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Originally Posted by mszv
On the Uru controls, my personal theory is that Cyan didn't want to scare off people who didn't play other kinds of games so they implemented the controls with the arrows. I can't remember - couldn't you remap them to the more normal WASD setup? Then there was that panning, all of a sudden the camera moves around to give you a different view...
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You were very limited in how you were able to remap the keys, but the main problem was the camera/control ratio. The camera was 'dynamically cinematically fixed' - that is, it followed the same idea as the Broken Sword 3 camera, where it interfered with total player movement and freedom. The camera didn't stay permanently behind the avatar, as in Max Payne (over-the-shoulder style), but at certain moments left the avatar to pan around. That in effect produced a bit of disorientation for us, the players. Now, with a gamepad a lot of that would have been alleviated - it's easier to control a 3D character in a constantly shifting view with an analog stick than it is with a keyboard/mouse setup.
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I have a theory that some adventure gamers aren't "in the game", all that much....
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That's a very good theory. The gameplay in your standard adventure actually takes place in the player's mind, thus affecting the design and behaviour of standard adventures. Because the gameplay is more 'cerebral' instead of visceral not much emphasis needs to be paid to anything dynamic going on on the screen. That's how many adventure games have always been done.
However, it wasn't - and clearly shouldn't be - necessarily the only way to experience an adventure game. It's just this way happened to become the most prefered way. Somehow the possibility of such things as real time and some reflex oriented challenges was subsumed by the 'popularity' of strict puzzle preferences. What I'm interested to know is how that happened. Was it more economical to just design a puzzle into a game rather than introduce an action oriented obstacle, especially during the advent of real time 3D graphics?
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Getting back to Myst V. If you want Myst V to be in the tradition of oldtime Myst, then it's 2D and videos of actual people. It's sort of a cross between a movie and a game. You don't move when the characters are in your space. It's a combination of static screenshots, and a tiny little bit of animation, which sticks out because there is so darn little of it. Now I love Myst with a deep undying passion, but I just can't do that anymore in a new game. I want more stuff in the game to make the world seem alive, including how the game interacts with me. I also want to walk where I want to walk, and see what I want to see. Let me navigate the space.
All that "in the game", "not in the game" thing - that's a part of the whole adventure game genre. It drives me crazy, actually. I like it that the games proceed at a slow pace (I like that quite a lot, actually), but it drives me absolutely batty that, so much of the time you play an adventure game, you aren't really "in the game". I don't have an answer for that.
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One person's idea of immersion is not necessarily another person's idea.
