Adventure Gamers - Forums

Much has been written about Telltale Games’ apparent decision to embrace an interactive movie style of gameplay, specifically one that draws inspiration from the early 1980’s QTE-based Dragon’s Lair, and to turn away from adventure gaming and open, explorable environments and clever puzzles.

What do you all think of Telltale’s look-to-the-past strategy of limiting interactivity and exploration in order to put more focus on a linear story with many non-playable cutscenes? Do you guys enjoy the interactive movies more than adventure games like Day of the Tentacle, Gabriel Knight and Grim Fandango? Enjoy both?

I’d like them to continue making more traditional adventure games AS WELL AS making the games that make them the most amount of money (i.e Walking Dead) That, however, is me being incredibly naive. I suspect the company has moved on. It’s on record that their next game, Fables, will be doing many the same things TWD did. Oh, well.

I’m slightly…underwhelmed with the direction they’re going, but it won’t stop me buying their future games. Unless they start putting stuff out that’s completely unrecognisable from an adventure game, but I don’t think that’s in their plans from what I’ve read of Dan Connors in interviews.

Well I certainly enjoy adventure games more than interactive movies. I hate when you have to press some button on the keyboard like crazy just to be able to climb the ladder or escape from some situation (Jurassic park is a perfect example of this). I don´t see the point of putting such things in games, it´s tedious. That being sad i loved the walking dead because of the story and characters and certainly not the gameplay. I really enjoyed Sam and Max and Tales of Monkey Island, and would like to see more of those games. We will see what will they do in the future with Kings Quest because that game should be made as a traditional adventure game.I wouldn´t mind more games with a gameplay style of TWD if they also make games like Sam and Max and their prior games that actually had puzzles, even though they were not difficult.

I don’t think it’s an abandonment of adventure gaming. There have long been adventure games of all difficulties and complexities, and I always accepted them as part of the genre.

But I don’t think it’s the way forward, either. There is an obvious need for the genre to evolve if it’s going to grow, but removing gameplay instead of fixing it isn’t a very good solution. Games like Portal 2 showed how challenging puzzles can be immensely satisfying to a mainstream audience, but they need to be a lot more polished and playtested than the typical adventure game fare.

Devs need to make games that make players think, but still figure out the solution. That “aha” moment is what drives puzzle-based games (in all genres), and too often adventure games rob players of that reward by being either too obtuse or too obvious. Now that play-testing has evolved so much, I feel like they have better tools to get these things just right, but most adventure devs are too rinky dink to actually have that kind of testing.

There’s also a need to figure out how to make an adventure game with larger areas and more exploration, and just a modern 3D presentation like people expect, and still have it make sense as a game. I feel like Dreamfall Chapters is trying to do that, and the Tex Murphy series tried by standards of their day, but there’s not enough work in this direction.

I feel like real adventure games can be mainstream again and still have gameplay, but they’re going to have to shake off the old-school baggage.

Iznogood - 16 March 2013 10:18 AM

Regarding Kings Quest then it is more than questionable if they will actually make it, they are most likely just waiting for the right moment to announce that it is cancelled, at least that is the news on the grapevine.

Does it count as cancellation when the game was never in development in the first place?

I don’t like the term “interactive movie” for these games. That term can mean a lot of things, and not all of them fall into the same genre.

The Tex Murphy games (even the early ones) were billed as “interactive movies” and were very much an attempt to fuse those media, and they’re excellent adventure games with a lot of depth and gameplay.

Meanwhile, stuff like Dragon’s Lair is also an “interactive movie” and is in no way an adventure game at all.

I wrote an article on the term back in my IGN Retro days. I think “interactive movie” has always been and continues to be an attractive idea to a lot of people, it just carries a bit of a stigma now thanks to the FMV craze of the 90s.

Frogacuda - 16 March 2013 10:31 AM

I don’t think it’s an abandonment of adventure gaming. There have long been adventure games of all difficulties and complexities, and I always accepted them as part of the genre.

But I don’t think it’s the way forward, either. There is an obvious need for the genre to evolve if it’s going to grow, but removing gameplay instead of fixing it isn’t a very good solution. Games like Portal 2 showed how challenging puzzles can be immensely satisfying to a mainstream audience, but they need to be a lot more polished and playtested than the typical adventure game fare.

Devs need to make games that make players think, but still figure out the solution. That “aha” moment is what drives puzzle-based games (in all genres), and too often adventure games rob players of that reward by being either too obtuse or too obvious. Now that play-testing has evolved so much, I feel like they have better tools to get these things just right, but most adventure devs are too rinky dink to actually have that kind of testing.

There’s also a need to figure out how to make an adventure game with larger areas and more exploration, and just a modern 3D presentation like people expect, and still have it make sense as a game. I feel like Dreamfall Chapters is trying to do that, and the Tex Murphy series tried by standards of their day, but there’s not enough work in this direction.

I feel like real adventure games can be mainstream again and still have gameplay, but they’re going to have to shake off the old-school baggage.

I’m more concerned for them to become better as opposed to more “mainstream” (even though I myself am DELIGHTED to play games like Book of Unwritten Tales…I feel there’s room for both old-school stuff and new) and so I feel Stacking was a brilliant example of evolving the adventure genre- sticking to the spirit of adventure games without adding combat or death or stealth that Tex Murphy/Dreamfall (the original)did. I loved the exporatory parts of the Tex games, but those sneaking bits and those bits where picking the wrong dialogue choice killed you were NOT very enjoyable to me. But I guess that’s just a personal thing…;) 

I don’t know how to take a game like Stacking and apply it more broadly, but I want someone to try.