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Originally Posted by Steve Ince
Having said that, however, we've seen some encouraging signs in the last year that the adventure genre can take encouragement from, so let's hope it continues.
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Let's hope.
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The problem with 3D when it first started taking off was that it was difficult to get real background and character quality. 2D painted backgrounds or pre-rendered 3D backgrounds gave a much higher visual quality, which is what adventure players had come to expect. Full 3D wasn't a good option for most adventure developers.
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My take from this is that adventure developers, publishers, and gamers erroneously pitted the burgeoning real time 3D format against the already established 2D and pre-rendered 3D backgrounds, which were considered the benchmarks for a good looking [adventure] game back then.
I'm thinking that instead of that they - we - should have understood real time 3D for what it is, a developing and evolving way of experiencing games. The technology may have been new and in its baby stages, but it was definitely not static. Not at all static. As we've witnessed in the past decade, the more advances there have been in technology, the more evolved and developed real time 3D has become.
Concurrent with all that technological advancement was the increasing popularity of 3D not just on the PC but also on generations of consoles, thus the demand for it, until its establishment as the dominant format for games today, much to the commercial detriment of many adventure games stubbornly sticking to 2D backgrounds.
And I think that partly explains why many adventure games now don't get the attention they used to (possibly another reason is that adventure games offer a much slower pace of gameplay). 3D is perceived by many of us gamers as more exciting, immersive, and visually pleasing for its dynamism. It also, of course, offers far more freedom of exploration and interaction than classic 2D.
