[Pyuras]

But that is exactly the problem: "making the most of what we have". The adventure genre as we know it for the past 20 years or so is really a tired formula. Even games with a high budget (Escape from Monkey Island pops to mind) have fail to sparkle any life in the genre, because they lack innovation. What bothers me in AGs today is that the genre isn't moving forward like other genres, and that is mainly our fault: the players. We are very resistant to chance, even small ones (for example, look at how many people here in this forum are instantly put off just for the thought of a game having some actions elements). I think bringing some elements (not necessarily only actions elements, of course) from other genres into AGs could really benefit the genre and attract a new audience to it (provided they're done well, not the mediocre "actions sequences" we're used to get. i.e: combat in Dreamfall, sequences in Bone and Sam & Max S1).

For me, AGs are about three things mainly: Great Story, Exploration of a interesting World and clever puzzles. As long as a game has that, it doesn't really matter to me if it's Parser, P'n'C, 2D, 2.5D, 3D, or whatever. Games like Soul Reaver or Beyond Good & Evil are good examples of genre-crossing games that still maintain most of the elements that make adventure games great.

I know this must have being discussed thousands of times here before, but as long as we're not willing to accept that the genre must evolve, we'll be stuck with a load of mediocre games with very, very few great ones.