Adventure Gamers - Forums

Voted for Phantasmagoria. Not really annoyed about King’s Quest because I was never very fond of the series anyway, but I had high hopes for Phantasmagoria and ended up spending a lot of money in this disappointment.

Kurufinwe - 12 December 2013 12:26 PM

Lambonius - 12 December 2013 11:56 AM

Without the shitstain that is Kings Quest 7, we would never have the (I can’t think of a strong enough negative adjective) casual interactive movies of Telltale.

I was going to reply to this, but that statement is factually wrong on so many levels that I don’t even know where to begin.

There’s an old saying (that I just made up): “The smarter the cursor, the dumber the player.” 

Seriously though—if you treat your players like they are too stupid to figure things out for themselves, then they will gradually just stop trying and eventually will no longer be able to function when presented with a situation that requires actual critical thought.  The smart cursor was the beginning of the end of the King’s Quest series for a reason.  It made players lazy.

Selling Sierra to people who not only ran it into the ground, but failed to respect their end of the bargain.

Wow, I thought Kings Quest 7 was the best of the bunch.  Hard enough puzzles, one could play with their children, and a good story line. I love that game!  Kings Quest 5 and 6 had so many things wrong with them, getting lost in the desert and if you didn’t find a shoe or an oasis, you were SOL.  I really dislike those kind of games.

Kurufinwe - 12 December 2013 12:24 PM

Not true. Back then, tricking players into a dead-end was considered a legitimate part of the the challenge.

Yes, I know what Sierra developers claimed back then, I was alive and AGing in those days.
However, do we have any evidence game designers deliberately introduced dead ends? Because even back then, to me it sounded like excusing a bug by calling it a feature.

Lambonius - 12 December 2013 05:56 PM

Kurufinwe - 12 December 2013 12:26 PM

Lambonius - 12 December 2013 11:56 AM

Without the shitstain that is Kings Quest 7, we would never have the (I can’t think of a strong enough negative adjective) casual interactive movies of Telltale.

I was going to reply to this, but that statement is factually wrong on so many levels that I don’t even know where to begin.

There’s an old saying (that I just made up): “The smarter the cursor, the dumber the player.” 

Seriously though—if you treat your players like they are too stupid to figure things out for themselves, then they will gradually just stop trying and eventually will no longer be able to function when presented with a situation that requires actual critical thought.  The smart cursor was the beginning of the end of the King’s Quest series for a reason.  It made players lazy.

KQ7 was the beginning of the end of the King’s Quest series because adventure games were on the decline anyway and because Sierra basically ceased to exist as we know it after KQ8. If you want to you can argue something about the Disney-fied graphics turning people off, which may have had a small effect. But it has absolutely nothing to do with the cursor.

Venkman - 13 December 2013 12:23 AM

KQ7 was the beginning of the end of the King’s Quest series because adventure games were on the decline anyway and because Sierra basically ceased to exist as we know it after KQ8. If you want to you can argue something about the Disney-fied graphics turning people off, which may have had a small effect. But it has absolutely nothing to do with the cursor.

Nah…King’s Quest 7 came out in 1994, man.  That was barely a year after the release of Nirvana’s In Utero, Day of the Tentacle, and Sam & Max Hit the Road (1993 was a hell of year for entertainment. )  Full Throttle wouldn’t be released for almost another year after that.  Curse of Monkey Island was just a glimmer in Lucasarts’ eye at that point.  Adventure games had nearly a full half decade to go before they were really and truly on the way out.  And the smart cursor was a huge point of contention among fans when the game came out, almost moreso than the art style was—at least equally so.

Antrax - 12 December 2013 11:40 PM

Yes, I know what Sierra developers claimed back then, I was alive and AGing in those days.
However, do we have any evidence game designers deliberately introduced dead ends? Because even back then, to me it sounded like excusing a bug by calling it a feature.

Oh, it was definitely deliberate.

Take this example from KQ5:

Graham is in the mountains. He has (among a lot of junk) some meat (roast lamb?) and a custard pie. At one point, he’s hungry and has to eat. Later on, he meets an hungry eagle that he has to feed. And yet later on, he has to fight a yeti. The proper solution is this: he eats the meat (but only half of it because there’s a lot), give the rest of the meat to the eagle, and kills the yeti by throwing the pie at his face (don’t ask).

However, the game lets the player eat the pie or give it to the eagle, which makes them unable to kill the yeti when they reach that point. That’s a dead end. And an awful one, because there’s no way the player can guess which item they should save for later (or even that Graham will somehow decide to only eat half the meat).

It could have easily been avoided by not letting the player eat the pie or give it to the eagle (it’s easy enough to come up with an excuse for why); but Roberta Williams chose to let the player waste the pie, and wrote text to describe those actions. If that’s not deliberate, I don’t know what is.

Kurufinwe - 13 December 2013 05:29 AM

It could have easily been avoided by not letting the player eat the pie or give it to the eagle (it’s easy enough to come up with an excuse for why); but Roberta Williams chose to let the player waste the pie, and wrote text to describe those actions. If that’s not deliberate, I don’t know what is.

I agree that that particular dead end is one of the game’s worst moments, but do we know for sure that it was Roberta’s explicit decision that it be in there?  Or that she personally wrote the text, for that matter?

Incidentally, for my money the worst moment of the game by far is having to wait for Mordack to fall asleep in the library in his castle—requiring the player to just stop and not do anything runs completely counter to every adventure game impulse and play mechanic that had been previously established in the rest of the game.  And of course, there’s no indication at all that that’s what you’re supposed to do—and there isn’t enough stuff in the library to naturally keep you occupied so that you would unwittingly stumble on the solution.  In fact, I’m fairly certain that everything you interact with pauses the timer, so you literally have to just sit there and watch an unmoving screen for a few minutes in order to progress the story.  God I hate that part (and I generally love KQ5.) 

I’ll never understand the whole smart cursor argument. The KQ7 interface is a complete imitation of Kyrandia’s (both the smart cursor and the inventory/menu at the bottom of the screen), but I don’t see people blaming that series for killing adventure gaming or what-have-you.

KQ7 is an awful game because the plot takes forever to take off and is a mess once it does. It’s an awful game because every single character is obnoxious, starting with the two leads. It’s an awful game because it tries to use wacky logic for most of its puzzles but is too painfully unfunny to sell that logic to the player. It’s an awful game because it mistakenly thinks it’s cute and that that excuses all its shortcomings.

The interface has nothing to do with it; it would be just as awful with the 5-icon system or a LucasArts-style verb coin.

Kurufinwe - 13 December 2013 05:39 AM

KQ7 is an awful game because the plot takes forever to take off and is a mess once it does. It’s an awful game because every single character is obnoxious, starting with the two leads. It’s an awful game because it tries to use wacky logic for most of its puzzles but is too painfully unfunny to sell that logic to the player. It’s an awful game because it mistakenly thinks it’s cute and that that excuses all its shortcomings.

The interface has nothing to do with it; it would be just as awful with the 5-icon system or a LucasArts-style verb coin.

Okay, I’ll grant you that.  Those are all very fair points, and things I also despise about it.  For me the (in my opinion) oversimplified interface is more like the icing on the crap cake.  haha   It definitely worked better in Kyrandia 1 and 2 (never was a huge fan of 3), but those were much smarter games overall.