performance in Curse
-Doesn't like Stan in Curse or Escape
-Doesn't like the art style of Curse
Etc etc and so forth. I felt like the Tales story did stuff for Monkey Island storytelling that really helped it. We:
-Got new characters who stood up to and fit with the existing cast
-Redeemed LeChuck as a truly badass villain
-Redeems Stan and gives him an awesome voice and a jacket that works in 3D
-Gave us solid mysteries and intrigue
-Had solid emotional hooks
The "story" of Monkey Island has always been a bit cartoony and silly, and it's never been an "epic" of any sort. Considering this game, in my mind, made something I could enjoy experiencing despite my MAJOR misgivings about Curse is a pretty big improvement as far as I'm concerned. It's not "a great story", but it's "the closest to a great story" that Telltale has ever produced. Unlike Back to the Future, it doesn't flippantly handwave previous episodes' plot points, and unlike Sam and Max it has a story that exists in a way that isn't just being a vehicle for jokes and parody.
Not everyone had that problem.
BTTF had a great setup, but was executed extremely poorly. They led you on with expectations that were never satisfied (or satisfied very poorly).
I don't consider much of anything Telltale does to be all that funny. Chuckle worthy every now and then maybe. But not near as funny as Ron or Tim's stuff. Stories as a whole are lackluster as well. It's kind of like Steven Spielburg's movies to me. The idea is awesome and they're good to a point but they just don't reach the peak of what they're capable of which always leaves you disappointed in the end.
I guess i agree, the overall story was better than you could have expected it to be but it had some weak spots as well. What i didn't like about Curse was the art direction, although i love Tiller's work on The DIG and AVST, and generally everything which drags you out of the pirate mood, like for instance Stan, the drinks machine. Pirates of the Caribbean did a much better job on being funny and still staying in the right mood.
But Curse had some great tunes like:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjudItsRWxQ&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SFZI5dgmAI&feature=related
With Morgan in some scenes TTG for the first time was able to trigger some emotions like that you actually started to care about a character but it wasn't there all the time. So yeah it was a good start but never used its full potential. Alone with Morgan you could have evolved such a strong story.
You were disappointed by Raiders of the Lost Ark? I guess this is all a matter of personal taste, as I was sufficiently entertained by the story of BTTF:TG and I felt that the story of TMI was right up there with the rest of the series. Then again, CMI is my favorite Monkey Island game
Never liked Jaws at all, for instance, yet it's revered as a classic somehow. A lot of Spielburg's movies had great premises and the journey was spectacular, however the final climax was either lackluster or turned an extremely strange turn. Like Explorers and The Goonies. Both movies I love. Not even Jurassic Park is THAT good.
And they never get old.
Except for the resolution, you can play, for example, Broken Sword right now and you can't say when was it made, cause 2D is timeless.
For example I still enjoy the graphics of Curse but all 3D-games from that time just give me a big headache.
I do see a kind of defferance between Vector 2D graphics and Handmade ones.. If only non-vector 3D was possible. That's actually what I've been thinking for a while.. Non Vector/Polygon 3D... Like Bitmap-3D or something..
A Voxel Adventure Game, eh? Hmmmmm...
There exist a few cute Voxatron Levels which have a nice adventure mood.
You mean like voxels? Those have been played with on and off for years, but they're computationally intensive. I think the game Outcast used voxels for it's environment.
I'm suggesting theres a thing with 3D - something I can't quite put my finger on, proven by my poor attempt earlier - that doesnt feel natural. And I was suggesting that's probably why 3D isn't timeless...
As i wrote there are a number of techniques which work different than the traditional approach you're used to from a typical 3D game and which provide a more natural sculpted look&feel. Voxels were the first being introduced many years ago in games like Outcast or Comanche and are still being used for certain functionality in more modern games like Crysis which uses it for instance for their caves. Or you could take a look at a tool like zBrush which uses another version of a 3D Pixel, they call Pixol.
There are a number of different approaches for volumetric pixels and all have their pros and cons but as speed matters and you best utalise the hardware computers and consoles offer in a efficient way, you'll most probably see a lot of hardware tessellation in the future because that's what DX11 GPUs offer in order to enhance the flat angular look. You can find some nice examples about these things on YouTube, like the heaven benchmark for DX11.
