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Are indies kinda resurrecting AG or killing it?
Observer has enough puzzles, though difficulty of which we can argue all day
Also much exploration and investigation , its not walking sim by a long shot
Valley by same standards used fro Inside, Cave or Portal series to name a few
i think the question must be readjusted to’ Are Indies what is only left for the genre?’
i see the Bronze era as Jan Klose described (i d rather call the silver era) is taking another turn maybe to a new bronze great era whereas no big production adventures anymore, maybe 2-3 a year, but only indies with great love to the core of adventure gaming, not trying change or putting adventures into new subgenre or trying to ignore the basic/original fans for new who are into different genres than adventure gaming.
when i saw the trailer for strangeland today i was very happy with it, and i said to myself i d rather spend the rest of myself playing indie adventure or retros than playing half cooked adventures as BorkenAge or those using the name of the genre to turn it into a storytelling (game?).
when i saw the trailer for strangeland today i was very happy with it…
Man Strangeland looks cool as hell, doesn’t it?
i d rather spend the rest of myself playing indie adventure or retros than playing half cooked adventures as BorkenAge or those using the name of the genre to turn it into a storytelling (game?)
I think Life Is Strange proved that there’s a threshold for puzzle solving that works very well for mainstream adventure games. Bigger devs should note that the wider audience likes puzzle solving. They just don’t want the same level of difficulty that core genre fans can appreciate.
Which is totally fine by me. I’m cool with the mainstream stuff being less difficult. I just wish companies like Telltale could differentiate “less difficult” from “completely brain-dead.”
In my opinion Telltale pissed away a lot of hype by dumbing their games down so much. Walking Dead season one should have been the limit for streamlined gameplay. And they’ve simplified the formula even more since then. Their new Guardians Of The Galaxy game has no hype and worse SteamSpy numbers than Thimbleweed Park. http://steamspy.com/app/579950
Telltale being pretty much the only “bigger” studio consistently putting out games means that they have a lot of influence on the mainstream side of the genre. If they incorporated better exploration and enough puzzle solving to at least make it feel like I’m an active participant in the adventure, I’d be happy. Basically just do what DontNod did.
But Detroit looks pretty awesome so at least there’s that.
and i said to myself i d rather spend the rest of myself playing indie adventure or retros than playing half cooked adventures as BorkenAge or those using the name of the genre to turn it into a storytelling (game?).
Why choose though ?
The more variety, the better.
Having such great games as The Talos Principle, Primordia, Edith Finch, The Cat Lady, Valiant Heart and The Wolf Among Us (to cite a few of my recent favorites) coexist in one genre is a blessing.
Speaking of Telltale: Yesterday, The Verge has posted an extensive article about Telltale and its inner workings throughout the years. Unfortunately, it’s not an unusual game industry story, yet it might be an interesting read.
Now playing: GreedFall, Control
Recently finished: Telling Lies, The Sinking City
Man Strangeland looks cool as hell, doesn’t it?
i love dark games and this looks dark as hell, too cool yeah.
I just wish companies like Telltale could differentiate “less difficult” from “completely brain-dead.”
In my opinion Telltale pissed away a lot of hype by dumbing their games down so much. Walking Dead season one should have been the limit for streamlined gameplay. And they’ve simplified the formula even more since then. Their new Guardians Of The Galaxy game has no hype and worse SteamSpy numbers than Thimbleweed Park.
Exactly! or come up with a choice at the beginning of each game to have this or that.
i always hated ttg, not for simplifying adventures but to rise up on the genre ashes and using us.
Thanks for the news about Guardians Of The Galaxy and Thimbleweed, this means a lot!
Speaking of Telltale: Yesterday, The Verge has posted an extensive article about Telltale and its inner workings throughout the years. Unfortunately, it’s not an unusual game industry story, yet it might be an interesting read.
thanks Ingmar, great reading, i guess we will see changes at ttg soon, or it is going downhill.
i think the question must be readjusted to’ Are Indies what is only left for the genre?’
In the sense of being self-financed, adventure games have been predominantly “indie” all the way through the three Jans’ “bronze era”. Even Daedalic is an indie, just one that was successful enough to become its own publisher as well.
“Publishing” of modern adventures is a bit of a misnomer. It used to mean a company fronting the cost of a game, but rarely does that ever happen anymore. Today’s adventure publishers are mostly just marketers and distributors. They let studios create games on their own dime, then swoop in at the last minute to maybe help finish them off, test them and launch (and many do a pretty bare-bones job of even that). So companies like Kheops and House of Tales and even Deck13 and KING Art are/were still essentially independent, even though they had “publishers” like The Adventure Company, Iceberg, Got Game, etc. slapping their finished products on store shelves.
