[Marek]

Thanks, Steve. And I almost entirely agree with your points.

The Wii can really blur the line between what is commonly seen as "adventure" and what is commonly seen as "minigame" or "action". I think overall though the Wii can lead to a tighter integration of all the elements, making it possible to create adventure games that are "purer" (read: more focused on adventure gaming) than before, but are still diverse in gameplay.

It is true the majority of "adventure gamers" want to play games on the PC. I very much doubt a large percentage of AG's readership, for instance, will buy a Wii. (Their loss. ) However, I think developers should not limit themselves by thinking there is only one market for adventure games. There will be people who have the Wii and who are looking for games that are interesting but easy to play, and adventure games really fit that description. The Brain Training crowd would love certain Myst-style games. The Warioware/Trauma Center/Elebits etc. crowd might be very interested in cartoon style adventures. There's a big mainstream audience on DS already that I think is very much interested in the sort of things adventure games have to offer.

I am writing this at a weird time, so I hope that made any sense.

(By the way, I can't comment from an editorial point of view on why or why not Mr. Smoozles should or should not be covered here. That's not my departement anymore. )

[Cycloptis]

Steve Ince covers all of my main concerns, although I have a few other points to add.

The ideology behind Nintendo's DS and Wii is to appeal to a much wider variety of audiences. I, for one, am happy about it - it's time that we move away from the "nothing but violence" law that we see all too often.

My problem is that their ideology also includes making games easier and simpler. While the potential growth of a mainstream adventure game market is promising, it also adds to the worry of whether or not our precious games may lack the difficulty or strong narrative that they're commonly associated with.

If this new mainstream adventure market also rejuvenates the demand for a hardcore market, then all the better. Otherwise, I'm not super-excited (although I'm not super-excited about the traditionally PC-centric genre moving away, but that's just me getting way ahead of myself.)

[Steve Ince]

Marek, don't get me wrong, if someone asked me to write an adventure for the DS or the Wii I'd jump at the chance and for many of the reasons you talk about - the possibility of trying new methods of interfacing with the game and new puzzle opportunities. But the PC will always have plenty of mileage if the games are developed well.

One thing your article touched on was the passive nature of the interface and how there was little to do in an ongoing sense (something which Nutso addresses in some ways). Although this made me think again about interaction density, it also made me think a little deeper and I realised that for many (if not most) adventure players it's the actual thinking (as opposed to reacting) aspect that they enjoy about this type of game. Thinking about the next move, thinking about the puzzles, thinking about the story, the characters, etc. For a gamer who doesn't like to think in this way, you'll never convince them of the value of point and click adventure games, so your arguments with your friends were always going to struggle.

How this ties in with interaction density is interesting - if the density is too low there is too much thinking time and this becomes counter-productive. The player becomes bored with moving through locations that are there just for being pretty because they've done all the thinking they can without going over things again.

High interaction density not only gives the player more to do in any location, but also keeps the thinking aspect of the gaming ticking over at a good rate.

Originally Posted by Marek

(By the way, I can't comment from an editorial point of view on why or why not Mr. Smoozles should or should not be covered here. That's not my departement anymore. )

That's fair enough and perhaps I shouldn't have brought it up, but when I see Dreamfall and Fahrenheit getting tons of coverage, it makes me wonder if I've done something to offend. I'm not asking for you all to love it, but to at least give Nutso a fair shake.

[Scott Nixon]

Originally Posted by jacog

Perhaps a good start would just be to port existing adventures to run on the Wii, to give them a wider audience. Then you basically just replace the mouse with the controller. It's not much and people may cuss about it, but at least you'll have a few more people who will know that there are such things as adventure games.

I'd guess this would be the first likely step before you see any dual-sku dev going on for most publishers/devs (with the probable exception of quantic, et al)... also, nutso is fantastic!

[Steve Ince]

Originally Posted by Scott Nixon

I'd guess this would be the first likely step before you see any dual-sku dev going on for most publishers/devs (with the probable exception of quantic, et al)...

