[Intrepid Homoludens]

Originally Posted by gray pierce

Damn! I know I shouldn't ve used the words "the masses" it's like the most snobbish word out there but you hear it so much these days. 'movies for the masses, music for the masses' so I thaught 'why not games for the masses?'
Anyways poor choice of words.

I suspected as much.

The question I aksed was do we want people to talk about AGs that way? That's a question not a statement. You say yes, okay that's fine. But let me just say if I were the person who designed that game I'd be sorely dissapointed seeing all my work of coming up with a good story and fine puzzles vanish into thin air.

I don't know if assigning blame over that, as some people have done, solves anything. As far as I know games that involve things like exploration and discovery and story have been marketed as adventure games since the early 90s. Tomb Raider was categorized as an adventure game, and that title was released in 1996. You could say that what those two guys on the train were discussing was not the kind of adventure game you yourself would play, but in many people's minds that game still qualifies as an adventure game.

So who's right about it? The traditionalists who play only point-&-clickers? Publishers like Eidos that market Tomb Raider as an adventure game? Current games like Uncharted that are also marketed as an adventure game? Is there actually a much more inclusive definition of "adventure game" that some people vehemently oppose? Inclusive in that it can also be about action alongside puzzle solving?

I'm not saying that making games like Heavy Rain is impossible. I haven't played Heavy Rain(kinda hard without a PS3) but I have played Dreamfall and immensely enjoyed it (I remember calling it the best game ever made) so yes absolutely these games should and will be made I just hope they won't stand in the way of the smaller more traditional AGs. Obviously you seem to think not. I hope you're right. I really do

LOL! Do you realize we've been having the exact same conversation as we did five years ago? Ten years ago?

You know, when I wrote The Cold Hotspot five years ago there was a controversy going on about the direction that the adventure game genre might have been taking. With real time 3D games like Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon and other similar titles there was a quite a heated discussion here at AG and at other adventure game sites. Some of us were freaking out or just outright furious that our "beloved" 2D genre may be killed off in favour of 3D graphics and - *GASP* - dumbed down action sequences!!!

Well, fast forward to 2010. What do you see? Look at the AG main page and tell me if none of the recent and upcoming games featured in reviews and previews are in traditional 2D point-&-click.

The same thing happened over 10 years ago with the advent of Gabriel Knight 3, which as we know was in real time 3D. People were freaking out and screaming bloody murder back then, too, that their genre was gonna be bulldozed by 3D and - *GASP* - dumbed down action sequences!!! Did anything happen that even remotely resembled that? (eventually The Longest Journey supplanted Gabriel Knight 3 as "The Next Great Adventure Game" and many traditionalists celebrated this because TLJ wasn't in 3D; LOL!)

In fact, there were others who also stated what you stated: "I hope you're right. I really do."

In other words, essentially nothing has changed. That's why I stated that I honestly don't know what you're complaining about and why.

Finally to make it a bit more personal I might have the wrong idea of (let's stick to that awful word) "the masses" as I'm living in a very small town and before that have lived in large city but in a really bad neighbourhood. In fact in our country it's considered a ghetto. So maybe I've just meet the wrong kind of gamers thus far.

Well, let's just say you hadn't yet met a very large section of gamers and realized that they love playing a variety of game types. In fact, many of us here at AG also play RPGs, first person shooters, strategy games, racing games, side scrollers, etc.