Adventure Gamers - Forums

SoccerDude28 - 13 January 2018 03:03 PM

crabapple - 13 January 2018 01:56 PM

wilco - 13 January 2018 01:36 PM

The change in policy was for the 2015 Aggies I think, that’s why Wolf Among Us shows up and Telltale stuff is absent the next year.

Would Edith Finch qualify for “Best Non-Traditional Adventure” then?
What is meant by “Non-Traditional?”

The ones that do not involve puzzles as I understand it, so yeah, Edith Finch would qualify for “Best Non-Traditional Adventure”.

I think in Non-traditional catergory are adventures that still have puzzles but don’t play like classic games.
This year I would games like Danganronpa 3, Tokyo Dark, Observer, Sexy Brutale will fit in there.

Edit: Have to say that while I don’t fully agree with the current policy, and have expressed it in previous years, I don’t mind it now. Games like Edith Fich and Tacoma get plenty of recognition in other gameing sites. Even Telltale stuff that was painfully average this year gets fully covered. So let the Aggies be a celebration of only classic adventures. Barely saw mentions of gems like Paradigm of Darkside Detective in other places

wilco - 13 January 2018 03:09 PM

SoccerDude28 - 13 January 2018 03:03 PM

crabapple - 13 January 2018 01:56 PM

wilco - 13 January 2018 01:36 PM

The change in policy was for the 2015 Aggies I think, that’s why Wolf Among Us shows up and Telltale stuff is absent the next year.

Would Edith Finch qualify for “Best Non-Traditional Adventure” then?
What is meant by “Non-Traditional?”

The ones that do not involve puzzles as I understand it, so yeah, Edith Finch would qualify for “Best Non-Traditional Adventure”.

I think in Non-traditional catergory are adventures that still have puzzles but don’t play like classic games.
This year I would games like Danganronpa 3, Tokyo Dark, Observer, Sexy Brutale will fit in there.

Edit: Have to say that while I don’t fully agree with the current policy, and have expressed it in previous years, I don’t mind it now. Games like Edith Fich and Tacoma get plenty of recognition in other gameing sites. Even Telltale stuff that was painfully average this year gets fully covered. So let the Aggies be a celebration of only classic adventures. Barely saw mentions of gems like Paradigm of Darkside Detective in other places

If what you said is true, I think that the wording is super confusing. I mean the so-called walking simulators still get coverage and reviews here (albeit with no score), so they are considered adventure games, and they do not follow the traditional model so wouldn’t that make them non-traditional adventures?

SoccerDude28 - 13 January 2018 03:16 PM

If what you said is true, I think that the wording is super confusing. I mean the so-called walking simulators still get coverage and reviews here (albeit with no score), so they are considered adventure games, and they do not follow the traditional model so wouldn’t that make them non-traditional adventures?

There was a talk like this last year   categories might change this year?

wilco - 13 January 2018 03:25 PM

SoccerDude28 - 13 January 2018 03:16 PM

If what you said is true, I think that the wording is super confusing. I mean the so-called walking simulators still get coverage and reviews here (albeit with no score), so they are considered adventure games, and they do not follow the traditional model so wouldn’t that make them non-traditional adventures?

There was a talk like this last year   categories might change this year?

Also one of the rare occasions when oscar and nomad agreed

https://adventuregamers.com/forums/viewthread/9124/#129339

lol

Sorry, late getting to answer this, but again Advie is pretty much right.

Back before adventures with no puzzles really became a “thing,” we leniently still treated them like standard adventures. Games like To the Moon and Gone Home squeaked in by virtue of having at least a marginal degree of puzzling (there are two legit “puzzles” in Gone Home that I recall, though neither was actually hard and at least one was optional). Ditto the earlier Telltale stuff. Hence the scores for those games at the time.

But once it became clear that this trend was here to stay, and in fact becoming more and more prominent, we decided to tighten up our focus and make a distinction between puzzles vs. no-puzzles. We still feel these games are of huge interest to adventure gamers, so we keep covering the bigger and better among them—but we don’t feel it’s fair to score them (or rather, fair to hold games with puzzles to a higher standard than those without), and nor do we want to commit ourselves to covering every new “walking simulator” (hate that wretched term) or CYOA story games. So any reviews of those types of games are essentially “bonus” coverage.

