Adventure Gamers - Forums

I had that thread a while a ago (a long while) titled something like your turn offs and the reasons to neglect an Adventure due the dislike of one Feature or more

as we all seem to have the same attraction for the love of AGs still we differ Big time from each other,  i.e i know some players wouldn’t touch a 1st person AG and viceversa , some other will never consider for a moment playing a game they heard it holds mini games or sliding puzzles within ...etc.

while those features seemed like little in number for me at the beginning i noticed lately or discovered that they are never ending ,... yeah yeah some people Like Mighty and Bastich will play anything that has even one slight element of adventuring but on the other side most of adventurers are picky or lets say became picky recently with the great number and the variation of AGs available.
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i will try to gather/remember all my turning off features which i believe they easily make me neglct an AG in case i knew about, still ...of course i have some little just little exceptions regarding not to deny some AGs from time to time when i find a game that is really worthy forgetting about that irritating feature for the sake of its greatness.

-No Voice Acting (being slaved to the monitor to read all and every text without being able even to take a sip of water cause i might miss something, just can not be right .. maybe long ago when sierra’s had it i was young but now i can not afford.

-Easiness or self-played (is that a correct phrase anyhow) or what they call interactive movie adventure; like The Walking Dead for example.

-Games that hold difficult/arcade action scenes and what else to mention but Those Ogres in the cave of Dreamfall or the Monkey fight at MI4 , tho i played them and finished but without a save game esp. Dreamfall it would have been left unfinished ‘til this day .. i really hate to see those difficulties of action QTE featuring at an adventure , someone either add a Skip option or just has to make it easier !

-Direct control plus clicking shift with WASD to make the character run (darn) is very irritating but tho (imo), sometimes i ignore this feature as a con and get used to it, and that happened with Telltale ToMI and S&M (when they used to release real AGs), so this is one of the exceptions i might go with for the greater result i enjoy more than being irritated   .

-1st Person game with Jumping and crouching features such URU’s!!! . i wish i can say this also an exception but as much i am intrigued with URU games and the love for anything that concern Myst i couldn’t finish any of them and here i was irritated more than having fun.

-text phaser AGs Nowadays (i know they almost not exist but i am speaking generally)
, hold on ,yeah i know some would think the Sierra man hates text phaser AGs!!! (what happen to the world) but this has an exception and i dont mind it out of nostalgia when i am replaying of the old games but new one, Naaaah .. i always i feel bad and sorry about myself for that but i just cant do it anymore, getting old? i dont know!!

-Too much dialogue in one game Esp. ones like Nancy Drew and those Noir games , i rather (love) exploring the scenes and atmosphere more than doing nothing but talking like 40-50% of the game,... the only one that left me ok with that feature was TDoAR (Laura Bow 2)

-and last games with 3-4 screens at most available in one time (escaping areas) and you must discover all their clues to move on to another place with the same everything, some games like these had me good ,only had the same idea of one place to beat then move to the next but the difference was that devs had enhanced the number of screens, Like with Art of murder 3, Dracula Origin, Lost Horizon ,BoUT which were acceptable big time and fun.

i don’t know but i am sure i am missed some features that i hate, so if i remembered i will edit this post or re-post another one.
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and Now what about you dear fellow Adventurer ?

I look at the quality of the game and not the features.

Want to make an adventure game full of clowns and mime artists then coool. As long as it’s good.

Maybe you want to make an RPG and pretend it’s an adventure game, as long as it’s good then i’m in.

I’m an equal opportunity Adventurer.

Lucien21 - 18 August 2013 01:09 PM

I look at the quality of the game and not the features.

Want to make an adventure game full of clowns and mime artists then coool. As long as it’s good.

Maybe you want to make an RPG and pretend it’s an adventure game, as long as it’s good then i’m in.

I’m an equal opportunity Adventurer.

is that a diplomatic answer.. i guess it is

Advie - 18 August 2013 01:03 PM

some people Like Mighty and Bastich will play anything that has even one slight element of adventuring

I’m flattered to be put side by side with Bastich, but when it comes to playing AGs I’m (unfortunately) nowhere near him (unlike Fien or some other people). Why? Because I’ve played less then 100 AG’s in 14 years (since I started my AG gaming career).
I may be good in guessing the screenshots since there’s hardly an AG I haven’t heard of/seen a picture from, but my gaming experience is quite feeble.

