Thinking of the best 20-30 games within the last five years, from The Last of Us to The Witness, story based games for adults are extremely rare. Mostly it’s about the mechanics, puzzles, strategy, exploration and action. You don’t play video games, on a regulary basis, for their stories. How many years does it take, until there is a video game on a Bioshock level?
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Big OT: I suggest everyone to watch “The young Pope”, by Paolo Sorrentino. Really impressive.
Beatiful setting in Rome and vatican City, incredible story, awesome storytelling. American people will love it, since it has strong italian flavour but with many famous american actors. Oh, and the original language is mainly english.
- I would say yes.
- Because we are smarter.
No, kidding. I have no idea. The other people here in the forum did some assumptions already. For me it’s the combination of getting challenged, to get an exciting and thrilling story and that I can push the story forward. For me the most action games are boring. - I don’t know. For me it seems that in the U.S. people more like violence and danger. Even kids are getting a real “first rifle” as a birthday present. So for me it feels natural that they like action games more. But of course that is a cliche and might not be true. In Germany action games are selling very well too.
- If you look at the backer statistics, most backer are living in the U.S. But in the U.S. live far more people then in germany.
That’s also true for Germany, we dub everything too.
Ehrm. Yeeeees. No, unfortunately not all Germans are good in English. I’m the proof: My English is horrible (just read my posts and you know what I mean…).
I am sure some of this has to do with the rise of Daedalic Ent. Before that, Germany might have still been more involved with adventures than the rest of Europe but I imagine the huge success of Daedalic bolstered popularity further and confirmed the region as a major hub for the production of adventure games.
Yes and no. Daedalic made and published a lot of adventures. But previously there was Deck13 (Ankh series and Jack Keane), KingArt (Book Of Unwritten Tales), Animation Arts (Secret Files series) and DTP/Crimson Cow.
Runaway was translated into German long before the English version was released. And the Broken Sword series was/is also very popular in Germany.
So the market was already “big”. That explains the rise of Deadalic.
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Your English is mothertongue if compared to the average English writings of the majority of my friends. I really mean it. While in northern Europe it seems like everyone can at least understand and answer basic questions like “which bus do I take for the main station”, it’s not the case in Italy.
Maybe it has changed now, as English became more and more important, but ask anyone above 30 and good luck in finding one that goes beyond “the pen is on the table” 
Isn’t/Wasn’t it a compulsory subject at school? I’m over 30 and we had to learn English at school. And today even the children in the kindergarten are learning English.
The hamster is in the oven.
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Not in my case. I’m 43, and 30 years ago (middle school), there was only one foreign language, and it was French.
Today English is taught to children starting from 3 yo.
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It was, but it didn’t help. First of all, I’m quite sure 99% of schools couldn’t find a native speaker as a teacher. For this reason, we had teachers who never spoke English during the lessons. Some even tried to say “ok, from now on we’ll only have lessons in English”, but they were the first ones not to be enthusiastic about it.
My improvements in English came mostly from my being a nerd and son of a nerd, having early access to the Internet and being able to exercise by chatting, reading foreign websites and so on. All others were stuck with their basic grammar rules, without never having to apply them. It was just another school subject, like algebra or art.
At the time it was also quite impossible to find movies in English. It was the kind of thing only English teachers had. So you ended up hearing actual English only once every two months. Once DVDs came out, it was better, but still, nobody was actually interested in watching a movie again in English. Nowadays it should be better.
Yeah, I forgot. There were also those people who only studied French during their whole career, and I’m 13 years younger than you. They were probably less than in your times, but there were still some. I, for example, studied French along with English for 8 years (3 in middle school, 5 in high school) and even if I loved it (I love learning foreign languages) I don’t remember almost anything because I didn’t have the chance (nor the will) to put it to the test in the “real” world.
Concerning (1), not just after looking at the sales charts for Thimbleweed Park, we must assume this to be true. The first game I saw on C128 was Maniac Mansion and the first game I saw on Amiga 500 was The Secret of Monkey Island. Reportedly LucasArts cancelled the sequel to FoA after (erronneously) being told that they couldn’t sell games in Germany that revolve around Hitler directly.
As to (2), that’s probably the real secret of Monkey Island or at the very least equally shrouded in mystery. I abhor explanations that try to bestow upon us a certain ‘mindset’ that makes adventure games more approachable to us, but I don’t lack approaches to the question that do exactly that.
For example, I recently waded through German reviews of Monkey Island 2 from the time it came out. I set out to disprove the thesis that Germans thought of this as an “easy game”. And I did disprove that. However, pretty universally, German reviewers lauded the difficulty. I hadn’t expected that. They didn’t even moan about the monkey wrench, and that was about as lost in translation as humanly possible.
So, uhm, maybe it’s the undying patience in self-flaggellation? Okay, maybe not.
Another explanation could of course be, sorry to take the magic away, plain ol’ marketing. The early LucasArts adventure games were distributed in Germany by Softgold, subsidiary of Rushware, then one of the largest game publishers in the entirety of Europe. That was probably the best thing that could have happened to LucasArts back then.
Concerning (3), I do believe Spain is hot on our heels.
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Maybe it can also factor in that at least in legal official sales terms games like Wolfenstein 3D and DOOM couldn´t take off here as strongly as they did in other countries because of censorship. Though I´m not sure how long it took then to ban them from being advertised. But those games along with Mortal Kombat changed the way games were controversial here. Before that it was war games, then it was graphic violence, of course that helped the popularity and made them popular on the pirate market, but maybe their influence on the mainstream market wasn´t as strong as in other territories because of the cenorship.
There was no censorship whatsoever in Finland. We have had at least basic English knowledge since third grade, and no films nor series were ever dubbed. So we had all genres to our grasp and language was never an issue.
I think in 90’s adventure games were really popular in Finland, along with puzzle and pinball games. Sure, Dooms and such were also really popular.
But I think Finns have the same characteristics Germans have, and that is an analytical and practical approach to things. Might be due to educational system or something. But that fits really well with adventure games, which require concentration and thinking.
EDIT: then again, in 90s the people who played, were “computer nerds” who were analytical, so adventure games were really made for them.
Okay just one more cliche, based on several american and german streamers I´ve seen.
I noted one difference, one sentence.
American streamers often say while playing: “I don´t get this…THIS IS STUPID!”
I´ve never heard a german say that.
Enough prejudice for today.
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I usually say: "I don’t get this… but I know there is a way! I have to seek it!"
That’s the reason why I was fantasticating so much on Thimbleweed Park textual adventure, Ray/Reyes kidnapping, and so on…
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Me too, I don´t blame the game I blame myself (and then try again or
differently), many don´t have that attitude and blame the developers, say
the game is broken. etc
I think that an attitude where if you don’t succeed, then you are a loser, could lead to blame the others.
Nobody is perfect, but that doesn’t mean it’s not ever my fault if something is odd.
I´m sorry that all sounds very contradictory, not sure I follow you here.
I try to elaborate my previous sentence with other words.
Who instantly blames others when there is something odd, strange or unexpected, does it so not to admit he is wrong. In an environment where if you don’t succeed, then you are a loser, that’s the result.
Instead, before blaming others, one should stop and think. Maybe the odd things are there on purpose, and if I didn’t understand them on first try, it could be because I didn’t pay attention, or I was missing something.
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