[oerhört]

I agree that adventures have stagnated -- but I have not played the Lost Crown yet.

However, Dreamfall, Fahrenheit, Broken Sword 3, Uru, Hotel Dusk and Myst IV all did relatively new things with the format, so I don't know why all the new games insist on following the old norms of LucasArts and Cyan.

(To a westerner, even the Phoenix Wright series felt fresh, although they are highly derivative and mostly derive their structure from 20-year-old japanese adventure games as far as I know.)

I don't know (or rather, don't have the time to start an involved discussion on) how the genre can come alive again or if it is really necessary, but I wanted to comment on one issue that seems to come up time and time again: That other genres are "dumb" or not as intelligent as adventure games. That is rubbish, and just goes to show that the poster holding those claims hasn't understood what goes into creating high-quality games in other genres, or how they should be played.

There is a lot of thought you can put into how you play Street Fighter, or Final Fantasy, or Ninja Gaiden, or Fallout 3, or Halo, or Ridge Racer. Games are not necessarily stupid just because their backstories lack depth.

Edit: Somehow related to this is the fact that the adventure genre's influence can be seen quite clearly all over the place, and especially in RPGs and action games. The genre has also spawned several hybrids, such as the Alone in the Dark genre (survival horror) that to this day still tend to feel like adventures to me. Gregory Horror Show is pretty much a straight-up adventure, but Fatal Frame/Project Zero, Alone in the Dark (1-4) and the Silent Hill series also qualify as very much related to the adventure genre to me.

As such, any discussion about how adventure games should develop is also a discussion of what an adventure game is and should be. But in order to focus a bit, I suggest that we abstain from suggesting incorporating RPG and action game tropes such as shooting and factions. Not because they have no place in a certain product, but because it's more interesting for this particular discussion to have a look at how the well-known distinctly adventure-y features can be done better or expanded in new and unexplored directions.

Edit2: Also, I'd like to point out that arguing on review scores to determine if the genre is dead or not is rather meaningless. It is not commercially dead (people still produce games and make profit), but it's clear to anyone with eyes that it's seen as dead by mainstream gaming coverage, with some notable exceptions (Telltale, Dreamfall, Fahrenheit, Broken Sword etc).