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What’s with the “straightforward” trend?
And that’s only for inventory-based games. Keepsake’s puzzles weren’t all that difficult but the size of the world made it a much harder game for me than it would have been if they had made it a progressive series of rooms.
It certainly made the backtracking extremely boring, that’s for sure 
. And, if my memory serves me correctly, the fact that in the later parts, it was often impossible to tell which puzzle you were already able to solve and which not yet, was extremely infuriating.
I have to admit that I’m not such a fan of “open gameworld” adventures as a lot of other people seem to be. I agree with quite a bit of “WitchofDoubt”‘s analysis, especially re exploration potentially becoming a slog if you’re not careful. This part of “WitchofDoubt”‘s post is just so true: “Let’s suppose you’re dropped into a large adventure game world. The first thing you should do is pretty much always the same:” etc etc. If a game is well-written enough (Longest Journey springs to mind with the 1st chapter, and arriving in Marcuria later) then the exploration is still enjoyable, but it’s a big risk.
Another major catch with open-world situations is (as touched upon with Keepsake above, if it’s actually impossible to tell which puzzle you’re able to currently solve and waste lots of time trying to solve a puzzle which is actually currently unsolveable. Yes, it makes a game more difficult, but it’s certainly not enjoyable.
And I do find “open gameworld” adventures are easier, and largely work better, for “comedy” adventures where storytelling is less relevant than they do for more serious adventures. Where the objectives are “Get x amounts of something and then we’ll take you to a new open gameworld situation scenario” a la Monkey Island 1, 2, 3 etc etc, then it works. Where actually you have a story you need to drive forward, open gameworlds are much more difficult to manage and still make interesting.
* Wasted time. Once you see how to solve a puzzle, it’s a matter of walking. When you don’t know what to do, a large environment just slows down your ability to get feedback on different ideas.
This is so true. It’s a major catch of open gameworlds in adventures for me.
Unfortunately, it does not take many bad puzzles for a game to squander a player’s trust. Every time a player wastes hours of precious time banging their heads on an ill-designed puzzle, they become more willing to look at the walkthrough next time. Large environments make the cost of wasted time much worse.
As is this. I know if I use a walkthrough once, and find out that the puzzle is totally illogical (or there’s a bug), I’m going to be much more likely to use a walkthrough a second or 3rd time in the same game with no pangs of conscience. If I get a “why didn’t I think of that” feeling after checking a walkthrough, I’ll be much less likely to use one a 2nd time.
Guess what I’m trying to say in total is that IF an adventure is really well done, then I agree there should be some more “open gameworld” parts - games like the Gabriel Knight Series, Longest Journey, and Machinarium are (semi) serious games that still managed to square the circle I believe exists. BUT an a game is far more likely to be “OK” or “enjoyable enough” if it’s fairly linear than an open gameworld adventure which might well result in a horrible disaster!
I think if Gabriel Knight was a better game then it would use old locations to advance the game.
Errrrmmmmmm…but it does lol! Guess you’ll have to revise your opinions of the Gabriel Knight games now
Large, open worlds haven’t been rejected. If anything, they’re more common, just not in adventure games. Arkham City is a sprawling metropolis, and you can explore just about anywhere as soon as the prologue’s done! But it’s not an adventure game.
So why are adventure games in particular becoming more linear? First, let’s get the lazy answer out of the way:
People in general (both developers and players) are becoming more and more lazy, spoiled brats that won’t put even trivial effort in thinking, let alone “tedious mooooving” a mouse for some (God forbidden) backtracking. That word is almost like a curse now.
Oh, them lazy developers!
This answer requires us to:
1) Ignore the prevalence of complicated, deep, punishing RPGs and strategy games.
2) Ignore the relatively low effort and thought involved in walking a character around a hundred empty screens.
3) Tragically confuse “patience with terrible design” for “brains.”
and
4) Assume that “wasting time” is equivalent to maturity.
