Adventure Gamers - Forums

Hi all!
I recently replayed some old games, like “Death Gate”, “Shannara”, “Innocent Until Caugh”, “Guilty” and “Rex Nebular”, among others. And came to think of it. They all are good games, with stories and puzzles way above the recents games. All of theme (games) were from the early 90’s, along with the MIs from LucasArts and GKs from Sierra. Do we are really lacking people that can’t write good stuff now or this have to do because only the “gamers” today need only adrenaline and not thinking?

Old writers are suffering from writers block or trying to immitate old success, also there is natural trend in having more lenient fanbase that goes crazy just on the name so that the writers dont have to put serious, hard and clever input in writing. Not in this genre only, all around. I too feel less and less impressed by writing and stories in current times against end of 90s and PS2 era games.

Also, the way the stories are delivered is different in more recent games.  The older games had stories that you uncovered gradually through your exploration of the environments, conversations with characters, etc.  All that exposition was worked organically into the gameplay of exploring the world.  More recent game developers think that a better solution is simply shoehorning story progression into non-playable cutscenes, or fully scripted events, which do significantly less to get the player invested in the overall narrative, because they have no sense of control over the experience.

I think there’s always been a big problem with translation in adventure games too, a lot of them are not being made by English teams and there’s often a noticeable dip in quality in the writing and voice acting when they’re being done by those who don’t have English as their native tongue

All valid points above, damn i miss Rika writing of Cing fame, the company is dead now.

There is definitely no market for just good writing,marketing and new corporate models have tainted everything. Kickstarter is gonna be good tool to measure the potential without any excuses of marketing tampering story argument by developers.
So i am curious how cecil, schafer and Ragnar will do.

This is a good point, nomadsoul. I started this topic because I am really missing good stories in the recent AGs. Could the main thing be the “lack of investment in good games by the publishers” or the new “way” of putting good stuff in the market wil be “kickstarter” an other ways? Or do we really are lacking writers?

If i have to keep the answer more generalized, the kickstarter companies are free now,
show what you got, and put everything, and result will be compared to old stuff.
We have matured with hardcore adventure games and atleast i have now higher urge to be stimulated in story terms not just the nostalgic one. With internet and alternative media and all so much to read and my demands for stories are higher. Things are recycling, themes are being repeated to death.
But again as i said, majority fanbase will just go crazy of over little things, just for the fact that there favorite devlopers are back rather than actually go on critical analysis of storywriting and all. People are so busy in life and all, that some small element of good experience is inflated to be something big.
I also think sometimes when i play good story games, horror games or hard games like Demonsouls, in this gaming climate, where such elements are dying, beggers cant be choosers, i have few game developers who are doing whats lost, so i have to accept them in anyway because there is no one else.

Another Question is why we cannot produce more Tim, JJensen and Cecil??

Food for thought

I think there’s a lot more pandering to a general audience now, instead of a specific niche of players.  It’s just how the business end runs these days.

Bt

nomadsoul - 21 April 2013 01:21 PM

Old writers are suffering from writers block or trying to immitate old success,

Or the people who played those games have gotten older and become harder to impress.

The bottom line is seriously talented writers wouldn’t be attracted to the industry. The medium has great storytelling potential, but the industry is largely juvenile. There’s been the odd example of an acclaimed writer in another medium (Benoit Sokal for example) writing for a game but mostly its unlikely to happen because the rewards aren’t there and the restrictions are massive.

When adventure games were at their peak, they were pretty much the only game in town for quality writing, which meant they were the most attractive place for good writers to work. Now, they’re a small niche, and all games need stories and writers, not to mention there are just less adventure games overall.

This was really the core reason why I jumped on the Kickstarter bandwagon last year. It wasn’t that I needed more adventure games, and it wasn’t even really about the old IPs, it’s that I wanted those great writers to come back to the genre.

Certainly not a lack of talent out there. I think it all comes down to the profitability of adventure games and funding projects capable of attracting/recruiting top talent.

Kickstarter is great because it allows us to reward and support adventure game writing/designing talent, both new and not new (“old” sounds bad…hehe).

Where there is money to be made, there will be no shortage of talented writers and designers!

