Sierra Have Sierra games aged worse than LucasArts?

[Korgoth of Barbaria]

I'm a big Sierra fan, I have never particularly cared for LucasArt's games to be honest. But lately on the web I've noticed a sort of, in the adventure game community, a sort of anti-Sierra sentiment. Perhaps that's wording it too strongly, but it seems lately Sierra games - especially the King's Quest series - have become 'cool' to sort of bash/ridicule/mock. Look at the Retsupuraes of KQV and VI for example, or VII and the comments therein - comments about 'shitty Sierra games' and what a 'hack' Roberta Williams was...You never see this kind of stuff with LucasArts games, for one.

Secondly, look at sales figures. On Steam, the re-release of the old Monkey Island games produced sales upward of 100,000. The new King's Quest game - and re-releases of the the original KQ games and other 'Quest' games - only did about 30,000. Yet, in the 1990s, LucasArts people would complain how Sierra games were outselling them by large margins; KQV was the highest grossing computer game of all time for half the 1990s, with sales of over 500,000 copies -

So, what is it? Is Sierra just cool to hate on nowadays? Have the games really just aged that poorly in comparison to LucasArts? What's prompted this shift in their respective popularity and legacies and general standings with the public?

 

[Kem0sabe]

Personally I played mostly LucasArts adventure games growing up, so now we buy these games for the nostalgia. maybe the Sierra market was more adult back then? And is not into games these days?

When I reminisce with friends about the good old days of gaming, people always refer MO key island, India Jones, day of the tentacle.

 

[Korgoth of Barbaria]

Personally I played mostly LucasArts adventure games growing up, so now we buy these games for the nostalgia. maybe the Sierra market was more adult back then? And is not into games these days?

When I reminisce with friends about the good old days of gaming, people always refer MO key island, India Jones, day of the tentacle.

I don't know...I mean, they had a very diversified line. King's Quest was family-oriented, so all ages and I'm a Millenial who got into them....QFG is aimed at teens, but people who were teens from around 1990 are in their 30s now, so you'd think they'd have some nostalgia. Space Quest I'd say was aimed at teens and adults and it was their second best selling series...Their mostly fondly remembered series, at least on the net, seem to be LSL and Gabriel Knight - those two were IMO explicitly adult series. But I don't think Sierra had any one demographic.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Shift, what shift? Its been like that since I remember. Sierra's early output didn't just start to show wrinkles in 2015. It became aged and dated the moment MI came out. It would take an essay to really explain just how much of a revolution in design LA games represented when they started coming out. And Williams was certainly a hack, because only a hack wouldn't figure out why LA approach became so much more succesful.

Sierra still had a few decent games in the 90s of course, but ever since MI they were reduced to playing catchup.

 

[Korgoth of Barbaria]

Shift, what shift? Its been like that since I remember. Sierra's early output didn't just start to show wrinkles in 2015. It became aged and dated the moment MI came out. It would take an essay to really explain just how much of a revolution in design LA games represented when they started coming out. And Williams was certainly a hack, because only a hack wouldn't figure out why LA approach became so much more succesful.

Sierra still had a few decent games in the 90s of course, but ever since MI they were reduced to playing catchup.

Monkey Island, the first game, came out October 1990. King's Quest V came out November 1990. Both had VGA graphics, both were of the same exact time period but King's Quest V shattered existing sales records at the time. So, I think that would nullify "Monkey Island destroyed Sierra" - when Sierra's main competition to MI destroyed it at the box office.

Thing is, sales wise, LA was never able to beat Sierra. Even the poorly received KQ8 (released Dec 1998) way outsold Grim Fandango (released Oct 1998). Max sales for the latter were at 500,000 while KQ8 sold around 900,000 copies.

As far as playing catchup? I don't really recall their games ever trying to be LucasArts games.

 

[<3sRichardSimmons]

I would suggest it's an issue of reported data and sample size.

LA games are much more in keeping with the game design preferences of your average Codexer.

There are plenty of places on the net where you will find people arguing Sierra's supremacy.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Monkey Island, the first game, came out October 1990. King's Quest V came out November 1990. Both had VGA graphics, both were of the same exact time period but King's Quest V shattered existing sales records at the time. So, I think that would nullify "Monkey Island destroyed Sierra" - when Sierra's main competition to MI destroyed it at the box office.

