Putting the 'role' back in role-playing games since 2002.
Donate to Codex
Good Old Games
  • Welcome to rpgcodex.net, a site dedicated to discussing computer based role-playing games in a free and open fashion. We're less strict than other forums, but please refer to the rules.

    "This message is awaiting moderator approval": All new users must pass through our moderation queue before they will be able to post normally. Until your account has "passed" your posts will only be visible to yourself (and moderators) until they are approved. Give us a week to get around to approving / deleting / ignoring your mundane opinion on crap before hassling us about it. Once you have passed the moderation period (think of it as a test), you will be able to post normally, just like all the other retards.

Wadjet Eye Technobabylon: Birthright - sequel with 3D graphics

MRY

Wormwood Studios
Developer
Joined
Aug 15, 2012
Messages
5,703
Location
California
We agree that for at least a decade, adventure games had better graphics than any other genre.
No, I did not agree with that. I agreed that in general, adventure games had aesthetically pleasing visuals. That does not mean they had 'better graphics' than other genres. And it only applies to backgrounds. They definitely did not have better animations than other genres, at least not obviously so.
This is inevitably going to come out the wrong way, but I'm curious how old you are. At least in my recollection, adventure games were by far the best visuals in their era.

For instance, Loom came out in 1990. This is what Loom looked like:

(Of course I'm cherry-picking.)

And here's a big budget RPG of the same era:
Ultima6.jpg


Of course there were other good looking games, but adventure games really were at the very top.

Aesthetically pleasing/good graphics != defined by graphics though
Oh, sure, I was using graphics as shorthand. Pick your own lingo! Adventure games developers tended to care a ton about aesthetics, and the best-remember adventure games tended to be the most aesthetically pleasing. Those games were also, often, technically advanced from a graphical standpoint too.

We went from acknowledging something that was generally done well to somehow assuming its the most defining feature ? How and by what virtue ?
I took your premise to be that adventure gamers care less about visuals (graphics, aesthetics, <SystermUser> is welcome to select his own terminology) than other genre fans. A kind counter-indicator is that capitalist adventure game developers poured huge amounts of resources into visuals and were always trying to be cutting edge -- pushing technical limits as well as striving for aesthetics.

Well, the budget thing is funny. Like I've mentioned before, adventure games are generally static, have a well-defined state machine, and not reactive, so programming and QA'ing them obviously doesnt take a genius or a huge team.

I'm sure people can do great adventures using wintermute or adventure game engine or whatever is popular right now. Adventure games are low-cost if you don't do graphics/animation. or voice acting.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Primordia had a lot more testers than artists, that's for sure. :)

Really, if you make a VGA adventure game, none of it is very expensive. You probably could hire people to make a standard WEG game for ~$60k.

Sure, big studios spent most of their budget on making good graphics because they could and those games were in demand back then. So obviously good graphics will cost the most in making an adventure game.

Simply because for most of those other (ie, non graphics) things they had things in place. Listening to Schafer talk about GF, they had lots of problems moving to the new engine, yet they still had tons of things in-house to help them with that. And that's with a very risky move to improve graphics which ultimately probably cost them in mainstream as it was a market flop.
I think we're talking past each other. I'm not saying that adventures should be about graphics, merely that nothing about the genre's history suggests its fans are more tolerant of bad visuals than are fans of other genres.

I would like to think (again, Im not one, so obviously it's just speculation) the modern day indie adventure developer spends more time thinking about dialogues, setting, story, characters, puzzles, etc. They are easier to make than great graphics
:negative:

I disagree pretty strongly. The number of adventure games with spectacular visuals in the past twenty years is significant. Even just looking at very small indies, you have Stasis, Paradigm, Dropsy, the WEG catalog, etc. The baseline expectation is that an indie adventure game will be roughly comparable visually to adventure games from the 1990s onward. When was the last adventure game that was as well designed as those games? I can't think of any.

