Adventure Gamers - Forums

Lambonius - 05 January 2015 12:22 PM

It was a terrible decision, both creatively and from a business perspective, to completely reinvent the formula after capturing near perfection with King’s Quest 6.

I basically agree. I consider KQ7 an OK-to-good game taken on its own terms—not amazing, but OK-to-good. There are aspects of it I quite like. But as a King’s Quest sequel, I found it disappointing.

I’ve been holding my tongue on explaining why until Wilco has a chance to play it and make up his own mind about it, but I’ll share a few reasons later when he’s further along.

I admire the King’s Quest creators’ willingness to never rest on their laurels and to try new things, but KQ7 tried some new things that weren’t right for its series, in my opinion. It’s easy to pick on tangible details like the Disney animation look or the single-click cursor, but I actually don’t even think those are the main issues. (I’d even argue that the single-click cursor, whether we like it or not, was a successful innovation, as were some of KQ7’s other modern features like auto-saving and automatic retries.) The main issues that bother me are deeper ones involving matters of characterization, structure, continuity, and tone, all of which departed somewhat from previous entries.

We talk a lot about franchise fatigue in gaming nowadays, with the dreaded annualized entries of things like Assassin’s Creed and Call of Duty, and there is definitely a point at which you want to continue to innovate to avoid stagnation.  However, when you first hit on a near-universally agreed upon successful formula, you SHOULD sit on your laurels a bit.  Tweak the formula, make refinements and expansions, but don’t reinvent it entirely, at least not right away.  I guess you could argue that Sierra kept the formula going with its OTHER series, at least for a few years, but I think KQ7 was too much of a departure.  If it had retained more of the tone and style of KQ5 & 6, even with some of the gameplay tweaks, like auto-retries and single click cursor (I am tasting bile as a write that ), it would have been a lot better, in my opinion.

I think an interesting thought experiment would be rewriting KQ7 to keep the core plot intact while revising the tone and characterizations to fit the KQ5-6 style.  I’d love to read something like that, and to do some artistic re-imaginings for it.

Another thing that I always find myself questioning is whether or not Ken and Roberta actually understood what made adventure gameplay engaging.  More and more, I see the golden age of Sierra adventure games as a coincidental confluence of the right technology with the right ideas, and it seems to me that as the technology advanced, that confluence got further and further out of sync, until we ended up with a game like Mask of Eternity. 

I read Ken’s words in that Game Informer interview the other day, and he really emphasizes the idea of interactive storytelling as the driving goal behind the King’s Quest series—he specifically talks about point-and-click gameplay being a dated style that only served to tell the story and make it interactive to the best of their ability within the limitations of the technology of the day.  I take issue with that sentiment—that point-and-click gameplay was something that only made sense for games in a bygone era of technology.  Certainly that gameplay style originated as a result of technological limitations, but I think it CAN still work, and that it can be used as a stylistic choice to fit the right project.  I think the point that Ken and Roberta missed was that certain gameplay styles (like point-and-click) can be engaging in their own right, regardless of the stories being told.

I think the same could be said of parser gameplay, too, for that matter.

Lambonius - 05 January 2015 02:14 PM

Another thing that I always find myself questioning is whether or not Ken and Roberta actually understood what made adventure gameplay engaging.  More and more, I see the golden age of Sierra adventure games as a coincidental confluence of the right technology with the right ideas, and it seems to me that as the technology advanced, that confluence got further and further out of sync, until we ended up with a game like Mask of Eternity.

for me, its less to do with the technology and more about the changing role of videogames. It was going from niche hobby market, to mainstream every household market.. And you had a lot of changing of powers with new teams saying “ok now we have to be *this* because this is what we see selling, and this is how we think you get to the “next level”.”
Perfect example: quest for glory 4 had maybe 20 or so people working on it… quest for glory 5 had like 70+, trying to break into larger commercial success.. and losing some sight of what got them success in the past.

TimovieMan - 05 January 2015 05:27 PM

Neither of those things actually have anything to do with the quality of KQ7, just your disappointment with it not being enough like KQ6.

If you take KQ7 at face value, it’s nowhere near as bad.

There are two ways that one must judge a videogame sequel.  Yes, you can judge it on its own merits, but to ONLY judge it on its own merits requires completely ignoring the fact that it’s a sequel.  Sequels are also judged on their relationships to earlier games in the series.  To do one and not the other is to willfully make an incomplete judgment of the game.

