Death of Adventure

[HawkZombie]

Ok, so this is a topic that has been discussed, argued, and simply covered in one way or another in several venues over the years on several different mediums.

The Slow Death of Adventure games.

Now, of course, Adventure games don't seem to be 'dying' per say, they just seem to be tapreing off as the demand for them wanes. Instead of a world of gaming where point and click was one of the only viable options for the systems and computers of the time, it was quickly overshadowed with the advent of 3D technologies, Action/Adventure games such as Tomb Raider(and several dozen clones :P), and the dreaded JRPG :P. Adventure games don't offer enough action for today’s ADHD inclined gaming crowd that want all flash, and don't have the time or the brain power to dig for the substance.

But this isn't to say every adventure game is stellar either. They've been contributing to their own demise just as well as the popularity of the other genres of gaming. It's been a while since I played a -good- adventure game (the most recent 'New' one I played that was stellar that comes to mind is The Longest Journey) and most of the newer ones suffer from shoddy graphics, terrible voice acting, horrible subtitles (It's ok if a word or two is different, but I've played one recently where every other words was different from the subtitled ones, and the subtitles cussed like a sailor, while the Voice over was going on like a Sunday School teacher), poor game play (You'd think a point and click would be hard to muck up...but the back and forth element is really easy to make grating...especially if there's too much 'back' and not enough forth.), and puzzles/key items that simply make you go 'huh?' because they don't have any forewarning before they're thrust upon you, and you have no idea that one key item was supposed to be used for that thing you've been looking at for an hour, because there were no subtle in-game hints.

Adventure games -are- dying, unfortunately. One of my favorite genres is dying, and it's because (mostly) it's choking itself to death. There are few games that are worthwhile. Still Life is a game I got a year ago, and was -amazing-...will there be a sequel? More than likely not. Mostly because other crap in the genre is pulling the gems down with them.

...I have no idea why I'm writing this, other than to get people's opinions on the subject. Plus, I've got the idea in my head I want to make adventure games. I've always wanted to make an adventure game, ever since TLJ...It's a rich way to tell a story in an interactive manner.

So, who here thinks the genre is dying slowly, due to outside forces, but mostly its own inability to adapt, and to filter out the crap (Sure, other genres have crap, but there are SO many, that it's easy to ignore...with Adventure, it's about 90/10, and there are so few, it's easy to get buried in the bad :sad:)

And who here thinks the genre/medium is worth working in? If a game had sup-par graphics (which is forgivable) but excelled in puzzles, story, and game play, would it be worth it?

*Sigh* I just have had that on my head for a while, and wanted to get it out.

[J.D. Slasha]

While I've never been a big fan of adventure games per se, I do recommend one game in particular that I happened to stumble upon: Zack and Wiki: Quest for Barbaros' Treasure for Nintendo Wii. It's a point and click type game and really makes innovative use of the Wii remote. It's also one of the rare games nowadays that really made me wanna' think about how to complete a puzzle or two. You'll die time and time again. but the game feels like that doesn't matter, very rarely did I feel frustrated with the game... but yeah try it out.

Back on topic:
I think that the demands of today's gamers like you said are the cause of the demise of many types of gaming. I for one feel that this decline is not limited to merely adventure games, but to other genres as well. Thinking about it, when I was growing up in the early 90's (I was born 87) the games I would play back then would really make me excited and were ones that I still would love to play nowadays. Perhaps it was just my younger mind back then, but I really feel that older games for the SNES and the Genesis had an old school element to them that I guess many games today are beginning to lack. I suppose I'm beginning to ramble now as well huh? Welp those are my thoughts...

JDS

[HawkZombie]

Games will never be as great as they were around 10 years ago and prior. Sure there are exceptions, but that, as a general rule, seems to hold fast.

[Lunarea]

Actually, a surprisingly large amount of games that come out would fit into the action/adventure category. Unfortunately, about 95% of them are fan-games for one movie or another. So, they're not exactly an extraordinary high-quality-game. However, there are rumors that a lot of the action/adventure games for early consoles (think original Nintendo, Sega and eary PC) are being remade - most of them for Wii. The return of these classics might re-ignite interest in action-adventure.

I've also personally found survival/horror games to be similar enough to be enjoyable. Though they do make me jump :blush:

Edit: I forgot to mention that there look to be some interesting titles for PS3 as well, similar to Tomb Raider.

[HawkZombie]

See, that's just it. The genre is Adventure. NOT Action/Adventure. Action/Adventure usually has little to do with Adventure games, other than box puzzles that are thrown in to break up the combat that is mostly so-so :P

Adventure games are point and click, heavy on the story, little to no actual combat, and lots of ingenious puzzles integrated (rarely though :P) seamlessly. I attribute another cause of the death of the genre to people also not fully understanding just what the Adventure in Action/Adventure stems from and bastardizes.