Everyone thinks that game design is a joke because we know we can't draw or make music but don't know we can't design puzzles or write well.

atmosphere != graphics. graphics is a subset of atmosphere.
if I can get 'atmosphere' reading a book or playing a text adventure game, then atmosphere can surely exist on its own. no doubt graphics contribute to it, but it's not a dependency.
[/quote]
Of course, I said as much myself. But other genres are not dependent on atmosphere at all.

It's puzzle solving, but the puzzles aren't particularly interesting without atmosphere.
that's arguable and probably subjective. I would disagree, but I am a puzzle lover though, so I am biased and I will not argue here.
I like puzzles too and am something of an evangelist for them in their waning days in the P&C genre. But even really great P&C puzzles, like the spitting puzzle in MI2, is only cool in the context of its atmosphere.

(Again, true puzzle-oriented games like Myst are different.)

So you agree, the less you are forced to DEPEND on graphics, the better you have to make other components ? That's precisely what I want from adventure games. Other components. I can replace the background with my imagination if everything else is great. Sure, in some cases, it'd be tough - it would be tough to replace Blade Runner or TLJ cyberpunk visuals with ugly pixels, but I would think it's more than possible due to strength of them as games first and not photoalbums with interactivity. If a picture is worth a thousand words, so instead of relying on that picture to say only 10 words, if every developer and designer uses their skills to the maximum and produces 1000 words for that picture (and if thats the tradeoff, make the picture worse), the picture's worth would be less and at some point it would be replaceable.
:notsureifserious:
The saying that a picture is worth a thousand words is a shorthand for saying words can't replace pictures, not a proposal to replace visual media with long-winded text.

Yes, without good visuals adventure games need to draw their atmosphere from elsewhere. But since good visuals are relatively easy -- easier in fact than other forms of evoking atmosphere -- I'm not sure this is a solution. A lot of mediocre words don't make up for nice visuals.

Anyway, if you want thousands of words and no visuals, a bunch of us are doing a long-winded interview with Chris Picone about adventure game design, which someday will be posted. Here's my take on puzzles, though my responses my change as the editing process goes on:
One of the great tragedies of the point-and-click adventure game scene of the past 20 years has been the flight from puzzles. The Old Man Murray “adventure games killed themselves” thesis has become so ingrained that it is now conventional wisdom that 1990s adventure game puzzles were all hopelessly illogical and impossible to fathom even with hindsight and hint-lines. But if you probe someone complaining about “moon logic” and ask them to give examples of “illogical” puzzles, they usually can’t get past Gabriel Knight 3’s cat-fur moustache. The same is true of the “pixel hunting” complaint. Even avid adventure gamers would be hard pressed to come up with more than a couple instances where it was really an issue. “Moon logic” has become shorthand for “I got stuck at a puzzle”; “pixel hunting” for “I missed an object.”

When a valid particularized criticism hardens into a truism about the genre as a whole, it blinds critics. It blinds gamers. And then it blind developers. In fact, the overwhelming majority of classic adventure game puzzles did not suffer from moon logic. Instead, the overwhelming majority either employed straightforward logic (distracting a monkey with a moving banana) or alluded to established tropes in the game’s particular genre (using ants to find a needle in a haystack in King’s Quest V or using smoke to reveal lasers in Space Quest IV). And the best of them (the very best being the spitting puzzle in Monkey Island 2) involved overlapping elements of environmental observation, study of the “rules” governing some phenomenon, experimentation with those rules, and lateral thinking. Moreover, almost all of these puzzles served as a way to showcase the protagonist’s personality -- whether Graham’s gentleness in King’s Quest V or Bobbin’s sorcerer’s-apprentice bumbling in Loom or the literal rigidity of Sonny Bonds in Police Quest.

The craft that lay behind the puzzles involved both science and art, and like other fields of endeavour, its output provides a repository of hard-won wisdom. If we write these puzzles off as bullshit, trolling, or idiocy, we may feel better about ourselves in contrast to our forebears, but the price of that smug satisfaction is high for designers (and consumers) of adventure games. We pay in our own ignorance.

