Codex Interview AdventureDex: A Conversation about the State of the Adventure Genre

[thesisko]

If those criticisms had come exclusively from an 18-year-old reviewer at IGN, I would've been inclined to dismiss them as a result of genre ignorance or ambivalence, but we got those criticisms from all over the place: an old-timer pro-adventure-game review on GameSpy, folks on Rock Paper Shotgun, message board posts on AdventureGamers.com, etc. Now maybe there's something else about the gameplay they really didn't like, and they were all misarticulating it, but I'm not sure. A lot of them seemed to just want more dialogue and visuals, and less puzzling.

Are you sure that's the takeaway from Richard Cobbett's review?

"Few of the puzzles stand out as particularly tricky or tough to solve"
"nothing is desperately difficult"
"The nadir is a series of tedious, unskippable word puzzles that are all the worse for thinking that they're being remotely clever. Most aren't a challenge of any kind though, just irritating."

Seems more like he was, as you did in this interview, criticizing the puzzle design rather than the difficulty or frequency.

 

[Zeriel]

MRY

Also, reviewers have to criticize something. Unless they've been paid or it's literally the best game of all time, they're going to make up things to shit on that really aren't that important. My take-away from those reactions would not be that adventure games are somehow outmoded or fundamentally flawed. No good game is. I'd argue that modern games have taught a lot of people who've moved on from adventure games to never be patient, to expect answers and solutions to be fed directly to them by the game, and so on and so forth.

There's going to be at least an equal amount of bitching about Project Eternity and Torment 2 when they come out, provided they stay true to their north star. There's a small number of us who actually still play these old games every year, but there's a much larger number of people who profess to love the classics while being hugely unfamiliar with them, at least in a recent sense.

The time I allot myself to start to get frustrated and consider looking up walkthroughs online for an adventure game is somewhere in the realm of several hours for a single puzzle. I don't know what to say to reports of people getting frustrated after a few minutes. Maybe it's a difference in the way they play them. I tend to play a lot of singleplayer games with the network cable pulled out, not chatting with a dozen friends online over Skype. I feel like this makes me more receptive to the idiosyncrasies of whatever I'm playing, but maybe I'm just crazy.

 

[felipepepe]

Generally speaking, asking the player to backtrack is a bad idea: there's nothing inherently fun about walking in an adventure game, if you've already seen the rooms before there's nothing fun about being asked to walk through them again, and -- typically -- the plot doesn't compel (or necessarily benefit from) a puzzle where the lock and key are located a long way apart. Yet the funny thing is, puzzle designers will often stick the lock and the key as far apart from each other as possible even when it hurts the plot. In the basement is a birdcage bolted to the floor; in the cage is a parrot; the key to the cage is in the attic; when freed, the parrot clearly wants to be returned to nature; the only window is in the attic; when released out the window, the parrot tells you the magic words to open the secret passage in the basement; in the seret passage you discover a solar powered calculator; the only sunlight enters through the attic window, etc., etc. The Longest Journey is shameless about this long-distance ping-pong design. Such design is inexcusable though not inexplicable ("The puzzle is too easy as is; at least make the player work for it!" "There's hardly any gameplay; at least give the player something to do!").

And here we have a nice description of why The Cave is such a shitty game. Ron Gilbert went one step beyond and added huuuuuge stairs and boring platforming to the already bad ping-pong design. You spend more time climbing stairs than solving puzzles... a shame really, because the puzzles were actually decent.

 

[Elwro]

Great read. Nice that there were plugs for some of best interactive fiction titles, which I'd count among the best games of all time. Honest.

I'm wondering about one bit:

I don't think it's appropriate for a creator to say, "It's my game [or movie or book or whatever], if you don't like it, screw you." I really do think, for example, George Lucas had a moral obligation to husband the Star Wars universe well.

I don't know what to think about this. Are there any reasons behind that particular point of view? In the case of Lucas, I simply didn't buy a movie ticket for episode 3. (People now tell me I made the worst possible decision by watching 1 and 2 and not watching 3, but that's beside the point.) But I thought the guy can do whatever he wants with the stuff he created, and I can either buy into it or not. No obligation on either side.




