Adventure Gamers - Forums

Karlok - 20 August 2020 07:46 AM

Are you serious?

sarcasm
/ˈsɑːkaz(ə)m/
noun
the use of irony to mock or convey contempt.
“she didn’t like the note of sarcasm in his voice”

I’m not sure I quite understand the point about the Zeitgeist of games; while I agree there’s certainly some works of art that don’t age well I’d argue that the best are actually that because they do so.

I’ve played many games years or even decades later, and of course you’ll sometimes be annoyed by certain things, or certain aspects of cultural humor etc might not quite work anymore ... but in the end you can still recognize a good game for what it is and a not so good for what it is as well. And you can also see in retrospective or top lists or ... that people don’t suddenly change their mind on what’s a good experience.

Case in point, Tetris is still one of the most popular games. There’s competitive leagues and everything. Pong as a concept didn’t quite survive as well but even in the 2000’s I played some 3D-Pong browser games along with others for highscores, so it’s not like people suddenly decided that idea was an awful one either.

So imo if the argument is that LucasArts games are comparatively more compatible with modern audiences than Sierra games then I’d say they were the better games in the first place, and that Sierra was too caught up in niche appeal that didn’t stand the “test of time”; or that, while they deserve credit for pioneering X or Y, they weren’t the ones leading those same innovations to “generell audience appeal”.

tomimt - 20 August 2020 06:32 AM

Sierra was, in many ways good and bad, one of the first, if not the first, modern game company. Had they survived, I think they could have turned into something like what EA and Ubisoft are now.

Especially during the 80s, Sierra is perhaps the most important western game studio.

Wouldn’t Atari be the first and most important?
They created the whole business as a business to a great extent, and of course few years later almost destroyed it too, but that’s another story.

Sierra was important for sure, but they didn’t create the entire business.

tomimt - 20 August 2020 06:32 AM

But somewhere during the 90s, Sierra became a follower instead of being the leader. Smaller devs managed to surpass them with games like Lara Croft and Doom, which were a paradigm shift the same way Sierra’s Mystery House and King’s Quest had been before. 

That’s really why Sierra fell so hard. Other companies managed to utilize the new, emerging technologies faster whereas Sierra couldn’t make them properly work with their games. They simply lacked their own property techs like the Quake or Unreal engine that would have placed them again on the top.

Yeah.
The ironic part is of course that they didn’t need to have their own technological expertise to survive. Everything was actually almost handed over to them on a silver platter, but they were unable or uninterested to take it.

I am of course referring to Sierra being the publisher of Half-Life. There’s no doubt that at some point they could have bought and merged Valve, and with the wonderful help of hindsight we can then speculate how Sierra could have established Steam like Valve did, and becoming more or less the de-facto ruler of the entire game distribution system.

But, well, they published Half-Life and did nothing more with the franchise, and that’s the end of that story as far as Sierra is concerned.

tomimt - 20 August 2020 08:58 AM

This is somewhat relevant to this topic, as I just heard that Ken Williams is writing a book about Sierra history: https://kensbook.com/

The contents presented start from how Ken and Roberta met and end with Mask of Eternity.

Thanks for the reminder.
I don’t find any information if that is coming out as ebook or not. Hopefully it will be, so I can get it (I am trying to get rid of physical media these days).

I hope they can put an interesting spin on that Mask of Eternity. For most, Mask of Eternity marks not-so-great ending of Sierra as a developer, and if the book will end with that same feeling, it won’t be the best of endings for sure.

I don’t remember if I answered in this post.

The old Sierra vs Lucasarts debate is it?

I prefer my classic adventures to be sierra, because for whatever reason, their game design makes more sense to me, and I find myself able to get farther/further (i forget) into them without help.

with Lucas arts games, I often struggle to understand what is expected of me, and because of that I get stuck for long periods of time, and get frustrated.

I think objectively Lucasart adventures are better, however my opinion has nothing to do with being objective.

And even though lucasarts tend to be more charming in some ways, often the experience is less of an “Adventure” -feel to me, and more of a playable cartoon.

Both are great, but it depends do I want to go on a an epic adventure, or would I rather play an endearing story?

Before you tell me how wrong I am, I know that there will be plenty of “what about this game?”  But just looking at my enjoyment of games, and which games I actually buy or beat etc, I find that I prefer Sierra games for some reason.

I’m always worried that in Lucasarts games that the puns will be a solution to a puzzle, where as with sierra, the puns are usually there to rub salt in the wound after a death LMAO

Pyoro-2 - 20 August 2020 10:25 AM

So imo if the argument is that LucasArts games are comparatively more compatible with modern audiences than Sierra games then I’d say they were the better games in the first place, and that Sierra was too caught up in niche appeal that didn’t stand the “test of time”; or that, while they deserve credit for pioneering X or Y, they weren’t the ones leading those same innovations to “generell audience appeal”.

LucasArts games have stood the test of of time because they were more widely available for longer, released sequels (and were picked up by Telltale) later, and jumped on remake/console trains sooner (Sierra hasn’t at all and may never - and by the time KQ2015 came out, LucasArts had loooong since won the post-‘90s PR war.) This all has little to do with the artistic merits of the games, and more to do with LucasArts still being alive to this day, Tim Schafer still being in the games industry, and a handful of journalists who grew up with LucasArts rather than Sierra who set the narrative for a generation starting in the mid-late ‘90s.

Yes, some of the lasting appeal does have to do with LA games typically being more accessible for modern audiences in terms of interface and dead-ends, and them being easier to translate to consoles for those reasons. But these are relatively minor factors in the real artistic merits of a game, imo. LA games having a “clean” feel and being embraced by modern audiences are certainly points in their favor, but they’re not the end-all be-all. Sometimes the best works of art are flawed or even “messy”.

If the company doesn’t go under and you have Ken Williams ordering QOL tweaks of the old Sierra games for consoles and Steam/GOG over the last 20 years, things may be different.

Venkman - 21 August 2020 06:05 AM

LucasArts games have stood the test of of time because they were more widely available for longer, released sequels (and were picked up by Telltale) later

I get your point, but most Sierra games had been available for instance on GOG for a long time before the first LucasArts games were re-released in download format for the first time.

Speaking of which, HALF of LucasArts adventure games have never been re-released as downloads. The first two Monkey Islands haven’t been, there’s only been those horrible remakes, Full Throttle, Day of the Tentacle, and Grim Fandango have only been released as “remastered” versions, and those weren’t even done by LucasArts. And of course, Labyrinth hasn’t been re-released either, because for some reason they try to act as if it never existed - it wasn’t even on any LucasArts cd collections.

King’s Quest was also picked up by Telltale, for what it’s worth, of course they never actually worked on their planned game as far as I’m aware of, and the licence went to new developers.