Did adventure games die? Or is it a case of biased criticism to new titles? Are we all suffering from a collective nostalgia that doesn’t allow us to enjoy newly released games because “old is better”? Do we appreciate TWP because of its story, dialogues, puzzles, art? Or maybe because the art (which is amazing) is in low resolution? Or because it has a verb and inventory interface? Or because it is a game of Ron Gilbert?
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I remember reading those comments on the blog and I wondered if these players were referring only to already-listened dialog or also to lines never listened before.
I think that listening to them for the first time is an extremely rewarding experience and a very important part of the gameplay, but listening to them again and again (as sometimes the player needs to do) can become a bit tedious.
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could be. but then, why should Ron be depressed about that?
[quote=“eviltrout, post:75, topic:275”]
Maybe my memory is failing me, but I have a feeling there are more adventure games being released these days than ever before, and the gaming universe is so much bigger that there are more people playing them than ever before.
[/quote]Yes, there are generally more games released, not only adventure games. Video games were considered a niche market for a long time. Reminds me of Mort’s line in CMI: “At least MY bad fiction doesn’t require over a thousand dollars in hardware!”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCK-LDL9t5E#t=4h52m24s
Computers were indeed ridiculously expensive in the 90’s which did not help getting more people into video games, and now, you can play almost anything of that time period on a cheap Raspberry Pi.
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Absolutely agree. Adventure games (of a huge variety, if you also allow deviation from the classic formula) are quite abundant, but absolutely drowned by the mass of other games released. There are also no “AAA” classic adventure game releases any more, which I guess the Lucasarts games were considered back in the day.
There’s no real arguing about taste and personal preferences 
. Ron certainly has a good grasp on the mechanics of an adventure game, and a certain kind of humour too, which makes his games quite special. Looking for that in other games seems a bit unfair, however.
Perhaps I do like the recent adventures made in Germany so well because I hail from there, and thus share the same mindset, but to me some of those are equally good, and even better than the old Lucasarts games. Always makes me a bit sad to see how little recognition they seem to get elsewhere on the globe.
I might have overlooked something. Maybe I generalized too much. But I could not find an adventure with that gameplay (not a sequence of cages but vast and parallel) and with a kind of graphics I can stand (not cartoonish and not high-res).
I see. That combination is indeed difficult to find these days . For low-res, there’s practically only the games from Wadjet Eye (and then whatever people cook up in AGS). From those, Resonance should be quite open, as you can switch between the 4 playable characters at will.
Anything else I can think of as being open (Deponia 2 and 3, Night of the Rabbit) come with hi-res, cartoon graphics.
I’m actually with you when it comes to the graphics. There’s something about pixel art that modern graphics simply cannot capture. Maybe it’s how pixel art allows your mind to fill in the details, or the reduction of objects to their essence … whatever it is, I mourn its absence from mainstream gaming.
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I was sceptical at first, because I’m not into this zombie thing and don’t like violent games. But then I took a look at the first episode of Walking Dead just out of curiosity and was positively surprised about the deep moral questions that emerged from the choices the player has to make.
No, it is not a classical PnC adventure. But it is definitely entertaining.
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Resonance! I bought a dozen wadjeteye games, but somehow I had missed that! Thanks!
This was the best suggestion ever. I am playing it and it is fantastic. I am in awe. It is wide, parallel (unlike other Wiadjeteye games) and has exactly the dialog system I wanted (you need to understand what to talk to people ABOUT, you don’t have a predefined list of choices).
And the way the 4 characters talk to each other is something that TWP should imho have copied. Sometimes they even talk to each other automatically, if they are on the same location.
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I love adventure games…there are not dead to me at all! It just depends who make them and how well they are written. 
Maybe, adventure games are missing some innovations, tech and visually.
And how do devs move away from the shackles imposed upon them by a fanbase who is as conservative as I’ve ever come across for anything surrounding any topic that I’ve ever encountered? I feel like, for the most part, PnC games haven’t moved forward for a very long time. Compare that to the platformer genre and the evolution of the Mario franchise, for example. I think a lot of people cocoon themselves around a time period (generally younger years, perhaps teens up to starting a family) and they NEVER come out. It happens with games and music especially I notice, but somehow less with TV shows and films from what I can see. I’m not sure why that is…
I just know that I’ll never be that way (and yes that does sound sanctimonious because it is).
Additionally, I have to imagine that given the timeline of the genre, it must be hard to remove the shackles of many other factors such as the ability to foster belief in publishers, but I don’t know all that stuff.
I don’t see how in a free market a microscopic existing fanbase can impose anything to anyone.
Developers can evolve and are free to propose new products, in they want. It could be possible that the old fanbase will not like these new products but the rest of the market is huge compared to the small fanbase of a niche genre. Telltale did it and it worked for them.
Telltale are an exception. Generally the genre has moved forward very little in comparison to most (or all?) other game genres I can think of. TWP itself was imposed upon through its crowdfunding beginnings. Most devs are big fans of the genre itself which has resulted in a huge amount of pastiche with very little evolution or innovation, so whether or not that’s a direct imposition of a fanbase or a long line of devs simply not being able to escape their own box, I don’t know… but the end result is clear and as such we have a market filled with games that are often pastiches. TWP is not a pastiche in the sense that the guys who made it are the progenitors and not the imitators, but I bet their next projects will do away with some of the things demanded through the kickstarter for this game.
That’s not completely true. A very rabid fan base can kill a game that doesn’t conform to it’s vision. Despite that we were purposely trying to follow classic conventions, there was a lot of push back on stuff from todo lists to pixels not being perfect. That’s not to say it can’t and isn’t being done, but a rabid fanbase can be a huge problem with moving forward and very hard to overcome. What a fan base does is given you a built in market. Without that, you have to spend a lot more money on marketing and PR.
It worked for Tell Tale ONLY because they got a huge license and attracted a large number of people who knew nothing of the genera. A lot of the “old guard” bitch about Tell Tale, and if they had not broken out in a huge way, they would have died. Them breaking out had more to do with the license then any game design decisions they made.
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So what did they do right with their licence that other game companies in the past like Ocean or LJN were less successful with(I mean the reviews were bad, not sure about sales)? Are the games better?
I agree, of course, but I’m sure that along that new road they perfectly realized that they were repositioning the company on the market, making the bitching “old guard” pretty irrelevant and harmless in the long run. They did accept this loss (and for sure they could afford losing the bitching old guard) and they moved on, providing narrative-based games to a larger and different market. Evolution has nothing to do with merits or careful planning, it’s just what happens when a species adapts to a new environment. Even if they got those results by pure chance or luck, it’s still evolution.
Yeah, they are good games, just not what PnC adventure fans wanted. When I say it “ONLY” worked, I’m saying that they could have made the exact same game, but with a original IP and very few would have noticed. TWD got picked up by mainstream press (because the IP was very hot), and it was easy to play, so non-gamers could enjoy it.
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Good point.
…
I’ll also add the disturbing thought that maybe PnC adventure games have already evolved in something different but we (old-guard players) are too focused on the old game mechanics to recognize their new form. (the non-telltale “Life is Strange” comes to mind)
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