Adventure Gamers - Forums

In 2009., AG published the article Casual Invasion: Concealing Hidden Dangers. We witnessed the rise of casual popularity. But is having the “Casual playthrough” on the forum the only consequence?

Looking at some of the current and recent adventure releases, there’re possibly at least 4 ways the casual adventures had an impact on the “regular” ones:

1) Games are shorter?

Of course, I haven’t played them all and counted, but somehow it seems to me the 20+ hours, The Longest Journey-esque titles are more of a polar bears today, than the ideal the designers are striving for. Perhaps it’s connected to the fact that:

2) Games are episodic?

They’re in minority, yes, but you know something is “going on” when the company announces their full-fledged game, only to transform it to the episodic format some time later. Rise of indies is connected to this - episodic format is sometimes the only way for a young company to achieve financials for future chapters (that, or Kickstarter).

3) Games are easier?

Pretty subjective and controversial category, but if anything - it’s almost mandatory for a game to include some sort of a hint system, hotspot highlighter… But that’s not the issue which should raise the concern - as long as they’re optional. It’s that other thing, the notion that the puzzles, core of the game (the games that do lean significantly on having puzzles contrary to the “story heavy” titles) are getting easier and easier. What it means “easy”? Perhaps it’s the fact, that majority of games think: “Will everyone be able to solve this puzzle, in a reasonable amount of time?”, instead of: “Will this puzzle be challenging enough to everyone?”.

4) Games are “cheaper”?

GK, Grim Fandango, Toonstruck… are measured in $ millions. That’s rare today, in adventure genre, and of course, the “production cost reduction” began much before the casuals started to spawn, because of adventure genre popularity decline. But - it’s interesting to question if casuals have anything to do with the current trend of several, mostly “technical” issues like - simple or “paper-doll” animations, little or no cutscenes, sometimes no speech at all… Of course, having some way instead of another is not necessarily a bad thing, and could be a proper stylistic choice. Also, when speaking about financials, it could be the only way for a company to make their work reach the audience.

Still, rise of adventure genre seem to be going “hand in hand” with casual adventures. It’s interesting to note that casuals, over time, grew from simple “hidden objects on screen” to having a more detailed story, character development, more complicated puzzles… or simply speaking, they’re more and more like “real” adventures. Is it a “two way” influence?

Also, you know something is BIG (pun intended) when your neighbour (well, not practically a neighbor, but a countryman from a country which never had major game developer) makes casual adventures for Big Fish. Like rise of AGS from 2000 onward, with new, creative ideas made possible for everyone to express, rise of amateur productions of casuals perhaps spawned another breath of fresh air to the parent genre.

I think lenght of games is always very debatable thing. Content wise very few adventure games can clock in the same 20h range with TLJ for an example, as that game really has insane amount of discussions in every location.

If you take most classic adventures and look at them purely in content, then I’d guess, as I haven’t really clocked them, the median lenght for them would be around 8-10 hours rather than 20h. For an example Space Quest 1 can be played through in about 30 minutes if you know exactly what you do (and let’s face it, no first time player would), where as Monkey Island 1 would take about 5 hours. But at the same time they both most likely took much more time from the players when they were originally released, as there was no internet full of hints and walkthroughs.

Difficulty is always subjective, as people find different things difficult. My usual frustration in adventures is any music based puzzle and I tend to hate pixel hunting as well. Some other player can find those both as salt of the genre.

Bogi - 05 February 2015 01:03 PM

Instead of all these directions AG now took, the only thing that could save the genre is a new type of walkthrough-proof games, which puzzles should be designed in a manner that cannot be solved by mere looking at the solution, so the players should be forced to spend hours thinking about them, and not just grabbing walkthrough after a minute of stagnation.

But that’s an argument you could have stated even in 2001, with internet walkthroughs floating around. Also, it’s impossible to design the walkthrough-proof game - you would need to design it for each player individually. At least, if we’re talking about puzzles. In Prince of Persia, on the other hand, even if you know “which way to go” it’s still you who needs to do jumping and climbing.