As for The Cave, I played with the Knight, Time Traveler and Monk. I have to say all three of the character-based regions were memorable. And surprising at times. But the regions in between were simply boring after you figured out what to do. I don't see myself replaying this.

 

[MRY]

Are you sure that's the takeaway from Richard Cobbett's review?

No, I probably am wrong about it. It's been months since I read the review, and you clearly just read it. (It runs together with some other negative reviews from the same time.) That said, it's quite strange for him to describe as "unskippable" a puzzle that is repeatedly identified as optional by characters in the game and which is, in fact, optional. (I might quarrel with him calling that puzzle "tedious" and not "remotely clever," since it's probably the only puzzle that was widely praised as clever, satisfying, and challenging, but unlike saying it's mandatory, saying it's lame is just a matter of taste.)

@ Elwro: A variety of reasons, basic courtesy being one of them. When you create something and release it to the public, encourage them to become invested in it, and profit from their investment in it, I think you have certain duties toward them. A work of art isn't like a cupcake that is consumed, excreted, and then exists as nothing more than a vague memory. It continues to exist, both "in the world" and in the minds of the people who engaged with it. Part of what you're selling is not just the one-shot consumption, but the long-term relationship the viewer will have with the product. That's especially so in the case of Star Wars, which was aggressively pushed on children to (successfully) make it an integral part of their childhoods and their "mythology."

It's not that I think there is or should be a legal duty that Lucas or another creator has to his audience. But there is a moral/ethical/social obligation there. Ordinarily, incidentally, that obligation would never require a creator to create something more. So I don't think Doyle had an obligation to bring back Holmes, or that Lucas had an obligation to make prequels at all. He could've just walked away. (The exception is that I think if you start selling people a multi-part epic and keep stretching it out without an closure, then abandon it, you're kind of a jerk.) Likewise, I think if a creator doesn't release his works publicly, he certainly has no obligations about it one way or another. It's only as a result of the creator-audience relationship that an obligation arises.

I can try articulating it further, but I suspect I'll just run in circles.

 

[Harg Harfardarssen]

I can try articulating it further, but I suspect I'll just run in circles.

No need, that was perfect.

 

[Ninja Destroyer]

So much love for streamlined KQVII and no respect for Jane Jensen theatric KQ VI ? The latter one was my first game in the series, so maybe I'm looking through rose tinted glasses. But during the playthrough through the whole series this year I couldn't stomach the sweet tone of graphics and very simple puzzles. It's a good "my first adventure game" but with Mask of Eternity (That horrible 3d!) it remains on dusty shelf for me.

As for Telltale, I like their Sam & Max interpretation. Sure, it's more "gamer friendly", but with it's light hearted themes and funny characters it's still nice series. The most QTE-fest was Jurrasic Park, Walkind Dead is something in the middle between adventure game and the action paced genre. And more focused on narration.

I think it'll be fun for fans of games like King's Quest, Kyrandia, etc.

Please, let it be more like Kyrandia, mmkay Blackthorne ?

Is it morbid and outrageous to say that I kind of have a vision that Steven's kidney transplants involved some kind of absurd puzzle dynamic, like he had to wear a fake mustache and a beret to persuade the hospital that he was the patient who was supposed to get the kidneys, and then maybe performed the surgery on himself using a pizza cutter and jelly fish?

I laughed so hard, black humor at it's best.

It's funny how MRY is adressing the issues of Primordia, being too hard for players. Too many items, puzzle solving? WTF! That was the bread and butter for me. Horatio and whole universe was very interesting, and I'm sure there are many who would like to see more of it. I just hope it won't be Primordia Chapters.

Very good interview. You can have interesting questions, and long thoughtful answers. Sometimes it doesn't work that well on one of the side of the fence.

 

[Blackthorne]

Haha, where is there love for KQVII? Cause there ain't! We were saying how it started the death of the genre in the 90's! Haha.... don't get me wrong; I love King's Quest VI. I just prefer other games in the series over it.

And, yes, more like Kyrandia, for sure!

Bt

 

[Jasede]

Oh my god, I sort of felt like your art wasn't quite "there" yet but that is a /wonderful/ screenshot.
You dirty advertising plant!

