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No new postsTelltale’s Interactive Movie Games - An Abandonment of Adventure Gaming?
I’m more concerned for them to become better as opposed to more “mainstream”
Well, so do I, but let’s face it: Other genres have all evolved and gotten better in many ways, while adventure games have been left behind.
Since the genre’s dramatic decline in the late ‘90s, almost all adventure game development has focused on trying to catch up to the past, not move forward. It’s the same fixed camera angles, small environments, and static presentation that we’ve had since the early CD-ROM era.
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’m definitely NOT talking about incorporating non-adventure elements like stealth or combat. I’m just talking about reinventing the control and presentation paradigms we’ve been stuck with for so long. Moving away from cramped locations and pixel hunts and putting the focus on the deductive logic that is the genre’s heart and soul, while giving the developers more room to make a compelling world and tell a good story.
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 have no real problem with death in adventure games, but that really isn’t what I was talking about. I’m more talking about moving away from having fixed cameras and small sets cluttered with hot-spots, and instead designing a game where people have freedom and they know what to interact with by deducing it rather than pixel hunting.
Stacking was good, but I think it can work with more traditional inventory-based adventure gameplay too, if someone would really try.
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.
So basically, making an adventure game is harder than we think and most of us aren’t up to the task. I’d agree with that.
I was watching a link diego posted of Ron Gilbert and Tim Schafer talking about when they worked on Monkey Island, and it struck me how much thought they put into everything in the game. Too often now it’s been a matter of ticking the boxes: throw in some inventory puzzles, a decent story, some humor. It’s like baking a cake, and anyone can do it as long as they can put in all the ingredients together.
But the problem isn’t that the ingredients are stale - the chef doesn’t know how to cook. Because any great chef can turn any set of ingredients into a delicious feast
So basically, making an adventure game is harder than we think and most of us aren’t up to the task. I’d agree with that.
More than that, I guess I’m saying it’s the kind of game that has to be designed iteratively as part of a collaborative process. It’s impossible for any one person to effectively predict how hundreds of players will react to a puzzle. It’s a gradual process of testing and refinement.
But most adventure devs don’t really have the the resources to do this. I’m actually hoping that crowd sourcing and public beta tests might give developers a new tool to exploit in this process, although the process of iteration still takes time and money as well.
So basically, making an adventure game is harder than we think and most of us aren’t up to the task. I’d agree with that.
More than that, I guess I’m saying it’s the kind of game that has to be designed iteratively as part of a collaborative process. It’s impossible for any one person to effectively predict how hundreds of players will react to a puzzle. It’s a gradual process of testing and refinement.
But most adventure devs don’t really have the the resources to do this. I’m actually hoping that crowd sourcing and public beta tests might give developers a new tool to exploit in this process, although the process of iteration still takes time and money as well.
I can’t yet see that larger collaborations has helped or will help with adventure games. More often the AGs I like best are very small teams, one or two people, maybe plus programmers. The more people involved designing, the less distinctive personality it usually has. ‘Public beta tests’ can’t be good for anything except smoothing out the bugs.
Why care how hundreds react to a puzzle? Make your game your own way and if some don’t like it, be assured that others will. I don’t want AGs to appeal to the lowest common denominator, the mass appeal the big titles seek. Researching what people like in puzzles and then making the game that way is the worst possible way I can think of making a game. It changes it from an art to a science.
I can’t yet see that larger collaborations has helped or will help with adventure games. More often the AGs I like best are very small teams, one or two people, maybe plus programmers. The more people involved designing, the less distinctive personality it usually has. ‘Public beta tests’ can’t be good for anything except smoothing out the bugs.
Why care how hundreds react to a puzzle? Make your game your own way and if some don’t like it, be assured that others will. I don’t want AGs to appeal to the lowest common denominator, the mass appeal the big titles seek. Researching what people like in puzzles and then making the game that way is the worst possible way I can think of making a game. It changes it from an art to a science.
I think you’re completely misunderstanding me. Let me step back a minute with a non-adventure example.
You can’t make a good fighting game without putting it out in arcades and watching what happens. No matter how good you are at designing and playing them, you won’t be able to anticipate everything that players will do. They need to watch how people exploit certain characters, and how other characters are underpowered; how people find unintended combos that can be abused, etc. Then they go back and change things, and do another arcade location test in a month and see what happens again. You keep doing that for a few months until they have a balanced fighting game.
None of the changes made to that fighting game conflict with the designers original vision, nor do they represent a “dumbing down” or a “pandering to the audience.” It’s just the only way to balance and polish a game.
