Adventure Gamers - Forums

Toefur - 29 April 2013 10:21 AM

But the question is: should there be grounds for reasonable explanation that that item (sunscreen) will be required? You can’t put a random bottle of sunscreen in a room, that isn’t currently needed, and then punish the player a few hours later in the game for not picking up that item at the time.

I think bad design would include the idea of having to pick up random (currently unrelated) objects simply because they exist within the game.

Of course, but that isn’t the case here. You’re going on a cruise to a tropical location and it’s not like there are hundreds of items in the shop. Let’s give some credit to the player, they aren’t totally stupid and can’t make decisions on what they will need until they are told so. Or maybe they are.

Hah, that was the idea with early adventure games.  Take everything that isn’t tied down.  I used to try to take EVERYTHING I saw.  Even the castle doors in King’s Quest 1 the first time I played it.

Bt

Oscar - 29 April 2013 10:37 AM

Toefur - 29 April 2013 10:21 AM

But the question is: should there be grounds for reasonable explanation that that item (sunscreen) will be required? You can’t put a random bottle of sunscreen in a room, that isn’t currently needed, and then punish the player a few hours later in the game for not picking up that item at the time.

I think bad design would include the idea of having to pick up random (currently unrelated) objects simply because they exist within the game.

Of course, but that isn’t the case here. You’re going on a cruise to a tropical location and it’s not like there are hundreds of items in the shop. Let’s give some credit to the player, they aren’t totally stupid and can’t make decisions on what they will need until they are told so. Or maybe they are.

In the old sierra games, death itself was a puzzle. Sometimes you would die without realising you needed something. Then you would reload and try to figure out how to solve the death puzzle. That by itself is not too bad. The Last Express has the same mechanic where you reach a dead end and then rewind time and replay certain areas to prevent the dead end, and that was one of the most praised features of the game.

The problem in sierra games was that often you had no idea where to look to solve the puzzle. If you don’t remember seeing a particular item then you were pretty much doomed and had to start over and look at everything carefully again. I think in one of the space quests you need an item from right at the beginning and you carry it with you until you use it right at the end

If they used some sort of hint then it might work, like “your skin starts to burn” just before you enter the cruise, which you might ignore the first time, but you remember it after you die so you know that the solution is somewhere there.

I like deaths in adventure games.

There are differences between dead-ends and deaths though. Not every death is a dead end.

The worst is a walking dead-end - when you’re stuck without something, but you don’t die.  You just keep walking about.

Bt

tomimt - 29 April 2013 11:35 AM

Blackthorne - 29 April 2013 11:10 AM

The worst is a walking dead-end - when you’re stuck without something, but you don’t die.  You just keep walking about.

Bt

And that’s pretty much LSL2 for you. It’s full of situations where you are just left thinking what you’ve missed. Like if you don’t dive in the pool to get the bikini, or you don’t get the airsick bag, or you don’t order the blue plate special.

It in no way good game design or even fair towards the player.

Yeah, I agree - and it’s that kind of stuff that could be fixed in an LSL2 remake!  The prospect of that, along with new jokes and material - hell, the whole airport stuff could be WAAAAAAY different because of how times are now…. I’m interested to see what they would do.

Bt

Kasper F. Nielsen - 28 April 2013 01:22 PM

I’d say remaking the first trilogy and then trying to get Larry 8 off the ground would be ideal. While 5 could do with a remake, neither 6 nor especially 7 needs one, and it would probably just confuse people that a 4th game isn’t available and they’re instead releasing Larry 5 reloaded. So going forward with a new game after 3 would be what I’d do anyway, even though it’d be tempting to try and milk the franchise as much as possible right away.

Agreed with this. Not only to the remakes get less necessary as the series advances, they also get more costly to produce, and there’s also going to be gradually declining excitement by virtue of there being one per year. Even Larry 2 and 3 seem like they’ll cost a lot more than the first. There’s probably at least 3 times the number of backgrounds to draw, for one.

So yeah, I hope they consider doing the 3, which have always formed a nice, neat trilogy, and then move on to something new. That seems to make the most sense to me.

tomimt - 29 April 2013 11:35 AM

Blackthorne - 29 April 2013 11:10 AM

The worst is a walking dead-end - when you’re stuck without something, but you don’t die.  You just keep walking about.

Bt

And that’s pretty much LSL2 for you. It’s full of situations where you are just left thinking what you’ve missed. Like if you don’t dive in the pool to get the bikini, or you don’t get the airsick bag, or you don’t order the blue plate special.

It in no way good game design or even fair towards the player.

Yeah, Larry 2’s design is indefensible. Deaths are not the issue. Trial and error is not the issue. The problem is that the game often leaves you stuck with no feedback or way to know that you’ve dead-ended, leaving the player to bang his head against the keyboard trying to figure out if the puzzle he’s on is even solvable or not.

It’s also full of unintuitive puzzles, timers that aren’t disclosed to the player, and all kinds of other issues. It needs to be pretty much overhauled from scratch. The story is ok (needs some fleshing out though, especially the villain), and the gags are funny, but the rest needs to be jettisoned pretty bad.

I missed this discussion somehow.
Larry 2 is one of the worst-designed adventure games of all times. It’s completely indefensible. It’s the only game I know where you lose by having an item in your inventory, an item which you got points for picking up. It also has that thing from SQ1 where you can only enter a room several times until it becomes unavailable, but unlike SQ1 there’s no indication of this and it has no in-game reason.

It might benefit from a redesign but they may as well make it an entirely new game, it’s not as though the plot was that great or anything.

jaap - 12 December 2013 01:52 AM

Al just left Replay

This is good news.