The Past/Future of adventure gaming
Reading a little blog about adventure gaming and its planted some thoughts in my brain.
Adventurous Gameous: The Rebirth
Basically, the question asked is - Will the popularity in adventure games continue to rise? If so, can it stay that way for long if the genre cannot evolve any further?
I especially like this part about TT: "I don't doubt that the rise in adventure games has been partially if not almost entirely down to them."
Personally I doubt we will see a continual rise in popularity - although im sure the new Monkey Islands will help a bit.
Thoughts?
Adventurous Gameous: The Rebirth
Basically, the question asked is - Will the popularity in adventure games continue to rise? If so, can it stay that way for long if the genre cannot evolve any further?
I especially like this part about TT: "I don't doubt that the rise in adventure games has been partially if not almost entirely down to them."
Personally I doubt we will see a continual rise in popularity - although im sure the new Monkey Islands will help a bit.
Thoughts?
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Comments
But I'm OK with that.
Well, actually there is an adventure game that is as mainstream and talked about and well known as Halo. It's called Myst. Seriously, even the least nerdy jocks and preppies are people I have heard praise this game. I've never played it myself though, so I don't know why it's so praiseworthy, but it is indeed one of the most mainstream adventure games ever made.
Even after MI, when so few adventures followed the old tactic, there were still often player defeating puzzles and it would be years before the internet was widely accessible so that people could just look up hints. (I don't think there were any books just for walkthroughs but even if there were I can't imagine too many people buying them. We don't pay to cheat, do we?)
As Pariah said; Adventure games may never be quite as popular as halo or GTA or whatever else but I do think people are looking for something more from games. For a while now the stories of most games have been becoming more and more advanced and I'm certain that this is something the consumers are asking for and not something being forced upon them (why would developers want to waste resources on extra content when they don't need to?)
Today was the very first time I have ever seen an adventure game advertised on TV. And I'm not talking about reviews on some games show that nobody watches but a whole advertisement paid for by Nintendo; "Another Code: R" and I really think that means something.
So yes, adventures may never be as popular as more 'action packed' games. But I think that if the right game was to come along, a game with a great story and just the right levels of excitement, suspense, humour, intrigue, (etc etc etc) it can attract floods of people that nobody ever expected. Myst came out in 1993, before adventure games started 'dying out'. Yeah, it was the world's best selling game before the sims but by that time Adventure games were an obscure genre and the titles within it were generally unknown among the unwashed masses.
And there is an adventure game as popular and mainstream as Halo. It's called Portal.
The idea that adventure games have one future that they'll all stick to doesn't sit well with me. I'd like to see a lot of people go off in radically different directions when it comes to puzzle-driven narrative games.
Rather_Dashing
Personally I wouldn't count the likes of Portal as a true adventure game but more simply a puzzle game, although i'm sure some people might. Maybe the reason were not seeing so many old school adventure games is that they have evolved and aspects of them have mixed into other genre's? Our Zelda's, Portals and MMO's.
Portal is an adventure game. Sure, the puzzles are a bit rigid and structured, especially at the beginning, but that was also the case with, for example, Myst 3. It's a design choice but it doesn't nullify its adventure status, in my opinion.
That's an interesting observation. I've never really looked at it like that before.
An Adventure game is a game in which the puzzles move the story forward. The structure of Portal may have been designed in such a way that the narrative was wrapped around the puzzles, but all the same it's not in the same league as, say, "Professor Layton".
The lack of an inventory or other such mainstays of the genre doesn't really change much. It's an adventure game to me in the same way that Loom is.
Sadly, this may have been one of the contributing factors in the genre's lack of popularity.
But now that consumers are actually seeking stories in their games is probably one of the factors in their revival, as an Adventure is nothing if not a self contained story that moves at your pace that you can feel involved in. TTG has really latched onto this with making their games episodic. To me that is a different direction that some have even considered radical (I don't know if they're the first game company to come up with this but kudos if they are
*An exception to this might be ‘In Cold Blood’ by Revolution Software which gives you the option of using your gun to shoot enemies (unless the situation requires stealth) but it isn't required. Actually, no... It's a stealth game with puzzles, forget I mentioned it. I understood what you said
And I think there's a good chance you're right.