Adventure games also have an especially strong need for balance compared to other games, so there’s that same kind of need for iterative refinement. It’s not about asking testers what they like or didn’t like, it’s about making sure that people notice what you want them to notice and understand what you want them to understand and are able to progress how you wan them to.
There’s literally no way to do that in a vacuum. It isn’t about the size of the team or how personal the vision is. Play Portal 2 with the commentary track some time. There’s some really interesting talk about how some subtle changes managed to make puzzles that weren’t working work and what they learned by watching people play.
The biggest barrier people have with adventure games is “that one puzzle” where they get hopelessly stuck. When you get stuck in an adventure game, it’s often very hard to get un-stuck without spoiling the puzzle or a lot of trial and error, neither of which are very satisfying.
There are two solutions to this problem: Simplify the shit out it like we have been for 15 years, or actually polish and refine puzzles to where they work like the designer intended. I think the latter is a better path.
So basically, making an adventure game is harder than we think and most of us aren’t up to the task. I’d agree with that.
I was watching a link diego posted of Ron Gilbert and Tim Schafer talking about when they worked on Monkey Island, and it struck me how much thought they put into everything in the game. Too often now it’s been a matter of ticking the boxes: throw in some inventory puzzles, a decent story, some humor. It’s like baking a cake, and anyone can do it as long as they can put in all the ingredients together.
But the problem isn’t that the ingredients are stale - the chef doesn’t know how to cook. Because any great chef can turn any set of ingredients into a delicious feast
I agree.
The challenge isn’t simply to find a new presentation style or user interface. Though those kinds of changes can certainly be important.
As I see it, the challenge is to create inventive, entertaining puzzles and a good story while allowing the player as much freedom as possible to explore and interact with the virtual environment. When done right, it can result in something very special. This is what a great adventure game is to me, and it isn’t an easy thing to create.
It’s much easier to just string together a bunch of non-playable QTE scenes in the “Choose Your Own Adventure”-style formula that Telltale has settled on. This is hardly an “evolution” of the genre so much as it is gutting the adventure game and removing the clever puzzles and greatly reducing the player’s freedom to explore the game world.
Speaking of Telltale, let’s not forget that Jurassic Park, BTTF and Walking Dead were all hugely popular franchises before Telltale got a license to use the material and apply their “Choose Your Own Adventure” interactive movie formula to it. Let’s see how well a Telltale interactive movie sells when it is based on original intellectual property with no pre-existing fan base. TTG’s TWD is well-made, but the success of TWD game has almost as much to do with the existing popularity of the tv show/comic as anything in the Telltale game. Therefore, it would be wrong to suggest that TWD’s success means we should necessarily view as old-fashioned or inferior adventure games with clever puzzles and more opportunity for exploration. Is it possible for a more traditional adventure game to be a huge seller today? I don’t know, but I know that the KQ series, for example, sold more than 7 million copies in its day. That’s a rather significant number.
I liken adventure game design to writing novels in this sense: different (and not necessarily new) ways of telling stories are not going to make either art form obsolete nor mean that we need to change the fundamentals of what makes novels or adventure games special. Creating a great novel or great adventure game takes a great talent, and isn’t simply the result of some easy-to-follow formula or focus groups/play-testing. This is why I get annoyed when some from Telltale arrogantly and wrongly suggest, in a self-serving way, that they are “advancing” or “evolving” the adventure game, implying adventure game fundamentals are in need of a change. They make some good games, but they are doing nothing of the sort with their interactive movies that draw inspiration from the early 1980’s game Dragon’s Lair.
About two weeks ago I interviewed Kevin Bruner for an article about Telltale and asked this very question. His answer:
Do you feel like this is the new gameplay style for Telltale? Is this the type of gameplay we’ll see moving forward?
I think we’ve always been trying to evolve what playing stories means, so I don’t think everything you see going forward from Telltale is going to be Walking Dead-esque, but I think we’ll take the best of what we’ve learned from Walking Dead and all of the other projects that we’ve done, and continue to try to refine them. There’s a lot of interactive storytelling techniques and gameplay mechanics that were kind of left on the cutting room floor with the design of Walking Dead, and things that we want to continue to explore. So I think we’re going to continue to evolve really aggressively and continue to experiment with stories, but that being said some of the more classic elements—like Walking Dead didn’t have a lot of puzzles in it, and things like that, that doesn’t mean we’re abandoning puzzles. We still think puzzles are fun. But it’s really a game series by game series basis, we still have our pilot program that we do experiments with. I think we still have a lot of experimenting left to do on different ways to entertain people.