Ok, let’s start:
1) First of all we are talking about adventure games here, if I’m not wrong, and second and more important, I’m not really sure that you follow the contemporary game scene if you claim that there “is a prevalence of complicated, deep, punishing, RPGs and” (especially) “strategy games”.
Could you please mention some of these new hard and complex strategy games, I would be extremely happy to try them.
2) The whole point is that there shouldn’t be a hundred of empty screens, but the screens (usually, but not always, the more the better) should be filled with an interactive content from which the player could draw information about the game world and get more immersed (what an overused word these days) into the game. Game world should feel alive and bursting (again not in every game of course) with activity even without player’s involvement and not look like a scene from a stage play or even the movie, because that’s the greatest advantage that games have compared to other visual arts (or media, if we are talking only about money grabbing, as it became usual these days).
That requires a lot of hard work, often more than resources, so that’s why I said developers are “lazy”. It’s not always the case, because many times it’s about the money, but it’s often just a designer’s choice and the easy way out.
3) & 4) What is for some people a terrible design, for others is brilliance that stimulates their “brains”, it same goes for wasting time, which for others is pure enjoyment. It mostly depends of people’s taste and usually their mental capacity and you can see that everywhere around you - what is a hard and tedious work for someone, it’s a stimulating challenge for others.
1) First of all we are talking about adventure games here, if I’m not wrong, and second and more important, I’m not really sure that you follow the contemporary game scene if you claim that there “is a prevalence of complicated, deep, punishing, RPGs and” (especially) “strategy games”.
Could you please mention some of these new hard and complex strategy games, I would be extremely happy to try them.
You made a shallow, insulting generalization about a generation of game players and developers. Any game with depth and challenge is a strong counterexample, regardless of genre.
Crusader Kings 2 is deep and highly rated. Europa Universalis IV, by the same developers, has an even stiffer learning curve. Both received a great deal of critical acclaim. The recent X-COM games don’t present as much information overload, but they’re tough. All show a supreme commitment on the part of developers to making a deep, engaging experience.
As for other genres… Faster Than Light is a challenging, procedurally generated space RPG. There’s a strong element of luck, but a good player can pull off a decently high percentage of wins if they know how to explore the possibilities, learn the major risks, and work from there.
And then, of course, there are deep, intricate text adventures being made.
2) The whole point is that there shouldn’t be a hundred of empty screens, but the screens (usually, but not always, the more the better) should be filled with an interactive content from which the player could draw information about the game world and get more immersed (what an overused word these days) into the game. Game world should feel alive and bursting (again not in every game of course) with activity even without player’s involvement and not look like a scene from a stage play or even the movie, because that’s the greatest advantage that games have compared to other visual arts (or media, if we are talking only about money grabbing, as it became usual these days).
That requires a lot of hard work, often more than resources, so that’s why I said developers are “lazy”. It’s not always the case, because many times it’s about the money, but it’s often just a designer’s choice and the easy way out.
And should these screens be fully 3D rendered? 2D traditional art? Both are tough to do on that scale, and the Sierra games used a LOT of shortcuts. And even in the Golden Age of Adventure Games (assuming you place that in the past and not now), there was often an inverse relationship between the number of screens and the detail richness of those screens. The Quest for Glory games had big, mostly empty settings. In contrast, Day of the Tentacle used a limited area very, very well.
3) & 4) What is for some people a terrible design, for others is brilliance that stimulates their “brains”, it same goes for wasting time, which for others is pure enjoyment. It mostly depends of people’s taste and usually their mental capacity and you can see that everywhere around you - what is a hard and tedious work for someone, it’s a stimulating challenge for others.
It may be a matter of taste, but it sure isn’t a matter of mental capacity. Would you call the brick-hunting in Tex Murphy: Overseer a taxing feat of deduction? Choosing every single dialogue option mechanically, like mowing the lawn? And what capacity does a pixel hunt test, besides willingness to tolerate pixel hunts?
I’m sure some people find a cereal box word search a stimulating challenge, but that’s not a positive testament to their brains. A stimulating intellectual challenge, like a good adventure game puzzle, requires the following:
1) A problem/question. It may not be an obvious problem, but it must be approached specifically as one, and not solved by purely incidental actions.
