First I just want to say, that I am a HUGE adventure game fan but I know that there is a limited market for this game genre it is almost non-existant on consoles (except for Indigo Prophecy). But, ive always loved the early Lucas Arts games (Monkey Island, Sam Max, Zak McKraken, Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle Maniac Mansion) I was wondering if anyone can see adventure games becoming popular again if It would be worth the time effort to make a “traditional” adventure game with Unity??
Well, both Monkey Island and Sam Max episodes are planned. I think there is definitely an audience for them still.
I know that the Sam Max and Monkey Island games are still popular a select few PC adventure games but most of the successes are because they are franchises sequels, but what about the genre as a whole?
I think it’s on the rise again but it will never reach the popularity it used to have.
A lot of the conventions present in classic adventure games were down to hard limits on what you could actually do in a game. Studios like Sierra and LucasArts hit on a formula that allowed them to pack a ‘big’ story into a game in such a way that it would actually run on computers of the era, and of course it was a big hit.
Once machines were powerful enough to really simulate worlds in a more thoroughly realized way, the genre quickly lost a lot of appeal outside of a niche audience, and I don’t know if it will ever become mainstream again. There’s still a place for classic-style adventure games though, and it’s never really gone away, they’re just not high profile titles like they used to be.
Studios like Cyan Worlds (Myst), Revolution Software (Broken Sword), Microïds (Syberia), and even indies like Amanita Design (Samarost) may not have topped sales with their games, but they’ve all done respectably in recent years making very traditional adventure games.
I’ve often wondered if the text adventure concept could be revived with modern technology. Basically the same concept, but with atmospheric illustrations, narration, music/sound effects and motion graphic effects for the text, a bit like they use on TV.
… I smell a Wumpus!
Wasn’t that essentially what those old WorldBuilder games for the Mac were?
I’ll never forget how cool it was when I took the menu option for ‘swing foot’ and heard a nifty sound effect. I wouldn’t quite call it immersion, but it sure was fun at the time.
I liked a couple of the more recent 3D adventure games. like Farenheight (indigo Prophecy) and Broken Sword 3.
Those were a lot of fun. Farenheit made good use of realtime 3D and had some interesting simple simon type reflex sequences in the action parts.
I used to like the old school text adventures. Monkey Island and older games like Twin Kingdom Valley on the BBC model B. But I really couldn’t get into the Monkey Island game again when I played it last year. Felt that it was best left back in history where it belonged.
Here’s an action sequence from indigo prophecy if you never played the game
i have the impression that it’s quite the opposite…
Don’t forget that many Hidden Objects Games are more and more incorporating classic adventure elements…
And there is a good number of adventures released regurarly - besides the already mentioned Sam&Max and Tales of Monkey Island Episodes.
I think because of the smaller marketing budgets they slip easily under ones radar if you are not searching for them activley…
just a bunch of current PC-titles…
- Black Mirror 2
- Legend of Crystal Valley
- Treasure Island
- Dark Fall: Lost Souls
I think the adventure genre in a broad sense still has immense potential. The first thing developers need to do - and this is the easy part - is to think outside of the Leisure Suit Larry (or Monkey Island if you prefer) box. Then you need to come up with a new model for the genre that will work with your budget.
Anyway, thats my opinion. If you want to make another Monkey Island because you enjoy that kind of game, then you should. BUT keep in mind that it is not likely a commercially viable project. You should do it primarily because you enjoy the process of making it.
Amongst the adventure games mentioned in the thread I think The Last Express should be included. Its a rare gem with a Myst style interface that is reliant on its story in which the passage of time is fully realized, and your play opens up a vast array of alternate endings (most of which are failures, but more than one is a success).
I think many of the Infocom games pulled of the same very well in text: time passes, and so the story unfolds whether you pull a particular lever or not. If you want to check these out try the detective games: deadline, suspect, and witness. They are brilliant if you can handle the text interface.
Myst and Riven by comparison are essentially just complicated state machines and the worlds just sit there waiting for you to do something.
Don’t get me wrong, I love a good adventure game. I just meant to say that the “classic” adventure game is largely a niche genre now, though they do still exist. If you take a broader definition of the adventure genre, there are actually a lot of really good offerings that appear now and again.
Quantic Dream, for example, has done some great work in breaking new ground for the genre and keeping it relevant. I thought Fahrenheit was great (and Omikron before that), and their upcoming Heavy Rain looks brilliant - I just wish it wasn’t PS3 only!
Frictional Games was another one - the first two Penumbra games were excellent, and really showed what a modern adventure game could be (Requiem was kind of weak, though).
I think also there is still the idea that adventure games are very difficult to play. Even the most popular well known ones will leave you stuck in the same place unless you find a certain object that unlocks another event in the game, and being “stuck” for hours realizing that the “key” or the “book” or whatever was IN YOUR FACE the whole time is enough to make you give up on the genre completely. I personally dont feel this way but ALOT of people do and I think thats what really hurts it. I think that people want more freedom in there games.