The gulf between the research and analysis (and resulting sophistication) of the best “amateur” text adventure developers, folks like Emily Short or Andrew Plotkin, and the relative ignorance of contemporary point-and-click developers is startling. Indeed, that gulf is equally vast if you compare the research and analysis that, say, Ben Chandler of WEG gives to adventure game artwork to the utter lack of comparable research and analysis from any adventure game designer of our generation.

The fact of the matter is, modern point-and-click puzzle design is terrible compared to either modern text adventure puzzles or classic point-and-click puzzles. I include myself most of all in that criticism; Primordia’s puzzles are generally mediocre “use A on B,” “ask A about B,” or “combine A with B” stuff, and some of them are genuinely bad because they break character (Horatio sawing off Goliath’s finger and shoving it up his nose) or internal logic (Crispin tying the cable when he has no hands) or external logic (needing to adhere the bomblet to the dome door in order to blow the door open).

Unfortunately, there are few incentives to improve in this regard. Because of the entrenched anti-puzzle truism, because studying and developing puzzles is very hard work, because professional reviewers are happier when they can breeze through a game, because Let’s Play streams work better when the LPer isn’t sitting there stumped, because frustrated players leave negative reviews while unchallenged players seldom do (though I was pleased to recently received such a negative review on Steam!), it is easier to simply remove puzzles -- to subtract something good -- than to preserve and improve upon them.

That is a real loss to the genre, and it’s a real loss to the players who, I think, could learn to overcome their anti-puzzle prejudice and rediscover the special joy of solving P&C puzzles -- that strange sense that you have reached across time and space to shake hands with the designer, that his or her puns and veiled references and train of logic may be distinctive, but they are comprehensible. Equal to the flash of satisfaction in that aha moment is the flash of recognition: solving a puzzle in an adventure game, like reading a scene in a book, can reveal that the player’s apparent idiosyncrasies are in fact shared by an author somewhere out there in the world. “You are not alone.”

On that point, I think it’s no surprise that the stock adventure game protagonist for most of the golden age was lonely. The most dramatic examples might be Bobbin Threadbare, “Gwydion,” and Brandon, but Larry Laffer, Roger Wilco, Guybrush Threepwood and many others are essentially lonely outsiders as well. This was not a Sierra or LucasArts trope; it was pan-developer. These characters appealed to the designers and players because I suspect many of them sometimes felt out of sync, and out of the in-group, in their day-to-day lives. The quasi-communicative act of solving a puzzle posed by the game’s designer was a form of recognition. That was true for me, at any rate. When Bobbin and I solved a puzzle the same way, I felt a kinship not just with him but with Brian Moriarty. Puzzles and puzzle solutions were also something to talk about and share with similarly offbeat friends.

Of course, my general view is that all game development is a blessing (a word with its etymological roots, rightly, in “bloody”) and that we should celebrate every game. The last thing I would do is suggest that games that eliminate or derogate puzzles shouldn’t be made; every developer has his own devil or muse or genius whispering in his ear, and that counsel should be heeded above my tantruming. But I worry that uprooting puzzles from adventure games isn’t so much a matter of weeding as of wholesale transformation, a transformation that ends with replacing challenge and exploration and even self-realization with the comforts of a manicured garden.
 

Blaine

Cis-Het Oppressor
Patron
Joined
Oct 6, 2012
Messages
1,874,662
Location
Roanoke, VA
Grab the Codex by the pussy
So following your logic, you think there is 'objective taste', thus you REALLY think that developers gather round a table and decide to do something objectively bad on purpose, in order to...?

Absolutely I do, yes. People do that all the time, and not only in computer game development—professionals ranging from artists to engineers and from film makers to manufacturers make compromises, cut corners, slash costs, and take shortcuts to save time; they then either stick their hands in their pockets and whistle innocently, hoping that no one notices or that nothing goes wrong, or else they actively try to convince themselves and others (especially others) that their product or service isn't the lesser for it.

