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No new postsdo you prefer/support developers changing their games appearance from one to the other…
..or sticking with one formula and concentrate on the story and the design?
I just played TIW: Last Wind Monk, and found there is nothing after more than 2 years from the original have been made to add to the gaming whole bunch of developing assets, character design, animations, even the soundtrack was just remixed.
Of course, there are new artwork new characters design, even better new artwork, but these are different from the mention above aspects which are most costly and worrying to any dev about to get into making a new game.
It reminded me when Sierra gave 10s of Adventures with one formula based on their SCI (interpreter) 88-92? and no one then had a problem, even ttg now sticking to one formula, right?.. other companies like KingArt like to change, add and experience new higher level every new adventure, mostly, Daedalic, its actually hard to put a hand on how they treat their games from on to the other unless we are talking about their last one, Silence !
whom others devs I’ve forgotten whether belonging this or that?
It depends if it is appropriate. Honestly I would not be able to tell if The Last Wind Monk improved the graphics even if it did, because it is such a distinctive style. The same goes for games like Edna & Harvey and the sequel. It would be a bad idea to change the style of these games.
For games like Book of Unwritten Tales, they were able to improve a lot of things because it is a 3D game, but none of the changes affected the style. TTG I feel could shake things up a lot, every game looks the same which turns me off most of the time.
It would be a bad idea to change the style of these games.
For games like Book of Unwritten Tales, they were able to improve a lot of things because it is a 3D game, but none of the changes affected the style. TTG I feel could shake things up a lot, every game looks the same which turns me off most of the time.
but change can come for upgrading your self, like the Sierra evolution story, and since i mentioned sierra, i can tell that the upgrading Sierra did to itself and creating and new evolution every or each 2-3 years, from 88 to 98, had never happened again to any developing company by the statistics and graph of the development comparing to Sierra, thru those 10 years only! in the last 20.
i don’t mind the change, you gonna represent a new even a sequel in a new more developed presentation, well hey, thank you a lot.
..or sticking with one formula and concentrate on the story and the design?
This is head and shoulders above appearances to me. The exception would be if there were some kind of flawed game mechanics that I didn’t enjoy in the previous game/s but I don’t think you’re referring to that?
I do appreciate the aesthetics of adventure games but if I’ve already bought into their previous offerings then it will have limited value to improve on it as opposed to the far greater value of producing superior story/puzzle design etc.
Computers are advancing their graphics ability with every generation, so I appreciate developers who take advantage of the upgraded hardware with better graphics.
I enjoy playing adventure games on my Alienware M17 r4 and my Nintendo Switch OLED.
If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it !!!
Very often radical changes to the well-established format just don’t work. Just see how Escape from Monkey Island and Simon the Sorcerer 3D feel like.
Of course sometimes it is interesting to see how well things hold up if the developer abandons kind of everything and tries to reinvent the wheel, so to speak. Like in Broken Sword 3, they went from 2D to 3D, they went from cartoon-style to realistic, they went from traditional point-and-click to moving boxes around, etc. It holds together surprisingly well, in all honesty, but the magic that originally created the series is very much gone.
Now you actually have not one, but TWO different questions you pose there… “do you prefer/support developers changing their games appearance”.
To answer both separately, I don’t PREFER them changing things, because changes for the sake of doing things differently is often fool’s errand, if everything worked well to begin with. However, I do SUPPORT them doing that, because in the end of all things I consider adventure games to be an art form and an outlet of expression, and if they feel that their creative drive goes towards something new and untried, who am I to tell them that they are wrong to pursue it?
If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it !!!
Very often radical changes to the well-established format just don’t work. Just see how Escape from Monkey Island and Simon the Sorcerer 3D feel like.
Sure, but there’s a nuance. In those cases the development team changed completely.
I think shaking things up visually makes sense if it’s the same dev team embarking on a different project once they put one behind them.
You spend so much time working within a certain style that - no matter how good-looking the result is - you start looking forward to doing things a bit differently. If you’re an artist, you are definitely all about evolving creatively, and by now you’ve learned from your mistakes and probably discovered a lot of cool stuff that was maybe too late into the previous project to implement.
Anyway, that’s my 2 cents 
Its a blurry line where you have to weigh the prospect of getting shiny new visuals Vs. getting a new game faster (or at all). I think the deponia games are probably good examples where they pumped out 4 games relatively quickly because there wasnt any innovation in the visual style.. but who cares, the games were great. Lets compare that to the whispered world where it took a bunch of years to make a sequel because it was reinventing the wheel and going for impressive graphics.. we had to wait and the gameplay missed the mark of the original.
So you dont want the recycling of assets to be *too* blatant or it feels like a cash in. But it can definitely be part of the best recipe to get out a good game faster.
If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it !!!
Very often radical changes to the well-established format just don’t work. Just see how Escape from Monkey Island and Simon the Sorcerer 3D feel like.