To do a proper dual-sku game, you'd probably have to lead on the Wii and then work out how to adapt all that cool stuff in a way that would suit the PC, too.

also, nutso is fantastic!

Thanks Scott, that good of you to say. (I didn't pay him, honest. )

[Jackal]

There are a couple side issues in this thread (Nutso, editorials, etc.) that I haven't addressed, not because I can't or don't want to, but because I'm trying not to derail the original topic here. If anyone wants to pursue these further, please feel free to start a new thread to discuss them. I'd be more than happy to do so. I just don't want reaction to this article being lost in the shuffle.

Steve, I don't see that making interactions more tactile replaces or even conflicts with the "thinking" part of adventures, but simply enhances the exploration aspect of it. Walk into a new environment in any adventure and the first thing you're going to do is scour it top to bottom looking for useful stuff. Only after that is any thinking required, and that would be true in either a P&C or Wii-style game. The Wii just offers (potentially) more ways to make the doing more interesting. Even P&C games have started incorporating small elements of this. I think it was Myst 4 that let players physically turn book pages and open drawers with custom cursor actions.

Just like direct control in general, I think the idea is to give players a much better sense that it's THEIR adventure - not the developer's, not the character's. If there's a drawer to be rummaged through, then let ME rummage, not let the game automate it for me. If there's a crate to be moved (), let me sweat out moving it myself to feel like I'm actually there. I don't think there's any amount of interaction density that could compensate for that.

Of course, for some, direct control even in its current form is too difficult to manage, which then has an anti-immersion effect. That would be magnified as a problem on the Wii in an example like Marek's, but it's doubtful that anyone who would actually own a console would find it particularly difficult. Again, we're not necessarily dealing with the same PC-only crowd that play the current PC-only adventures.

One problem I can foresee in an example like Marek's is the inevitable result of making something more "real". And that's tedium. After the initial rush of being able to turn doorknobs for yourself, you may find yourself cursing the 20th closed door you encounter. Devs would have to be mindful of a pretty precarious balance.

[Steve Ince]

Originally Posted by Jackal

There are a couple side issues in this thread (Nutso, editorials, etc.) that I haven't addressed, not because I can't or don't want to, but because I'm trying not to derail the original topic here. If anyone wants to pursue these further, please feel free to start a new thread to discuss them. I'd be more than happy to do so. I just don't want reaction to this article being lost in the shuffle.

Sorry, it wasn't my intention to try and derail this thread in any way. I actually started a separate thread elsewhere, but Jake decided to merge it with this one, which may have been better left alone.

One problem with the discussion of the article in the Site Feedback forum is that it doesn't strike me as site feedback, but is a discussion about the subject matter of the article. This would have been better if it ran in the Adventure forum as more people hang around there and would be of wider interest.

Steve, I don't see that making interactions more tactile replaces or even conflicts with the "thinking" part of adventures, but simply enhances the exploration aspect of it.

I may have not been clear enough, but this was not what I was trying to suggest, merely voicing my thoughts, expanding on the interaction density ideas and applying it to what most people like about adventures - the cerebral challenge as opposed to the reactive challenge of action games. I was actually trying to develop support for some of the things Marek was saying in general terms and not specific to the Wii or DS.

[Jackal]

Well, for better or worse, this is where we discuss article content. Of course, there's already an Adventure thread about the Wii's potential, so we're a bit all over the place right now.

Originally Posted by Steve Ince

I may have not been clear enough, but this was not what I was trying to suggest, merely voicing my thoughts, expanding on the interaction density ideas and applying it to what most people like about adventures - the cerebral challenge as opposed to the reactive challenge of action games. I was actually trying to develop support for some of the things Marek was saying in general terms and not specific to the Wii or DS.

Ah, okay, I guess I'm closer to understanding now. You're saying they basically serve the same underlying goals for people who prefer a cerebral sort of gameplay, then? That I certainly agree with. Just not that they fill the same roles in doing so, since they're not at all exclusive.