If you still don't recognize the phenomenon I'm describing, then you haven't left your home since at least the Clinton administration and have forgotten how human beings operate when they aren't at their best.

Help me out here, fill in the blanks. What is the motivation to do something that is 'objectively' detrimental to their product, both from mainstream and niche standpoint ?

It logically doesn't make any sense.

It makes perfect sense: It's called MONEY. A proper artist isn't available, apparently, so inferior and shitty outdated 3D graphics are being used instead. As described above, when one makes compromises, one tends to put a brave face on it and pretend that nothing's wrong, or even that everything's great, couldn't be better! That's called BULLSHITTING. There, that's two blanks handily filled in.

I've never said that developers decide to make their games objectively bad for no reason. There are always reasons and justifications.

And you still, unlike MRY, haven't addressed my point which you quoted in the very first place.

I don't remember what that was at this point, but chances are I did in fact address it and you're pretending that I didn't as part of some petulant tantrum. Accusing people of not addressing one's point is a very common tactic here on the Codex.

Either way, your pathetic insistence on making a stand by rules-lawyering objective vs. subjective only serves to underline how low you've got to stoop to defend this obvious graphical downgrade. Perhaps a few more walls of text will help to ensure high sales for this compromised sequel?
 

Wizfall

Cipher
Joined
Oct 3, 2012
Messages
816
I'm more a casual adventure gamer and consider visuals in adventure games the most important feature, above story, setting and puzzles respectively.
Visuals does not mean top notch modern graphics though as a game such as Gemini R is truly beautiful in my eyes (in contrast i like more modern looking game like the Runaway serie or the journey down too)

It seems Technobabylon will be a free roaming 3D and it's not so much the graphics that the gameplay that i dislike in this kind of adventure game (and the changing of view point).
Usually too much uninteresting walking/bland background introduced instead of "intense" fixed background with more things to look at/interact with.
Moreover the more the view is zoom in this kind of game the more the visual may look cheap (in the link four posts above the first view is fine, the second is "awful" IMO, the third is very average and the last is fine).
 

mondblut

Arcane
Joined
Aug 10, 2005
Messages
22,205
Location
Ingrija
I thought, "who'd have the audacity to make the Birthright sequel 20 years after the setting was canned?"

But it's merely clickbait. Shame.
 

coldcrow

Prophet
Patron
Joined
Mar 6, 2009
Messages
1,649
At least he admits that it "may" not work out. I hope he doesn'T go full Daedalic.
 

fantadomat

Arcane
Edgy Vatnik Wumao
Joined
Jun 2, 2017
Messages
37,083
Location
Bulgaria
It could work,but there is really good chance to alienate most of its fans. I doubt that i will play it.....too much diversity for my taste. If it was made a half a decade ago i wouldn't have minded,but this climate...
 

Beastro

Arcane
Joined
May 11, 2015
Messages
7,938
I disagree pretty strongly. The number of adventure games with spectacular visuals in the past twenty years is significant. Even just looking at very small indies, you have Stasis, Paradigm, Dropsy, the WEG catalog, etc. The baseline expectation is that an indie adventure game will be roughly comparable visually to adventure games from the 1990s onward. When was the last adventure game that was as well designed as those games? I can't think of any.

A problem I find is keeping the divide between good visuals and the work becoming just an interactive novel.

Given the emphesis on gameplay back then, I think they could get away with it, but we're in the other extreme now.

Course, I'm speaking as a not adventure game person here.

But I suspect that's a big part of it because, for instance, Amiga games tended to have a slightly different style of pixel graphics (IMO, the distinctive look is that they have poor light sourcing but a lot of gradients, and sprites that are somewhat too large to allow for good gameplay), and when I see games with that style of art, it does nothing for me.

