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AG Theme Of The Week #8- Most Impactful Adventure Games

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BitingWit - 14 July 2017 07:47 PM

Dead ends are the original TellTale ! If you ever read Choose Your Own Adventure books, you could run into dead ends all the time. They are endings, just not always satisfying endings (which is just like games with “alternate endings”).

You seem to misundertand what dead ends are. They aren’t unsatisfying endings; they’re unfixable fail states that prevent you from reaching any ending at all. You eventually just have to quit because you’re screwed from continuing, then reload before your fatal mistake (wherever that may be) or start all over.

If you read through interviews from developers of that period, these sorts of sloppy design issues really just happened because there was no quality assurance oversight like there is now. Add to that rigid deadlines that demanded products be shipped, and dead ends were considered acceptable and pretty much inevitable.

     
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Jackal - 16 July 2017 12:15 AM
BitingWit - 14 July 2017 07:47 PM

Dead ends are the original TellTale ! If you ever read Choose Your Own Adventure books, you could run into dead ends all the time. They are endings, just not always satisfying endings (which is just like games with “alternate endings”).

You seem to misundertand what dead ends are. They aren’t unsatisfying endings; they’re unfixable fail states that prevent you from reaching any ending at all. You eventually just have to quit because you’re screwed from continuing, then reload before your fatal mistake (wherever that may be) or start all over.

If you read through interviews from developers of that period, these sorts of sloppy design issues really just happened because there was no quality assurance oversight like there is now. Add to that rigid deadlines that demanded products be shipped, and dead ends were considered acceptable and pretty much inevitable.

Of course you’re right that dead ends were in no way intentional and are fail states which would be removed if the developer knew about them. I still think in the context of the question of whether there are any benefits to dead ends, challenge is one of them. You get to a point in the game where you can’t progress because you didn’t pick up the tweezers in the bathroom at the beginning. Most people would hate that, but a small minority would probably enjoy it, seeing it as an opportunity to stay vigilant and putting the onus for fully exploring on the player. Somewhat similar to “hardcore mode” in a RPG - another genre of game which has fail states if you use your XP poorly.

The badge of honour some people wear over finishing Larry II or Maupiti Island all those years ago without a walkthrough might be silly, but it is a thing.

     
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Jackal - 16 July 2017 12:15 AM

If you read through interviews from developers of that period, these sorts of sloppy design issues really just happened because there was no quality assurance oversight like there is now.

I’m sure that’s the case for plenty of the dead-ends in games of that time period, but not all of them.  To use a famous example, there’s no accident in being able to secretly steal Weird Ed’s hamster from his cage, microwave it, and then return it to him.

Doing this in no way helps you win as you lose the ability to get his help for the rest of the game and get one of your characters killed, which may put you into an unwinnable situation depending on if anyone else has died.  But it also allows you a higher degree of freedom to do things that nowadays will usually just result in the dreaded “I can’t do that.”

I know for me at the time, the freedom of choice that many adventure games offered was one of the things that really attracted me to the genre.  A game like The Legend of Zelda allows you to walk around, talk to people, and use your weapons and items in ways the designer of the game intended you to do to complete the story.  And that was it.  You couldn’t decide to use your items in detrimental ways, like using your bomb to kill the old man in the cave that gives you items, or to blow a hole in a building in a town.  The bombs only worked in places you were suppose to use them.  Whereas games like Maniac Mansion and Deja Vu seemed to offer players so many other potential ways to interact with the world around them.

Adventure games still had limitations on what you could do, of course, but it was more limited by the designer’s imagination, and by the amount of effort that they put into the game.  There was a whole lot less “I can’t do that” or “I won’t do that” in those days.  Taking away the player’s ability to ever do something that would result in their death, or put themselves in an unwinnable state, also removed quite a bit of what attracted me to the genre in the first place.

     
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It’s been too long since I’ve played MM to remember specifically, but killing any one kid isn’t a deal-breaker, and if all the kids die then the game ends, no? So even that’s not a dead end. It’s just a “bad” ending, which is a totally different thing.

A dead end is when the game lets you carry on playing, without ever knowing you’ve been backed into a corner you can never get out of.

 

     
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Jackal - 16 July 2017 01:01 PM

A dead end is when the game lets you carry on playing, without ever knowing you’ve been backed into a corner you can never get out of.

Yes, and it was very possible to get into one of those in MM.  If 2 of the 3 kids died that was basically guaranteed.  In a more blatant example, the game would allow you to eat or throw away items that were necessary to progress in the game.

The game philosophy at the time was more about giving players as much freedom of choice as possible, and expecting them to learn not to do dumb things.

     
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Detective Mosely - 17 July 2017 10:17 AM
Jackal - 16 July 2017 01:01 PM

A dead end is when the game lets you carry on playing, without ever knowing you’ve been backed into a corner you can never get out of.

Yes, and it was very possible to get into one of those in MM.  If 2 of the 3 kids died that was basically guaranteed.  In a more blatant example, the game would allow you to eat or throw away items that were necessary to progress in the game.

I think Jackal’s point was that the other kid could die too, ending the game? I’d agree that being locked into an unwinnable state is not good, I’d probably prefer the game ended itself at that point rather than let me blunder around until I get killed - but I suppose there’s a distinction.

The game philosophy at the time was more about giving players as much freedom of choice as possible, and expecting them to learn not to do dumb things.