It doesn't seem so long since computer games were viewed as an obscure form of entertainment for kids and the nerdy. But a lot of that market was made up of youngsters who wouldn't have had much attention for Adventures, even SMI and its successors. I think they’d have been behind the demand for games with much more action. (I’m certain they might be the reason why so many console games in the mid 90s were scrolling platformers).
sorry but i would not class portal as an adventure game! its a puzzle/platform played in first person!
i'd say adventure titles were major big when they first came out, then sort of 'died' out (apart from the hardcore fanbase) now i believe they are making a comeback and grabbing a whole new audience
heavy rain for the PS3 looks like its a 'next gen' adventure title with point 'n' click elements and some QTE thrown in, def worth checking out if you have a PS3 and into adventure games
http://e3.gamespot.com/video/6211160/
Don't have to be a purist when it comes to the genre...
I really don't understand the obsession with 2D.
i hear ya but thats like saying mario is an FPS
i know i am being a bit silly but come on, portal is not in the adventure game genre, puzzle/platform yeah, but adventure..........sorry but nope!
and its not really a debate more a fact, halo is an FPS, gears of war is a third person shooter, sam & max is adventure, thats just how the industry calls the shots not me or others on this forum but the games industry puts games into genres.
And like others have already said, there's still room for the genre to grow and evolve. And that might also explain why there is some confusion as to whether or not certain games could be considered to be adventure games.
I agree that the overall genre will become fairly popular again, just not necessarily as mainstream as some action games and whatnot. But still popular.
like i said in above post, check out heavy rain (PS3), which is as near as damn it to a next gen adventure title as you can get!
i think this will def appeal more to the masses!
hey tbh i dont really care what people want to class genres of games as, like i said its the industry but i am sure Loom was a point 'n' click adventure title by lucasarts where you went around collecting musical notes etc and are we talking about the same portal game which is a puzzle/platformer played in first person by valve?
we might have 2 different games mixed up so apologies for that
It's like adventure gamers have gunphobia.
ok you could be right then! its a first person puzzle adventure title!
Grim Fandango (and MI4!) are adventure games however you look at them, they're just not "point and clicks". Myst was a point and click and an adventure I can't think of a single reason why you shouldn't consider this an anything other than those.
By your logic (and I know somebody else said something very similar, sorry; please bare with me) Ratchet and Clank is an adventure because it has puzzles in it. But it's not, it's a platform game with guns that has puzzles. Almost all platform games have puzzles. (Notable exceptions being the first few conic and Mario games, both franchises having few or no puzzles early on).
I know it seems weird that adding too much action too a game (running, jumping, shooting/violence) it ceases to be an adventure (when surely a real adventure usually consists of all of those things) but when I sit down to play an adventure game I don't want to be presented with anything other than puzzles that can be played at my own pace without having to worry about some NPC coming around the corner and killing me if I go afk for a few seconds at just the wrong time. Yes, I know almost all games have a 'pause' feature but that's beside the point... When I sit down to play an adventure I'm in a specific frame of mind. When I sit down to play Dynasty Warriors I'm in a different frame of mind but still a very specific one. Or Ratchett & Clank. Or Command & Conquer. (I'd mention an FPS but I don't play them. Much as I love them I can't play them for more than a few minutes without getting terribly nauseous and if I play for too long I get a migraine)
And if I was to start playing any game while in the frame of mind for that kind of game and found it was something else I'd be frustrated. I probably wouldn't even give the game a fair chance because I'd have felt mislead.
I really don't like people trying to call a band or a song to be any kind of metal when it so clearly belongs t a genre somebody has already coined. This is a power metal song, regardless of the symphonic synths.
I think the "this is power metal" is indicative that we have a fundamental disagreement about the specificity of terms fundamentally anyway. I'm willing to call "metal" a lot of things in a broad category even if "metal" is a term within "metal" itself and accept it as the "generic" metal.
I think that Telltale’s achievement here is both an ideological and an economic one. The idea that you can actually sell a product to a niche audience and be passionate about that product is a massive victory in my eyes – they’ve taken advantage of advances in technology + game design and advantage of high speed internet to come up with an exciting new business model that lets them release games in episodic format, a format that works for fans, works for the artistic integrity of the product and helps them balance their books and produce better product than if one game per year were hitting the shelf dead. They are also expert marketers of their product.
I can only applaud Telltale for spotting a large but niche fanbase unhappily treated (a bit like Dr.Who fans were over that barren period), for testing the waters with Sam and Max and for gratifying us all with a new Monkey Island. I’m so excited I can’t put into words – however, why are we suddenly all expecting that somehow these games are going to re-catch on with a wider audience…. ? There may be a larger demographic than is vocal who would appreciate story, humour, excitement, adventure etc in their games as opposed to the very macho FPS’s and other games for the trigger happy out there. (I know that, after years of decrying computer games my girlfriend squealed for joy at Grim Fandango and Curse of Monkey Island… there’s nothing more engaging than a good story IMO, however it’s presented) but it still seems pretty clear that mindless people use mindless games to distract them from their mindlessness.. and that’s not meant as derogatory as it sounds, I also enjoy trigger happy games and it’s great that they “take you out if it”, but I’m sure that most people don’t see them in terms of artistry, particularly not in terms of narrative. After all, if most are content with Transformers 2, why are they going to want Monkey Island or Grim Fandango 2 (please god let this happen….)