--EDIT--

This is to me a quintessential Amiga screenshot:
173481-shadow-of-the-beast-amiga-screenshot-bloody-thorn.png

Note how the thorn's gradients all have different light sources.


Odd you say that about those gaphics, because to me, they are Sega Genesis ones (even if they are poorer than Aimga's) and I get a far more distinct reaction to them than I do anything NES or SNES. I can't really think of anything quintessentially NES, while things I think about being SNES-like have more to do with general 90s design choices than the consoles graphics themselves beyond maybe a few games like Final Fantasy IIIs that blended well with CRTs.

Back to Genesis, no game expresses that more than Shadow of the Beast is Sonic 1.

serveimage


Turbo Graphx 16 also had a very similar feel, though I didn't see more than a couple games for the week my cousin had his.
 
Last edited:

bertram_tung

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Jul 6, 2012
Messages
1,254
Location
Sunco Gasoline Facility
Insert Title Here
Ben Chandler is a genius and the fact that he can whip up something like that with little to no experience with that kind of style is impressive.

I still wish this was 2D but the last few screenshots released by Dave and co. are more encouraging than the first ones.
 

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
Joined
Jan 28, 2011
Messages
97,228
Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
https://adventuregamers.com/articles/view/37538

Dave Gilbert – Wadjet Eye Games
Written by Laura Cress — April 17, 2019

dg-fp__huge.jpg



Intricate storylines, nuanced characters, and beautiful 2D environments. When you think of Wadjet Eye Games, all of these elements spring to mind. So it was with some surprise to hear that the latest sci-fi production they’re working on, Technobablyon: Birthright, a sequel to James Dearden’s 2015 Technobablyon, would be in 3D. Curious to find out more, I sought out acclaimed writer/designer Dave Gilbert at EGX Rezzed in London to chat about revising people’s perception of his studio, Unavowed’s huge success, and what indie developers should be doing in this day and age to get their games noticed.

Laura Cress: Hi Dave! So, you’ve announced that Technobablyon 2 is going to be in 3D. Can you tell me more about the decision behind that?

Dave Gilbert: It’s just another way of making a game. We’ve been doing the same type of game for a long time. I feel like we’d kind of plateaued; even though Unavowed did do much better than expected, that was kind of an outlier. I was kind of fighting the constraints of flat 2D environments with Unavowed and so this just seems like the natural progression. We've been doing the same thing for 13 years, and the tools to do 3D are much better. Ben [Chandler, Wadjet Eye artist] has learned how to do it and it looks pretty good, and so we've figured, well, now's the time since we have money in the bank from Unavowed. The retro label is something that's been given to us; it's something that we haven't sought out ourselves. I never think of our games as retro. I always consider our designs quite modern in terms of design. But some people say they're retro or throwbacks to nostalgia or love letters to the golden age. I'm like no! They're not!

Laura: Are you annoyed that people say that?

Dave: I'm not annoyed, it's just that that's not what we're trying to do. But, they look like that. And I can't deny that's what they look like, and these two things I haven't been able to reconcile. So I thought, well, maybe it's time to try to do something a little more modern, a little less retro in presentation at least. I do know in Unavowed I was struggling with that a little bit, because I wanted to have this feeling of travelling with these companions, your friends, and they'd banter and talk around you as you did things, but it didn't really work because of the 2D. Sure, they would talk, but they would just stand still while you wandered around the screen, and as soon as you did anything, it would interrupt them, and that did annoy a lot of people.

Laura: So part of the reason behind the change was to rectify that?

Dave: Sure. If it was a more 3D environment where you could walk and explore while your friends are chattering around you – that's what I was going for. And so I was talking with Ben and thought, why don't we just do that?! (laughs) It's sort of scary because we've been doing this one specific thing for a long time, but I don't think our games are successful because of the 2D. I think if you're only playing our games because they have the retro look then that makes me sad because there's a lot more to them than that!



