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Old 01-22-2007, 04:14 PM   #11
MoriartyL
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It's not like the old adventures have lost their quality. And it's not like adventures are never made anymore- just rarely. If by "dying" you mean "decreasing in frequency", then yes. Certainly. But no idea ever dies completely, even the worst ones. There's always one or two people who still hold onto it, somewhere in the world. So if by "dying" you mean that someday it will be completely dead, well, of course not. It couldn't possibly.

I think what you're trying to get at, though, is that it's not progressing artistically. You're right there. Most we'll see is a gimmicky game every few years which tries to push the form in a questionable direction and fails.

Here is my opinion; feel free to disagree with it and tear it to shreds. There was never much artistic progress. Even by the end of the graphical adventure's heyday, it had barely progressed past what was being done by early text adventures. Still only the most purely practical verb-based interface, still letting puzzles get in the way of storytelling, still not bothering to use the gameplay for storytelling, still not allowing the player to control pacing. No one was trying to progress, because the more obvious way forward was by just improving the graphics every few years. This was the adventure's undoing: Eventually they couldn't keep up on the graphics front. And having achieved so little on the storytelling front, still not even figuring out how to tell good stories well, the public lost interest.

But as I said, an idea can't die. So I am reasonably confident that eventually (perhaps fifty years from now, perhaps more) someone will make an adventure worth making, and the adventure will very quickly have more life than ever.
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