In short – adventure games are back…and I’m happy and now getting back into the community that I sadly left behind me a long time ago. Let’s just celebrate that there’s a flourishing niche for us, rather than insisting that we bash this stuff over people’s heads who clearly don’t want it.
yep i think adventure games have made a comeback and are getting the die hard fans back (although a lot never went away) & a new audience of young and hardcore gamers who like you said normally play FPS etc
i myself have been gaming since 1982, used to play text adventure titles back then (zx spectrum), but tbh i have only really played grim fandango on PC so i am new to the genre as my usual staple diet of video games are FPS, TPS & RPG's but i was trying to get into point & click adventures on my PC, but it kept crashing so my monkey island, grim fandango & sam & max never got the play through's they deserved
so i was very happy when i found out telltale were releasing sam & max on the 360 (i was saying they should have done this many months ago) & the wallace titles and will def pick up the special edition remake of MI for the 360 and the new MI title for the wii
so basically i love video games full stop, i consider myself a BIG fan having a gamesroom @ home with all manner of games consoles here plus a couple macs and i love playing adventure titles which make for a nice refreshing change from my usual fragfests & roleplaying
i can sit back in my comfy chair, put up my feet and play some great adventure game on my HDTV using some of the grey stuff upstairs and get involved in some fantastic story with some crazy, devious puzzles to work out, now thats what i call an adventure!
what the famous first person action/puzzle video game which has nothing to do with adventure titles
i know...thats why i popped in a
cos me and a couple of the other guys had been debating whether or not portal
can be classed as an adventure
The problem with the adventure game fanbase, I think, is that there IS a level of snobbery about what defines the genre. "A slow-paced, action-less game with a 2D third-person view, hand-painted backgrounds and inventory-based puzzles with a point-and-click interface." But then you look at the "exceptions". Loom had no inventory, Myst was in the first person. Various adventure games had keyboard controls. Infocom made adventure games with action in them, in that things happened around you as the "turns" passed by. There is more to adventure gaming than LucasArts and their usual mold, and even within that ONE company's set of releases there are exceptions to those genre snobbery rules.
I don't want the genre to phase out anything, but I do want it to also come to accept new definitions. Portal's gameplay is not action-driven, it's all about puzzles with an action element to them. Like the King's Quest games, like Zork, like Space Quest.
Just to be clear, im not [quite] one of those snobs who considers anything 3D, 1st person, with CGI backgrounds or with something other than a point and click interface to be outside the adventure game genre. (I love both Myst and Grim Fandango… Though I don’t think I ever got around to finishing myst, now I think about it). I just think that there needs to be [fairly] clear cut off point where you can say 'this is an adventure game but this is not'.
I suppose, at the end of the day, my opinions regarding whether or not it's an adventure don't count as I haven't played the game. Unfortunately, based on other people's descriptions, I don't think I will play it as a lot of 1st person games with a lot of action (usually FPSs) cause me motion sickness and even migraines.
But, really, why does this need to be the case? Aren't all genre classifications really just arbitrary anyway? Personally, I think that clear-cut definitions of genres lead to an unfortunate lack of genre-bending titles. The best titles are the ones that may be hard to categorize, as it shows the developing team went out of their way to be innovative.
People are always going to want some idea of what they're getting involved in before they sit down to play it.
Maybe I am the one whose being too rigid, here, but it seems quite like that people's ideas of keeping adventure games fresh and exciting is to add more action and that most adventure players have "gunphobia". Does this mean that the genre can only move forward if it imitates other genres?
Not necessarily, but nothing can move forward by staying the same. You're right, the games that have pushed the boundaries of gaming have usually ended up being failures on the market because people are wary of that which they don't immediately understand, and that which can't be summed up in a single sentence.
But I personally don't care what "most people" buy. I don't look at sales numbers when I buy a game...all I care about is whether it's fun to play. My fiancee once said to me "You don't like shooting games, why are you buying that game?" and I replied "Because I heard it's a heck of a lot of fun, and offers me more than just the point-and-kill aspect of most FPS games". Good games transcend genre compartmentalization, and the average consumer needs to widen his field of vision.