Early work-in-progress screenshot from the upcoming Technobabylon: Birthright, Wadjet Eye's first adventure in realtime 3D

Laura: When it was announced that you were looking to make Birthright in 3D, people started throwing up the old comparisons of adventure games that moved to 3D but didn’t do as well, like Escape from Monkey Island

Dave: Yes, I was like, oh sure, bring up Escape from Monkey Island. I'll try and make my game like one of the most reviled games in existence. Thank you! (laughs) The tools are different now. You can make good games in 3D very easily now. Most adventures are in 3D and they look great. I think Escape from Monkey Island came out literally twenty years ago – we can do better now. I joke that in 2006 I made a game that looked like it came out 15 years earlier and we're technically doing the same thing now: making a game that looks like it came out in the early mid-2000s!

Laura: Whereabouts are you in terms of development for the game?

Dave: It's hard to say because there's so much to tweak and change. We're about a third of the way through the design. There's a lot of recurring areas that we reuse. It was a big learning curve in terms of how to get everything made. At GDC Ben described it much better because he's the artist, but basically at one point he realised he'd learned so much that the way he was doing things was completely wrong – it was taking too long and looked ugly and so he re-did it all in a month!

Laura: Will this be a direct sequel to Technobablyon?

Dave: Yes. You only play as one of the three characters though; Technobablyon had three characters and you bounced between them. In the sequel you just play as Latha, who has just joined the police force, and so she's kind of finding her way. She's a cool character. And now that we're using 3D, there's a lot more we can do with The Trance as well. That's what I loved about Technobablyon – whenever I give James [Dearden, of developer Technocrat Games] feedback, it's just "more Trance!"



In the Technobabylon sequel, the protagonist Latha will have full freedom of movement at the range

Laura: Will the sequel have a branch of endings like Technobablyon did?

Dave: Yes it will, and we've managed to do something clever where you can choose which ending you had originally chosen in the original. There's some very subtle branching paths.

Laura: Can you tell me anything more about the "Birthright" part of the title?

Dave: I can't really say without spoiling it! I don't want to speak for James; I think I know where he's going with the title because I know the story, but I don't want to spoil it!



Latha's avatar can once again meet up with Cheffie in The Trance in Technobabylon: Birthright

Laura: When will Technobablyon: Birthright be out?

Dave: It might be close to being done at the end of this year, but I doubt it’ll be ready. It looks really good; I'm kind of amazed! I can't wait to get the voice acting in there and see how that plays out. I don't know when that'll come out – or Nighthawks for that matter. We're hoping for next year.

Laura: Thanks for chatting with me!

Dave: No problem! I will say: I don't know how I managed to get this far but I'm very grateful that I have. The fact that I can do this for a living and support my family on it and live a fairly comfortable life while doing something that I love is an amazing blessing, and I'm just grateful for that every day. Especially to Adventure Gamers, because you guys were supporting me from the beginning and I'm always grateful for that; you guys have always been behind me and you reviewed my stuff from day one and that's awesome. But also to our fans and everyone that's played our stuff – since 2006 – I owe you all so much because I'm here because of that, and I'm grateful and thankful every day.
 

MRY

Wormwood Studios
Developer
Joined
Aug 15, 2012
Messages
5,703
Location
California
I think it's great that WEG is taking their games in a more console-style, Telltale fashion -- it helps differentiate our games while also broadening the tent of potential customers, since if they reach new folks, some of those customers might make their way to Primordia or Strangeland. Also, it's hard not to be happy for these devs being able to make the games they really wanted to, even if they aren't the games I'd necessarily want to play. For me, Primordia's style was aspirational -- I started wanting to make a game like Primordia in ~1993, after playing King's Quest V, King's Quest VI, Loom, and Hugo II: Whodunit? (admittedly, a parser based game), and I have a deep conservatism in my tastes, meaning once I love something, it takes a lot to get me to change from it. (I still eat at the same restaurants I did 25 years ago, for instance.) But Dave has always said that he didn't want to make retro games at all, he just made them that way because that's what the tool (AGS) and resources dictated. Pretty sure James Dearden and Francisco said the same thing. The old school games for them were a creative sacrifice en route to creative freedom. They aren't pandering to the market by making streamlined or consolized games, they're achieving a decade-long goal that was put on hiatus while they settled for puzzle-based point-and-clicks. If they were "selling out" that might disappoint me, but this I can only applaud -- the only thing that makes me happier than Dave getting rich publishing the games I like is Dave getting richer publishing the games he likes.
 