Indeed - and the structure was more closely derived from text adventures where having to replay a section just means a bit of extra typing and skim-reading some text you’d seen before. When replaying means steering the character(s) around and waiting through animations it gets a lot more tedious.

     
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Phlebas - 17 July 2017 10:30 AM

I think Jackal’s point was that the other kid could die too, ending the game?

Oh, you mean if 2 die it’s not technically a dead end because you can get the 3rd kid killed too?  Well yeah, I guess you could consider that a prolonged bad end if you’d like.  But the game still continues with you walking around the mansion while unable to win.  If that qualifies as not being a dead end, most other games that have both them and player death being possible don’t have ones either.

But in case this wasn’t clear, if 2 of the 3 kids die, the game will continue yet will almost certainly be unwinnable.

     
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There was a fatal dead end in the Sierra’s Shivers game. It occurred despite Sierra having one of the best beta test/QA systems. So mistakes can happen even when designers have the best intentions. When I pointed it out Willy Eide said that I was the only person he knew of that found the flaw. I really can’t blame Sierra. The flaw required that a precise set of circumstances converge in one specific location. Chance of that happening is maybe one in ten thousand, if not greater.

     

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My understanding is that you can finish Maniac Mansion with just one kid alive. So no, in that case killing off even two is not a dead end at all. If that’s wrong, and you can’t finish with only one—or in some very particular cases you can’t—then I stand corrected. (I can barely remember the LAST game I played, let alone one I played decades ago. Tongue) Although in that case, I’m highly skeptical that such an unwinnable state was intentional. (The ability to kill all three off was intentional, but not to prevent just one from finishing.) The freedom to choose paths was clearly a design decision, definitely. I’ve never heard that that the inability to finish (other than killing off the lone remaining survivor) was an intended possibility.

     
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I’m not even sure what you guys are arguing about, but here are a few facts about MM from someone who’s played it far too many times.

The game is full of dead-ends. The biggest ones revolve around getting past Purple Tentacle at the end of the game. Each kid has his/her own way to do it (except for Dave and Jeff, who are basically useless), but there are many ways to screw things up irreparably.

For instance, early in the game, Weird Ed receives a package. If you fail to steal it before he gets to it, then Wendy, Syd, Razor and (I think?) Michael can no longer get past Purple Tentacle. So unless you have Bernard on your team, the game’s now in an unwinnable state, even though you won’t realise it for a long while.

Likewise, at some point you find an envelope, whose contents you need. If you just rip it open, then Wendy, Syd and Razor, who need a pristine envelope later on, can no longer get past Purple Tentacle. Hope you have Bernard or Michael on your team!

(Fun MM fact: The reason why Bernard was the most popular character, and came back in DOTT, is mainly because his path is the easiest / most foolproof, and many players never figured out how to win without him.)

Anyway, MM is full of dead-ends, and Gilbert & Co. can’t have been unaware of them, and actually purposefully put them there. For instance, they didn’t have to let you destroy the envelope: they could have just made the characters open it without destroying it, or refuse to tear it open. That’s clearly a case of the game actively tricking the player into a dead-end.

So, yeah. Some dead-ends were definitely just bad QA. But whether it’s the package and envelope in MM, or that bridge in KQ2, some dead-ends were definitely put into games on purpose, because that was considered a “fair” way to increase length/difficulty at the time.

     

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For me, the most impactful adventure games were Myst (even though I didn’t like it), Sherlock Holmes and Kings Quest 7.  Those were the games that made me want to play adventure games forever!  Then I found Simon the Sorcerer 1 and I was totally hooked. But, that was at a time when we played as a family and it was so much fun sounding out ideas on the kids and making it family fun. I wish those days were back!

     
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When speaking about “pioneers” in some aspect, I can wholeheartedly agree with the games mentioned by SoccerDude. “Pioneer” and “Most impactful” are not necessarily interchangeable terms: Most impactful games, in my mind, are not those that came “first” at something, but those that made certain things dramatically popular (there were British 4-member pop bands with cool hairs before Beatles).

Monkey Island 1 is, without a shadow of doubt one of the, if not the most impactful game that was ever released - it cemented the point&click; philosophy as we know it today, and it brought all good ingredients to one place - the insane puzzle ideas, out of this world music pieces, and epic story that was a comedy also. It’s “Doom” of adventure gaming (with Maniac Mansion being “Wolfenstein 3D” in that analogy).

     

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Kurufinwe - 17 July 2017 03:38 PM

Anyway, MM is full of dead-ends, and Gilbert & Co. can’t have been unaware of them, and actually purposefully put them there. For instance, they didn’t have to let you destroy the envelope: they could have just made the characters open it without destroying it, or refuse to tear it open. That’s clearly a case of the game actively tricking the player into a dead-end.

So, yeah. Some dead-ends were definitely just bad QA. But whether it’s the package and envelope in MM, or that bridge in KQ2, some dead-ends were definitely put into games on purpose, because that was considered a “fair” way to increase length/difficulty at the time.

Exactly.  Thanks for your addition to the thread, because you clearly know and remember the game much better than I do.  I played it a lot as a kid, but I’m not sure if I ever actually beat it myself, since it was in the days before walkthroughs, and it was a really hard game to actually complete without one.

But yeah, when a game regularly lets you destroy or throw away key items continuously it’s not a product of oversight.  It was a design decision.  And in most cases I’d say it was pretty fair, though some of the examples you give (like opening the envelope possibly secretly locking you into a dead end) definitely took it too far, IMO.

     

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