That’s the same thing that I thought when I started to ponder about the need to “update” adventure games to make them more interesting to a larger audience.
To me, most of the other game genres evolved from a technical point of view, but they are pretty much the same stuff that they were decades ago.
So, adventure games could benefit from a similar treatment, losing their relationship with retrogaming (which in my opinion is still strong) and moving on, from both a technological and visual point of view.
The only issue that I see is that making these updates could still not be enough to motivate people to play the resulting games, if the real obstacle is a cultural one: brain-teasing puzzles.
I would exclude them. These are not “technical categories” for programmers, these are categories useful for regular folks to classify games and have some understanding about what to expect.
I wouldn’t put any of those games in the same category as Maniac Mansion, Monkey Island, or Kings Quest for that matter.
That’s like saying, Dr. Venkman and Dana Barret have obvious chemistry on screen, there’s clearly a love interest there, so I will classify Ghostbusters as a Romantic Comedy (it has jokes, and those two have a romantic interest), and put it right up there with You’ve Got Mail, Serendipity, Shakespeare In Love, etc.
Or how about Die Hard, which takes place during a Christmas party and John McClane is trying to get back together with his wife and kids – it’s technically a Family Holiday film, of course (it takes place during the holidays, and it has a family in it, doh!)
I don’t want to start a genre-war here (hehehe, is there such a thing?), but if people traditionally call PnC adventures those from of the kind from Sierra and LucasFilm (among others), they have a certain style and atmosphere emblematic to them, which is missing in games like Myst and Riven.
Do we include Silent Hill and Resident Evil as PnC too? I’ve played those games and trust me, most of what I do is Point and Click in there.
We are talking about point’n’click adventures and not Monkey-Island-like games.
Of course the original Myst and Riven are point’n’click adventures.
The “point’n’click” is a technical aspect describing the main user interactions with the game.
What the hell are you talking about? They are as much point’n’click as the original Grim Fandango (with the difference GF being an actual Monkey-Island-like game).
I disagree, the genre for PnC is not purely a mechanical and technical consideration – it is the style of game. Wikipedia seems to agree with me:
Take a look below that section, look for “Puzzle adventure games,” which uses Myst and the 7th Guest as examples.
-dZ.
P.S. Notice that I said “not purely a technical aspect,” by which I mean that the term comes from the actual pointing and clicking mechanic. However, just having a mouse does not make it PnC automatically, otherwise every single game since the old DOS days would qualify.
Waxworks is a dungeoncrawler. Include one you´ve got to include them all.
The puzzles in Resident Evil and Silent Hill are more in the slide puzzle category. Not that far removed from Myst or Legend Of Zelda. While I wouldn´t include those in general I think they are immensly important in gaming history when it comes to mixing toned down action elements with light (but not too easy) puzzle parts.
On your second point, what I was trying to say is that, if I go to a store to purchase a “puzzle adventure game” expecting something like Myst and I buy Silent Hill instead, I’m going to be more than a little surprised and disappointed!
In other words, these genre classifications are not intended to mark technical qualities of the software, but to aide people understand their contents. They are for people, not for machines, so they are obviously to some extent subjective and a bit arbitrary.
Like I said, I didn’t mean to start a “genre-war” here. It seems we’re not going to agree, but that’s OK.
And I´m totally getting you. But I think the same about Tell Tale games. They are really influential, if it wasn´t for Tell Tale there probably wouldn´t be Until Dawn. But that´s also not what I´m thinking of when I hear the term Point N Click. Then again that´s not what I´m thinking about in regards to Shadow Run Returns (Dragonfall, Hong Kong etc) but that describes what you´re doing to play the game perfectly.
Well, that’s someone’s else description on Wikipedia, I use a different one
I don’t differentiate a lot between Myst-like games and MI-like ones. Although Myst-likes ones are more of the separated-puzzle-kind ones there are games like Lighthouse which is a proper P’n’C adventure for me (e.g. including inventory which you don’t often have in Myst-like ones).
Also I don’t know how could someone say The Last Express isn’t a P’n’C adventure although it being 1st person with Myst-like controls.
Yes, this was bullshit from my side, I don’t know why I thought of it when I tried to remember 1st person adventures (well, it is 1st person).
But some even earlier game from Horrosoft fits: Personal Nightmare. It’s P’n’C and an adventure, with inventory and all but 1st person and no walking character (except NPCs of course).
When I hear Resident Evil I think about tank controls plus shooting and stabbing zombies in their faces. This is not what I link with point’n’click controls at all.
And that would be depending on the particular title of the series more or less wrong. Yeah the controls have absolutly nothing to do with point´n´click but half of your play time you would spend figuring out puzzles, orders to push buttons, reading hint notes and books, sliding around statues, picking up items and using them in correct places and most of all item and resource management.
As far as combinging action and puzzle elements those early survival horror titles are not to be underestimated.
I was thinking about TWP-style adventure games. The problem is that they require a lot of actor animations that are expensive. And once you spend half a million dollars to do them, they will still look obsolete, and people will call you “retro”. And they’ll say the graphics is cheap, even though it isn’t.
I think 2d character animations made sense in 1990 when they were bleeding edge technology. But now, they are big pain for very small gain.
I think today, if you are doing a 2d adventure, it’s pointless to spend money in walking animations and pick-up animations and special-case animations and so on. Just do a game with no animation, a sequence of pictures, and it will be the same to most people who might buy that kind of game.
Yeah but that is what you get when replacing “point’n’click” with “3rd person”.
We normally don’t mean action adventures in style of Lara Croft when we talk about adventure games here.
That most games which came out after our beloved original adventure games took elements from those is without question. This may be inventories, this may be proper puzzles.
Btw. is there some specific Resident Evil game you have in mind? I have to confess I only played RE 1&2 and I have seen one special kind from the series which was a rail shooter.
I had the impression the later ones are similar to those first ones or are even more shooter like.
I´m also mostly familiar with the first 3 (though part 4 and the latest one are also really popular) I believe 5 and 6 are heavy on the action and also happen to be the least popular. People like their action slow in Resident Evil games. Not going out guns ablazing.
But I admit I generally prefer the Silent Hill games, for several gameplay reasons(saving and item management), the general atmosphere and story and those also being even less focused on combat(you play regular people who aren´t really good shots in contrast to muscular elite soldiers) and more on story and puzzles.