Thing is, sales wise, LA was never able to beat Sierra. Even the poorly received KQ8 (released Dec 1998) way outsold Grim Fandango (released Oct 1998). Max sales for the latter were at 500,000 while KQ8 sold around 900,000 copies.

As far as playing catchup? I don't really recall their games ever trying to be LucasArts games.

I didn't mean sales, dude. I meant design. Lucas Arts games stayed popular simply because they're actually still playable.

Most of the Sierra's back-catalouge, especially the early stuff, is so comically archaic, it seems like it was made in the 1920s. And its not archaic in a cool "oldschool" way. Its archaic because of nightmarish usability and no regard or care for player experience. Shit's so bad, you could put out a book titled "How to make people rage quit within 5 minutes" using only examples from Sierra adventures.

 

[SCO]

Butthurt

 

[MRY]

Sierra has a few really good adventure games (QFG series, Conquest series, and then a few spot choices from the other series). One problem for Sierra is, the last generation of Sierra games are across the board crap (KQ7+8, SQ6, QfG5, GK3, Phantasmagoria), whereas the last generation of Lucas Games are almost all strong (Escape from Monkey Island is the exception, but Grim Fandango, Full Throttle, CMI, and The Dig are all quite good). When you end on a good note, it's easier to be nostalgic.

 

[Alex]

I think a lot of people didn't like Sierra games because they saw it as "unfair". While Lucas Arts games went to great lengths to make sure you couldn't lose. Most of them don't have any kind of character death, nor can you get to a state where the game is unwinnable. Unfortunately, this seems to have brought about a lot of people who actually play these for the story. I figure that is the reason why Sierra has been unpopular for pretty much as long as I knew it.

 

[Correct_Carlo]

King's Quest was always more about pushing the envelop of technology for the times than it was telling a story (the series did have a series of firsts for PC gaming: animated graphics in a text adventure, EGA graphics, fully voiced audio...maybe some others I'm forgetting). LA had the benefit of Sierra pioneering the template of adventure games before they ever came onto the scene, so in MI they could largely focus on story and innovating on the genre (not to mention drawing a good deal of their humor from satirizing genre conventions popoularized by Sierra) more so than implementing entirely new technologies or features.

But even apart from that, Williams was never a great writer. Even under the best circumstances, I don't think she could have created a game as good as MI. I love Sierra's early games, but even I would admit that they largely acquired their fame because they were first, as opposed to best. Which is why the KQ series hasn't aged well. The early games were just too generic. While the series got more complex as it went along, it was always saddled by the blandness of its universe, which was just kind of a hodgepdodge of half assed fairy tale tropes collected over the years, as opposed to anything that was thought out or designed. Which is why I (and I imagine most people) really have no interest in playing a new King's Quest game. There's really nothing unique about the universe that couldn't be done in any generic fairy tale setting so there's really no reason to make a new game set there beyond just milking whatever brand recognition the series has.

 

[SCO]

King's Quest (any game written by the Williams actually) was never great, even the best of them - KQ 6 - was never nothing much more than 'romance story (eww) with major parts completely copied from fairy tales with C&C'.

QfG4 for instance is at least 3 times the game it is even if only for the more original setting, disregarding puzzles and dead ends. The truth is that a family history of some mix'n'match fantasy kingdom is not all that interesting. It's the same reason i ignore right now the book of unwritten tales series.

Sierra had many other worth playing series though. Conquests of the longbow, Gabriel Knight, QFG even space quest, laura bow (which i don't know if it was written by the Williams actually), freddie pharkas...

People complaining about 'unfairness' are sissies. Adventure games are about saving, narrative exploration and restoring. Dying is part of the fun, ideally just before C&C is found. Dead man walking is bad though.

 

[<3sRichardSimmons]

I will continue to maintain that both Laura Bow games were pretty well written. Outside of that, yeah Williams never really impressed me, and even she has admitted that Jensen is responsible for most of the end-result writing for KQVI.

 

[Ulminati]

Growing up, I always liked LA games better than Sierra games. The writing was better and the puzzles more interesting. Plus the SCUMM verb system for interaction was a huge improvement on the text parsers in early sierra games.

Having no dead-ends where you're fucked if you haven't got a save from 5+ hours ago to reload is a huge plus too.

 

[DeepOcean]

So, what is it? Is Sierra just cool to hate on nowadays? Have the games really just aged that poorly in comparison to LucasArts? What's prompted this shift in their respective popularity and legacies and general standings with the public?

