Adventure Gamers - Forums

TWD game is riding on the success of Comicbooks and estabilished IP, its Transmedia Synergy in effect. Had it been some new adventure IP with same content, would have been ignored. So its not totally adventure games WIN.

And TWD is gimped version of HeavyRain, which won BAFTA and other awards already,
ironic that on that time some of you were resisting to accept HeavyRain as adventure.

thejobloshow - 08 December 2012 07:39 PM

Sierra watered down text adventures by adding graphics, Lucasarts watered down graphical adventures by going from parsers to verbs to point and click and removing unwinnable states and Telltale watered down LucasArts adventures by going to QTEs and ingame hint systems. The slippery slope fallacy dictates that it’s not long now before Telltale makes Space Ace 2.

I used to think this too and it’s correct, only now I think watering down is good. The text adventures are still there, graphical adventures with parser are still there and Lucasarts-style adventures are still there. All these types of games are still being made, all that’s happened is increased diversity and choice in what you want to play.

I find this conversation so frustrating. It’s like people who swear by the 1990s formula of adventure gaming think that no one else deserves to have any fun.

Dag - 08 December 2012 12:55 PM

This had me thinking, why would I still pick Chaos as my GOTY? The more I think about it, the only explanation I can come up with is fear. Fear that the popularity of TWD will make such an impact on the adventure game scene, that all future adventure games will copy its direction. Why would this worry me so much, when I found TWD to be such a thoroughly enjoyable experience?

This is a really good question. Why do some AG fans feel so threatened by the fact that not all adventure games strictly follow this formula? People are still going to make the games you want to play. Even *text adventures* are still being made…

fov - 08 December 2012 08:30 PM

This is a really good question. Why do some AG fans feel so threatened by the fact that not all adventure games strictly follow this formula? People are still going to make the games you want to play. Even *text adventures* are still being made…

This is 1993 all over again: The Walking Dead is the new Myst. We’re getting the exact same hysterical arguments from a handful of people: It’s not worthy of being called an adventure game! It’s going to ruin everything! I don’t like the game but instead of just not playing it I make it my personal business to spoil everyone else’s fun! etc.

Twenty years down the road, it’s clear that Myst didn’t bring about the apocalypse:

1) Myst built its own formula, which required jettisoning elements from earlier adventure games (such as the inventory and most character interaction). The reason it was successful was not because removing these elements somehow “dumbed down” the traditional formula, but because it allowed the game to be its own, consistent thing. It spawned cohorts of similar games, some great, some mediocre.

2) The Sierra/LucasArts type of adventure games kept existing and is still alive and kicking (and Kickstartering) today.

3) Nevertheless, Myst had a huge deal of influence on the genre, especially in how it emphasized immersion during exploration (many people may not realize that, but Myst’s biggest legacy is probably how it revolutionized sound effects in games), as well as introducing some different forms of puzzles, that were used to bring some variety among inventory puzzles in other adventures. I don’t think anyone is going to complain about this influence.

4) Myst-style games are now universally considered adventure games, but belonging to their own sub-genre, which has its fans and its detractors. Most of the hysteria has died down and people, having realized that Myst didn’t destroy their world, have learnt to live and let live, and to ignore Myst-style games if they don’t like them.

I have no doubt that the same thing will happen with The Walking Dead. Hopefully it won’t take 20 years for the crazies to see reason and calm down.

Kurufinwe - 08 December 2012 10:06 PM

This is 1993 all over again: The Walking Dead is the new Myst.

And this is nowhere near a giant leap (for mankind) as Myst was.

To put it into perspective: If Myst was the discovery of nuclear fission, The Walking Dead is like finding a new subspecies of tropical tree-fern.

Oscar - 09 December 2012 12:10 AM

And this is nowhere near a giant leap (for mankind) as Myst was.

To put it into perspective: If Myst was the discovery of nuclear fission, The Walking Dead is like finding a new subspecies of tropical tree-fern.

I’m not sure about that. The Walking Dead is a highly interactive experience, but one that removes all the gamey elements (down to the idea of “winning” the game, which it seems was the OP’s main beef with it), devoting all the interactivity to making the storytelling more powerful. There certainly were precursors (and, even before that, Myst itself, and even Monkey Island: already games whose appeal went far beyond gameplay), but TWD is the first to have the courage to go all the way down that path and that does it in such a masterful way.

Something that, at first glance, looks like a video game, but is actually pure interactive story-telling: that’s a pretty huge paradigm shift if you ask me. We’ll see where we are 20 years from now, but I’m willing to bet that TWD’s impact will dwarf Myst’s. The recent Golden Age of TV drama began in earnest with The Sopranos, when creators realized that they had a fantastic medium for ambitious, quality serialized storytelling. I’m not sure if TWD will be interactive drama’s Sopranos or if it will take a couple extra steps for the revolution to start (maybe I’d lean slightly toward the latter); but we’re getting very, very close.