I don’t think the problem is that adventure game budgets are too SMALL.  If anything, it’d be the opposite.  Budget size should be directly related to market demand.  The higher the sales expectations, the higher the budget should be.  With adventure games being a *relatively* niche market, you absolutely do NOT want to sink a huge budget into a project, and then not be able to recoup expenses, let alone make a substantial profit, once the game is released.  The problem in the late 90s was that the adventure game budgets were too BIG, and thus they weren’t considered financial successes, regardless of the fact that some of those later adventure games (like Mask of Eternity) sold more than all the previous games in the series combined.

I should point out that a lot of older games were just as guilty of having awful writing as any of the ‘bad’ contemporary ones.
‘Innocent Until Caught’ and ‘Guilty’ are both incoherent at best, in terms of both design and story/character.
The other games mentioned by name, ‘Death Gate’ and ‘Shannara’ had the benefit of being based on well known fantasy properties, so a story scaffolding was already in place.
Rex Nebular is…well, really pretty good.

Yes, commercial concerns are stifling everything, because it’s expensive as hell to make a game, period. So anyone who’s being cautious need to pick something close enough to what’s already successful to make returns. And the glow of Adventure nostalgia doesn’t help because both the players and the developers have a way to play it safe by holding close to expectations.

For my money, here’s the thing: Interactive stories are a fairly new thing. Aside from certain recent trends like tabletop gaming, narratives have been used to share and pass on cultural information. If you exclude the past 15-ish years of gaming becoming massively culturally accepted, the entire history of storytelling has been based on the teller having some sort of point to their story. A focused reason for the telling of it.
  Adventure games are hard to do well because you (as the writer) suddenly have to balance a lifetime of cultural training (that narratives are single track communications, not explorable constructions) with the fact that the game needs to offer some sense of freedom.
I expect that as younger generations come of age in a world of games they won’t be as severely attached to thinking about stories as quite so rigid and linear.
This is true of any newly emergent form. Comics came about in the newspapers at the turn of the century, and there was a glut of brilliant newspaper comics as people began to shape the form of the medium. Aside from Will Eisner and maybe R. Crumb and some 1960s folks, almost no one was attempting any kind of formal innovation or rethinking of the basic presumption that comics were ‘movies that didn’t move.’ It took until the 1980s for comics makers (people who had grown up with comics, I’m thinking Alan Moore specifically) to finally start to explore things that only comics could. 

It’s easy for a free-form game the Sim City or Minecraft to do what they do so successfully because they’re not going for any kind of narrative coherence. But creating a story that is both controlled by the designer and controlled by the player is just a really uncomfortable balance.
Some people want to feel like their actions matter. In a lot of cases, I don’t want my actions to matter. I want there to be a clear story that’s been designed by someone. I want someone to be telling the story.

The problem with multiple endings (an opinion, obviously): If a game is heavily story based, it should only have one ending. If a game has a ‘good ending’ and a ‘bad ending’ then to my mind there’s only really one ending. Why waste my time fleshing out the game’s fail state?
If the game has multiple endings that are more ambiguous than the simple good/bad, it feels to me that there *is* no true end. This rasps against the lifetime of narrative conditioning that wants to know what the *actual* ending is. Instead I just feel like the multiple ending approach leaves me with a sense of non-closure. It’s a many-worlds approach where none of the endings end up seeming true.

Obviously none of this is roundly true—and to be clear, I would not consider a game like Fallout 2 to be heavily story-based in the sense mentioned above. There are almost no required narrative beats. The multiple endings approach works because its structure is loose. You choose how much you want to get out of the experience. You can miss a lot of the game and that’s fine.
That wouldn’t have worked for Tales of Monkey Island, let’s say, where there were explicit and inescapable plot points that changed the course of the narrative.
I don’t *think* Planescape

I’ve hardly ever posted on this site, but I look at it daily and I’ve been thinking about/struggling with this a lot lately (I’m a writer/designer) so I felt compelled to post here (and hopefully I’ll keep it up!) not expecting that it would start trying to become an essay. But I’m interested in following this conversation as it unfolds.
~Nick