Death of Adventure Games
in General Chat
I'm genuinely wondering something:
Why doesn't Telltale make point & click games anymore? Why is every single game a quicktime event game?
I know most of the original team left now, but do you guys just not care about what made the classic adventure games so fun?
I've been disinterested in almost everything you guys made when you dropped point & click for quicktime events, and certainly not because I wouldn't like the IPs.
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To be fair you've have had over 6 years to adapt to this change, and move on, like a majority of the folks who don't like their current approach.
Not buying telltale games isn't adapting, exactly. I'm just trying to understand why they betrayed their main fan-base?
Is it because the IPs are so huge that enough people will buy it anyway so the original adventure game fans are irrelevant?
They experimented with a new concept they had, and it became immensely popular in comparison to a standard point and click formula. Back to the future I'm sure sold well enough, but Walking Dead peaked a ton of interest, which got them more known around the internet. If you've played the games they aren't just all QTE events, there's still a fair bit of exploration with simple puzzle solving, but its no longer the main focus as they want the story and characters to be the main center piece, rather than halt the plot to a immediate stop, so that the player can spend 20 minutes treading back and forth looking for that one item they need. Classic Telltale games weren't exactly hard or massive to begin with, so its not a huge change. There are still a ton of full time adventure game developers around the internet to enjoy. I recommend checking out Daedelic who took over Telltale's place for puzzle game needs.
agreed if your looking for more traditional point and click id try out some of wadjet eyes games they have some solid ones as well.http://www.wadjeteyegames.com/
I have played the adventure games from Daedalic. Chains of Satinav and Memoria were interesting. But I quickly found myself bored with the puzzles and I greatly missed Telltale's style and interactions with the character.
I guess old school is not my thing.
Ooo Wadjet Eye are also great.
So just as a disclaimer at the top: None of this should be read as me speaking for Telltale, our business as a whole, or anything like that. This is just me, a writer who loves adventure games and thinks about this a lot wanting to share some of my thoughts on the subject --
It's definitely interesting the way video game genres evolve. My biggest inspirations first starting out were all the LucasArts adventure games (part of how I ended up as a writer at Telltale), and so I remember feeling a little bummed to see the industry seemingly moving away from them too.
It's tough, because as a storytelling format, adventure games are really really tricky and the kind of stories they tell just aren't for everyone. Lemme back up for a sec before I delve into this -- In the beginning of video games, many of the popular games encouraged detachment between the player and the player character. In arcade games especially, the characters you played as were just vessels that you controlled, rather than characters you felt like you were being and inhabiting. This was partially because of low graphical fidelity (it's hard to empathize with the triangle in Asteroids or the 12 pixels making up Mario) and partially because of the ludonarrative philosophy (Your player character was expendable - When it died it was replaced with an identical one. "Lives" were sometimes even just referred to as "Men" - As in "I have 25 men left before a game over.")
RPGs, on the other hand, were called "role-playing games" literally because they were games where you were expected to be playing a role. When you played Legend of Zelda, you WERE Link. When you played Final Fantasy you WERE those characters. That philosophy carried over to text adventure games too - Sometimes your character didn't even have a name, it was just YOU. "You are in a room," "You pick up the torch," etc. You had no secrets from your character, and the two of you couldn't see anything that the other couldn't.
Graphical adventure games, on the other other hand, treated their player characters like a strange hybrid of arcade character and RPG character. King's Quest, Monkey Island, Sam & Max... You controlled the characters in those games, there were deep RPG-type stories, but you never felt like you were those characters. Instead, you were clicking and telling Guybrush or King Graham where to go. You were picking their dialogue options. You were telling them to pick things up, asking them what they saw...
In my opinion, the people that fell in love with adventure games fell in love with the way you got to know these player characters, because they were like your strange little puppets/friends. You could see things they couldn't, and they could look at 4 pixels on a table and interpret what they were. They sometimes had snarky things to say about your orders. They wouldn't always cooperate. They had these complicated inner lives that you would experience and get to know based on their reactions to things you told them to react to.
As video games evolved, things all started to bleed into each other. RPGs started adopting more arcade-y elements, arcade-y games started adding more storytelling, everyone got better graphics and controls... and adventure games were sort of left in this funny place of not knowing exactly how to evolve - Especially since the things that people loved about adventure games (entertaining characters, exploration, puzzles) were being adapted and used by all sorts of other genres. I played dozens of games in the early 00s that were trying to figure out what the "future" of adventure games would look like, but none of them ever became blockbuster successes and so, for a while the genre kind of went dark: unable to compete with the GTAs and Halos of the world.
Which brings us to now - The bar just keeps getting raised on storytelling in video games across numerous genres, with more and more emotional, well-crafted stories being told, full of realistic characters and scenarios... it's truly on the same level as storytelling in movies and television. Annnd that's where the adventure game disconnect kicks in.
Adventure games are a pacing nightmare, from a storytelling perspective. Think about how many times in a classic adventure game you'd be stuck for hours, sometimes days, wandering the same 3 rooms trying every single combination of inventory items, having no idea what to do. You'd solve a puzzle, be rewarded with a little bit of a story, and then you'd be thrown right into the next puzzle. It's a tough, start-stop, sort of way to tell a story, and it's the kind of story that a lot of players just don't connect with. Honestly, as I've gotten older I've found that I have way less patience for it than I used to. Banging my head against a puzzle trying to progress the story forward just feels less satisfying to me than playing, say, The Witcher III, where I could go kill monsters and do cool action hero things to progress the story forward. It's probably because I've gotten spoiled, but there it is then.
(Wow, this has gotten way longer than I intended - Lemme try and bring it in for a landing)
For people who still crave that classic point-n-click goodness, I really believe that we're in the middle of a huge adventure game renaissance. I don't think we'll ever see the big video game companies ever going back to pure, 80s/90s-style adventure games, because they're still just way too niche, but if you look to the indie scene there's a veritable treasure trove of variety and choice. There are super throwback adventure games with 8-/16-/32-bit graphics, adventure games with modern flash, adventure games with action elements, action games with adventure elements... The adventure game hasn't "died": It's just diversified and shared its best traits with the video game industry as a whole.
And I think that's pretty cool.