[Steve Ince]

Originally Posted by Jackal

Well, for better or worse, this is where we discuss article content. Of course, there's already an Adventure thread about the Wii's potential, so we're a bit all over the place right now.

And THAT thread was about a different article altogether... Ah, well.

Ah, okay, I guess I'm closer to understanding now. You're saying they basically serve the same underlying goals for people who prefer a cerebral sort of gameplay, then? That I certainly agree with. Just not that they fill the same roles in doing so, since they're not at all exclusive.

And I think that the cerebral challenge is at the heart of the adventure definition, regardless of the visual style, story style, interface style, etc.

What the Wii gives us the opportunity to do is have that cerebral challenge at the same time as having fun with this new interface in the same way that the DS does. And this is exactly what I'm trying to do with my games, even though they are (currently) only slated for the PC.

[Simo Sakari Aaltonen]

Great article, Marek, as usual.

What concerns me here is the issue of freedom, or the prospective lack of it. This is the direction adventure games have been heading since Gabriel Knight 3. Fahrenheit, much as I enjoyed the novel gameplay in the more relaxed sections of the story, was pretty much on rails, and what Charles Cecil has said of the new Broken Sword sounds similarly depressing.

While acknowledging the shortcomings of the timed puzzles in BS3, he said there will be timed puzzles in the next instalment, only of a different sort: rather than simple twitching to be carried out in a second or two, longer sequences to be completed within a set timeframe. This is like going from a rat in a cage being given electric shocks in order to elicit a push of a button, to a horse in a harness. I certainly derive no enjoyment from such psychological pressure or limitation of freedom. (I doubt most gamers do.)

I worry that the Wii might accelerate this trend. What if freedom (or sense of freedom) will grow even scarcer in games? What if the future has all of us simply in harness, flailing at the air with our hands, with precious little to actually engage our sense of adventure? Which seems to me rather important in an adventure game.

The potential offered by Wii is fantastic. But the technology will only be as good as the uses it is put to, which will be only as good as the vision of those wielding its business end. The way the industry has been going for a long time now (present company excluded) does not fill me with confidence in this latter regard.

Many developers seem to think a good game is all about pressure and tight constraint. Maybe there are some game types where that is true. But what excited me back in 1987 in Zak McKracken was the giddy sense of freedom. And that is still the number one thing I look for in an adventure game, or any game.

Should Wii become a tool for building on earlier-established concepts of freedom or for establishing entirely new ones, we have every reason to be optimistic. But few would want simply a more evolved version of Simon Says.

[Jake]

I don't think that the issue of "having to think" is as much of a road block in the average gamer's mind as one might imagine. You can't complete Half Life or Zelda by just holding down the attack button and the jump button - it's impossible. Those games are more action oriented than an adventure game obviously (as in, its impossible to complete either a Half Life or Zelda game without climbing on things and attacking things), but you have to be engaged as a player to complete them. You have to be watching for clues, looking around your environments, and figuring out the combination of events required to progress. Shooting everything in sight will do nothing but put little pretty looking holes in the wall. You have to think.

I bring these two examples up because those are two of the most popular, well known gaming series of all time.

In Half Life, or in Zelda, the average player (against all odds) doesn't dislike the puzzle parts, the thinking parts, or the parts where the story, puzzles, and gameplay all intersect. In fact, most people love them, and credit those parts of the games as what makes them unique and worth playing in the first place.

I don't think Marek is arguing at all in favor of removing the thinking and contemplating puzzle solutions from adventure games, or even removing the emphesis from those things.

He's pointing out, really, what everyone has been trying to point out in every "progressive" adventure game editorial for the last four or five years - that for all their potential atmosphere, storytelling prowess, and yes, mind-bending puzzle filled gameplay, those good elements are buried, one level down, beneath a weirdly abstracted unengaging play control interface carried over from twenty years ago. In other words, adventure games contain - in huuge quantities - some of the most beloved aspects of other hugely popular games, the problem is that unlike those hugely popular games actually revealing them, or interacting with them, is hugely mundane. Then, when developers have tried to scrape away the mundane, they may have accidentally scraped too deep and cut out the good bits, or maybe (to further mar this already weak analogy), after scraping bits away they forgot to actually replace them with some new bits that are equally functional or, you know, actually better than what was there before.

