The topic at hand is an ever re-occuring theme, and you may find many threads like these if you dare to blow off the dust and cobwebs, charge your flashlight and dig deep within these boards' past. Beware, there be grues down there.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Giligan
Not necessarily. It's a matter of taking the genre and running with it rather than changing the formula. Take a game like Mirror's Edge - it uses some of the pre-established rules of a first-person shooter, but it experiments and innovates to be something completely different.
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One of the mistake people usually make when debating this is that they act as if this man-made category of games they're now refering to as "adventure game" has ever been a single, easily-discernible entity, with every game being a carbon copy of one another. Arguments about "changing the genre" abound, are countered by outcries of keeping the A in Adventure, pretty please. It is not like that, I'm sure Colpet could tell you a story or two about it, as should anyone that ever got to play games such as Bad Mojo, Blade Runner, Myst IV, Monkey2, The Pawn, that list goes on and on.
There are games that are 2d, 3d, text. There's games with logic puzzles, there are games without any sort of puzzles. There are games with action, there are games without action. There are games that are being controlled via gamepad, keyboard, mouse. The only thing all of these really have in common is that are being referred to as "adventure game".
So that is that.
Now whilst it'd be unfair not to accredit the vastly different design philosophies between something as strictly narrative-driven as Overclocked and a puzzler like Safecracker, Giligan is right, in a way. With commercial games, there's for the most part two schools of design at work here, one being the LucasArts/Sierra kind of way, the other being the Cyan kind of way. And there's very little being done with those respectively, excpect stripping both down to their utmost basics - point&click interfaces, object/logic puzzles, some kind of narrative, and so on. Which is a little odd, considering their heritage.
Between the aging Sierra quest series of old, which Sierra used to churn out at the pace of an assembly line, they did vastly different kinds of stuff. All kinds of stuff. Take the pseudo-realtime murder mysteries of Laura Bow, playing out like an interactive stageplay rather than a click-thru movie, for instance. A game in which the murder and characters are the very core of the puzzle, in which missing out on vital events is part of the game if your sleuthing skills weren't up to scratch. Or Police Quest, a police officer simulator trapped in all the limitations of its parser fueled engine,
resulting in the second clunkiest car driving mechanics in any video game, ever. Makes you wonder how that would look like given today's technology. Probably a bit like GTA meets CSI, a mix of driving cruisers, taking witness acounts, cross-questioning convicts and munching sweets at Lytton's Dunkindonuts in between, all without ever needlessly assuming the player to be any kind of useful at playing Left4Dead.
Still, all the fresh and original ideas won't do anything to anyone if the package just isn't sound. It makes you wonder what would have been if all the sound ideas of In Memoriam weren't trapped in what looks a fairly standard murder mystery, for instance. It's not a question of keeping it "real", as it never was any kind of "real". It is about finding ideas, taking a deep breath and running with them, whether they be genuinely new or not.