[J.D. Slasha]

See, that's just it. The genre is Adventure. NOT Action/Adventure. Action/Adventure usually has little to do with Adventure games, other than box puzzles that are thrown in to break up the combat that is mostly so-so :P

Adventure games are point and click, heavy on the story, little to no actual combat, and lots of ingenious puzzles integrated (rarely though :P) seamlessly. I attribute another cause of the death of the genre to people also not fully understanding just what the Adventure in Action/Adventure stems from and bastardizes.

Oh man, seriously. Check out Zack and Wiki Sketch. I really honestly think you'd enjoy it.

[Lunarea]

Adventure games are point and click, heavy on the story, little to no actual combat, and lots of ingenious puzzles integrated (rarely though :P) seamlessly.

Myst :aww:

I hear jokes about this, actually. Most people think that the reason the really complex adventure games like Myst aren't made more is because they're just too complicated for most of the "gamer" audience. I mean most of that audience is made up of teenage boys (though teenage girl gamer population is growing). Teenage boys want to shoot, maim, kill, destroy, race and play one sport or another. Sitting down for an hour trying to figure out a particularly complex puzzle would feel too much like school :hmm:

I don't know whether I'd personally go as far as saying that target audience isn't smart enough for these games, but I do think that the games are currently on a "more integration and user control" kick. The true adventure games had people more as an active observer than anything else. I mean you solved puzzles and interacted with the environment, but it often felt more like watching a good movie than actually playing that adrenaline-rush action.

But these things tend to come in waves. If a good adventure game does get released and has successful sales, more will follow. I remember when Myst came out, shortly after there was a good dozen of the same type of game available.:aww:

[ccoa]

A lot of younger gamers seem to feel scorn for adventure games. I've mentioned games like Myst, and get responses like "Oh, you mean that expensive screensaver?" And very few of the current generation of gamers has any idea what Zork or Colossal Cave are.

I still have the entire Myst series (although it just wasn't the same after Robyn Miller left the creative team) and the entire Zork series. I'd love to see the genre brought back.

There are some hopeful signs - Myst will be released for the DS this month in Europe and was remade for the PSP last year (although no release outside of Japan), for example. But for fans of the genre, things look pretty grim.

[Barbatos]

Man adventure games are so nostalgic. I grew up on text adventure games like hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy and zork and graphical ones like Sierra's Quest games. To be honest though, I've never really lamented their disappearance, because all of the best adventure game creators have since left the business. You see the latest Liesure Suit Larry game? Yeah, talk about franchise-ruining.

Adventure games were great because they were truly interactive stories (much moreso than RPGs) but in this day and age, people want more action and less reading in their gaming, so I don't think they'll ever come back, at least not western-style ones.

[HawkZombie]

Hmmm...Interesting points. And I dunno about Myst being part of the downfall (Yes is was rather difficult, but I nearly beat the game before there was a such thing as 'Gamfaqs.com' with the manual, hint book, and my own ingenuity. I was also 13 or 14 at that time (Maybe younger...it HAS been a rather long time).

Gamers are more interested in flashy, and immediate, instead of long and drawn out with more substance. *Shrugs* I miss the western style ones, and wish to continue their tradition...but not where it feels like a thrown together game.

But who knows if I can accomplish what groups of teams cannot, ya know? I'm not saying I want to become the messiah of Adventure games...just that I want there to be a genre to make games IN.

[Cup o' Wisps]

I can't tell you anything about the decline in Adventure games.
I can't.
But this post exists at another forum and I'll quote myself in a spoiler if ya care to read why I stopped playing adventure games.
I've always been partial to Gabriel Knights - but the game sucks anyway.

Why I stopped playing adventure games - and this is an actual set of puzzles that were mandatory to solve if you wanted to beat a certain game - who honestly I barely remember the name of.

Rubik's cube.
No really. You had to solve a digital representation of a Rubik's cube. Best of all, you couldn't move the camera - you couldn't rotate the entirety of the cube. You were stuck looking at it the way it was, seeing 3 sides, and solve the fucking Rubik's cube.
Sure it wasn't called a rubiks cube - instead of colors there was a triangle on one side, a circle doodad on the other - but it's a fucking Rubik's cube.
Best of all your fucking progress on it, all those moves you did weren't saved - if you exited the item menu you lost all your turns and motions. Though there was a trick. It was called "uninstall".

Rubik's cube.

What? It deserved to be said twice.

Another thing in this game was they gave you a fictitious language. A language completely alien to you - and no booklet or anything. I'm sorry but I know some people like to take notes, but I'm really not going to sit down and write down and decipher a language - they didn't even have examples. It wasn't the hardest thing - oddly of the things I'm mentioning it was the thing I completed first, but my god if it wasn't for rapid fire mouse clicking and sore index fingers it can't be done.