Instead of walkthrough-proof puzzles, I think it’s about puzzles that should convince the player not to look at walkthrough. There’re many factors here - it needs to be a believable gameworld, and it needs a proper “introduction” to the puzzle, meaning the player is certain he/she knows what it takes to solve the puzzle and is generally interested in finding a way to solve it.

I love casual games. I see no reason that I should have to defend them.

The original post pointed to the Casual Game Playthrough as being indicative of an AG cultural breakdown. Quite the contrary. The current playthrough is of the Drawn trilogy. The first episode Drawn - Painted Tower is being led by Sefir. And is being played by many of the same people that participate in the regular AG playthrough. Here’s the thread. Check it out. And join if you want. Everyone is welcome.

I think you will also note that it goes both ways. Those of us who love casuals also love AGs. All of the people who participate on the Casual Games thread are also active participants everywhere else on the forum.

And, it might be worth noting that the Casual Game thread is the second most popular thread in terms of views and posts on the forum.

There’s only one major influence in gaming and that’s “the international system of currency that determines the totality of life on this planet”!

If the money is in watered down, episodic, cinematic experiences then there are plenty of publishers that are all too willing to go down that path.

All you can do is hope one dev out there can make the case for a market that’s craving difficult or long-form adventure games. I believe that can happen if people can get hyped for absolutely unpleasurable experiences like Dark Souls.

I don’t really think that Casuals have had a big influence on the Adventure game marked, instead I believe it is some general gaming trends in the recent years that has also found their way to AG. Casuals might be a representative of these trends, but not the cause.

1) Games are shorter?

nomadsoul - 05 February 2015 06:01 PM

Then we have market with stats of only 30% userbase who actually finishes AAA titles like GTA4/5. Devs don’t want to make games that large number of people cannot finish.

I also read an article about this recently, and the simple point is of course: If only a minority actually finish the game, then why not simply make it shorter and stop the game where the majority would stop playing anyway? No point in wasting money creating something few will ever see.

I would like to think that most people playing AG also finishes the games, though I don’t have any numbers to back that claim. But here the rise of the indies, the cost of making games versus the sale numbers and prices of the games, also shows it face. If you can’t make money creating a long game, then perhaps you can by making a shorter one.

2) Games are episodic?

Regardless of whether we like it or not, the simple truth is that for a developer there are many advantages to this format. Not only can they use the profit from the first episodes to finance the development of the later, but they also get a lot of extra exposure every time a new episode is released.

3) Games are easier?

Again a general trend that is happening in pretty much all genres, not just to adventure games. The cause seems to be that they are trying to appeal to as many players as possible and not just the hardcore fans of the genre. Why risk alienating 90% of your potential customers by making the game too hard, just to satisfy the 10% that are actually looking for something more challenging?

Also if we look at this site and forum, then pretty much all the top reviewed games in the last 5 years or so have all been in the easy side of the spectrum, and similar with the games that are most talked about here in the forum, whereas the few games that actually tries to set the bar higher and have difficult puzzles, tend to get mediocre reviews and are ignored by most players even on this (hardcore) forum.

If not even the hardcore adventure gamers buy and play the more challenging games, then how can we expect anything but that the games will become easier and easier.

4) Games are “cheaper”?

At least adventure gamers are still being made, and not all of them are what I would call cheap. There are some indies that seem to scrape the bottom in form of production value, but there are also others like Daedalic that aim much higher.

From a developer standpoint, episodic content is a great idea and I love it. From a gamer standpoint, I don’t like it, and the main reason isn’t even the fact that it makes experiences shorter. I just have a problem with breaking the game experience into little pieces.

Anyone else here one of those tv shows binge watchers? I think to some extent we all are bingers, and e.g. House Of Cards owes much of its success to the entire season being available all at once. I don’t know if all this makes sense to anyone, and granted games and tv shows are definitely different beasts.

As for difficulty, I’m very much OK with toning down impossibly hard puzzles, because, even though I’m an advocate for puzzles being part of the core experience of an adventure game, I’m not the world’s greatest detective and I hate having to resort to walkthroughs. In that respect, I think it is a cultural phenomenon that’s reflective of how much more information and entertainment is available to us compared to the 90s for example, and how accelerated modern life in general is.