Adventure Gamers - Forums

tomimt - 16 April 2014 02:50 AM

What comes to sales numbers it’s pretty telling that Broken Age is among the better sellers in the recent Kickstarter adventure boom. I doubt Moebius manages to make a even a fraction of the sales Broken Age or Broken Sword have.

I think you are spot on. Going through the larger titles: Moebius isn’t going to be a hit. The question now is how badly it will bomb. Larry Reloaded… WTH? So much promise there, and it became a missed opportunity. Broken Sword pleases series fans, and I think they should be commended for a competent job with Ep. 1 (especially the graphics!), even if it’s not a masterpiece.

But back to Broken Age. I just don’t think it was a game anyone was really crying out for. We wanted a new game in the tradition of the Schafer comedy classics. Not… this.

Oscar - 15 April 2014 08:53 PM

With The Cave and now Broken Age I almost feel adventure games have passed Schafer and Gilbert by.

Let’s not even talk about Ron Gilbert.  I hold him single-handedly responsible for the death of the adventure game.  That well-known article he wrote about all of the problems with and solutions to adventure game design has been picked up and taken as gospel by all of the worst adventure game developers of the contemporary era.  He’s the one who formally prescribed the dumbing down of adventure games as the solution to making them mass marketable.  I don’t care if he was right or not.  He killed the art, dammit! 

Jim Purcell - 16 April 2014 03:53 AM

OrionO - 16 April 2014 03:21 AM

But back to Broken Age. I just don’t think it was a game anyone was really crying out for. We wanted a new game in the tradition of the Schafer comedy classics. Not… this.

You mean like the new game in the tradition of the Schafer comedy classics we got?

Seriously, it takes some serious blinders to pretend Broken Age isn’t exactly what it was promised to be. It may not be to your personal tastes, but that doesn’t mean anything.

What I’m saying is that a lot of people were hoping for a DOTT-like game. You didn’t think the backer enthusiasm for Broken Age appeared, while polite overall, increasingly muted over time as it became clearer what the game was going to be like? Lack of enthusiasm among not just backers, but also potential customers following the development, probably wasn’t what it could have been by the time the first episode came out.

I think it’s great you are pleased as punch with all things Broken Age. But, if you asked people, back when the Double Fine Kickstarter ended, what they were hoping for, I believe most would have said something along the lines of DOTT-style humor.

Give Schafer credit for some risk-taking in going against what he had to know was the desire of many potential customers and fans. Unfortunately, that choice probably led to less sales.

Jim Purcell - 16 April 2014 04:29 AM

Because the established desires of the Adventure Game old guard has done so much for Adventure Game sales over the last 16 year. Clearly cratering their esoteric tastes would have lead to so much money pouring in Double Fine would have had to build giant furnaces just to burn all the excess cash.

To be fair, there have been very few truly GREAT adventure games in the last 16 years that have been worth spending any money on.  I will always buy great games if people make them.

Jim Purcell - 16 April 2014 03:53 AM

OrionO - 16 April 2014 03:21 AM

But back to Broken Age. I just don’t think it was a game anyone was really crying out for. We wanted a new game in the tradition of the Schafer comedy classics. Not… this.

You mean like the new game in the tradition of the Schafer comedy classics we got?

Seriously, it takes some serious blinders to pretend Broken Age isn’t exactly what it was promised to be. It may not be to your personal tastes, but that doesn’t mean anything.

It’s also in the tradition of what we’ve been consistently served up by the AG industry since 2000 - a plodding storyline, tedious gameplay, an enjoyable but overall forgettable experience. If the backers thought they would be getting exactly that, they’d be better off sticking with the top 4 or 5 AGs released each year (on display in the Aggie awards) which are much better than Broken Age.

Seriously, go and watch their kickstarter video again. They use the DOTT interface, implied criticism of modern AGs (“only in Germany”) and lots of nostalgia to create the impression they’d be making something similar to the old classics.

I can’t agree with anything you say about Broken Age. I already played it a second time, and I didn’t find it tedious to play then either. And I find many moments of the game to be unforgettable. The opening shot, the spoon, the end, the cloud colony, the lumber jack, the barfing tree, Mog Chothra, the (s)mothering A.I., the yarn pals,...
Maybe it’s forgettable to you, I don’t know how your brain works after all. But it’s not to me.
In the video game medium Broken Age is also an utterly unique kind of story: a coming of age story. I guess Beyond: Two Souls might also count as an coming of age story, but eh, I rather would not count it.

Gosh, are you reading too much into the Kickstarter video. That adventure games exist only in our dreams, memories and in Germany wasn’t really so far off from the truth, considering the quantitative output from German adventure game developers, but, more importantly, the size of the commercial market for adventure games in Germany. I don’t think Tim Schafer thought of the Daedalic games when he said that, because I don’t think he has played any of them. I also think he meant more the playerbase rather than adventure game makers because I don’t think he meant to say that no good recent examples of adventure games, like Machinarium, exist outside of Germany.
How do you read into that a criticism of modern adventure games? Please, stop grasping at straws!

And I never got the impression Tim wanted to do a retro throwback, that would have been atypical of him anyway. I expected Tim to make another Tim Schafer adventure game, and an old-school (or classic, I consider those terms to be synonymous) one at that. And he did that.

I guess some people don’t like Broken Age, because it’s quite different than Schafer’s previous games and they were expecting something more similar than his earlier work. I’m one of those people, personally I don’t like Broken Age, but I know that it’s a matter of personal taste and it doesn’t mean that there’s something wrong with the game. I don’t find the story interesting at all, and while I understand the graphics and animations are really professional, I just really dislike the trendy children book art style.