(This eliminates any adventure game puzzle where the player is supposed to take a wildly unmotivated action just because it happens to be clickable. Bone xylophone in King’s Quest 6, I am looking at you.)
2) The problem is solved by thinking and experimenting.
3) The thinking and experimenting are not trivial, and are driven by insight, not sheer bloodyminded persistence.
The above can apply to a strategy game, an RPG, or even coming up with a way to get past enemy defenses as a spy in Team Fortress 2. They do not automatically apply to adventure game puzzles.
A bad adventure game will only be convincing and playable if you turn off your brain a little. In Moebius, I had to try to ignore the stretches of plausibility involved in taking an plane flight just to get jewelry or alcohol. Other games force you to disregard commonsensical solutions. Why, yes, let’s build a ladder from scratch instead of… buying one at a store.
In contrast, good adventure games usually come up with some kind of excuse for the way you solve problems, and make sure the solutions click with a game’s atmosphere. But even then, it usually pays not to think too hard.
It’s easier to make the player “feel smart” than it is to make the player think hard, and many graphic adventures do this by letting the interface and the characters do most of the mental heavy lifting.
When I was a teenager, someone posted a criticism of adventure games online, and I replied that they obviously had “short attention spans” and “didn’t want to think.” At the time, I really believed that adventure game players were OBVIOUSLY smarter because adventure games are puzzle-y, and puzzles are for smarties! I blame this stance on having been a teenager. Teenagers tend to be snobbish about the things they like.
But there’s no excuse for anyone else.
I’m inclined to agree with WoD. I don’t understand playing an adventure game for the puzzles as the puzzles are usually either obvious or made intentionally difficult not by their elegance or cleverness but by artificial and unnecessarily obfuscatory means. It becomes a ‘read the designers mind’ puzzle.
There are really only a handful of adventure games that actually have real puzzles—The Last Express, I’m looking at you! If adventure gamers are really looking for exceptional puzzles there are other games that do it better.
From Portal to Antichamber to the emergent puzzles of Spelunky and Starseed Pilgrim. Or way-better-than-Minesweeper Hexcells, or the open-world inductive reasoning puzzles of Toki Tori 2. Or one of the very best, SpaceChem, a game where the player designs his solution from the bottom up. My favorite game is an old RPG, Star Control 2, which has no hand holding and puts the onus on the player to go find the questions to be answered before they can look for and induce the solution.
What adventure games are really better at is introducing and exploring conversations and settings at a pace set by the player. And I would argue that like in the case of Star Control 2 a large world is possible so long as it is packed with interesting things and characters so that when the player gets stuck on a real puzzle, which asks him to go FIGURE OUT what to do next, there are five more other mysteries going at the same time, more to find, and each has branching solutions.
But that takes a very good designer and some resources. It is possible to make a pleasant enough adventure with the current format, and so that will do for most companies. See: BoUT, which I’m currently enjoying, but not for the puzzles. Thankfully they don’t let them stand in the way of the real fun of the game, unlike games like the awfully designed Syberia.
I like games in which the player has to discover the questions he has to find the answers to. These are puzzles with discovery and inductive reasoning as the keys.
Favorites: Star Control 2, The Longest Journey
Most Anticipated: The Witness, Divinity: Original Sin, Gorogoa, and MAYBE Dreamfall Chapters and the upcoming Star Control game.
Some great thoughts here, and excellent points! I should probably point that “free world” I mentioned is not meant to be a parallel to “free roaming” world like in RPG games, but strictly a game design feature where you’re presented with more “freedom” - in this case, meaning you can travel and unfold the story while not feeling like going trough a “tunnel”, or a one way street (which can also be a designer’s choice).