Many attempts to "modernize" the adventure genre in the last three or four years have revolved around reducing the amount of actions the player can do, "streamlining" the control interface to make it more console like, more cinematic, but what's actually ended up getting cut out is all the player's potential unique interactions which make the puzzles seem ... interactive ... in the first place. Marek's article points out that with the Wii, one could take a different tack - namely, going in entirely the opposite direction.

The complex and varied interactions one does in an adventure game - the tools you as a player have to solve the puzzles - are one of the thigs that make adventure games feel like adventure games, so maybe instead of cutting them all out to make the game like everything else, it's worth considering taking those classic interactions and running with them.

Marek's point is that instead of simplifying, trimming and streamlining an AGs interface and structure, instead of scraping it all away in hopes of replicating the seemingly minimalistic controls and mechanics of some rubbish like EA's Batman Begins game, on the Wii almost all of that old classic adventuring interface can not only be kept intact, but be sexed up! Suddenly a pick up action or an open action could be adventure gaming's equivilent of a sword swing in Zelda. Rifling through a drawer could exist on the same tactile level as swinging a quick 180 and looking up over a conspicuous crate in a corner in Half Life. I don't mean this in terms of things being more "action packed," but in terms of the visceral, tactile "I'm actually doing something" experience one feels when doing them. Who knows how well it would work in practice, but it's a really cool theory.

[Simo Sakari Aaltonen]

I totally agree adventure games need to become more visceral than the click-and-sit-back-while-the-ego-inches-forth-or-the-characters-gab-for-half-an-hour-without-any-input-from-you-the-player syndrome that started infesting the genre around the time of Curse of Monkey Island.

There have been some worthwhile attempts at making the actual gameplay more involving, and not all of them focused on "action". Gabriel Knight 3 experimented with a freefloating camera and Fahrenheit explored some intriguing control possibilities.

Just to clarify, I never did think the article was advocating upping the "action" quotient in favour of involving content. I believe the kinds of games Marek would like to see for the Wii are what I would like to see.

I think the Wii has terrific potential. I only worry because the games industry has a way of underestimating its audience and, consistent with that attitude, it may be that the introduction of a new controller will mean less content, for starters at least. During the honeymoon period action games will likely predominate. I worry the old genre prejudices will simply eat up this gaming system as well.

Having said that, what intrigues me as much as anyone is that with the Wii, control and content have the potential to become more like a single thing than ever before. The freedom issue I commented on actually has more to do with design philosophy than with technology. But as we all know, in this business technology often dictates content, or lack of it.

[Erkki]

Great article, Marek!

Originally Posted by Jackal

One problem I can foresee in an example like Marek's is the inevitable result of making something more "real". And that's tedium. After the initial rush of being able to turn doorknobs for yourself, you may find yourself cursing the 20th closed door you encounter. Devs would have to be mindful of a pretty precarious balance.

I also think this could be a problem. But no more of a problem than walking to 20 different closed doors that are there just for decoration and hearing "That doesn't work" when I try to open them (I'm thinking of a Broken Sword game, the 3rd one probably).

Still, if there are any actions like that that get repeated often, those should be very quickly and easily doable, so that opening the 20th door would need only a quick push or something. However, picking a lock in "Thief IV: Wii Garret" would require some more elaborate movements

[Legolas813]

I thought this little conversation was interesting. You see a lot of this over at major gaming sites.

Point and click adenture games ?? I thought they had gone extinct witht the coming of the last gen of consoles . I hope they dont make one for the wii *fingers crossed*

i was afraid this was going to happen. these "games" have plagued the pc for years, and now thanks to the wii, their infection could spread to the consoles. the horror...

Trauma center can almost be considered that kind of game

No it can't, because Trauma center is actually fun to play.

http://www.gamespot.com/pages/forums...ic_id=24909292