Wouldn’t games like KOTOR sort of be considered along the line of Adventure game? I know it incorporates a lot of other elements, but it’s still very much in the vein of adventure. It’s not quite a Zork or Loom, but if you took out the combat elements, it probably would be. However the combat scenes are very much secondary to the gameplay and interwoven into the story.
I’d say the genre is very much alive and as popular as ever. It may have evolved quite a bit though. I’d love to see Loom redone (maybe it was… I haven’t looked)
…mind wanders back to the countless hours of playing Day of the Tentacle.
Although I like Infocom’s games, I think Zork is one of the games that doesn’t need to be redone. A maze full of puzzles held together by a thread of humor was novel in 1979 but … yeah … Infocom’s other games are world’s more mature than the first Zork.
And this I think leads back to Eleventh’s point about how hard these games can be.
You’ve got a few problems:
First problem is whether a player who doesn’t like puzzles plays your game and has a bad experience. As long as you make it clear that your game has puzzles in it, then do not worry about their reaction. Thats their problem. Your job is to make it clear what kind of experience they can expect. After that its up to them.
Second problem is that you need well designed puzzles for your players that enjoy them. The puzzle that requires some random object to solve or whatever is a very bad puzzle in my opinion. They are easy to design, and painful to solve. Random trial and error should not be the primary way to solve a puzzle. I think as long as the problems have solutions that flow naturally and logically from them then you’ve got a good one. Basically the player needs to feel that the solution makes sense. No matter how hard a puzzle is, if the solution makes sense out of what you have given to the player, then its a good experience.
Third problem is to provide a mix of puzzles in a manner that is fun for a wide enough audience that lots of puzzlers buy your game, and your sequels.
They did redo Zork, with ‘Return to Zork’. That one was developed by Activision in 93. It was a decent game at the time. It had more of a Myst type quality to it. Though, I just barely remember, as it was a long time ago. I remember it being a short game, that I beat in a couple of days. Which is unsual for me. Typically I never finish a game, so it must have been easy.
I was always more of a fan of the games that were a series of quests that built upon eachother, rather than games that were straight up puzzles. Like 7th Guest, which was really just a series of puzzles and cut scenes. That game might not really count as an adventure game though.
Infocom also did Beyond Zork before Activision took over, but I don’t consider these games actual remakes. Zork I - III were scavenger hunts in which you had to solve puzzles for each item, and to win you had to collect all of the items. They were simply puzzles to solve in the middle of a vast maze like environment. Thats the aspect that doesn’t need to be remade in my opinion.
My first thought when you mentioned quests was RPGs (which can be like adventure games). But when you describe 7th Guest, I was wondering if there was anything more to this than just solving puzzles in the game play? Thats good for them for recombining those elements in
I guess the integral piece of the adventure game is the environment. Exploring the environment is fun, and thus the motivation for the player to keep going. I think however that interactive fiction put a twist on this so that rather than explore an environment, you can explore a story. In other words, as you solve the “puzzles” in the story you unlock alternate branches of the narrative or reveal more back story than you knew before etc…
Its a fluid genre. You basically explore a structure to achieve the win condition. That structure can be a story or it can be a virtual reality or a combination of the two. All of those I think are “adventure” games.
Not RPG, I was thinking more of how ‘Day of the Tentacle’ worked. Where you’d come in contact with player or situation and you’d need to sort of solve the quest before you code proceed with that section. Like going back in time, and chopping down a tree, so that it wasn’t in the way in the future. (Classic adventure game, imho)
As apposed to 7th Guest, which was literally puzzles. You’d click on the cake, and then it turned into a rubix cube type of cake game. Once you beat it, a cut scene would happen, and a new door would open up. In another room the floor would turn into a chess game, and you’d have to beat it. To me it was less adventure, because the puzzles were so far removed from the game.
I really like the whole adventure game genre, I wonder if it has more mass appeal when you add elements of action, sort of the way it was done with the ‘Alone in the Dark’ series.
Probably one of the grand dads of them all, is still one of the most challenging game I’ve ever played, and it had no graphics. The original Wizardry on the Commodore64.
It was cool, scary and frustrating all at the same time. You could be on an adventure, 30 levels down in a complex dungeon with characters you honed over weeks or months of game play only to have them wiped out for good. I remember the sheer horror of realizing you were not going to win this fight, and your sorely earned characters would be killed and written to disk as dead immediately. (Unless you were fast enough to flip open the 5 1/4" floppy drive before it could record the deaths…lol
Your only option then was either to hope you had one character left to get back up to the surface and bring down a powerful enough cleric to raise the dead, or a retrieval party to pick through all the corpses for their magical weapons. And all this with only text… That was pure determination.
B.