P.S. It’s not that I won’t play every AG there is. I just have to be lucky (lucky?) to live some 113 years.
Or a few more.

P.P.S. I still miss Fien.

I think just focusing on features doesn’t do justice to a game as a whole. It is easy to say ‘I like this feature in a game, and if it has the opposite I will not play it’, but then I think you would miss out on a lot of gems.

To give an example from my own experience: I am not much a fan of first person games. I am not sure why, maybe it is just that when I started playing adventures I always played third person games, so it was a matter of being used to it, or maybe I associate it with puzzle games, which are not really my favorite because my prejudice says that the story gets a bit shoved aside there. Whatever reason, I always had a big preference for third person over first person. However, for some games first person really works. Had I chosen not to play any first person games because I don’t like the feature, I would never have played Scratches. And Scratches is a game that works so well exactly because it is first person. I think the tl;dr here is that although there are some features I don’t like, they just work amazingly for some games. So just focusing on features without the context of the game would not work for me. Sometimes ‘aversive’ features may enhance a game.

That said, I am still no fan of arcade sequences, but if they enhance the game, I would not say no to it just because of the feature.

Luna Sevithiainen i had changed the thread title, as it is wrong to take this subject as an absolute , but there should or must be a game that you had ignored once because you read something about it (whatever it was) ... i know people when they hear the words Pixel Hunting or Backtracking at one AG review they back off right away !

Actually, I haven’t. When I choose a game to play it is because the game sounds interesting. And that is not based on just one feature. I can stand a bit of pixel hunting if the rest of the game is good. I don’t mind playing first person if it enhances the atmosphere of the game. I don’t mind arcade sequences as long as they make sense in the game and make it more exciting. I think I am with Lucien in this one that it is the overall game that counts, not a specific feature.

Sure, if a review would say that game X was no fun because of all the pixel hunting, arcade sequences and a thin story I probably would skip the game, but I think it is not the features that count here, but more the negative review.

Discussing what we don’t like in adventure games, or what can or has destroy an otherwise excellent game, is imo just as useful as discussing what we like in AG or what we like about a specific game.

For me it is not so much a question of specific feature, but more a question of how they are implemented in the specific game, and some common mistakes that I believe developers often make.

Having said that, the thing that is the biggest turn off for is ... Cutscenes!

Now don’t get me wrong, cutscenes can also add to a game and help tell the story, but it is very easy to overdo. Telling the story through cutscenes is imo a lazy way to tell a story in a game, when playing a game the story should be something that you discover, and not something that is told to you in the form of cutscenes. Also cutscenes tend to break the illusion that it is you the player that are in charge, whenever a game switches to a cutscenes, it also switches the state of a player from someone that is actively playing to someone who is passively watching. Used sparsely cutscenes can greatly add to a game, but too long or too many cutscenes can completely destroy the game for me.

Another turn off for me is ... Dialogue

It is not having dialogue in itself that is the turn off, but too much and too long dialogues can also destroy it for me. I simply don’t have the patience (any more) to go through 15 minutes of mindless chatter, before we get to the point and I get the information I actually needed. I guess this is one of the reasons why I liked a game like Haunted, even though many others apparently found it terrible, and I don’t really liked The Moment of Silence, even if most praise it. The dialogues in Haunted are short and precise and (almost) always get straight to the point without any fuss, whereas I found the dialogues in TMoS to be extremely elongated. I am of course also not a fan of games completely without dialogue, so again it is really a question of dosing it right. 

Now both of these turn off’s can actually be hard to deduce from a review, reviewers tend to only mention it if it is extreme, so it is usually only something that I discover when I have already bought and are playing the game.

For those among you that know me and have read my posts about TWD it will also not come as a surprise that I hate QTE. I actually don’t mind a bit of action sequences in AG, as long as it is made properly, not too difficult, not overused and fits into the game, which of course excludes about 90% of the AG with action or timed sequences.