I miss the Sierra games the most, while Lucas Arts games were more polished there was some spirit of trying new shit at Sierra. From GK dark storytelling, the adventure RPG combo from Quest for Glory to make a game about Robin Hood. Lucas Arts adventure games were kinda conservative in comparison and maybe because they were conservative and didn't go wild on new technologies is that the titles are more acessible to new audiences.

 

[MRY]

I think Lucas may have been a little more conservative, but there was quite a bit of innovation there: there's Loom with its spell system, Indiana Jones with its branching paths (maybe not quite QFG level, but still pretty good), and the multi-character titles (Maniac Mansion, Zak McKracken, DoTT), plus Full Throttle does have some different stuff going on, even if it's kind of bleh. And certainly later Lucas Games did change a lot (CMI, Full Throttle, and Grim Fandango are all really different from the prior generation). You don't have quite the same range of genres as Sierra, to be sure, but that's partly because there were so few Lucas Arts games by comparison.

 

[Agesilaus]

I reckon lucasarts games have aged much worse. Maybe it's a product of my age, but I'd much rather play a keyboard-based Sierra game than day of the tentacle, Sam and max, or whatever point and click popamole game you have in mind.

Then again, I wouldn't be caught dead playing later Sierra games, either. The rise of the mouse was the death of adventure gaming.

 

[Lyric Suite]

The rise of the mouse was the death of adventure gaming.

Trying too hard much?

 

[Unkillable Cat]

I played and enjoyed Sierra games more than LucasArts games, but even I have to stare the truth in the face - the Sierra adventure games have aged much worse than the LucasArts games. So the answer to the thread topic's title is "Yes."

Unlike many others, I don't hate specifically on the Sierra games except for the aforementioned "last generation", which was truly bad. SQ6 feels so detached from the rest of the series in almost every way that it might as well star a completely different character. QFG5 is an action RPG with some adventure game elements, instead of being an adventure game with RPG stats sprinkled about like the other four QFGs. The less said about the rest of the "last generation" games, the better.

The parser generation of Sierra games has aged especially badly, mostly because of how primitive the parser is. One of the final parser commands of LSL2, for example, needs to be so specific that there are NO options for alternatives. If you use "INTO BAG" instead of "IN BAG", the game executes the wrong action and screws over the player. Time to load a saved game! The (graphical) user interface was a big difference between Sierra and LucasArts, best shown when parser-only titles from the Sierra titles were re-released as point 'n' click games with updated graphics. With the possible exception of King's Quest 1 EGA, the revamp improved all the titles involved. Sierra did release some stinkers now and again, and also games that had good concepts but horrible execution. The Colonel's Bequest is a great example, an adventure game that looks and feels like Agatha Christie herself wrote it: You're thrown into a family feud concerning an inheritance and a string of murders. You can question people, investigate clues...but what is the core element of the game, what needs to be done in order to solve the mystery? Being in the right place at the right time. How do you find out where to be and at what time? Via trial and error. If there's one game that could have used Braid's "rewind-time" gimmick, Laura Bow's first outing would be it.

The thing is...the LucasArts catalog isn't a field of roses either. The first three Monkey Island games, Loom, DoTT and Indy 4 are true masterpieces, but the rest don't fare so well in comparison. Sam & Max Hit the Road had overly complex and abstract puzzles, years ahead of games like The Longest Journey and Gabriel Knight 3, not to mention a style of humour that wasn't that well-received outside of the US. Full Throttle is little more than an interactive movie (though an enjoyable one), but when we get to the "last generation" era of Sierra the LucasArts titles from those years tank just as badly as the Sierra ones. Monkey Island 4 is an abomination, and I'm currently struggling through Grim Fandango for the second time. It just doesn't appeal to me. The whole Petrified Forest section can be skipped and should have been skipped (you were wrong, Tim!) and several other sections are deliberately bloated. It's just as much of a chore for me to play this game now as it was back in 2002. I'm not saying Grim Fandango is bad, but it's certainly different - different enough that it alienates some players that were used to LucasArts games having a certain appeal to them.

And that last bit is probably the factor that best describes the difference between Sierra and LucasArts. Sierra was not afraid to make and release games that only garnered to a niche crowd within a niche crowd. King's Quest is aimed at families, Space Quest is aimed at the nerds, Police Quest targets the pedantic/OCDs/autists, Larry goes for the "adults", Mixed-Up Mother Goose and The Black Cauldron is for the children, and so on. (Don't ask me about Codename: Iceman, I have no idea what they were thinking there.) It's a business strategy that certainly was viable enough to make Sierra On-Line into a major developer/publisher in the 1980s, but it wasn't enough to keep them as one.

