Adventure Gamers - Forums

Fien, you can act offended all you want, that won’t change the fact that the idea that Double Fine would go out of their way to call the game an adventure when they could just call it a puzzle platformer and benefit from the popularity of games such as Trine and Limbo is completely bonkers.

Clearly, they believe it’s an adventure game. Maybe it won’t fit your definition of what an adventure game is. Maybe it won’t fit mine for all I know. And it most certainly won’t fit Advie’s narrow idea of what an adventure game should be. But implying that Ron Gilbert is being disingenuous about the game’s genre as if he’s trying to get in on the latest popular fad makes no sense.

I don’t know if I’ll like the game. But after years of people trying to avoid the stigma of adventure games, of trying to stay as far as possible from the stench of the dead genre, I have a lot of respect for Gilbert, and Sega, for insisting on calling The Cave an adventure game when they could easily have called it something else. Despite the whole Kickstarter thing, that’s still not an easy business decision.

If I might join in on the fun, I think it’s impossible to call the game anything else then an adventure until next week just because that’s what the creators are calling it.
I don’t think you can say it’s a puzzle platformer like limbo or braid just because you have direct control of the character.

Anyway, it’s certainly more of an adventure then DeathSpank or Ron Gilbert’s last games so he’s not drifting away from adventures - he is coming back.

Fien - 18 January 2013 07:06 AM

.....

Second and third trailer makes it look like an adventure game. Ron gilbert even said they have mouse controls though not sure how precisely it works might even make it like normal adventure game.

Fien - 18 January 2013 07:06 AM

I’ve just finished rereading AG’s preview of The Cave and I still don’t like Gilbert’s comments about broadening the definition etcetera.

it particularly bugs me because iv seen him bash games he doesnt think should count as adventure. And now he wants to broaden it to include this. From the day of announcement iv thought of it as a puzzle platformer and will continue to do so until iv played it and find otherwise. It really feels like the adventure tag was added to it with the success of DFA. And because theyr selling it that way, publications decide to run with calling it an adventure without question. But hopefully that means more adventure elements made it into the game.

zane - 18 January 2013 11:24 AM

Fien - 18 January 2013 07:06 AM

I’ve just finished rereading AG’s preview of The Cave and I still don’t like Gilbert’s comments about broadening the definition etcetera.

it particularly bugs me because iv seen him bash games he doesnt think should count as adventure. And now he wants to broaden it to include this. From the day of announcement iv thought of it as a puzzle platformer and will continue to do so until iv played it and find otherwise. It really feels like the adventure tag was added to it with the success of DFA. And because theyr selling it that way, publications decide to run with calling it an adventure without question. But hopefully that means more adventure elements made it into the game.

The cave is playable as point and click game on the pc. And gilbert was right that limbo isn’t an adventure game it is full physics puzzels.

zane - 18 January 2013 11:24 AM

And because theyr selling it that way, publications decide to run with calling it an adventure without question.

Or because they’ve seen it in person…

Fien - 18 January 2013 07:06 AM

I’ve just finished rereading AG’s preview of The Cave and I still don’t like Gilbert’s comments about broadening the definition etcetera. Implying that MM was the first adventure with little figures running around is most certainly disingenuous, has the guy never heard of Sierra?? I was already playing adventures in the mid-eighties and if there were die-hard adventurers who were unwilling to accept MM as an adventure because of the verbs on screen, I haven’t met them.

He didn’t say it was the first game that had little figures running around. He said this:

“It’s interesting, because I remember when Maniac Mansion came out, people were saying that was not an adventure game,” he answered. “It had graphics, and worse than graphics, they animated. I think a lot of the die-hard adventure game fans back then, they were okay with a text adventure that put up a pretty picture, like a storybook, but Maniac Mansion was a game where these characters all just ran around, there was no descriptive text, you were not typing stuff into a parser, you were just picking verbs off a screen. And so lot of die-hard adventure people did not consider Maniac Mansion to be an adventure game.”

The people he’s describing probably didn’t consider King’s Quest an adventure game, either (and that may sound silly to us, but it’s not that far-fetched considering that this conversation about what a “real” adventure game is still comes up all the time…)

But yes, he’s heard of Sierra. In fact, King’s Quest was a major influence for Maniac Mansion.

Gilbert describes Maniac Mansion as “My favorite game, and it’s very personal to me—not because it’s a great game, but because it’s a very flawed game, and those flaws make it special to me.”

The mansion in Maniac Mansion was inspired by George Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch, where then-LucasFilm Games was housed and the game was developed. Both the external house and internal details, such as the spiral staircase in the library, are taken from the ranch.

Once the team had settled on the characters and setting and come up with a general plot and some interesting gimmicks, they reached a creative block.

Says Gilbert, “We kinda figured the game would just kind of write itself after this. We didn’t even know the genre—it wasn’t an adventure game at this point. It was an amorphous game where you just went around and did stuff… I tried to imagine the gameplay and it didn’t make a lot of sense to me.”

A Christmas trip home changed everything, however. “Watching my eight-year-old cousin playing King’s Quest made Maniac Mansion fall into place.”

Sierra’s King’s Quest, however, featured a text parser—something Gilbert found extremely frustrating. The game forced players to identify items on screen to interact with them and then type text commands. “This was not gameplay; this was not fun. Why can’t I just point at this thing? I can see it right there!”

Thus the inspiration for a point-and-click verb-based system arose. Players chose actions from an on-screen menu rather than fighting a text parser—a key innovation for the genre.

http://gamasutra.com/view/news/33372/GDC_2011_Ron_Gilberts_Odd_Collection_Of_Maniac_Mansion_Memories.php#.UPm30LYYK2w

Obviously a lot of people won’t be convinced about what kind of game The Cave is until they’ve played it—and even then, we’re not all going to agree. That’s totally fine (keeps the forum lively!) But, personally, I’m tired of people putting words in Ron’s mouth and accusing him of lying to adventure gamers. He’s a game designer who has put a lot of work and passion into making a game that he hopes people will like playing, whatever genre they feel like it fits into. This is not some big conspiracy.