Adventure Gamers - Forums

I think it’s the start of something special.

I doubt we’ll be back to early 00’s any time soon. Just look at the amount of games coming out now without any Kickstarter projects in mind. Daedalic and a lot of other developers consistently release new, great titles. It weren’t like this in the early 00’s (or for that matter mid 00’s).

Kickstarter or not that likely won’t change. And mainstream sites also often review adventure games now - and the great ones actually get proper reviews and good scores. Again, nothing to do with Kickstarter.

So while the Kickstarter craze may be able to provide an extra boost to the genre to make it even more popular, I doubt the genre would lose much steam even if all the Kickstarter games end up sucking.

^ What he said. Surely, the Kickstarter discovery was a great one, but, for now, I am already greatly satisfied by titles from the likes of Daedelic, Amanita, Telltale and independent diamonds like Resonance. It’s not 90’s, but 10’s. A new golden era of its own and this is already a great achievment. At least for the time being.

I’m sceptical. There’s not a huge difference as far as I’m concerned, apart from a few more games on the radar than usual. I would be more enthusiastic about the kickstarter phenomenon if there were more games to my taste - a Myst or Zork revival project, a Journeyman Project 4, maybe digging up some old 90s teams like Legend, Coktel Vision and Infogrames. Yeah, I’m an ungrateful bastard - I should be glad to have Tex, Jensen and Cecil back in action (and I am, promise!).

But all that’s irrelevant in the scheme of things - there WILL be positive feedback and it will be good for the genre. Very likely a 2nd golden age.

I’m quite optimistic about the time we’re in. Ten years ago I thought I’d never play a decent adventure beside the ones I’ve already played. I won’t call it a renaissance but it’s a revival for sure. Maybe not in the commercial state it used to be but that doesn’t bother me at all. Quite the opposite. I see the 10’s as the years of the indie scene. Games that doesn’t try to be successful, just try to be good. That’s exactly how the 90’s were. Game industry was just starting to blossom. Graphics were limited so game designers had no other choice but to be creative in order to make a success. Nowadays it’s different but you can see the reference. Recent games like Resonance are perfect example of such games. They remind of the old times but don’t follow the old ways and add something new to the genre. (I’m still very fascinated by the short-term-memory way of avoiding the predetermined dialogue options). In other words, time for modern games which copy the only essential thing of their predecessors - creativity. Time for evolution in the never changing style of adventure genre in the past 20 years (and yes, that doesn’t mean action elements). I know that today these gems are quite few and all of them have their flaws. But I see that as a great potential that is just waiting to be polished.

I’m very grateful the games we’re getting from kickstarter are the ones to my taste, and not Oscars. Nuh-nuh!

Double Fine, Broken Sword and Tex are the safest kickstarter bets on delivering quality products I think.

I wish I could throw Jane Jensen in the mix there, but I just worry about the resources at her disposal (apart from her husband, who’s magnificent, obviously).

SpaceVenture and Larry…will have a harder time, I suspect. 

I’m very grateful for The Book of Unwritten Tales, proof that adventure games from Europe CAN be fantastic; in stark contrast to recent titles that ranged from appalling to mediocre (Alternativa, Belief and Betrayal, Lost Horizon, The Whispered World (too dull, sorry!), Ceville, Next Life et al).

I did like Overclocked though.

A.A - 07 September 2012 10:22 PM

I’m very grateful the games we’re getting from kickstarter are the ones to my taste, and not Oscars. Nuh-nuh!

Double Fine, Broken Sword and Tex are the safest kickstarter bets on delivering quality products I think.

I wish I could throw Jane Jensen in the mix there, but I just worry about the resources at her disposal (apart from her husband, who’s magnificent, obviously).

SpaceVenture and Larry…will have a harder time, I suspect. 