Tigranes:

One of the best parts of those older adventure games is when a puzzle solves itself by magic. As in, you try and try and you don't find a solution so you give up, annoyed- go watch TV, go to bed, read a book, go for a walk- and then the next day - or maybe a week later - the solution just comes to you out of nowhere, like a particle of inspiration hitting you smack dab in the forehead.

It's a fantastic feeling and it kinda sucks you can't get it anymore except with other problems, like math proofs. But adventures lost a lot of magic with the invention of the walk-through.

See, we think now that getting stuck is bad. That it frustrates people. Well, it does- but it's an invitation to do something else, let your brain work, and then, when you find your solution that way, you really feel a huge sense of satisfaction that's difficult to reproduce.

 

[Murk]

Parallel problem solving.

I'm reminded of a scenario used in a study in which people were given a situation as such:

"You are part of a neurosurgical team and must remove a tumor in the brain using lasers, however, the intensity at which the laser beam must strike the tumor is too high and will damage other parts of the brain before it hits the tumor itself. In order to pass the brain without damage it must be at 1/3rd of its current intensity."*

People who were unable to come up with a solution were then asked to read a small snippet from a made-up historical battle from the middle ages.

"The lord of the North was laying siege to a fort that sits atop a river mouth and is safely guarded by the roaring waters. It has 3 bridges that connect it, but the bridges are built such that they collapse when too much weight travels on it. Unwilling to risk passing all his troops over a single bridge, the lord of the North split his troops into three groups and attacked from all three sides at once -- effectively reducing the weight he put one each bridge but still bringing forth the full muster of his troops."

Immediately afterwards participants knew how to solve the first problem.

Such occasions, when encountered naturally in life, are beautiful.

*May not be 100% accurate in regards to how lasers work but whatever.

 

[Elwro]

Laser beams shoot right through each other, right? Like flashlight beams?

 

[Murk]

Hell if I know, but if you split the beam into 3 beams that are at .33~ intensity you can aim each one from different parts but that converge on the tumor -- thus each beam cannot damage the route it takes, but when combined with the other two, should be able to burn the tumor.

 

[Manny]

Excellent, excellent interview. I don’t post much at the Codex or the Internet, because writing in English takes a lot of time and work for me. But this interview really makes me want to share some impressions, especially with MRY. Now, because the interview is very long and contains a lot of information, I’m going to divide my comment by topic, without citing exact parts. So, here I go.


Hardcore adventure gamers

I share your impression, MRY, that there isn’t an adventuregamecodex on the Internet. I’ve been playing adventure games since the 90’s and I’ve followed various sites of adventure fans: adventuregamers, adventureclassicgaming, adventure lantern, quandary (now metzomagic, but they don’t post almost anything anymore), etc., and to a lesser extent the AGS community. And the “feeling” is that a lot of people (the majority I would dare to say) prefers adventure games that “flow”, without obstacles that make the player stop for a while (hours, weeks, even months sometimes). I think the article that best summarizes this is one from the editor-in-chief of adventure gamers (aka Jackal): http://www.adventuregamers.com/articles/view/24000. The article is interesting, and so is his discussion, in the comments section, with Kurufinwe. There, it can be seen that he thinks typical adventure puzzles aren’t fun, because they’re frustrating. I quote from the comments: “Puzzles are designed primarily to frustrate, and the act of solving them isn’t particularly fun. Rewarding, stimulating in other ways, yes. Fun, no.”

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying that is bad some people, like Jackal, prefer adventure games with easy puzzles or almost non at all. His article is interesting too. But I think it shows what the adventure game community expects. In that regard, the people who expect difficult puzzles, the kind that get you stuck, are a minority. I have more “evidence”.