So in that sense, nothing much has changed in the last… oh, 20 years or so.
What has changed, as the three Jans talked about, is the inability for most of those indie developers to survive making “AA”-level games anymore. We have fewer middle-tier developers making adventures, and more small teams making more modest productions. And that’s going to be the reality for adventure games for the foreseeable future.
I just wish companies like Telltale could differentiate “less difficult” from “completely brain-dead.”
In my opinion Telltale pissed away a lot of hype by dumbing their games down so much. Walking Dead season one should have been the limit for streamlined gameplay. And they’ve simplified the formula even more since then.
Precisely. That and deciding to ram their formula into each new franchise whether it was narratively compatible or not. It totally worked for Walking Dead, Wolf and Borderlands. It never fit for Guardians and Minecraft. It should have worked for Game of Thrones, but they just bungled the execution. I’m still on the fence about Batman, but then I haven’t played the new season yet.
i always hated ttg, not for simplifying adventures but to rise up on the genre ashes and using us.
Come on, Advie, that’s just silly. Telltale makes a product, and you either buy it or not. You are certainly entitled to resent them for turning away from traditional adventures, but no one’s using you for anything.
Speaking of Telltale: Yesterday, The Verge has posted an extensive article about Telltale and its inner workings throughout the years. Unfortunately, it’s not an unusual game industry story, yet it might be an interesting read.
Hadn’t seen that story yet. Sad, but confirms a lot of my suspicions about the creative deficiency on display the last few years.
I will never understand why highly successful smaller companies strive to become so big that they implode under the weight of their own ambition. It almost never ends well.
I will never understand why highly successful smaller companies strive to become so big that they implode under the weight of their own ambition. It almost never ends well.
Because once in a blue moon it works, at least for a while, and you get to retire at 45 and spend the rest of your days going around the world on your fancy yacht. I get why it could be tempting. I mean, sure, your (former) employees’ future, your creative legacy and all that are somewhat important too, but… a yacht!
I will never understand why highly successful smaller companies strive to become so big that they implode under the weight of their own ambition. It almost never ends well.
Because once in a blue moon it works, at least for a while, and you get to retire at 45 and spend the rest of your days going around the world on your fancy yacht. I get why it could be tempting. I mean, sure, your (former) employees’ future, your creative legacy and all that are somewhat important too, but… a yacht!
LOl, hilarious.. Kuru, you just can’t take the idea of the Williams and their ‘Yacht’ act, always. 
i think the question must be readjusted to’ Are Indies what is only left for the genre?’
As an indie adventure developer, I would certainly love to believe this is true. 
The sense that I am getting, talking to a lot of adventure devs of various sizes recently, is more of what I was feeling in 2017 when I released Neofeud, but multiplied. Dave Gilbert aptly summed it up on the podcast with, “I have no idea what I am doing.” Obviously, he knows how to make great games, and has an established brand, but knowing exactly what will sell better or worse, not so much. Essentially, the market is insane, and fairly unknowable. Dave’s modus operandi for the past few years had seemed to be, “Less dialog. Less talking. More doing / exploring,” and he even gave a talk on it at an Adventure X. He played VA-11 Hall-A and thought it would totally bomb, because it is basically people talking non-stop for seven-plus hours. And then VA-11 Hall-A made millions and is the #1 game when you type cyberpunk into Steam.
There have been many publishers, even, who seemed to know what they were doing, all of a sudden not know what they are doing, in the sense of getting games sold (don’t want to mention names cause I know some of these folks). Wormwood Studios, now on track with Strangeland, I know has been concerned with this also. (I actually got to see some of the promotional artwork as I was speaking with Mark in December 2017, but I didn’t want to dilute the splash this Spring Break / GDC).
I really, really hope Strangeland sells like hotcakes. Not only because I like Mark, James and Viktor of WWS and their games, but because highly stylish indie adventure games made with Adventure Game Studio is also what I have done and am continuing to try to do with Neofeud 2. If Strangeland succeeds, it will help prime the market for Silver Spook Games.
At least I think so. But I also have no idea what I am doing, other than trying to make the best games that I can, and promote them as best I can. I wish I had any money whatsoever to spend on marketing, or going to GDC (I barely have a car good enough to make it to the airport, let alone plane ticket money, lol).