As I've said; I haven't played this series. I can't judge them until I do, but I will concede to the concensus that they are until I do.
I'm not saying that if a game has shooting, physical violence, etc, it's not worth playing. What I'm actually trying to say is that, after a certain point, it ceases to become an adventure game.
That's to say, that Portal is nowhere near an adventure game. A lot of other games are, but not Portal.
Thanks to the publishers and adventure game developers in Germany, there are a vast variety of high-end adventure games released and especially in the works. Games like 'Ceville', 'A Vampyre Story', 'The Whispered World' and 'The Book of Unwritten Tales' are all necessary to breathe life into adventure games.
Nintendo deserves big thanks as well. Wii has introduced gaming into massive amounts of people who didn't consider themselves interested in video games at all. These are the sort of people who would love the right kind of adventure games - I've noticed this first hand in several occasions. It's wonderful that the adventure game titles are coming out on Wii - Telltale Games releases their titles on Wii, and at least So Blonde is out or being released soon.
I'd say that the genre is alive and well, way better than it has ever been, even better than it was in the golden ages. Sure, the situation is fragile at the moment, but if all turns out well, we're probably going to see a new golden age of adventure games. Or are we seeing it already?
I haven't played many modern adventure games, but my brother occasionally buys game or two and usually his comments have been like: "Don't bother, it was buggy and puzzle design was horrible. It's nothing compared to Gabriel Knight 3 or Monkey Island."
Tales is actually first new adventure title which I have bought in several years. It seems decent enough, so I will probably buy new Sam & Max games (I liked Hit the Road, so I hope that I also will like the two new games). Tales sure gives me some hope that we will see some decent adventures also in the future.
Then some comments:
I don't have problem with dead ends, it was part of the game challenge at the early days of adventuring and people took it in such way. When I played King's Quest games for a first time, I usually restarted or restored save from much earlier point several times, because I had managed to get myself into dead end. But during time you learned to avoid such situations, even today I usually keep several saves around, so that if I think I have missed something (which may not even be necessary for completing the game) I can go back.
Gaming magazines usually published walkthroughs (at least it happened around here) and if you didn't subscribe the magazine, then you borrowed it from your local library. In 80s dead ends were standard, but it changed in the 90s and eventually even Sierra followed the trend and in their last adventures there wasn't dead ends. Change away from dead ends started ten years before the genre died.
Point and click? It's not for real adventurers. Real men write the commands in following manner: Get up, walk north, look around, look wizard, talk wizard. ->You Died -> Restore
Another Code: R, despite being a sequel to a DS game released not too long ago, is getting a lot more media coverage, and as previously mentioned, daytime television advertising! Another Code isn't exactly a traditional p+c third person game, but it is still an adventure game.
Broken Sword: Shadow Of the Templars has recently been revamped on the Wii and the DS, which is a big moment for adventure game fans. Broken Sword was probably the only p+c adventure game in the late 90s to achieve real success (after CMI, Full Throttle, etc) and Broken Sword 2 (correct me if I'm wrong I can't remember the chronology exactly) was the last proper 2D p+c game to come out that got success financially and critically. A director's cut is a big deal, particularly on the Wii and the DS. It's found a new audience. My mum, once only ever played Tetris on her Gameboy, went out and bought this game without any input from me. It's a crazy world a game like Broken Sword can suddenly sell to the "broad audience" Nintendo have managed to pull in, out of no-where!
Tell Tale Games have managed to keep the hardcore fans of the genre very happy, with Monkey Island and Sam & Max. They've also pulled in extra fans with SB:CG4AP and getting the contract for Wallace & Gromit, making a popular, decent game for it, and releasing it on the X-Box was the wisest decision a company in their position could do.
With smaller companies bringing out games like Runaway, A Vampyre Story, Secret Files and Zack & Wiki, we have games filling in the gaps LucasArts and Sierra have left dry over the past several years. And now, ultimately we have LucasArts testing the water with a comeback.
I don't think Sierra will come back, and the closest we'll get are rehashed, terrible, Leisure Suit Larry games that will never get anywhere. But if Lucasarts can profit out of their partnership with TTG, or if SMI:SE sells well, or makes a decent profit, we could very well have a new dawn of adventure gaming on it. With the Wii and DS providing great platforms for the more traditional p+c adventures, and the X-Box providing an alternative (that suits Wallace and Gromit down to the ground in my opinion) I think we're onto a winner.
Hopefully, whoever owns the rights to some of those older classics (King's Quest, I'm looking at you!) could come forward and maybe revive the franchise, or better yet, provide a new ip to a company like TellTale Games, who have a proven track record with perfection!