For example, if we read the review made by Nathaniel Berens, mentioned above, of Primordia we can read that the game is good, but that the “gameplay is satisfying but not particularly memorable”. Then, he explains that the puzzles are very well done, even with multiple solutions, but that they are not memorable enough, because they aren’t outstandingly clever, an evaluation that –I think from his comments- MRY shares. At the end, the game receives 4 stars. It’s a good grade. But let’s see other two reviews from the same reviewer: Journey (http://www.adventuregamers.com/articles/view/24211) and L.A. Noire (http://www.adventuregamers.com/articles/view/18569). Both games receive 5 stars. In the respective reviews, it said that they almost don’t have any puzzles. In the L.A. Noire review, the word “puzzle” doesn’t even get mentioned. So I think this reviewer doesn´t consider the puzzles important in the case of the games categorized as adventure games.

In the end, adventure gamers that look mainly for solving puzzles in a narrative frame are few. And, at least in English, there isn’t any site, as a whole, that loves the hardcore feeling of difficult puzzles. (In Spanish, there are at least two of which I know: Aventuraycia and Indiefence, but they post very little, in comparison with English sites). That’s one of the reasons why I prefer to read Codex comments on adventure games than those of sites dedicated to that type of games.

I can write more regarding this topic, but I think is enough.


Analyzing adventure design

There isn’t anything complex as the discussions at the Codex regarding RPG design. You have some old articles here and there, but nothing deep. We have some exceptions: the article of MRY already cited, “Visually Directing the Player” (of Joshua Nuremberg), in English; or, in Spanish, indifence has some nice articles regarding puzzles and design. (For example: http://indiefence.blogspot.com.es/2013/09/como-empezar-o-no-una-aventura-1-grim.html or http://indiefence.blogspot.com.es/2012/11/new-york-crimes-crimenes-contra-la.html). But they are sporadic. And in the forums of the adventure games sites I haven’t seen discussions with the same passion or attempt to understand the design, as occurs here regarding RPGs. It would be interesting having more of these, a lot more.


Games

I also think, MRV, that Lucas Arts has, in proportion, better games than Sierra. But I think that saying that only the QFG Series (I-IV, right?, because V, at least to me, is one of the worst games I’ve ever played) and GK1 have resisted the test of time is too much. For example, the last 2 Larry games, especially Love For Sail, are excellent and on par with S&M: hit the Road or Monkey 3 and, in my opinion, are better than Full Throttle or The Dig. I also think that the last Space Quest, Freddy Pharkas, KQ3 and 6, and GK2 are really good, but it’s true they’re inferiors when compared to the best games of Lucas.

Regarding new games, in other threads I have shown my admiration for Edna & Harvey: The Breakout and the Second Season of the new Sam & Max (also the fifth episode of the FS and the second of the TS are really good). I haven’t played anything better, including the indies I’ve played. I have Primordia and Resonance but haven’t played them yet, because right now I play almost nothing (which it’s a shame, but, well, work and personal projects and all that). But of the rest I’ve played, the only other interesting games are The Blackwell Legacy saga, as a whole, and Gemini Rue, The Shiva, Tales of Monkey Island (third and fourth episodes specially), and maybe Gray Matter and Perry Rhodan. Their main problem is the puzzle design: too easy and not that memorable.

The other new games I’ve played I find terrible. Black Mirror 1 and 2, Lost Horizon, The Book of Unwritten Tales, for example, are boring and with terrible puzzles. The last one is an interesting case, because is nice and has a nice sense of humor, but it makes you believe that it has puzzles. Interaction with the environment without thinking is a puzzle? Maybe on the surface. And it says a lot about the expectations of the players that this is one of the most praised ones in recent years.


Well, following the spirit of the interview, a wall of text.

 

[MRY]

@ Ninja -- I hate KQVII. I thought we both derided it in the interview? That said, I'd be interested in replaying it today; I actually slightly suspect that it might actually have gained in charm as I've aged, since I'd be less put off by the lack of seriousness.

@ Blackthorne -- Amazing shot. I agree with what Infinitron said.

@ Manny -- Sigh, my browser crashed and ate a long reply. The short version is: (1) Hardcore gamers: very interesting observations, and useful data. (2) Design: thanks for the links! Though my Spanish isn't great, I can actually make my way through most of them. (3) I just haven't played as many games as you have! I concede KQIII. Haven't played the Larry games. I left out Conquests of the Longbow, which is a great game. I would put SQIV over SQV, but I don't think either is quite good enough; SQIV's inside humor and random deaths probably aren't going to be much fun absent nostalgia. I personally think GK2 is terrible and KQ6 is rather overrated, but I suspect my contrarianism is getting the better of me.