You had to collect a set of items. Not so special - except no one told you what these items were, and trust me they were more random than those listed in Marcus' examples. My god it made no sense, had no explanation, and really confused me. I never beat the game.
Why? Could I just go randomly move the mouse over every screen until the pointer became a hand and then just started clicking away? No. I couldn't. They were hidden.
The mouse never changed. You had to find them by clicking every pixel. Fuck.
Rubik's cube. Every pixel. Best of all there was an item that would beep if you were in a room/map with one of these items, but unfortunately (no joke) you had to hack a save file for it.
Rubik's cube.Far to many of the games I played near the end of the era were just random.

They each tried to top one another and all they did was add prettier graphics, more insane puzzles, and just random things that made no sense. No sense whatsoever. Things like the aforementioned came out of nowhere and had nothing to do with the game - hell if you took them out it would have no actual bearing.

When you beat the Rubik's cube (god rubik's cube!) you unlocked a plot point.
It had nothing to do with the cube, you defeated it - and if you happened to go to a certain area afterwards, a new that actually involved finding a dead body came up.
The rubik's cube was a cruel swerve. One I might add you could miss easily, or even throw away - for an item that was mandatory that's just mean!

The language again was just a throw in to show how smart the guys were, look what we made - it was really of no use whatsoever. You did have to learn it - or just click the right chain of words, but there was no real point to it. It wasn't fun, nor was it challenging - it was just incredibly hard.

Half the adventure games you still find offer nothing new.
Nothing.

If the genre is dying I really don't see a problem with that.
I'm sorry, but I'd rather have the point and click styled game play and the whole feel get integrated in some other genre in some fashion.
Hell, the text based games eventually evolved - there's still those interactive story books that offer random event encounters, creation, and gui interface - and some are coming up with new things, there's some with puzzles and RPG elements too!
Let adventure games in their purest form die, and let's replace something quickly enough so it can dance on it's grave while the body's still warm.

[Elijah von Böse]

I think I've only ever really played two "Adventure" games, as you describe -
The Crimson Room (An Online Web Adventure Game that was interestingly fun.)
Where in Time is Carmen Sandiago? (It came on a blue floppy with my first computer)

I must say - what is with people degrading Action/Adventure and Adventure in the 3D Genre? If you take a step back and look at Oblivion's style of 'adventuring,' (first person, where every object is interactive), the 3D Adventure genre should be exploited as it has an extreme amount of potential.

I think a few of the major reasons for it's downfall is lack of possibility - there are only so many puzzles we can create without just dressing up existing ones - your typical push-block-clear-path puzzle is, ingeniously enough, the same puzzle as everyone's favorite "picture slate" puzzle, where you have 16 squares (usually) and one of them empty, and you systematically move them into place to organize the picture, and both these puzzles surely get boring after solving one or two of them. See the problem? Say, each puzzle takes 20 minutes to solve, you do 5 puzzles then one major puzzle taking 40 minutes and skills from each of the five you just did, You'd only have a two hour game (give or take) and five different puzzle-types, (excluding the one major puzzle that would be a fusion of the five puzzles). And we all know, to have a worthwhile game, it's gotta be around 10 hours long, minimum (especially if it's story-based). That adds up to a whopping 25 puzzles. Now tell me, without re-using puzzles, how many unique experiences could you possibly create? I myself would find it extremely difficult to come up with the initial five puzzles from game one, without repeating them.

Now integrate each puzzle into a story and give it a deeper meaning, without degrading the story into "This is trial, where you must solve five puzzles to get the key for the final chamber, lol gud luck!"

With Society's lovely new mindset where "instant-gratification" is a priority, for the mainstay of folks, creating 25 unique puzzles (or more) is a daunting task. I, for one, would love the challenge. I love creating puzzles.

Oh, and another thing - you have to balance these puzzles. They can't be obvious what to do, but it can't be random/suicidally difficult.

[ccoa]

Recent adventure games being bad is no real reason to wish death on the genre. It was great once, and it could easily be great again. The problem is when people add puzzles that have seemingly no relation to the objective. When you solve a puzzle and then something unrelated and unpredicted happens, or you have to solve a puzzle just because it's there, that's bad game design. However, a good adventure game integrates the puzzles with the world seamlessly. Riven is a very good example of this. So are most of the Space and King's Quest games.

It would be far better for the genre to revive itself rather than to simply die. What a waste of a fascinating and fun category of games if it did!

[HawkZombie]

I completely agree with ccoa on her last post...it's a matter of 'crap, this needs puzzles' and one of the biggest complaints being the puzzles have NOTHING to do with the story or the gameplay whatsoever.

[grim_honk]

A Vampyre Story

"Adventure isn't dead, it's UNdead."