Having said that, I prefer games that go along the lines of:
A -> ABCD -> EF -> G
Excellent, I forgot to mention this! Of course, every game is different, but you’ll agree that A->ABCD->EF->G still falls under the “free” category, but it’s just whether someone prefers to start/end in a more “enclosed” space (there was a thread about that particular issue somewhere…). Like I said, there’re many variants, just like I said “group of locations” because there’s a “worse” or “even less freedom” scenario - A->B->C->D->E->F->G->H…, where “A”, “B”, “C”... is just ONE location.
There seem to be a lot of players even on this forum, that prefers a more linear approach to their games
Spending hours solving a puzzle or going back through the gameworld to figure out what to do next is not something most gamers enjoy.
Of course, but on the other hand - if you ask those SAME players to name their top 10 games I’m almost certain more “open” games will prevail. I don’t think there’s a single game in Top 20 in AG’s Top 100 that significantly “reduces” the players’ freedom - with, perhaps, Broken Sword or The Longest Journey being the most linear of all.
1) BIG WORLDS ARE EXPENSIVE
I agree this could be one of the most critical reasons, though on the other hand - I do feel that there’s always a way to “work around” the “smaller” budget if you’re passionate to make the game, or - gameworld that you want. Anything else is shallow design, IMO, meaning that the game designer is making the game he wants to make by converting that very same game to fit the budget and still feels happy about the game, and not changing the principles and the scope of the game just in order to make the game. That’s why I would slightly change your “Big worlds are expensive” to “Big worlds are more work (that might not necessarily mean a better game)”
2) EXPLORING IS ADVENTUROUS IN THEORY, BUT QUICKLY BECOMES A SLOG.
I agree - but only in a poor design. It’s just like an average soccer player who knows to shoot only by using his right foot - if the coach starts telling him to “shoot and dribble” with both feet suddenly, he’ll do poorer in the game than he would if he was using only his right foot which he’s comfortable with. But if “bigger exploration” is put into “clever” design (or if a soccer players, after a while, becomes comfortable with shooting with both feet) there’s also a bigger potential for a better game (again, it doesn’t automatically mean a better game).
3) BIG WORLDS DO NOT MAKE THE PUZZLES “MORE CHALLENGING.”
Not necessarily, but if done right, they do make them “less obvious”. It’s really hard to speak in “general”, because there’re so many things a game can do right or wrong, for example:
* Wasted time. Once you see how to solve a puzzle, it’s a matter of walking. When you don’t know what to do, a large environment just slows down your ability to get feedback on different ideas.
Using the map for quick travel, double click on the edges of the screen, speeding-up the dialog or a line of a text… these are all often necessary to avoid that problem. For example, the usual adventure map could be an equivalent to the “fog of war” in strategy games - once you reach the location for the first time, it’s put in your map and you can access it with fast travel.
Recently finished: Four Last Things 4/5, Edna & Harvey: The Breakout 5/5, Chains of Satinav 3,95/5, A Vampyre Story 88, Sam Peters 3/5, Broken Sword 1 4,5/5, Broken Sword 2 4,3/5, Broken Sword 3 85, Broken Sword 5 81, Gray Matter 4/5\nCurrently playing: Broken Sword 4, Keepsake (Let\‘s Play), Callahan\‘s Crosstime Saloon (post-Community Playthrough)\nLooking forward to: A Playwright’s Tale
I do feel that there’s always a way to “work around” the “smaller” budget if you’re passionate to make the game, or - gameworld that you want. Anything else is shallow design, IMO, meaning that the game designer is making the game he wants to make by converting that very same game to fit the budget and still feels happy about the game, and not changing the principles and the scope of the game just in order to make the game.
This works well if you’re a design genius and/or have unlimited access to incredibly passionate (—read: talentend AND underpaid/unpaid—) workforce. Otherwise, the most reasonable and responsible way to work around a WAY too small budget is to cancel the project.
That option is not always available in commercial development (for a variety of reasons), and it’s also not always the best overall option (for another variety of reasons). Anyway, I’d say the majority of projects do not set out to deliver shallow design; they set out to deliver something that is structurally near impossible to deliver, and then fail to deliver it.
It’s a tricky issue.
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