Of course sometimes it is interesting to see how well things hold up if the developer abandons kind of everything and tries to reinvent the wheel, so to speak. Like in Broken Sword 3, they went from 2D to 3D, they went from cartoon-style to realistic, they went from traditional point-and-click to moving boxes around, etc. It holds together surprisingly well, in all honesty, but the magic that originally created the series is very much gone.
Now you actually have not one, but TWO different questions you pose there… “do you prefer/support developers changing their games appearance”.
To answer both separately, I don’t PREFER them changing things, because changes for the sake of doing things differently is often fool’s errand, if everything worked well to begin with. However, I do SUPPORT them doing that, because in the end of all things I consider adventure games to be an art form and an outlet of expression, and if they feel that their creative drive goes towards something new and untried, who am I to tell them that they are wrong to pursue it?
You know its funny you quote EFMI as fixing something that ain’t broke when COMI did the same thing from the 2 previous MI games and people approved of that 
The game this topic reminds me of is Simon the Sorcerer 3 They had such a good following and were almost done with #3 and then they changed it to 3D and arrow key controls. And that arcade area was a killer. I wish they just would have stayed with the tried and true appearance. JMHO.
If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it !!!
Very often radical changes to the well-established format just don’t work. Just see how Escape from Monkey Island and Simon the Sorcerer 3D feel like.
Of course sometimes it is interesting to see how well things hold up if the developer abandons kind of everything and tries to reinvent the wheel, so to speak. Like in Broken Sword 3, they went from 2D to 3D, they went from cartoon-style to realistic, they went from traditional point-and-click to moving boxes around, etc. It holds together surprisingly well, in all honesty, but the magic that originally created the series is very much gone.
Now you actually have not one, but TWO different questions you pose there… “do you prefer/support developers changing their games appearance”.
To answer both separately, I don’t PREFER them changing things, because changes for the sake of doing things differently is often fool’s errand, if everything worked well to begin with. However, I do SUPPORT them doing that, because in the end of all things I consider adventure games to be an art form and an outlet of expression, and if they feel that their creative drive goes towards something new and untried, who am I to tell them that they are wrong to pursue it?
You know its funny you quote EFMI as fixing something that ain’t broke when COMI did the same thing from the 2 previous MI games and people approved of that
i think you are catching or inserting a layer into the question, the question; changing appearance best example (new) is in Silence, but EfMI and CoMI, they two had changes of team for each one of them, (which Daedlic didnt) than the original two first parts, and that is the layer i am talking about.
the very late 90s where the years where computers were flipping a big chapter t(hat had the core for the last almost 20 years) of the book of gaming and close it for good, devs where hitting their head to the wall whether inteionaly or because of the ground shaking under their feets, sierra went GK3 and Lucas went Grim fandango both trying to at least hold on to some wall above the groud thats beanath them and they both had a big last hit againt a wall that gets broken and discharges them of the whole building of the genre.
Funcom and Microdis have learned from LucasArts and Sierra gone wrong and gave adventures moooore developed than last seen by that basic classic formula 2-5 years ago depending on if we are subjecting Funcom or Microids.
so the point, even changing for the sake of walking along the new technologies is a big mistake, and not changing esp when everybody is, is also a big mistake… changes need to be better, not from the devs perspective but for the first-hand fans of whomever (dev), and its tricky.. again if my Q is about choosing ono answering of both sides of it, i will choose the Change, be brave like Ranger, but smart like Gilbert.
If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it !!!
Very often radical changes to the well-established format just don’t work. Just see how Escape from Monkey Island and Simon the Sorcerer 3D feel like.
You know its funny you quote EFMI as fixing something that ain’t broke when COMI did the same thing from the 2 previous MI games and people approved of that
Yes, changes can go either way. Third Monkey Island was a radical change, but despite everything, it worked. Although lots of things were changed, lots of things were also kept, it was still 2D point-and-click like its two predecessors were. Fourth time around it just didn’t work too well, as it wasn’t 2D anymore, it wasn’t point-and-click anymore, and even the content in itself wasn’t as compelling as the previous installments had been.
I think it can be stated as a mostly approved fact that whenever an adventure franchise has taken a leap into 3D, things have gotten worse. Monkey Island, Simon the Sorcerer, Broken Sword, King’s Quest, etc. I can’t think of any example where a sequel changing from 2D to 3D would have ended becoming a better game than its predecessors.
Sometimes sequels that depart from earlier installments DO work, so no one can say that it’s a road to disaster in all cases.
As far as Monkey Island goes, even the second Monkey Island had different graphical style than the first one, so seeing COMI as a radical milestone is kind of false. Personally I don’t think Guybrush looks that good in MI2, they should have kept the original assets in the sequel. As far as the redesigned version of him goes, I think it looks best in the original (COMI) form.
What looks kind of bad in the fourth game, is that they try to use the cartoon style version as a basis for a 3D character. They would have been better off using the character concept from the first game (which actually had two designs, the playable version and a different version for static closeup shots), or creating a third 3D version of him, like they did with George Stobbart in Broken Sword.
But at least the fact that the protagonist looks more or less different in every installment gives something to talk about.
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