The article I interviewed him for will be in next month’s GamesTM if anyone’s interested (issue 134). It’s mostly about Telltale’s reaction to The Walking Dead’s reception, some tidbits about its development, and their plans for the studio moving forward.
I think people tend to forget that just because Telltale has adopted a certain style for their games doesn’t mean the rest of the developers in the genre will follow suit.
This is the best time for adventure gaming since the early 90s “golden era”. There are so many different games being developed. If you don’t like Telltale’s games, certainly you can find others that suit your playing style.
I have no issue with what Telltale is doing with their games. I think of them as a “gateway drug” to other adventure games. If that’s what it takes for adventures to be more mainstream, so be it. I would bet that in the long run the rest of the games and developers in the genre will benefit from heightened interest of people who become more curious about adventures after playing a Telltale game..
tl;dr - Telltale is not the only AG developer, and their design philosophy isn’t something every other developer is forced to follow.
TellTale approach is western version of Japanese Visual Novels at best.
Walking Dead received many Game of the Year nominations (maybe some wins?) and was embraced even by many of the more, shall we say, “intellectual” game critics. Most intelligent game critics do not think highly of new traditional adventure games nor interactive movies. Yet, a number of those critics did like Walking Dead. Why?
I’ve only played the first two episodes thus far, so I may not have a full grasp on this. Player choice was a big factor in the game’s popularity. Of course choice has been done in games before, but choices that appear to effect things to such a large extent are rare.
The QTE’s (in Heavy Rain and other games as well) help to viscerally bring you into the game and are arguably preferable to just sitting there watching the character do something. After a semi-QTE fight, I felt horrified seeing the results of my actions. To be specific: [spoiler]the fight with that brother at the end of Episode 2, pummeling his face. I went crazy with the buttons out of anger and fear, and afterwards was extremely disturbed seeing that I had permanently mangled the hell out of the guy’s face to the point of disability. Because of the way the game is set up and the QTE, it felt like I had directly caused that and that I didn’t have to be so brutal.[/spoiler]
This is the best time for adventure gaming since the early 90s “golden era”. There are so many different games being developed. If you don’t like Telltale’s games, certainly you can find others that suit your playing style.
This doesn’t comfort me, somehow. There could be millions of game styles being made and it would still be meaningless if the games are crap. Quality is the issue.
So what we can do is set up a company, hire some writers for Screenplay, some average engine, and turn screenplay into QTE , area will be limited by invisible walls to cut corners and exploration, and technically no game mechanic means no decent game programmers skill is needed. Voila!
This is the best time for adventure gaming since the early 90s “golden era”. There are so many different games being developed. If you don’t like Telltale’s games, certainly you can find others that suit your playing style.
This doesn’t comfort me, somehow. There could be millions of game styles being made and it would still be meaningless if the games are crap. Quality is the issue.
So you’re saying there aren’t any quality games out there in the current landscape? Okay.
This is the best time for adventure gaming since the early 90s “golden era”. There are so many different games being developed. If you don’t like Telltale’s games, certainly you can find others that suit your playing style.
This doesn’t comfort me, somehow. There could be millions of game styles being made and it would still be meaningless if the games are crap. Quality is the issue.
So you’re saying there aren’t any quality games out there in the current landscape? Okay.
No. But I wouldn’t blame someone for having that opinion. I just don’t see a Myst fan (for example) being consoled that there’s ‘something out there’ to suit them, because no one can argue that there has been anything approaching the quality of that series for quite a while now.
This is the best time for adventure gaming since the early 90s “golden era”. There are so many different games being developed. If you don’t like Telltale’s games, certainly you can find others that suit your playing style.
This doesn’t comfort me, somehow. There could be millions of game styles being made and it would still be meaningless if the games are crap. Quality is the issue.
So you’re saying there aren’t any quality games out there in the current landscape? Okay.
No. But I wouldn’t blame someone for having that opinion. I just don’t see a Myst fan (for example) being consoled that there’s ‘something out there’ to suit them, because no one can argue that there has been anything approaching the quality of that series for quite a while now.
I think both of you are right, because for one thing it is a great time for adventure games, considering that there wasn’t so many games developed in the past years and yet, I agree with what Oscar says because they used to make games for the love of it and now that there’s money in video games some try to make a game as fast as they can without the same passion…or make two and three games thar are cheaper and easier to make rather something that might take years to be made…
But still there are so many great games out there, so I guess we shouldn’t complain 
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