Adventure Gamers - Forums

Nostalgia and timing also play a very big role in it. If Broken Age was released back in 1990 it would have probably had a very different reception. As time progresses, people’s tastes and expectations change and it is very difficult for a developer to meet the increasing expectations.

diego - 17 July 2016 07:26 AM

Today, with the rise of the indie technology (hardly a bad thing on many other aspects) it’s usually one-two guy acting as a “company”, with a little help from their friends along the way, and the risk is too big. The final game is also in most cases “rushed”, or developed in a hectic manner. Are we actually wrong to invest in Kickstarter?! Are we really saving the genre by investing to one man + his friends, instead of forcing people to join strengths in a traditional company?! Monkey Island was great not only because of Gilbert/Grossman/Schafer teamwork, but because working in a big company they actually were in position to “use” the brilliant drawings of Peter Chan and Steve Purcell, music of Michael Land….

I’ll speak to this - coming from experience

Kickstarter is not just limited to 1-2 person teams. In fact, a lot of successes are by larger companies that can show prior successes and have existing fan bases to leverage. The team that worked on Broken Age, for example, was pretty big!  But the great thing about KS is that a 1-2 person team CAN have a chance, where previously they had close to 0%.

You can’t ‘force’ people to join forces into a company or larger team. The usual reason teams are small is that the people have no money, so they keep things as small as possible and work from their basements (or stuck in their attics ) on a shoestring in their own time. If they form a company - who will pay them and put food on their table while they make the game? If not KS, then they have to approach a publisher, or attract private investment. very difficult.

Adventure games would be one of the most labour intensive genre to produce. Huge amounts of art, writing, music, testing etc, and despite the fabulous and active community here at AG, overall we are still considered a niche market. Telltale being the obvious one, and a handful of others, have done very well from the genre, but overall it’s very difficult to make money from an adventure game, which means there tend to be many 1-2 person teams working on their labours of love, from the goodness of their heart

It is unfortunate that some of the games don’t live up to the hype, or are rushed, or developed in a hectic manner. But I think enough gems are created to make it worthwhile. And at the end of the day, most people only drop $20 or so on a KS campaign, so they don’t lose that much! To those who fund more than that - you are truly heroes to our community

So to answer the question - yes, we really are saving the genre by investing in 1-2 person teams on KS. It gets the fans excited about the genre. It spreads the word. It allows future generations and new-to-genre players discover the games. And it ultimately grows the audience that much bigger. The bigger the audience, the more demand is generated for adventure games, and the more the game companies and the funders and publishers take notice

Antrax - 17 July 2016 11:14 PM

Because as you grow older it’s more difficult to enjoy things.

This if you have played and done better.
Brokenage wasnt upto Tims past work, his worst game but not bad.

But i am sure Thimbleweed park will be better than BrokenAge, TheCave and Deathspank.
Cecils BS5 was better than BS3 and 4 indeed, major stepup.

Designers need to benchmark themselves with their past work not to meet backers easy to please biased sentimentality.

It’s not just adventure games. I’ve gone back and played (emulated) games I remembered very fondly from the C64 days or the Amiga 500 - I loved those games back then - and they just didn’t live up to my memory of them.

Tomimt is right about expecting more now because we are used to a higher standard. I tried to put graphics aside and focus just on the experience, but some of those games were just not how I remembered   But back in the day, in context, a lot of those games were awesome and groundbreaking.

And it’s often the same going back and trying food I used to love as a child and haven’t had since, etc.

For the record, I think that Tesla Effect is the second best of the Tex Murphy games, inferior only to The Pandora Directive. And given that I think The Pandora Directive is the second-greatest adventure game of all time, I didn’t expect Tesla Effect to be THAT good.

And however you look at it, it’s better than Martian Memorandum, and therefore not the weakest game in the series.

I think famous designers have far more limited resources than they had in the past & seem to want to try different approaches to perhaps fit into that constraint?

Jane Jensen introduced some new ideas in both Gray Matter & Moebius that haven’t been too well received.

“Broken Age. Average. Hardly a material to be compared with Day of The Tentacle or Full Throttle.”
.....
“Only Broken Sword 5 could bring discussion, because I see many BS fans favoring it over BS3/BS4, and that’s fine, though it could also be discussed that BS5 is a “rehash” of BS1, not really original.”

Well it really is a case of what do you want? Neither the new more original ideas nor more of the same seem to be making anyone happy (except for me of course because I just love them!  )
N.B. I haven’t played Broken Age but I thought the Tesla Effect was excellent but will confess that I liked The Pandora Directive better & was it because I played it 1st?

Personally I think there’s too much nostalgia - games should be appraised on an individual basis regardless of the developer(s) & not on expectations based on their previous games & it has to be taken into account that the budgets for producing a game are far less than in the past & from that PoV I think those ‘old’ developers are doing a great job! 

You still have to judge on a case-by-case basis and it’s somewhat unreasonable to expect a classic every time. 

The Good
Like others have said, I thought Tesla Effect was pretty great myself, only second to The Pandora Directive in the series. 

Broken Age was not as great as one might have hoped, but still had a certain high quality standard overall that keeps it in the good category.  The main disappointment factor there for me was the delays.

Broken Sword 5 was very good all-around, it just didn’t bring anything new to the table.

The Average
Dreamfall Chapters - Nice graphics, voice acting, and art style didn’t make up for poor pacing and minimal gameplay.

The Bad
Moebius - This was a massive disappointment on several levels.  The first is that quite frankly Jensen sold her fans a false bill of goods, with her initial Kickstarter marketing this as her company’s production and that it would be a 2D adventure game.  Then soon after the Kickstarter she teamed up again with Phoenix Online Studios and turned this into a 3D game produced by them with her mostly doing the story.  I actually liked Phoenix Online Studios work on Cognition, but I was very disappointed with the change in plan, and then when the game finally came out, it was marred with technical problems besides looking very low budget.  And tacked on to that, it didn’t even have a particularly good story, which is something that Jensen is known for in particular.  It wasn’t the worst game, but it was below average for sure, and as we see, there hasn’t been a follow-up game to date.