I greatly prefer games with voice acting, but can accept games without voices, as long as it is small indie games or freeware, but a fully fledged AG at full price has to be voiced.

I could probably add more but I think this is enough for now, I don’t want it to sound to negative

i actually (anyone please do not get me wrong) fed up of Ideal speech and that how Mr/Mrs Luna Sevithiainen & Lucien21 sound to my ears , when i was young a kid i mean (bear with me please) and the teacher or my dad ask me a Q about anything and due to the nonexistent of life experience i got i used to answer with ideal words and that always pleased mature people and we learnt to keep them pleased , if i was asked do you brush your teeth and drink Milk before sleeping i would answer yes i always do those and never ever forgotten them for one night , just a trivial Example to explain in trivial words that there is no AGs player doesn’t have one point or two that makes him/her back off on one Game , even if its Ron’s the Cave for some People (who only playing AGs on PC) moving left and right in platformer output was enough to make them give up on it. and lets not forget that some features are really crucial they can verify from just Pixel-Hunting Hotspot reveler to shooting and jumping like the case Mystery of the Druids.

P.S: i am sorry in advance if my words sounds impolite in anyway .

I think it is a matter of how different people feel about how features influence gameplay. For me the whole counts. If you would extent the word ‘feature’ to something larger like story, or atmosphere, or how it all comes together, then yes, I would ignore a game if it is said to have no story whatsoever, or when it is a random mish-mash with no soul. But the thing is that, just with features I am very lenient. I don’t like arcade sequences, but if they work within the context of the game, they work for me. I am not trying to give an ideal answer, I am just trying to put to words how it works for me. And I do dislike things in games (arcade sequences, pixel hunting, main characters that claim to be smart but only after a lot of persuasion start to see what I saw a few hours ago), I just don’t feel like skipping a game over it if the rest of the game still manages to capture me.

I never said that all adventure games are brilliant and should be played no matter what.

There are things I lean more towards, but flatly blanking a game just because it has a specific feature I may not like is short sighted. Now if the game as a whole wasn’t good then of course I would give it a miss or at the least the feature I don’t like would limit my overall enjoyment.

For Example.

I hate Myst (the original game sucks), but if I cut off all games of that type I would have missed playing Myst 4 or Scratches or Dark Fall.

If I hated direct Control, I would have missed Dreamfall or the new Brothers game.

If I banned dialogue then Longest Journey would be out the window.

Etc Etc.

Luna Sevithiainen - 18 August 2013 04:03 PM

I think it is a matter of how different people feel about how features influence gameplay. For me the whole counts. If you would extent the word ‘feature’ to something larger like story, or atmosphere, or how it all comes together, then yes, I would ignore a game if it is said to have no story whatsoever, or when it is a random mish-mash with no soul. But the thing is that, just with features I am very lenient. I don’t like arcade sequences, but if they work within the context of the game, they work for me. I am not trying to give an ideal answer, I am just trying to put to words how it works for me. And I do dislike things in games (arcade sequences, pixel hunting, main characters that claim to be smart but only after a lot of persuasion start to see what I saw a few hours ago), I just don’t feel like skipping a game over it if the rest of the game still manages to capture me.

i think we are getting somewhere but hold on! Feature is something dynamic (i hope you understand me if dynamic is not the word cuz i am not sure) but the story can not be referred as a feature, or the Hero’s attitude , double clicking on an exit to fast forward the walking scene is a feature .. lets not get mixed up here

Then features are small things, right? In that case, sure, there are features I dislike, and that can make the game less enjoyable (or enrich it if the feature is implemented well, like a well-made arcade sequence that is doable after a few tries and actually puts you on edge in a dangerous situation), but still, they are only small features in a larger whole. And I prefer to judge whether to play a game or not based on that larger whole.

ozzie - 18 August 2013 02:17 PM

zobraks - 18 August 2013 01:49 PM

P.P.S. I still miss Fien.

I have to ask: Why isn’t she here anymore? Did I miss something?

She got banned. To my surprise hardly anyone noticed (or cared about) it.
That’s the world we live in, I guess.