LucasArts, on the other hand, went for a softer, more "inncloosive" approach, appealing to a broader audience and a lower common denominator at a time where gamers were becoming a bigger demographic - an approach that has a greater chance of success, but doesn't always work out. Adventure games still died, despite LucasArts's string of hits and Sierra's established fan-base of close to 15 years.

 

[RuySan]

I was an Amiga user, and Lucasarts games had wonderful ports. Sierra games, not so much. They had awful graphics. They were using either the EGA palette or some terrible downgrading from the 256 VGA to 32 colours. Besides that, Sierra games had too much disk accessing and swapping. Since most europeans played on Amiga's, there's a case to be made here for Lucasarts games when it comes to nostalgia.

 

[Aeschylus]

I always loved both companies' games, but I suppose I preferred Sierra's because they were more challenging, and hence more rewarding to figure out. As was mentioned Lucasarts also probably had a better end-game for the companies' adventure game prodcution, though I'm of the opinion that the later Sierra myst-clones (Shivers, Lighthouse, etc.) were actually underrated.

But yeah, by modern sensibilities the Lucasarts games have aged better and have more influence on modern gaming. Whether or not that means they're actually better is debatable.

 

[Alex]

Trying too hard much?

He is right, I think. I like many of Lucas Arts' games, but they pushed the games into a direction where gameplay mattered less and less. Also, I would exchange all of the Lucas Arts games to have Infocom still alive and making text adventures.

 

[3 others]

Well, the two companies practically pioneered the whole graphical adventure concept, so they did a lot of trial-and-error experimentation with the game format. Nothing wrong with that, it comes with the territory when you're a pioneer in a field. However, I think Sierra's errors are much more glaring in hindsight so that might hurt their reputation nowadays more. Some of the game design decisions in the earlier adventure games by both studios are just strange to the modern eye, and it's hard to conceive how they were ever considered "good gaming" back then.

However, Lucasarts' errors always seem comparatively pedestrian to Sierra's. In Zak McKracken, you can run out of money and get annoyingly stuck that way. Sierra's early King's Quests are downright bizarre in parts: KQ1 spams a witch that attacks you randomly in the forest and you have to type DUCK to evade her each time she swoops down. KQ2 might have had a house where a RNG decided whether there was a sleeping granny or a disguised wolf lying on the bed each time you entered. And if it was a wolf, you'd better GET THE FUCK OUT in time or be eaten (and return 3 seconds later to check if the dice rolled you a granny this time).

My understanding is that Sierra was more prone to these glaring-in-hindsight gaffes even during their golden age. In King's Quest 6, if you don't pick up a fistful of coins in a labyrinth during the first half of the game, you will be stuck sitting around at the bank of river Styx before the finale of the game because you can't pay the ferryman for a trip. There's no way to know at that point whether you've hit a dead end or whether you just haven't yet stumbled upon some obscure item combination that would solve the 'puzzle'. LucasArts quickly learned to streamline their games enough to eliminate these types of ambiguous failure states and those WTF granny/wolf moments.

tl;dr: Sierra's idiosynchracies were easier to accept back in the day than they are now. LucasArts titles from the same era were closer to the Platonic ideal of point'n'click so they've stood the test of time better.

 

[Korgoth of Barbaria]

So basically LucasArts was the original 'new shit' and arguably dumbed down the genre, which is why faggots who don't like challenging games are more fond of them? That's kind of the consensus I'm getting, even from supporters. Also noticing that a lot of people, when referencing the Sierra games, are mainly taking about the Parser games, even though Sierra stopped using the Parser in 1990. LucasArts' no death, no challenge policy and its tablet-friendly interface do play well with today's gamers; hell, LucasArt's ideology is responsible for the shittiness of Telltale games. But easier =/= better.

 

[SCO]

Some of the 'new shit' design was a tangible improvement. Dead man walking is just bad design whichever perspective you look at, from challenge to accessibility.

It was always bug and not a feature though, so i guess it can't really be called a 'design'. Sierra was just too ad-hoc about preventing it until it was too late not to have the reputation for it, so even in later games when there are none of those situations or they segue inevitably into a deserved death (instead of being stuck) they got the reputation for it whenever some fag got stuck on a puzzle.