I’m very grateful for The Book of Unwritten Tales, proof that adventure games from Europe CAN be fantastic; in stark contrast to recent titles that ranged from appalling to mediocre (Alternativa, Belief and Betrayal, Lost Horizon, The Whispered World (too dull, sorry!), Ceville, Next Life et al).

I did like Overclocked though.

Can’t argue with your concern about Jane’s resources, but remember that when she’s writing and designing a game you know it’s going to be quite solid in that regard. She has a lot of faith in her developer team, and she knows how to lead a production.

Not criticizing you, but I think a lot of people underestimate Jane. Some do so because of GK3’s cat mustache puzzle (not done by her) or the 3D (which was nowhere near as bad as people say, and actually good in my opinion for the time in came out). Others underestimate Jane because they were let down by Gray Matter, which was in my opinion a fantastic game with a few flaws. Jane has said she didn’t have as much involvement in later stages of development as with earlier projects. Gray Matter had flaws, due to the production hell and changing publishers/developers, but the root elements were amazing.

Another monologue to myself on these forums.

tl;dr - I’d add Jane to the list of projects I count on delivering the goods.

If you told someone on this forum a year ago that we’d be getting a new adventure from Tim Schafer, Jane Jensen, the Two Guys, a Leisure Suit Larry remake, a new Tex Murphy and Broken Sword 5, they’d shit their pants in disbelief.

Then there’s the independent scene to complement the “blockbuster” titles, which is better than ever at the moment, as well as the usual European games that have always come out. I can’t really imagine how it could get much better.

Adventure games are never going to be the next first-person shooter and I don’t really want them to be.

I guess the ultimate question is “will it last?”, and I guess that depends on if these big Kickstarter projects actually make money, so these studios can keep making adventure games. I really hope so.

I think the key ideas have already been mentioned in this thread:

1) A lot of what happens in the future will depend on the (perceived) quality of the Kickstarter games.

2) Whatever happens, it’s not going to make adventure games anything but a niche genre. A very successful adventure game 20 years ago would sell a couple million copies, a very successful adventure game today will sell a couple million copies. Nothing seems to be able to change that.

What has changed, however, over the past few years, and quite dramatically, is the conversation outside AG circles. We went from “Adventure games? The cat hair moustache genre? That should have died with the 90s?” to “Ooh, point-and-click adventures! Why don’t they make those anymore?” Ten or even five years ago, adventure games were a joke, and everyone with any ambition would try to distance themselves from the phrase and the stigma that went with it—whether Charles ‘give me money for my new point-and-click adventure’ Cecil proclaiming point-and-click dead, or Funcom trying to label Dreamfall anything but an adventure game. Nowadays, you have the Sega marketing people calling The Cave an adventure game, when they could easily have called it a puzzle platformer or something like that. I think that shows how much things have changed.

And I believe that change actually started before the Kickstarter craze. Already games like Machinarium and Gemini Rue (don’t ask me why it was those two…) did a lot to change the way people outside AG circles look at adventure games: to make the genre’s status go from “total joke” to “niche but respected”.

Still, the importance of the DFA Kickstarter on the gaming industry cannot be overstated. There was actually a very interesting post on the Kickstarter blog a few days ago showing the impact that Kickstarter had. Video games funding on Kickstarter jumped from about $1m in 2011 to $34m for just the first 8 months of 2012! Even for a decent-sized publisher, that’s no small change.

.

Oh, by the way:

diego - 07 September 2012 05:46 PM

Is that what we fought for?

What is that even supposed to mean? A bunch of people whining on teh internets does not qualify as “fighting for” something. 

Revival? Revival of what? The genre never died; there was always a constant stream of releases in the genre (a few of actual quality in recent years, but that’s besides the point). It’s just that the mainstream media ignored them and hurried to declare the genre dead.

Despite what everyone seems to think, the genre actually never died. It just became a niche genre (and will probably remain like this forever, but that’s not a bad thing actually). Other than that, there were adventures released in every year, whether on pc or consoles. You people should know this better than anyone else, after all you’re adventure gamers.