NEW! Yahtzee's take on adventure games' history
 

As I know Yahtzee can always provoke a good discussion in these forums...

During the recent AdventureX adventure games expo, the voice of Yahtzee presented his take on history and evolution of adventure games. Here's the whole thing recorded, available courtesy of the AdventureX organizers:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpNSlzk80HY

Some interesting opinions/evaluations that got my attention:

- Adventure games are basically all story, no gameplay. Possibly the only game genre without gameplay.

- The idea of adventure games is to extrapolate basic interactivity you can have in games (not only adventure games) - i.e. "use key on door"

- Point & click interfaces are "for babbies" - you can get to the solution by brute force. Text parsers were a much smarter way to play adventure games.

Well, it might've been a nice little lecture for someone named Captain Obvious. But for a critic there was no analytics, no suggestion or prognosis made whatsoever. What was the point? To declare adventure genre dead again? Or Yahtzee just felt nostalgic? In this case I hope to see more of Chzo series :)

he is not a critic. cant treat what is fundamentally comedic internet entertainment too seriously.

he is a clever writer who makes people laugh using the medium of games, and though makes a lot of good points while doing so, i doubt he is looking to be more than that.

It's like listening to Charlie Brooker talk through his nostrils.

I certainly think adventure games have a lot of room for improvement rather than just integrating action gaming with adventure/RPG elements like they do today. The problem with trying to stuff adventure elements into an FPS or third person action box is that it creates an awfully bipolar game. Look at Catherine!

I also saw that with Uncharted 3 last year where you have this very detailed story and character development strung together by long, repetitive padded combat sequences that completely take you out of that experience.

We rarely have games where the narrative is at the centre of the design. Cinematic platformers have been able to do this for years with titles like Out of this World, Ico and Limbo. In those games your gameplay tells the story because the mechanics of the game are defined BY the story and not the genre.

I see some of the savvy designers already know that. I mean, in the past two years we've had Ghost Trick, Heavy Rain and L.A. Noire and those games all fall into the same genre of "adventure" but have wildly different mechanics. It'll be interesting to see how games develop this way because I don't see this as just reviving "adventure", I see it as the next step in making games what they should be: art.