 

[Infinitron]

@ Blackthorne -- Amazing shot. I agree with what Infinitron said.

I'm not sure what you're referring to, but good!

 

[thesisko]

I haven't played adventure games since the 90's, but back then I don't remember getting totally stuck on every single puzzle, nor do I remember being most fond of those puzzles. The games I played were Indy IV, Monkey Island 1&2, Star Trek 25th/Judgement Rites and Simon the Sorcerer.

I've tried playing some newer adventures but I usually get bored by them after a short while. I don't think it has anything to do with puzzle difficulty, even though I may in fact quit playing after failing to solve a puzzle.

The thing I remember about the above games is that the puzzles felt like a part of the game, rather than obstacles that prevented me from getting the next bit of story. They were well integrated, provided feedback when testing hypothesis and some had multiple solutions with varying outcomes (the Star Trek games were particularly good at this).

I don't think that a "difficult" puzzle needs to stump one for days or weeks, since a reasonably smart person seldom needs to reason and think for weeks to solve a problem. Maybe if it's a complex mathematical proof, but even those usually involve methodical work in small steps, not just "thinking" for weeks until a solution pops up.

A good puzzle should assume that the player is smart and enjoys solving puzzles, then provide enough feedback and guidance so that he arrives at the solution by reasoning and analyzing the puzzle parts and feedback from trying out wrong solutions.

Allowing the game itself to inspire the solution doesn't make the puzzles any dumber, it just makes it easier to get that "aha!" moment while playing the game rather than hoping to stumble upon it days later in real life. Maybe I'm remembering things wrong, but I think the older adventure games were pretty good at this, and it's those puzzles I remember most fondly - not the ones that had me stumped for weeks.

 

[Lady_Error]

The most recent adventures I enjoyed were the first two Sam & Max games from Telltale. Really well done, even though they completely changed the engine compared to the original Lucasarts adventures.

 

[ghostdog]

I think you're partly right about people being unable to articulate what they liked about adventure gameplay. But I guess what I'm talking about is not the positive reviews that other games got, but the negative commentary Primordia got even within the classic-adventure-game-fan community. Now, I'll be the first to admit (1) that the game is riddled with flaws and (2) that, despite my best efforts to suppress it, I have a defensive streak when people criticize it. So my reaction might be all wrong. But it seemed to me a large amount of people who grew up playing adventure games and say they loved them nevertheless said, for example, that Primordia had too many puzzles or too many inventory items or that it was grossly unjust that you could fail puzzles in Primordia (never mind that there were no deaths or dead ends) or that the puzzles required you to remember too many obscure details (never mind that the datapouch stored every necessary number or factoid and there was a built-in hint system).

If those criticisms had come exclusively from an 18-year-old reviewer at IGN, I would've been inclined to dismiss them as a result of genre ignorance or ambivalence, but we got those criticisms from all over the place: an old-timer pro-adventure-game review on GameSpy, folks on Rock Paper Shotgun, message board posts on AdventureGamers.com, etc. Now maybe there's something else about the gameplay they really didn't like, and they were all misarticulating it, but I'm not sure. A lot of them seemed to just want more dialogue and visuals, and less puzzling.

I think that those "adventure veterans" you've mentioned haven't touched one of the oldies in ages and have forgotten that most of the adventures games from the golden era were harder and usually had some much more obscure puzzles than Primordia. They have forgotten that even if they were little kids that didn't understand every concept of the plot, or being foreign (like me) didn't have full grasp of the language, they would still bust their head over a puzzle for hours and even days, because they wanted to see what happened next, because they wanted to beat the game and because thy didn't have the easy solution of the internet.

Another random data point. Primordia was set up so that Crispin would automatically supply a context-appropriate hint if you'd been stuck for five minutes. Now, the hint system was imperfect. But mention of this feature was very, very rare in reviews or posts about the game. What was very, very common was complaints about Crispin demanding that you wait (around 60 seconds) before soliciting another hint from him. In other words, it strongly appears that the number of people who spammed Crispin asking for hints was many orders of magnitude greater than the number of people who allowed themselves to be stuck for more than five minutes. And even with the Crispin hint system, even people who really liked the game reported using walkthroughs.

