Adventure Gamers - Forums

I don’t believe in gatekeeping. They’re all adventure games and they’re all welcome as far as I’m concerned. Variety is good.

Charophycean - 20 June 2023 11:34 PM

would Doom (the game) without enemies and a gun be an adventure game? The story wouldn’t even make sense. It’s definitely not a game I’d want to play. But neither would a Doom with puzzles.

I recommend reading the original Doom design documents.

They intended to have a ten-level game that would also have puzzles, conversations with NPCs, etc.

The Doom that we know, four levels of nothing but shooting, is a very different game from that.

They also went with the “traditional style” where you need to read the manual or something to understand the “story”, the game itself doesn’t tell it really.
Then again, with the concept of something opening a gateway from Mars to hell you can’t expect much from the plot anyway…

Let’s not forget Unreal, which was released just before Half-Life.

There is a narrative in the game, but there are no real conversations or anything, it’s kind of like walking and shooting simulator, where you walk through large environments and try to learn how to go further and escape the planet.

If you are not too trigger-happy, the local aliens help you by taking you to secret locations with ammo and so on.

Charophycean - 22 June 2023 08:07 AM

Jdawg445 - 14 June 2023 09:16 AM

To use fmv, Gabriel Knight 2 is an adventure game, it literally has a crap ton of puzzles, now they’re not as challenging as some other adventure games but they’re there. these new interactive movies like nightshift are literally just watch a movie pick a choice, that is not even remotely a puzzle. By the way not every puzzle has to be inventory based, for instance contradiction has very few inventory puzzles but there are still lots of dialog puzzles, where the players still has to use logic and reasoning to solve the puzzle and it is not just pick between A and B choices.

What makes you think that the player can’t use logic and reasoning to choose between those A and B choices?

Let’s take two examples of a hypothetical person playing 2 different games:

Case 1: A player who plays an adventure game with traditional puzzles (sliders, dialogue puzzles, piecing together ripped up paper puzzles, inventory puzzles, slide the paper under the door to get the key puzzles) and the player breezes through them without any challenge at all. They have seen most of these type of puzzles before in other games, the solutions are reasonably obvious and not much challenge to a seasoned adventure gamer. After the game ends they soon forget about it, adding it to their pile of completed games.

Case 2: A player who plays an interactive fiction game, taking significant amounts of time with each option they are presented with. They make notes, draw diagrams and have internal philosophical conversations to justify their choice at each junction. They discuss their choices at length with friends who are also playing the same game, having debates and reasoned arguments about these choices. After the game ends they spend a lot of time thinking about the game, going over the decisions they made and the consequences of those decisions, and how they may have decided differently given the path the game’s story took.

Now if you had to decide which game provided more intellectual engagement and mental stimulation, would it be option 1 or 2?

you’re conflating two different issues that have nothing in common with each other. Adventure games have puzzles, the other genre does not. This has nothing to do with what they player finds more stimulating. This topic was about the tenants of what is and what is not an adventure game.

Also I just had to chuckle at your analogy to begin with, like somebody is watching an interactive movie and is really sitting there staring at the screen for an hour and a half totally confused about what choice to make with no gameplay involved. but okay. For the record I’m not saying some of those movies don’t have interesting stories because they do, they’re just not adventure games to me at all, just like a game with a qte event is not an action game. I also highly doubt no matter how many slider puzzles you have done or cyphers you have broken before, that you breeze through those puzzles in two seconds. unless it’s an adventure game you’ve already played through, and know the puzzles by heart

Charophycean - 22 June 2023 09:41 PM

Okay. I can accept that. The point of this thread is not to get back into the “are they adventure games?” question. That’s boring and it’s been done to death. I was hoping to have a real discussion. So let’s conflate things! Can we do that?

Maybe what I’m suggesting is that, for me, the time for objective markers in games isn’t very useful anymore. A label such as “adventure game” or “it’s got puzzles!!” says very little about what my experience with the game will be.

It was useful in the 90s because it distinguished action-based games (which I disliked) from ones where I didn’t need fast reflexes. The spirit of those games wasn’t to do puzzles, it was adventuring. Discovering things, not fighting, and doing it at your own pace. Now, in 2023, there is a huge variety of those games. Only a fraction have puzzles in the traditional sense. The ones I like, whether they have puzzles or not, still have that spirit of discovery, of adventure, at their heart.

What’s your experience with this?

I mean you’re free to like whatever genre of game you like, there’s nothing wrong with that. But to me, games that simply revolve around picking a choice between a and b is not stimulating or Adventurous to me. They are a gimmick. Much like those choose your own Adventure books that we used to read in the early 90s. I much rather an author tell me the story they want to tell, without gimmicks.

Plus at least in the gaming sense these choices usually do not matter very much at all, like The Telltale Games. I remember the first game i played and saw, this character is going to remember this, I did get a little excited and then replaying the game none of this really mattered. The game still funneled you down a certain path, it was a BS gimmick. Plus it didn’t help watching the puzzles slowly get taken out, each following chapter.

For the record I do mean real puzzles, I can’t tell you how many demos, I have played of a game where it’s like you have to get out of a room and there’s only three hotspots in said room and one of them is a lockpick on the table. just because I picked up a lockpick to open the door, that is not a puzzle, that is lame busy work.

I always go back to my example of Full Throttle because that was like discovering new ways to use certain actions for the first time at least for me.  the foot icon was not simply used to walk but also kick doors in. Hand icon picked stuff up, and punched etc…
That was a true sense of Discovery to me.  a walking simulator type game where you get to make just a couple of choices, lacks the fundamental thing to me which is gameplay, half the time I’m wondering why do they not just make this a movie or TV show. For instance the story of tales of the Borderland is wonderful. As a game its awful, bc there is no real gameplay.

I do still think proper tags are important, for example Uncharted is an action game with Adventure elements within. Broken Sword 3 is a puzzle/adventure game with a slight bit of action in it. A walking simulator is not an adventure game just like a game with a half dozen QTE events is not an action game and they should be tagged properly.

PS slightly off topic but I also hate when games forget their roots. For example I’m a huge stealth fan and I used to love the Splinter Cell franchise and watching it slowly morph from a stealth game into a very generic action game was sad to see.

Charophycean - 23 June 2023 08:05 PM

I feel like you might be trivializing the subjective experience that other people have with certain games.

I’d invite you to scroll up to my post where I described the experience of someone playing an interactive fiction game. Imagine they’re playing a game where, as you describe, you pick a choice between a and b.

What’s your reaction to reading that? Honestly. If you care to share it, I’d like to hear.

Its just that an experience, doesnt mean its gameplay to me. Maybe it is bc i never had this euphoric situation that you describe, i usually just put those type of games down and move onto something that makes a game ya know a game aka gameplay. We just wont agree on this, which is cool.

Charophycean - 23 June 2023 08:05 PM

I feel like you might be trivializing the subjective experience that other people have with certain games.

I’d invite you to scroll up to my post where I described the experience of someone playing an interactive fiction game. Imagine they’re playing a game where, as you describe, you pick a choice between a and b.

What’s your reaction to reading that? Honestly. If you care to share it, I’d like to hear.

Do you have examples of games that fit your case 2? because that does sound great but I have never had a game where I experienced that or needed to ” make notes, draw diagrams and have internal philosophical conversations to justify their choice at each junction.”