Funny you mention Phantasmagoria because that’s the game keeps coming to my mind while I’m playing this. Style over content.
I’ll refrain form to much comments for now because I’ve just reached chapter 4 and still have some stuff to see but it is a sudden change for the series.

And Valanice, why can’t you walk faster!!

Yes, KQ7 is the direct predecessor of Phantasmagoria. KQ7’s engine and interface carry over to Phantasmagoria 1. The series also share designers. Roberta Williams and Lorelei Shannon co-designed KQ7. Roberta Williams went on to do Phantasmagoria 1, and Lorelei Shannon went on to do Phantasmagoria 2.

Wilco, I think if you do the shift and the Plus key she walks faster. I remember being annoyed with her “slow walking” too I there was some trick to it. Try that.

KQ7 had a lot of strong points, in hindsight! There were only one or two really nasty bits of pixel-hunting, and a lot of the optional solutions were great. Several of the characters you met were more charming and less generic than many of the prior KQ NPCs (though others were Cedric-level annoyances), and there was just more fairness all around. Some parts just felt half-finished, though - especially the backstory around the sudden ending. I suspect that so much was cut from KQ7 that the rest of the game never quite hung together as a story.

(Actually, I more than “suspect” that. Back when KQ7 was out, I glanced through the strategy guide at a bookstore and learned there was a ton of cut material that would definitely have made the story clearer!)

KQ6 and KQ3 remain the peaks of the series for me, though, and not because they’re more traditional adventure games. Both of them had much stronger “story sense.” Rather than telling their stories by exposition, they let them emerge naturally from the hero’s adventure. KQ3’s story in particular is a great allegory about the way that discovering books sets you free, and it’s the most adventurous King’s Quest.

Nothing can quite match the tension of having to squirrel away spell ingredients and hide while the clock counts down, though the Realm of the Dead sequences in KQ6 come very close.

None of the King’s Quests had brilliant writing, but KQ3 kept its writing out of the way and let the sense of story emerge from the things you had to do. KQ6 used foreshadowing, backtracking, and player choice to add a little more heft to what was happening. Both stand well above all of the other King’s Quest games in almost every way.

mbday630 - 05 January 2015 09:17 PM

Wilco, I think if you do the shift and the Plus key she walks faster. I remember being annoyed with her “slow walking” too I there was some trick to it. Try that.

Thanks! Going to try it later, hope it works!

When it came out, I had issues with KQ7 being such a departure from KQ6 (which I *loved*), plus it didn’t play well on my aging computer at the time, so I never finished it. I was actually excited by the idea of the Disney-like look because I was a huge fan of Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast (which were recent releases at the time). I was in high school, so I didn’t necessarily see it as a move to dumb down the franchise or appeal solely to a younger audience. They were trying to innovate and chase what was hot.

(And those movies were, to some extent, the “next big thing” in animation. Along with The Little Mermaid and The Lion King, they were part of a new wave of big Disney successes, the first “new classics” in many years. This was before Toy Story, and the revival of animated feature movies with Hollywood actors was a big deal in the early/mid 90s.)

Anyway, what kills KQ7 for me is that it’s so damn annoying. Valanice and Rosella are both sniveling and weak with grating voice acting to match, and I remember that whole troll sequence being doubly obnoxious because now the snively weak character constantly laments how awful it is to be a TROLL [insert dramatic whine].

Sorry… think I had a bit of a flashback there. :o

I did finish the game years later and remember it being… eh, okay, but still annoying. I reviewed KQ1-6 for AG and Jack has been trying to get me to review 7 for years to complete the series, and IIRC I actually started the game again with that in mind, but couldn’t make myself do it. Maybe I’ll give it another try in preparation for the new game…

Lambonius - 05 January 2015 12:22 PM

TimovieMan - 04 January 2015 05:08 PM

KQ7 gets WAY too much flak…

King’s Quest 7 doesn’t get ENOUGH flak.

It was a terrible decision, both creatively and from a business perspective, to completely reinvent the formula after capturing near perfection with King’s Quest 6.  When you happen upon something that is nearly universally praised, why in the fuck would you throw it out the window and restart from scratch?  All they should have done was tweak the formula and improve the graphics, and they did neither.  KQ7 was the beginning of the end of good adventure games.

Games were changing fast. Between KQ6 and KQ7 the paradigms were shifting. You can’t blame one questionable decision for all bad decisions that came after it. KQ7 is not to blame for all bad games after it. On its own merits, and even as part of the KQ saga, it’s totally on-brand, it had a next gen level of polish that pushed the tech and design forward, and was a good AG with lots of puzzles and memorable scenes/characters.