That also suggests to something to me.

For what it's worth, I have some thoughts about how to address this issue, but I want to save them for another time (put otherwise, I need to recuperate from that epic interview). The basic gist is going even farther in the multiple-solution direction we took and basically stopping thinking of puzzles as gameplay-stopping obstacles and reconceiving of them as recurrent choice-and-consequence opportunities in which certain choices are only available if you're clever or neurotic enough to figure them out. To use a metaphor, puzzles would be less like locked doors and more like hurdles. You can run a 400-meter hurdle race, knock over every hurdle, and still make it to the finish line: you just look ridiculous and are unlikely to win the race. By contrast, if you're walking down a 400-meter hallway of locked doors, either you have the necessary keys/strong shoulder/lockpick to get through the doors or you don't. If you don't, you never make it to the end of the hall. Part of what seemed to bother players about the puzzles in Primordia is that so many of them were effectively locked doors; even when they weren't literally locked doors (which they often were!), they functioned that way.

I think the "hurdle" puzzle idea is great. It would definitely enrich an adventure game, but you can't build the whole game around it because then it would become a "choose your own adventure" game. What you propose is basically multiple paths and long term C&C (the only meaningful way of C&C), which is something I crave to see done well in an adventure game, but I believe that good progress-puzzles are necessary because it's only by solving them that you get an actual sense of achievement. I think that gaming in general should provide both an enjoyable ride *and* the sense of achievement from mastering gameplay elements.

It's good that you listen closely to the negative feedback, you should take it into account if you want to make better games, but I think that being a first time developer you're maybe giving it too much thought. You shouldn't try to re-invent your whole approach to adventure games because in my opinion you did most of the things right with Primordia. Puzzle creation of course is an art and a skill as you have stated and even if the puzzles of Primordia were well made in general, maybe you are correct to think that their density should have been decreased. It's very difficult to think of a great puzzle that can fit the context of the game, so generally it should be a good idea to go for less-and-better puzzles.

I think that when it comes to puzzle design, a good adventure should have a few complex, multi-layered, clever puzzles that will leave an impression on the player and the rest should be designed in order to accommodate the plot as much as possible and not be very difficult, in order to let the game flow.

Hmm, now that I think of it, a power-based adventure game with an inventory would easily make this happen. MRY get ready to make a new pitch.

 

[MRY]

@ TheSisko -- I do think we didn't a decent job of integrating puzzles into the world of Primordia and the theme of the game, if nothing else.

@ Infinitron -- Misascription error! Confused you for Jasede. Sigh.

@ Ghostdog -- I think Primordia is, arguably, a powers + inventory game, it's just not packaged that way. Your powers are Crispin, the plasma torch, the lantern, the transmitter, the energy reader, and the crowbar. Like powers, those items are used recurrently to accomplish similar, though not identical, purposes.

Our designs for the next game are still in the very early stages. To be clear, I'm not proposing that every puzzle take the form of a random person asking you whether to adopt a Martian or not. Think more along the lines of puzzles in Primordia like Gamma, EFL, and the confrontation with Scraper outside the courthouse. (Or even the game's finale.) It's pretty easy to advance through all those puzzles, i.e., they're not progress-impediments, but depending on how carefully and cleverly you resolve them, things may work out better. I do think we'd still have at least a couple "locked doors," but probably just not as many of them.

 

[Infinitron]

Sceptic Aeschylus suejak Interested in your comments on this interview.

 

[Aeschylus]

Sceptic Aeschylus suejak Interested in your comments on this interview.

Haven't had time to sit down and read it yet, but I will try to go through it and leave some comments this evening, since you asked so nicely .

 

[Blackthorne]

READ IT, YOU PHLEEBHUTAN MONGREL, YOU!


Bt

 

[Aeschylus]

READ IT, YOU PHLEEBHUTAN MONGREL, YOU!