I suppose sculpting and/or volumetric pixels do the trick. But still, that's not exactly what I'm getting at.
OK, I found a good example. You can identify purely digital art vs. hand drawn scanned art, don't you?
Now, we can't scan a clay sculpture can we? Even if we could (I think there are some expensive laser aided methods actually) the resulting end output does not feel like clay, does it? That's different in 2D. You can keep the feeling of a hand drawn painting even if you scanned it.
It's all just a matter of resolution. For instance polygons and a traditional rasterization process, as long as the provided data is complex enough, are also fine if you use one polygon per pixel because in the end it's just a colour value, right?! It was Eric Chahi (Another World) who also talked about this idea at GDC, i guess he called it pixigon. And it's the same with all the other techniques, the higher the resolution, the better it will look but the more performance&memory they will need. Due to this some approaches make more sense in use cases like medical visualisation and others in computer games. And as long as the image data will be calculated by a client like your computer or your console, you'll use whatever's available in there.
I think you can do pretty amazing stuff with zBrush and do very different styles. Now the problem is how to get as much of this look into the engine of a video game. You'll need a good rendering engine and best a technique like hardware tessellation. And of course great artists. Never forget that great art can compensate a lot of deficiency on the technical side but hey if both comes together, why not.
I thought RAGE actually hit a nice mix between the two, god knows it did nothing else particularly well.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-ATtrImCx4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=iv&annotation_id=annotation_115233&src_vid=Q-ATtrImCx4&v=THaam5mwIR8 - Further explanation (in 720p)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3Sw3dnu8q8&src_vid=THaam5mwIR8&feature=iv&annotation_id=annotation_984443 - Further explanation Part two
This would also allow for a perfect recreation of a "scanned" clay sculpture, if they have a proper enough method of scanning one. So the potential is there. The problem is we're still using polygons. Polygons need to die. The point is, the more 3D technology evolves, the more humanistic and hand-made it looks. Very similar to 2D. In the same way it took a while for 2D art to look hand-made. We just need more resolution and computing power to display all those pixels. 3D will have its turn as well.
Sure they would work with less polys and a less complex rendering process as well but they also can be tweaked into a direction that they look even better and i think that's less about realism and more about getting a certain style really nailed and so more freedom for the artist.
Btw. we passed 1.65 million dollars.
Also; Back to the Future: The Game had an okay story, but a lot of the last three episodes could and should have been cut, as I was incredibly bored by the end. I'm late to respond to this, but I thought I'd add my two cents.
Thanks for sharing that! That's really interesting... I'll definitely keep an eye on that.
Hmm, Well, That looks more like a digital 2D art than a hand drawn. It looks like vector art.
Yeah, that's the only way to make the eye forgive the non-natural art...
That's why Grim Fandango looks very well compared to EMI. Because the concept is unnatural.
Hmm...
Why do we feel the difference between digital art (3D/2D) vs hand-made? An interesting psychological question...
Maybe we could have a baby live in an augmented reality soon after he's born. Then the baby will prbably see the natural world un-natural when he's realesed...
EDIT: That sounds like something GLaDOS would do... The difference with The Matrix's computers being that she does it for no reason.
I liked peppermint, liquorice and chocolate in my youth and i still like them. Same applies to point&click adventure games.
@gamer247
Obviously they won't do it but i always liked the AdLib sound, it had style and focus and sounded so much better than this Roland MT-32 crap, those sounds always reminded me of some pointless cluttered circus music.
They also could go for some clay or paperboard style like in The Dream Machine or Lume, Lume also had some camera movements.
:eek:
You obviously don't understand how far ahead of other music modules the MT-32 was at the time. And I hope you're not basing that opinion on the older crappy MT-32 emulator.
Hard, and a little generic in gameplay.
But had a art style that was perfect, (especially so considering its based on a comic!
Oh, No, I know that it's 3D rendered. I know the game. [Haven't played it yet though... I'd love to do so and will very soon probably...]
I was referring to the feel of the image. It felt like a 2D vector art. ie. The digital nature of it is recognisable...
Oh yeah! I wanted to play that... I'll hunt it down soon.
This whole discussion remind me of TellTale's The Walking Dead... I'd like to see how the style the've shown in the screenshots will work in action.