Traditional Adventure Games Are Rubbish

[imagremlin]

I can see the point, but don't fully agree. Adventure games were conceived to appeal to a completely different crowd, the people that did not want action in their games. Back in the day, they took pride in the fact that theirs was the "intellectual" audience. Anyone who was there will remember the controversy over "arcadey" sections in games like Space Quest and Heart Of China.

The allure of traditional adventure games was creating a world worth visiting, where you did not have to fight to stay alive (only stay away from ledges, but I digress). When done right, it was magical. I still have many fond memories of those worlds, as if I had actually been there.

The reason adventure games lost their appeal was the limited game mechanics. There's only so much you can do with the take object A to person B system. Good stories became scarce as the pressure not to repeat old puzzles got to the designers. That's what led to the absurd solutions Yatzhee points out. Cat moustache anyone?

The question is whether someone can come up with new mechanics to revive the genre. How to tell an interactive story where you don't have to kill anyone/anything. Its harder than it sounds, but I'm hopeful.

On the other hand, as you play modern action games, with their well defined characters and interesting worlds, you are in debt to the old Adventure Game.

 

[WouldYouKindly]

I could understand taking a sanity hit if the monsters looked significantly human. There's still that part of your brain that puts an automatic do not kill sticker on humans you meet. If it wasn't stressful, soldiers probably wouldn't have so many problems.

 

[soitgoes19]

I don't see how failing to fulfill some arbitrary definition of a fully realized game invalidates a whole genre. It's only rubbish if it's a poorly executed example of that genre.

 

[ms_sunlight]

The best adventure games were good despite being adventure games, not because of it. When I think of The Longest Journey, Loom or Grim Fandango, I think of the storytelling, the characters, the art style... not the puzzles. I'd happily watch any of those made into a feature-length film; I almost certainly will never want to replay them.

 

[Mouse One]

I grew up with Infocom games, but I get what Yahtzee is saying. It's a "story with an unusual pause function". I mean, I loved the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy game, but really, that's because I love Douglas Adams (and curse the fact that I've never been able to play Starship Titanic). But c'mon, that section with the Babelfish? Yes, it was funny. But mostly I remember being frustrated that I couldn't, as Monty Python would say, GET ON WITH IT.

So, like a previous poster said, I went out and forked over for the hint book. And growled in irritation when I got through that part.

BTW, said game is online at the BBC these days. http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/hitchhikers/game.shtml Worth playing, but again, mostly because anything written by Adams is worth a look, not because its gameplay is anything other than a nuisance.

 

[gim73]

Hmmm... adventure games... like zelda and startropics...

Yeah, that's right, adventure, not rpg. If you gotta pick up your health like some kind of scavanging hobo rooting through the garbage, you are definately an adventure game. Hell, while I'm at it, I would like to classify demon souls as an adventure game as well. Sure, the adventure is being anally violated over and over, but it's still more of an adventure game than an rpg.

 

[Blood Brain Barrier]

This article is rubbish.

Any conception that considers a game as story + gameplay is a bad conception, as bad as considering a film as a visual story while in fact story plays a very small role and it's the good films which realise that and bad ones which don't.

No wonder Yahtzee failed at making adventure games. Besides, I'm willing to bet Yahtzee hasn't played some of the better adventure games in recent years.

 

[NerfedFalcon]

The point is that the traditional adventure gameplay is rubbish. Oh, sometimes they'd come up with a really clever puzzle like using insults to win sword fights, but these were the exceptions rather than the rule. Most of the time the inventory puzzles only served, as in The Walking Dead, just as a token effort to be able to call itself a game rather than a linear story with an unusual pause function.

This article feels like one of those cases of "writer goes too far with his grand unified theory of what gaming ought to be".

I would rather agree with Jim Sterling, that "art shouldn't be limited". Individual creations should be seen as art first, video games second. If they don't fit into your narrower definition of video games, then they should be seen as a separate medium or adventure games, with their own values, instead of just bad video games.


For example I always campaigned for not talking about Visual Novels as if they would be video games. Not just because they are even more linear than adventure games, with nothing but literary content only interrupted by a handful of A/B/C choices between major novel-lenght story parts, but anyone who imagines them as video games, incorrectly pictures their romantic plots as dating sims (that would be more creepy than just romance plots in a novel).

And anyways, what's the point of taking a story, either an Adventure Game, or an Interactive Movie, or a Visual Novel, that is great at what it is, but declare that since it's an interactive software, it is officially categorized as a Video Game, and a shitty one for not being as interactive as the average?

This.

So much this.

For the record, I haven't played a lot of visual novels or the like, but I still completely agree with this. A game, or a movie, comic, or even stuff like Indigo Prophecy, is 'good' if it succeeds at what it sets out to do. Just because what it sets out to do involves less interactivity than most games doesn't make it a bad game. Citizen Kane is not a bad game because it's not a game at all.

