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Originally Posted by After a brisk nap
I do play a lot of "Tomb Raider style" games (in fact, the last few commercial games I played were Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, POP: Two Thrones, Beyond Good & Evil, Psychonauts, Fahrenheit, Dreamfall and the Tomb Raider Legends demo, so I guess lately I only play that type of games), but I agree that direct control is a bit micro-managey for adventure games. In the best 3rd-person 3D games, moving around is a thrill. It's just plain fun to run along walls, jump, twist, skid, zigzag, climb, crouch and dive (and sometimes fly, float, bounce and roll, depending on the game); throwing the camera around to inspect every angle, or just to admire the view.
I haven't seen an adventure game that offers that thrill (to any great degree), and I'm not sure it's possible while remaining a real adventure (though improving the camera controls would do a great deal to help). That leaves guiding every step of my character as essentially a chore.
I played Dreamfall pretty much all day yesterday, and it certainly did occur to me that I had better things to do than making sure Zoe could cross the street without getting stuck behind a crate. Or, rather, that I wish there were better things to do in the game than making sure Zoe didn't get stuck behind crates.
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That's exactly what I didn't understand in Crapstorm's post (I was not so much saying that he is unfair to
people, but rather that he is not giving the
interface enough credit). Outside of hardcore simulation genre, I think majority of games strive to have as much transparent, and as little overwhelming, controls as possible. In particular, I always associated direct control with a highly *fluent* movement (as opposed to step-by-step, as you guys present it). In a perfect world, I mean. In practice, of course, it may not work because of either bad design decisions or player's lack of skill (or both), but that doesn't mean direct control is
inherently a more micro-managey option. In
Moment of Silence p'n'c also felt like a micro-management chore to me, but the problem lied in bad pathfinding, not the point'n'click as such.
As for "pure" adventure games where moving (in this case, crawling
) around is a joy in itself,
Bad Mojo instantly comes to mind.