Bt

I may, but perhaps first I can sell you this fine Orat-on-a-Stick! Almost certainly unlikely to cause gruesome death when ingested.

 

[Karellen]

For what it's worth, I have some thoughts about how to address this issue, but I want to save them for another time (put otherwise, I need to recuperate from that epic interview). The basic gist is going even farther in the multiple-solution direction we took and basically stopping thinking of puzzles as gameplay-stopping obstacles and reconceiving of them as recurrent choice-and-consequence opportunities in which certain choices are only available if you're clever or neurotic enough to figure them out. To use a metaphor, puzzles would be less like locked doors and more like hurdles. You can run a 400-meter hurdle race, knock over every hurdle, and still make it to the finish line: you just look ridiculous and are unlikely to win the race. By contrast, if you're walking down a 400-meter hallway of locked doors, either you have the necessary keys/strong shoulder/lockpick to get through the doors or you don't. If you don't, you never make it to the end of the hall. Part of what seemed to bother players about the puzzles in Primordia is that so many of them were effectively locked doors; even when they weren't literally locked doors (which they often were!), they functioned that way.

I think the "hurdle" puzzle idea is great. It would definitely enrich an adventure game, but you can't build the whole game around it because then it would become a "choose your own adventure" game. What you propose is basically multiple paths and long term C&C (the only meaningful way of C&C), which is something I crave to see done well in an adventure game, but I believe that good progress-puzzles are necessary because it's only by solving them that you get an actual sense of achievement. I think that gaming in general should provide both an enjoyable ride *and* the sense of achievement from mastering gameplay elements.

I think one of the major issues in adventure games is how they handle progression. In a game, I think it's crucially important to have obstacles, that the game pushes back when you try to move forward; pushing past them is what creates satisfaction. That said, a problem I think a lot of people are dancing around while criticising adventure games - including in the reviews about Primordia, if I recall correctly - is that progress rarely feels like progress. Solving a decent puzzle does feel satisfying, but generally that simply leads you to another puzzle, so nothing has really changed. It might lead to progress narratively (though in a bad adventure game, even that doesn't happen), but often there's no substantial change in the game itself, which can also undercut the sense of narrative progress. On some deep level, it often feels rather underwhelming.

In contrast, metroidvanias and classical dungeon crawlers in particular generally involve a lot of backtracking and slow progression against largely arbitrary obstacles, including locked doors, but nonetheless they are often remarked for how satisfying they are to play. What games like this have in common, as I see it, is that the game is founded on an incremental sense of mastery over the game world. At the beginning, you're weak and ignorant, but gradually, your knowledge of your surroundings increases, while you unlock shortcuts, collect resources and gain new abilities by which you can exert power over the environment and overcome the challenges the game presents.

The way I see it, it's this sense of 'agency' that adventure games usually lack, which is also why they rarely feel satisfying in the same fundamental sense as well-designed RPGs and Metroidvanias. Even though you gain new items in an adventure game, they usually have very limited and specific uses, and so it usually doesn't feel like you're becoming more powerful; this is particularly the case with puzzles that actually expend the item you used to solve it. Moreover, you 'use up' spaces in adventure games; a room in which puzzles have been solved is an empty, meaningless room. In contrast, in a dungeon crawler or a Metroidvania, a solved area isn't 'empty'; rather, you've turned a dangerous place to a safer one. It's a deeply satisfying transformation, and it's a big reason why backtracking in those games is satisfying, while in an adventure game it's often more of a pointless chore.

So this is the sort of thing I really want to capture in my designs. The way I see it, putting a Metroidvania aspect into an adventure game doesn't just mean that you can solve things in a variety of different orders, but also, that by making your way through the game, your options increase in a meaningful way. You gain allies who can offer useful advice, abilities that can help you diagnose problems and approach them in different ways, ways to bypass problems entirely or even buy items from, say, a merchant. So the game isn't just about solving problems, but also building a toolset you use to solve them, if you see my meaning. I'm also hoping that this will reduce the sense that earlier areas are 'obsolete', by making revisiting earlier places an option that's genuinely useful for solving problems elsewhere; that way, players can also modulate the difficulty of the game simply by changing how they play the game.