It’s not unlike our change in policy towards episodic games. We used to grade each new episode like its own entity, but the more episodic games became popular, the less inclined we were to keep that up. So now we won’t grade any new unfinished serial adventures, but games like The Journey Down and The Dream Machine were “grandfathered” in as games that existed before this new policy took place.

As beholden to tradition as adventure games often are, the genre as a whole is an ever-evolving thing. We’re just trying to adapt.

I’m curious to see if puzzlers that don’t focus on story/dialogues/inventory interaction/exploration are going to be scored and put as eligible for voting this year (like Gorogoa, one of my favorite games last year, which in my book is a puzzle game with a hinch of story intertwined in it). I regard them as the other side of the coin and as much distant from classic adventure games as the so called walking sims/story-driven games without puzzles/CYOA and so on.
Don’t want to start a fight here. I love all kinds of games, no matter which tags people put on them. It’s just the discussion (which tries to tag games and genres) that got me interested in that matter.

Thank you for taking the time to explain, Jackal.
I see where covering “games that adventure game players might like” is tricky.

I don’t normally enjoy either so-called “walking simulators” or “choose your own story” games, but I thought the way the stories were told in Edith Finch, and how they were interwoven with the environment, made the game something special. I still think that when an exceptional game like Edith Finch comes along it deserves some sort of honorable mention in the Aggies, though it wouldn’t have to be in a category intended for “classic adventure games.”

Years ago, there was kind of this sudden breakout of more and more developers going “pff puzzles who needs them.” And the result was these games that strongly resembled adventures and in some cases came from devs strongly associated to adventures, but profoundly felt… gameplay-lite. And at first it probably didnt seem like it was a real significant departure.. but once we had a bunch of these games i think it got clear its a distinct sub-genre of “narrative focused” games. But for a lot of us puzzles arent a negotiable piece of what adventures mean to us. Adventures can be very very different beasts, but if you strip out nearly all of puzzles and/or exploration it just cant be compared in the same way to other games that include them. And i believe most of these devs making these gameplay-lite adventure-ish games really arent concerned with thinking about labels like adventure and whats expected from it. “Adventure-gamers” arent even really their true target audience.
But at the same time this doesnt mean these games are automatically bad. Telltale for example shouldnt be completely written off as bad even if they have landed in a disappointing frustrating place. They just decided that major adventure elements like inventories and puzzles alienate the giant mainstream base that they aim for. They might not be wrong. And we dont have to rate their games as adventures on the same scale as something by wadget eye.

crabapple - 14 January 2018 11:14 AM

Thank you for taking the time to explain, Jackal.
I see where covering “games that adventure game players might like” is tricky.

I don’t normally enjoy either so-called “walking simulators” or “choose your own story” games, but I thought the way the stories were told in Edith Finch, and how they were interwoven with the environment, made the game something special. I still think that when an exceptional game like Edith Finch comes along it deserves some sort of honorable mention in the Aggies, though it wouldn’t have to be in a category intended for “classic adventure games.”

I don’t think it does deserve a mention. Freewares and text adventures don’t get a mention and they are true adventures, so why should almost-adventures? Should excellent RPGs now get a mention?

crabapple - 14 January 2018 11:14 AM

Thank you for taking the time to explain, Jackal.
I see where covering “games that adventure game players might like” is tricky.

I don’t normally enjoy either so-called “walking simulators” or “choose your own story” games, but I thought the way the stories were told in Edith Finch, and how they were interwoven with the environment, made the game something special. I still think that when an exceptional game like Edith Finch comes along it deserves some sort of honorable mention in the Aggies, though it wouldn’t have to be in a category intended for “classic adventure games.”

I saw last year they had something called silver Aggies to recognize these “almost” adventures:

https://adventuregamers.com/articles/view/32193/page14

Maybe(hopefully), they will have something like this again this year?