A few weeks ago Ron asked on Twitter which 3D engine would have been a better choice for someone who, like him, was good at C/C++.
We don’t have a clue about why Ron is interested in 3D stuff, but just to play a bit with our imagination, which kind of 3D stuff would you like him to create?
I have two personal dreams:
A Gone-Home-kind of game, because he likes to write and Gone Home was full of short texts.
A Firewatch-kind of game. Exploration of a beautiful setting + not-too-hard puzzles, to expand the audience of the game.
I would like another game like The Cave, but without the need to play certain sections multiple times just to get all characters through.
Also a first person adventure like Normality, but with modern graphics would be interesting.
But more than anything, I’d like to see his Monkey Island 3, but that should fit the style of the first two games, so a 3D engine isn’t probably a good idea for that.
Because the differences in Maniac Mansion are not as big. In the Cave you want to see all of the areas that are related to the characters so the urge to playthrough fast is bigger than in Maniac Mansion where most people possibly didn´t get all of them through (+ you don´t get to see anything extra for Razor or Jeff) just so see endings that really don´t differ that much (porch ending, talk show ending + the animation of the Edsel taking off).
In The Cave you want to see all the areas that relate to the characters and do all the puzzles. So it feels more complete if you did it all. And that means 3 playthroughs to get 3 characters through with the inbetween sections not being any different AND having to repeat two entire characters on your third and final playthrough because you have to choose three and the number of them is uneven.
It didn´t bother me really, but I thought having one character more or less would have helped. I really enjoyed the game as a whole.
I was thinking along the same line. At least the old adventure gamers were not the same people. They were older. Maybe even more impatient, with less time available to play?
I’m pretty sure it bothered people in Maniac Mansion as well. Too bad there were no achievements back at the time. There would be one for each ending, so you could see how many players actually played all of them.
Also the situation in The Cave is slightly different, since the playable characters have no text at all, which make the common sections even more feel just like a repeating task to get the game longer. And the world is much bigger than in Maniac Mansion to begin with. Maniac Mansion doesn’t take too long for a walkthrough, if you know the solution, while in The Cave, there is a lot of walking around involved.
I still enjoyed the game, but I wouldn’t have mind if it were a little shorter by not having to repeat as many sections.
It doesn’t help that each character actually has two endings. Even more basically identical playthroughs, just to get those.
If I were to take a guess, it’s that some hardcore gamers are obsessed in getting every single little bit of a game done. So when a game is designed for replayability or variation to provide multiple scenarios, characters, or endings, they somehow feel compelled to go through them all.
The problem is that the game was not designed to do all those things at once or in one play-through, so then they get annoyed when it becomes tedious to do so.
I think that games like Maniac Mansion work well (I never played The Cave, so I can’t judge that one) in their design, because whenever I wish to play it, I can choose a different set of characters or a different mode of play and get some variation.
Maniac Mansion and The Cave are very different games. You don´t get blocked from entire rooms of the mansion if you choose certain characters. To see absolutly everything in Maniac Mansion you have to be a lot more dedicated completist than for the Cave where even somone who isn´t much of a completist can feel like you didn´t see the whole game after playing through it once.
Last week I was in a theme park. Ron should develop a 3D puzzle-adventure game about a kid who has been trapped in a theme park at night, when the ghosts of the past employees return to do their tasks and chores and the kid is their only customer.
Just before you leave the final area, you have the option to return the object of desire or to take it with you. That makes the difference for each character.