That being said, since 'adventure games' are still labelled as games, that creates an expectation that they'll be more like other games. Perhaps, like the word 'gamer', point and click adventures need a new label.

 

[DeadlyYellow]

I wonder how many Myna birds flock to send you recommendation emails after Extra Credits puts up a "Games You Might Not Have Tried" episode.

 

[Scrustle]

I guess you could fix that problem of killing enemies (the least challenging method) being the most rewarded by giving some kind of canon consequences to killing that are worse than avoiding the monsters. Like perhaps if you kill an enemy it makes even more take it's place, or that after it dies it's essence somehow infects you. Maybe killing them slowly turns you in to one of them.

 

[Alterego-X]

This.

So much this.

For the record, I haven't played a lot of visual novels or the like, but I still completely agree with this. A game, or a movie, comic, or even stuff like Indigo Prophecy, is 'good' if it succeeds at what it sets out to do. Just because what it sets out to do involves less interactivity than most games doesn't make it a bad game. Citizen Kane is not a bad game because it's not a game at all.

That being said, since 'adventure games' are still labelled as games, that creates an expectation that they'll be more like other games. Perhaps, like the word 'gamer', point and click adventures need a new label.

More like we need to realize that "game" is not a single medium with a singe set of goals.

A game of soccer, a game of chess, and a game of cops and robbers are not the same categry at all. Why should a game of CoD, a game of Heavy Rain, and a game of Sim City be?

 

[tetron]

All I know is that wikipedia says Snatcher is an adventure game. And if that game is rubbish then holy hell the games of today are some kind of awful I can't even comprehend.

 

[GuruJ]

I'm a little surprised that no-one's pointed out the obvious flaw in Yahtzee's argument yet. The best adventure games make it *fun to fail*. With fun exploration, adventure games are far different from a "story with pauses".

Space Quest was genius at this (as long as you saved often). On many screens I would try and figure out amusing ways to die just as much as figuring out how to progress

I always found that the biggest flaw of the LucasArts "no fail" approach -- too many dead ends that weren't worth finding. But their later games, particularly Day of the Tentacle and Grim Fandango, did this well.

 

[Blood Brain Barrier]

I'm a little surprised that no-one's pointed out the obvious flaw in Yahtzee's argument yet. The best adventure games make it *fun to fail*. With fun exploration, adventure games are far different from a "story with pauses".

Space Quest was genius at this (as long as you saved often). On many screens I would try and figure out amusing ways to die just as much as figuring out how to progress

I always found that the biggest flaw of the LucasArts "no fail" approach -- too many dead ends that weren't worth finding. But their later games, particularly Day of the Tentacle and Grim Fandango, did this well.

Lucasarts was really the harbinger of the death of adventure gaming. While they came up with brilliant stories and games which were great fun, the approach of eliminating failure reduced the dynamics of the game to a flat experience in which nothing unexpected ever happened. This was, unsurprisingly, subsequently adopted by the entire genre's developers, since it was more acceptable to the casual (also older) gamer-type which made up much of the adventure game consumption base simply because it was the only genre which did not have violence and didn't require high levels of skill with the controls.

Adventure games need to bring back some of the unexpected, a bit of confusion and surprise, and a higher difficulty and dynamicism which the genre really can offer like no other can. Otherwise it's just a safe haven for those unable to tolerate surprises, uncertainty and death - a losers genre.

 

[Madmonk12345]

How do you feel about Myst, then? It's a "traditional adventure game", but the inventory puzzles consist of "not actually existing".

Especially in the sequels.

In Yahtzee's retro review of Symphony of the Night, he said that it didn't live up to the nostalgia it acquired, so that would be a "no".

Although, this was just stated in passing.

 

[lacktheknack]

How do you feel about Myst, then? It's a "traditional adventure game", but the inventory puzzles consist of "not actually existing".

Especially in the sequels.

In Yahtzee's retro review of Symphony of the Night, he said that it didn't live up to the nostalgia it acquired, so that would be a "no".

Although, this was just stated in passing.

I'd agree that Myst itself didn't, but Riven most certainly does.

And the newer games (especially Uru and End of Ages) are still great, even though they're too new to have "nostalgia" attached to them. So I'd be interested to see what he thinks of those ones.

 

[WaterDancer]

Don't forget Adventure games like The Colonel's Bequest, The Dagger of Amon Ra, the last express, Maupiti Island, Spycraft: the great game, Police Quest series, and Maniac mansion are all traditional adventure games that are hardly boring. All the games are dynamic where events are happening as you play, you can get a lot of the story or a little of the story form the games. Each have the risk of failure too.

It is true that many adventure games have become safe inventory puzzles but I would hardly call them rubbish or boring. They don't have to be hindered and can have game play besides inventory puzzles while being similar in function

 

[WaysideMaze]

I'd heard a bit about Lone Survivor, so thought I'd have a look at how much it is on Steam. Turns out I already own it. I need to actually pay attention to what's in these indie bundles I keep buying, and actually try the games out.