WallaceChambers

Learned
Joined
Jul 29, 2019
Messages
311
They aren't pandering to the market by making streamlined or consolized games, they're achieving a decade-long goal that was put on hiatus while they settled for puzzle-based point-and-clicks. If they were "selling out" that might disappoint me, but this I can only applaud -- the only thing that makes me happier than Dave getting rich publishing the games I like is Dave getting richer publishing the games he likes.

They haven't shown anything to indicate the game wont be puzzle based. Why keep making vague allusions to this? Because Unavowed had easy puzzles just like The Shivah and every Blackwell game? Just like every game ever directed by Dave Gilbert? Who isn't directing his game. Literally the tweet you posted shows there's still inventory and item combinations. The fact that they're using a radial menu doesn't mean its dumbed down.

Also, the end of the video shows James' cartoony pilot character. The one he's using for a personal side project. So it's not even clear this is for Tech 2. It wouldn't surprise me if it was but it's still not clear.

Why all the underhanded speculation? "Oh I guess they're gonna make babies first adventure no puzzle crap from now on, not my thing, but good for them I guess lol." There's literally no indication Technobabylon: Birthright will be that way. Them saying the 3D style is similar to oldschool Telltale does not indicate that. Them using a radial inventory menu does not indicate that.
 

SerratedBiz

Arcane
Joined
Mar 4, 2009
Messages
4,143
so tough luck if you're one of those people who insists on using a mouse

What the flying fuck? Is using a mouse considered some kind of primitive vestige of early computing which we're trying to shed away? Am I coming out of the mouse-using closet here?

They aren't pandering to the market by making streamlined or consolized games.

But this is exactly what they're doing. The fuck are you talking about 'settling for point-and-clicks'? If anything, the past years have shown that not every genre needs to be moving in the 3D, technological "advancement" direction. I mean, it was already apparent back in the 00's but those pesky publishers wouldn't let us make the games we wanted to make. Or something.

Furthermore, since when do radial menus not work with a mouse? Is it too complicated to move your mouse in a certain cardinal direction to select an option? I feel like games have already done this before - I want to say Mass Effect or some other streamlined consolized kind of game that was simply a stepping stone towards unbound creative freedom or some other bullshit. :lol:
 

MRY

Wormwood Studios
Developer
Joined
Aug 15, 2012
Messages
5,703
Location
California
Unavowed had easy puzzles just like The Shivah and every Blackwell game? Just like every game ever directed by Dave Gilbert? Who isn't directing his game.
I really liked the puzzles in The Shivah and the first Blackwell game—haven’t played the others or Unavowed—but I always recognize the de gustibus rule; if you don’t like them, you might try Resonance, which has great puzzles!

Not getting where your hostility to Dave is coming from. It’s not fair to rob him of well deserved credit on Technobabylon. If you compare the original freeware version to Dave’s commercial release, you can see the important role he played in the game. Heck, even in the small part I alpha-tested, Dave played a huge role in reworking the early puzzle flow. So if you liked Technobabylon’s puzzles, you shouldn’t bash Dave’s work. It’s just that he’s very focused on story and narrative these days.

