A vision for adventure games on Nintendo Wii
 

I just had to come out of my hibernation to comment this article. It's like a breath of fresh air for the site after all the reviews/previews being posted lately. Not that there's anything wrong with reviews and previews, but articles like this one is something I think the site has needed for a good while now.

So thanks a million Marek for putting it together. There's definitely a potential here, so I'm really hoping adventure game developers will catch on and take a shot at it.


Next up, Top 20 Adventure Games of All-Time - The 2006 Edition, by Evan Dickens!


... asking for too much? Okay... I'll go...

I agree. It's great to have an article that's genuinely forward-looking and will (with any luck) spark some debate.

Although I'm not convinced that "instinctually" is a word.... ;)

I guess instinctively I wrote instinctually. :P

Great article.I agree with most of it. I remember when I was playing Fahrenheit, the Wiimote had been recently revealed, and thinking was perfect for it.

My major concern is that only Japanese developers are making adventure games for the DS, the same thing could happen for Wii.

This leads to another question, why don't the traditional PC developers (Kheops, Cyan, Revolution, etc) risk doing something for the DS (and later the Wii) ? Is the development cost high?

Phoenix Wright sold pretty well, I think, at least it's getting a sequel, although it probably isn't very expensive, it's only a translation...

Good article, but I'm concerned about how well such direct control would work in a third-person game. All of these little actions rely on the identification of the player with his character, which doesn't make much sense in the context of a regular adventure. Try picturing a scene where you see the character in third-person from a nice angle, and now think about how this type of control could possibly work. I just don't see it.

Now, first-person adventures absolutely would use Wii's controller well. I can see all that twisting and turning being a lot of fun, and effectively giving all the verbs of a text adventure but keeping it simple and intuitive. The D-pad on the remote itself would be fine for movement ala Myst V, and the motion sensor could control the avatar's hand, and probably camera control as well. Sounds like the evolution of the Myst 3/4 system to me, not anything groundbreaking.

Thanks for the positive feedback.

Wilco: I was trying to keep the article focused on the ideas themselves, but you are right. As much as I like what Capcom and Cing are doing, I really wish western developers would get into Wii development.

Developing for Wii is not as expensive, in terms of assets and programming, as developing for Xbox 360 or Playstation 3. Getting a Wii dev kit is easy. (I hope some adventure developers are reading that.) I know of a certain company with no track record at all that got one from Nintendo simply after meeting with them at E3.

MoriartyL: interesting point. I definitely think most Wii adventures would work best in first person, or a combination of first person and third person (think Tex Murphy). I haven't fully wrapped my head around that one yet though.

Something I also didn't touch upon in the article is how gameplay could be added to dialog sequences. (I'm thinking gestures and such.)

I watched the two videos. At first my mind immediately rejected the thing as a gimmick for people who walk into a game arcade and go straight for Whack-a-Mole, but I eventually started to think in terms of how we can make adventure games utilise the thing effectively sans cheese.

Myst-style games could use this well I think. Any type of manipulate-knobs-and-levers activities could make really good use of it. I think of the Mangree puzzle in Myst IV for example. While rotating those frigging sound system knobs with the mouse I was secretly hoping I could use an old Atari Paddle instead.

With a Wii controller, I imagine just click-holding to grab the knob, and then rotate as one would in real life.

(tangeant: Wii - Is that pronounced like "oui" and in that case do the French youth pronounce the console name as "ouay" ?) :)

Third person games? Not too sure ...

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.

Replacing the pointer control with the Wii for the mouse is easy enough, then the basic game experience stays pretty much the same. And you could update all the first-person manipulation puzzles to be more life-like and objects seem more tangeable.

But after that how does one capitalise on the thing in a non-gimmicky way I ask ye? And if you make the game too Wii controller dependant, making the game for multiple platforms becomes hackish and contrived.

Congratulations, you have been dugg. Let's hope you can handle the traffic.