This will be my first post on this forum, but I feel the strong need to de-lurk. Long rant coming up.

This forum, and the Adventure Gaming Community as a whole, can feel incredibly insular and resistent to change at times. I get why. Adventure fans didn’t have it easy ever since the genre’s halcyon days back in the mid 90s. After the big publishers dropped Adventures, after Lucasarts and Sierra stopped dealing with the genre, a lot of people started clinging more and more to the old ways. Rightfully so, in fact. In my opinion, series from the 90s like Broken Sword, Tex Murphy and Gabriel Knight are still the standard to judge Adventure Games on.

However, whenever someone does something in order to get the genre back into the public conscience, there seems to be this big outcry of betrayal from the community. I remember reading AG back in the Broken Sword 3 days, not understanding why this great game, that actually tried to evolve the genre, got so much hate.

But then again, I now read that even the point and click interface was just dumbing down. Can you never evolve genres? Never simplify the way people interact with a game? If we start thinking like that, we would even to criticize Zork for having a story and deluding the adventure experience.

But, here’s the thing that really bugs me. I have always been a fan of a lot of genres. I love Japanese console games, for example. Do you know, how things loook for old-fashioned, Japanese console games? Awful. Sure, Nintendo still do their thing and in the handheld space there are still lots of old-fashioned experiences (but even that is more and more eroded by mobile). Apart from that, it’s exactly what happened with Adventures back in the day. Consoles are now all about big budget, AAA, Hollywood style shootbang blockbusters. No room for plattformers, action adventures, shmups, jrpgs and all the genres I dearly love anymore. It’s a sad state of affairs. And one that has no apparend solution.

For Adventure fans on the other hand, there’s NO reason to be pessimistic at all right now. The genre is having a renaissance in the mobile touch screen space, where it works spectacularly well. Developers have found new financing models, that actually enable them to make the games they want to make again. Be it Wadjet Eye with it’s low budget (but awesome) indie stylings, European companies like Daedalic with their sleek retail games, or the entire old school development scene with Kickstarter. Why are people worried about The Walking Dead destroying the entire Adventure genre? I doubt it’s gonna impact the European development scene all that much, and in America there was no development scene to speak off, until early this year. Now, next year, we will get ...

- Double Fine Adventure
- Mystery Game X (which may very well be a new Gabriel Knight)
- Moebius
- a NEW TEX MURPHY (!!!!)
- a reimagining/remake of LSL1
- A new game by the Two Guys from Andromeda
- A reimagined Shadowgate
- Broken Sword 5
- Jack Houston and the Necronauts
- Asylum
- More Cognition episodes

Moving on, we will also get:

- Syberia 3
- Dreamfall Chapters
- Hero U
- The next Blackwell game

And these are just the games I am personally interested in. I don’t even count Daedelic, because their games do nothing for me. But a lot of people will already be looking forward to The Rabbit’s Apprentice, for example.

The genre is in a better place, than it has been for over a decade. DFA is pretty much guaranteed to be a critical- and sales-hit. That will have consequences for the genre too. But not every Adventure afterwards will try to be a Tim Schafer game.

There’s also games like The Cave, that play around with genre conventions in a completely different way to The Walking Dead. Or Gone Home, that also does it’s own, intriguing thing. Neither of those will become the only way for Adventure games to exist, but just alternate directions. Remember, the adventure genre is not driven by big AAA publishers these days. It’s niche genre, that can afford to do it’s own thing.

And, yes, The Walking Dead DOES break new ground. Not gameplay-wise, but certainly narratively. The bleak, emotional story is something that, in my opinion, has never been done in a game. Games usually try to make the player feel on top of things, to make you feel like you can win, to give you a feeling of success, in order to have you play on. The Walking Dead SHATTERS these conventions. It’s the feel-bad-game of the year. I can totally see, why some people don’t enjoy that kind of story. In fact, at times it was a bit too much for me as well, but it’s certainly an incredible accomplishment, to tell this kind of tale in interactive form. It goes against all rules of interactive storytelling, and it works beautifully.

Will more games in the future be like it? Sure! It’s very well possible, that TTG is going to focus on this kind of game for at least the time being. Other companies may try to do something similar. And, yes, some elements from the game may even find their way to more traditional Adventures. So, the genre will do, what it always did. Evolve and change, developing different branches, while intrinsically staying the same. A Broken Sword or Gabriel Knight game would not work with the gameplay structure of The Walking Dead, and the developers, I am sure, are aware of that.

So, the worst case scenario is, in my opinion, that American Adventure developers would only be able to either kickstart their games or do something in the vein of TWD. But if we really think about it, that’s two more options, than they had a year ago.

Nobody knows, where gaming is going in the next couple of years, with driving forces like cloud gaming and F2P lurking their head. But for the time being, Adventure games are very much alive and thriving. I for one, am incredibly happy about that and looking forward to all the cool games coming up.