I have been keeping a close eye on Steam, and we’re on track for over 20,000 games released this year, or one game every 20 minutes, over twice 2017. Again: we’re in crazytown, uncharted territory here. Gonzo-world. Strangeland. “Youtubers and Streamers will save us by giving us visibility!” I thought. Until I saw a game played by Markiplier sell less than a few hundred copies and get a mere 7 reviews two months in. (I don’t doubt the impact of the visibility provided by Let’s Players and Twitchers, but I think now in 2018 it is also no guarantee of success, either.)
So I think it is really tough to say not just whether adventure games are killed or resuscitated by indies (although I agree that basically all adventure games are relatively niche and indie-ish, with a few exceptions). I think it’s becoming difficult to know if *any* game genre, or particular sort of game is dead or alive, at any given time. Specific sub-categorizations of video games in 2018 are all like Schrodinger’s Cat; they are all in an eternal state of quantum-uncertain dead-or-aliveness, depending on how the algorithms, the social media winds, and what Gabe Newell had for breakfast today.
Speaking of Telltale: Yesterday, The Verge has posted an extensive article about Telltale and its inner workings throughout the years. Unfortunately, it’s not an unusual game industry story, yet it might be an interesting read.
Really good article. So many choice quotes. Also a lot of personal vindication for how I assumed things were going internally at TTG. It is sad to see a lot of those negative assumptions confirmed, though.
Particularly interesting insights on their former CEO, Bruner, as well. Seems like he stifled a lot of potentially cool new gameplay ideas due to his narrow focus (constantly trying to re-create The Walking Dead S1) and personal insecurity.
On a positive note there’s a healthy recognition that TTG had lost a step or twenty in recent years. As well as a clear desire to right the ship.
“We needed to break out of the Telltale formula, do something different, surprise and delight people, multiple years ago. It’s reflected in [online] comments in articles about us. It’s reflected in our review scores. It’s reflected in our sales. It’s reflected in our game scores. Everyone [could] see that, not just people who work for Telltale.”
It’ll be interesting to see how they handle their next few upcoming games. I expect they really wont want to mess up the final Walking Dead game and would pull out all the stops for that one.
I’d really like to see them work on an original property. It’d be something different from them and I think it’d get more attention than usual based of that alone.
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It’ll be interesting to see how they handle their next few upcoming games. I expect they really wont want to mess up the final Walking Dead game and would pull out all the stops for that one.
Absolutely! It’ll be very interesting to see the next few games. In a way, it’s a pity that some enormously talented people like Sean Vanaman and Dave Grossman aren’t on board anymore. [At the same time it’s nice to see that someone like Sean Vanaman is able to do ““smaller games”” now that give him more creative freedom]
Ideally, it’s not too late for Telltale, though, to step up their game instead of using the same formular over and over again. Personally, I’d definitely be happy to see them succeed, and I think the result could be quite interesting.
This is an aspect I really like about David Cage, by the way. Whether people like his games or not, at least to me, none of his games feel like, “ok, so last time we did this, and the next game is going to work exactly the same way the previous one did”.
Sure, a David Cage game is probably always going to feel like a David Cage game, but I do feel like he’s constantly trying to improve previous elements and/or bring in new stuff with each game.
I’m not saying that all of this works out, but I definitely appreciate that he doesn’t - for instance - make Beyond: Two Souls feel like a 1:1 version of Heavy Rain, which is just taking place in a different setting/different story genre with different characters.
Now playing: GreedFall, Control
Recently finished: Telling Lies, The Sinking City
By the way: Whenever Dave Grossman is mentioned in any way, I just feel an urge of singing a “song of praise”. Just looking at the list of important/brillant games that he worked on throughout the years is more than impressive. Respect where respect is due, what a terrific game industry career!
Now playing: GreedFall, Control
Recently finished: Telling Lies, The Sinking City
i always hated ttg, not for simplifying adventures but to rise up on the genre ashes and using us.
The only company in the adventure game scene that has ever USED and deceived their loyal fans is not DF/Tim Schafer, not TTG, but your beloved Sierra with their King’s QUest 8.
To those of you who are attacking TTG:
Fairly recently, two or three years ago I think, many if not most threads in the adventure forum were ruined by an active group of TTG bashers who never missed an opportunity to spout their venom. I stayed out of it, but it was awful. After a long, long time the mods put an end to it.
I really, really hope from the bottom of my heart that we’re not going there again. Everything that anybody can think of has already been said about TTG.
Butter my buns and call me a biscuit! - Agent A
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