I'm surprised the author resisted the temptation of using the "Wiision for adventure games " title for his article :D

Great article. For the Third Person, I assume a dual control scheme might work. Use Nunchuck for the direct control, while use the Wiimote for all other interaction, e.g. push, pull, pick up, give, turn on/off, handling inventory etc.

Okay being a huge fan of Nintendo, and a huge fan of Adventure Games I was excited at the prospect of the possibility of having a REAL adventure game come to a console.

The Wii (pronounced Whee!) would be the perfect console for such games as given the many evidences in the article. The best thing is too that you wouldn't even have to do the big budget thing as the other gaming companies would because Nintendo is making the Virtual Console in which you can download any game to the system (for which they already have a ton of old school games lined up for it). Basically with that set up someone could make a decent adventure game and set it to dowload to the system or even port a classic one.

Anyway I had to add my two cents worth to this. Great article.

Exactly. Character movement would probably be best handled through direct control (joystick on the nunchuck), but interaction with the enviroment could retain some elements of point and click.

Mory, look at Fahrenheit, it can work in 3rd person.

Oh, and that was really a nice article, Marek.

[x] Yes
[ ] Other

Fine article, Marek. :)

Woohoo! I was hoping someone would fill out their feedback form at the door. ;)

It's good to know you guys like this article. I wanted to do it since about a year ago but I somehow resisted actually writing it. Maybe I'll do the occasional editorial again for AG.

Using a joystick with point-and-click (a la Super Mario Galaxy) could work extremely well, but I don't think that's the sort of thing that Marek was talking about. The article was referring to extremely direct, immersive controls over the verbs. The similarity to Fahrenheit has not escaped my attention, but that system was messy. Often Lucas would do an action only after you had already completed it yourself. So you didn't really feel like you were the one doing it, and the whole thing became pretty gimmicky. Since the Wii's controller is much more precise for this sort of thing, the player will naturally expect (and demand) that the character's movements be immediate and relate directly (or as close as possible) to his own hand motions. And that I don't see working. Marek suggested that the verb system could be retained from modern adventures with the movement itself added on top, but that would seem redundant.

You know what, here's an idea. Say holding the A button temporarily moved the camera right behind the character's shoulder, and while it's held you've got pretty direct control over his hand. Maybe a bit disorienting and maybe hard to program, but it could work. No, you know what, it would be really weird because it only supports verbs that are carried out with his hand. You'd need a whole separate system for talking and looking.

Marek's Wii Article
 

Hi Marek,

Thoroughly enjoyed reading the article and find myself agreeing with you in many places. Having played Another Code and thoroughly enjoyed it, I can see how it only just scratched the surface of potential it offers. Yes, some of the interactions and puzzles were gimmicky and often only used once or twice in the game, but with a well-thought through and developed design much more is possible.

The Wii controller has a gimmicky nature to it, too, but there are lots of possibilities that can expand on some of what you suggested and it would be exciting to design and develop for the Wii, particularly as the dev kits are reputed to be pretty cheap in comparison to those of the other consoles. Publishers like DTP and TAC should be looking at ways to bring adventures to the Wii with these unique features.

However, one of the biggest stumbling blocks is likely to be resistance to anything that takes the adventure too far away from its traditional roots. Heck, take my own game, Mr. Smoozles Goes Nutso - there's probably more adventure gameplay in it than in Dreamfall, but when the top adventure site (Adventure Gamers, in case you were wondering :) ) doesn't cover it, how does that sit with what you're saying?

I want to try out new ideas and develop them in a fun way. I'd love to be able to develop for the Wii and explore the possibilities it can offer, but I don't think we should see the Wii as some kind of saviour or forget that the core audience for adventure games is still firmly rooted on the PC.

The worry I have about developing an adventure for the Wii is that to take advantage of the controller in the fullest sense will make the game completely specific to that platform and to bring it out on any other platform will be a major amount of additional work as the Wii specific stuff is taken out, re-worked and re-implemented. Not the simple scenario it might appear.

Great article, Marek! Thanks for the interesting read.

Pun intentional?

Nope, sorry. :)