Oh I guess they're gonna make babies first adventure no puzzle crap from now on, not my thing, but good for them I guess lol.
My man, Dave has been making adventure games for over a decade. Pretty sure he knows what he’s doing, as I’ve said a dozen times. Even if you don’t like Unavowed, we are living through a bounty of quality indie adventures, thanks in no small part to Dave sowing the seeds. If you’ve played the first five minutes of
Unavowed, you’d know WEG is not making kids’ games. Puzzles != target age. Kids’ games from the 90 like Pajama Sam had way more puzzles than Unavowed, but you’d be crazy to say that its target demographic is older than Unavowed.
 

Alpan

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Mar 4, 2018
Messages
1,340
Grab the Codex by the pussy Pathfinder: Wrath
Like Adahn in PS: T, it seems all the speculative, baseless talk about hostility towards Gilbert has inevitably manifested in a new account.
 

WallaceChambers

Learned
Joined
Jul 29, 2019
Messages
311
I really liked the puzzles in The Shivah and the first Blackwell game—haven’t played the others or Unavowed—but I always recognize the de gustibus rule; if you don’t like them, you might try Resonance, which has great puzzles!

I never said I didn't like the puzzles. I said they're easy and generally are in all the games he directs. I don't think that every adventure game needs mind melting, obtuse as fuck puzzles, with 50+ red herrings in your inventory and 30+ screens full of hotspots to try them on. I appreciate the puzzles in Blackwell for what they are. A mild challenge and a way to involve the player in progressing the narrative.

Not getting where your hostility to Dave is coming from... It’s just that he’s very focused on story and narrative these days.

My point is all Dave's games are like that. Which, for some reason you assume I intended as an insult. You may like the puzzles in The Shivah, but can you honestly say they're difficult? They're in the same range as difficulty as Unavowed. So where is this supposed shift? How is he "very focused on story and narrative these days." I'm not seeing it. I'm not seeing this big change.

My point is that you keep saying they're watering down the puzzle solving but there's no legit evidence that's happening in Technobabylon Birthright and the other example, Unavowed, is completely in line with how difficult Dave Gilbert's games have always been.

My man, Dave has been making adventure games for over a decade. Pretty sure he knows what he’s doing, as I’ve said a dozen times. Even if you don’t like Unavowed, we are living through a bounty of quality indie adventures, thanks in no small part to Dave sowing the seeds.

You've really, really, misread my post. I'm gonna assume you just skimmed it, which is fine, but you're missing my point entirely. Didn't you notice that part was in scare-quotes? That's me summarizing the point (I feel) you are getting across that WEG is "very focused on story and narrative these days" and mentioning that they're becoming more "like telltale" (ignoring the context that they're referencing pre-TWD TellTale) when there's no evidence they're dumbing down their puzzles.

In your Old Skies thread you basically sum up the game as "lol here's the new style for WEG" when Dave himself says the game was an exercise to work through writers block (probably not gonna hardcore focus on puzzles if that's your goal w/ only two weeks to spare) and learn Unity. Something he threw together in two weeks. Why would you frame a freeware test game as indicative of WEGs moving forward?
 
Self-Ejected

Harry Easter

Self-Ejected
Joined
Jul 27, 2016
Messages
819
As long as they don't go full Telltale, this can still be good. Technobabylon had solid puzzles and a good story and I think we can expect the same here. At worst it will be a bit like Dreamfall (more story, less puzzles), but I don't need all my games to be 60 hours long, so I could live with that. After that we hopefully get the second Season of Unavowed. I loved that one even more than Technobabylon and hopefully it will keepthe pixellated look, because that stuff looks always good.
 

Don Peste

Arcane
Joined
Sep 15, 2008
Messages
4,277
Location
||☆||
A mysterious screenshot he just posted on the RPG Watch...
I guess they know how to treat devs properly.

frontviewrabbi3dmodelSignature.jpgc578ae52-fa22-4a2e-9256-8eb4523a9a7aOriginal.jpg
 

As an Amazon Associate, rpgcodex.net earns from qualifying purchases.
Back
Top Bottom