[imisssunwell]

@Intrepid Homoludens,

I read your article(s) last night and it is interesting. If I understand correctly you wrote this pre-Dreamfall/Fahrenheit, which I think are cool games, but actually apart from these two I don't think you missed too much. Spending time with ME ended up being my choice as well, the game quality speaks for itself.

Your article(s) take up some space and it would be impossible to discuss every single point you touch within reasonable space, more or less I agree with your remarks, some bulletpoints from my part,

* happy to see other people saying as well that patience is what is required for AGs not a PhD in particle physics.

* graphics in AGs could admittedly use some change, as you say, during the early 90s they had some of the best graphics, best gaming interfaces (they were also among the first games to have MT 32 sound and add voice acting) but the standards bar has raised a fair bit since 1991

* AGs should provide things to do while the player's main progression is fhalted and there should be more than one way to pass an obstacle (non-linearity), choices should affect the world/continuation of the story.

*

any illusion of choice, of exploration, of interaction, of discovery -- especially by people who can't read and infer directly into the abstracted scripts of the game -- is completely obliterated..

*

The golden days of Lucas Arts and Sierra are pretty much done, so it seems pointless to cling to them and demand that they produce games that are carbon copies of what we had in 1995

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It must never be about the arbitrarily imposed prisons of flat 2D graphics, embarrassingly unskilled 3D graphics, point-&-click interface, and tired slider puzzles

In your article series you also touched promotion/disctribution & pricing issues, which I did not touch upon this thread, not because I don't consider them very important but because a better distribution system won't fix a bad game (but it can make a good game shine). I may start another thread on distribution systems sometime in the not-so-far future, being both a fan of retail distribution and online (I think they are both needed) and totally against restrictive & invasive DRM (not *all* drm, Steam is fine by me), I'd like to see what other people think about games distribution. Pricing is also very important, iphone quality games should imho have iphone game prices, that's usually 1-2 Euros. Publishers imho should be taking in consideration the distribution method when considering pricing, online distro is cheaper & it's practically rental, so prices should be "steam prices" for the AAA games and alot less for games whose quality is not on par. I promise to start another thread on all these interesting topics but since they are not AG specific (not that I don't find AGs lacking in these departments as well), I won't expand more on this here


Also some posters mentioned some recent AGs do not use recent ideas but are rather implementing known ideas which were somewhat confined to the Japanese market so far. While something entirely new is very welcome, to people , like e.g. myself, who had little exposure to Japanese culture this is "new" and I find it nice that such schemes are entering more mainstream channels.