Not to go too deep into this, but from a design standpoint, too, I think treating items even a bit less as "necessary quest objects" and more as "variable resources" gives a designer useful tools for creating mood and integrating narrative and gameplay. Gaining resources feels more like a reward than gaining a "quest object"; on the other hand, resources that have been gained can also be taken away. It's a trick that's positively ancient in many other genres, but only rarely used meaningfully in adventure games, which is a damn shame.

 

[ghostdog]

I think one of the major issues in adventure games is how they handle progression. In a game, I think it's crucially important to have obstacles, that the game pushes back when you try to move forward; pushing past them is what creates satisfaction. That said, a problem I think a lot of people are dancing around while criticising adventure games - including in the reviews about Primordia, if I recall correctly - is that progress rarely feels like progress. Solving a decent puzzle does feel satisfying, but generally that simply leads you to another puzzle, so nothing has really changed. It might lead to progress narratively (though in a bad adventure game, even that doesn't happen), but often there's no substantial change in the game itself, which can also undercut the sense of narrative progress. On some deep level, it often feels rather underwhelming.

In contrast, metroidvanias and classical dungeon crawlers in particular generally involve a lot of backtracking and slow progression against largely arbitrary obstacles, including locked doors, but nonetheless they are often remarked for how satisfying they are to play. What games like this have in common, as I see it, is that the game is founded on an incremental sense of mastery over the game world. At the beginning, you're weak and ignorant, but gradually, your knowledge of your surroundings increases, while you unlock shortcuts, collect resources and gain new abilities by which you can exert power over the environment and overcome the challenges the game presents.

The way I see it, it's this sense of 'agency' that adventure games usually lack, which is also why they rarely feel satisfying in the same fundamental sense as well-designed RPGs and Metroidvanias. Even though you gain new items in an adventure game, they usually have very limited and specific uses, and so it usually doesn't feel like you're becoming more powerful; this is particularly the case with puzzles that actually expend the item you used to solve it. Moreover, you 'use up' spaces in adventure games; a room in which puzzles have been solved is an empty, meaningless room. In contrast, in a dungeon crawler or a Metroidvania, a solved area isn't 'empty'; rather, you've turned a dangerous place to a safer one. It's a deeply satisfying transformation, and it's a big reason why backtracking in those games is satisfying, while in an adventure game it's often more of a pointless chore.

So this is the sort of thing I really want to capture in my designs. The way I see it, putting a Metroidvania aspect into an adventure game doesn't just mean that you can solve things in a variety of different orders, but also, that by making your way through the game, your options increase in a meaningful way. You gain allies who can offer useful advice, abilities that can help you diagnose problems and approach them in different ways, ways to bypass problems entirely or even buy items from, say, a merchant. So the game isn't just about solving problems, but also building a toolset you use to solve them, if you see my meaning. I'm also hoping that this will reduce the sense that earlier areas are 'obsolete', by making revisiting earlier places an option that's genuinely useful for solving problems elsewhere; that way, players can also modulate the difficulty of the game simply by changing how they play the game.

Not to go too deep into this, but from a design standpoint, too, I think treating items even a bit less as "necessary quest objects" and more as "variable resources" gives a designer useful tools for creating mood and integrating narrative and gameplay. Gaining resources feels more like a reward than gaining a "quest object"; on the other hand, resources that have been gained can also be taken away. It's a trick that's positively ancient in many other genres, but only rarely used meaningfully in adventure games, which is a damn shame.

Indeed, a system where you have resources you can increase/improve can bring a whole new depth. Adventure/RPG hybrids is the obvious choice, the QFG series, Veil Of Darkness and Bloodnet have already done it successfully, but even the simple need to have to somehow gain money in order to progress could add a lot to the gameplay. Brian Fargo's first (and only?) game he actually took active part in design, Neuromancer, comes to mind. Of course all the above games incorporate combat in one way or another. Combat is the easiest and surest way to reward the player for his increased resource-gathering and skill improvement, and also the easiest way to spice up things. Hearing you talk about a metroidvania-adventure game I assume you'll also include combat. So, here is the question : Could you totally avoid combat in a good resource/ability-based adventure game ?