Broken Age - Double Fine's Kickstarter Adventure Game

[Boleskine]

I enjoyed the game overall while recognizing that it was on the easier side and had limited interactivity. In the interest of trying to find common ground I thought to share this review which is more reasonable in conveying the game's flaws while recognizing it's virtues and potential.

Broken Age is missing one key aspect: depth. And it's missing it in so many places.

There's a sparseness to Broken Age. The game is beautiful, but it's a passive beauty. Frames are crammed with visual detail, but 95% of it is static background. A frame with five objects to interact with—even if “interact” just means “Shay or Vella provides commentary”—is a crowded frame in Broken Age. Too many areas have a single object.

On the one hand, simplicity is good. One of the reasons point-and-click adventure games “died” to begin with was the absurd, opaque logic behind most of the puzzles. “How would I ever figure that out?” was a common refrain with those 90s LucasArts games.

There's a balance, though, and Broken Age feels a bit too much like Shay's “Baby's First Spaceship!” setting. Broken Age wants you to solve puzzles, but the solutions are often so glaringly obvious that there's no satisfaction when you've moved on—no “a-ha!” moment.

But what is offered...if you're coming to Broken Age because you want a challenging, wacky adventure game in the vein of Day of the Tentacle, you're going to be disappointed.

Personally, the story on offer was enough to keep me engaged even as I churned through the puzzles, but if you're coming to Tim Schafer's table hoping for a classic LucasArts adventure...well, just don't. Don't come to the game expecting that.

And I think that's the issue right there - people who expected a return to the likes of DoTT are more disappointed, whereas people who were more interested to see what Tim would do have been pleased. It was clear to me during the documentary series that much of the budget was focused on artwork and visual design, so I wasn't expecting too much complexity in the puzzles.

Broken Age gets a lot right—certainly enough that I'd call this Kickstarter story a success—but it's a shallow victory. “More” is the key word, here. I want more depth to the characters, more dialogue for incidental characters, more difficulty for puzzles, more objects to interact with.

Oh, and more story, obviously. After all, half a story is half a story, no matter how beautiful the art.

Broken Age is still full of potential. There's room for the second half (whenever it releases) to plumb the depths of both settings, giving us more characterization for both Shay and Vella and wrapping it all up in a shiny emotional bow. Perhaps that's not feasible on the project's shoestring budget, but I'll hope for the best.

And here's the thing - I doubt there will be a significant increase in difficulty in Act 2, so again I think it's important to keep expectations reasonable in that regard. It's wishful thinking.

 

[tuluse]

If Broken Age were compared to other games, it's overall length is akin to getting through the Petrified Forest in Grim Fandago; successfully leaving the wizard's house for the first time in Kings Quest 3; or escaping from the garbage freighter in Space Quest 3. Imagine if every classic adventure game ended at such an early point. None of them would be remarkable, except for the seedling of an idea that could've been so much more. Thus is Broken Age.

Grim Fandango had way better puzzles in the first year than this game has. It also had more freedom and felt like it had more dialog nodes*.


*not sure about this, this game feels very constricting which makes it feel shorter than it is

 

[Dexter]

On the one hand, simplicity is good. One of the reasons point-and-click adventure games “died” to begin with was the absurd, opaque logic behind most of the puzzles. “How would I ever figure that out?” was a common refrain with those 90s LucasArts games.

Every time I hear that redacted history bullshit as an argument I want to smash a bottle into someone's face. It's like saying that the reason Classic RPGs died is because they were too hard and the systems were too opaque. ""How would I ever figure that out?" was a common refrain with those 90s Roleplaying games."
No, that wasn't the reason, the reason is pretty fucking clearly explained here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nm1Ba_rdPHI#t=2m06s

I should know, I fucking lived through it and it was my favorite genre at one time. It's a simple matter of I HAVE NEVER ASKED FOR THIS with a fine pinch of "we got to make a game like Myst, because that made lots of money".

Spoiler

In order: Simon the Sorcerer 3D (2002), Escape from Monkey Island (2000), Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon (2003), King's Quest: Mask of Eternity (1998), Gabriel Knight 3 (1999), Quest for Glory V (1998), Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare (2001), Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude (2004), Fahrenheit (2005)

Interview from 2002: http://www.adventuregamers.com/articles/view/17561/page2

BS3 has caused for a bit of controversy on game forums. The foremost reason for the skepticism is probably how other adventure games have failed to implement 3D succesfully. King's Quest 8 and Alone in the Dark became miserable action games; Monkey Island 4, Simon the Sorcerer 3D, and even Gabriel Knight 3 couldn’t benefit from the new engine. How will BS3 be different?

You’re right, of course. But where I think those games went wrong was in the translation; their move to 3D was literally just that--essentially the same game, but with an added dimension. Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon is so much more than that. We’ve maintained the same visual style, but moved to realtime 3D, sure--but we’ve radically redefined the control system and exploited this to open up more gameplay options. The puzzles will remain essentially the same--we’ve always had sections where you’ve needed to elude a guard or perform a task quickly. This move to 3D will hopefully make the game more appealing to those that have dismissed 2D adventures in the past. Then they’ll see what they have been missing.

I never had much of a problem with playing a bunch of the 90s Adventure games at the time and I was barely above fucking 10 at the point, if I ever got stuck long I got on the Internetz and got some help. They were making "Adventure games" for some weird market that wasn't people who actually liked Adventure games in the hopes that they'll come and buy their games and they didn't all the while losing almost all of the old market they had built over years. The same thing they are doing now by Casualizing them in the hope of attracting people that usually play Bejeweled or fucking Angry Birds.

The thing is, they could even largely satisfy both if they wanted to, for instance I personally liked the way they solved this in the Monkey Island: Special Edition games with their Hint system: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdZCNWO7izE#t=5m21s
It was three-tiered hint system with a not-so-obvious, obvious, and DO THIS! type of hint for each puzzle. So the puzzles could remain as “hard” as they were and if people got stuck they either had the decision to stay stubborn and push on till they got them without any hints and if they just couldn’t bother with them they didn’t need the Internet or a Walkthrough but just displayed the Hint as to what they got to do.
Another added enticement to not use any Hints was an Achievement that you got by playing through the game without using any hints or less than ten hints.

The Germans seem to have the right idea at the moment and they seem to be doing pretty well and only to be getting bigger and gaining a larger audience despite not dumbing down their games. The only thing often missing from them is the charm and story/character design of some of the classic Lucas Arts and SIERRA games, as well as very often the lack of a sense of humor.
http://store.steampowered.com/search/?developer=Daedalic Entertainment#category1=998&developer=Daedalic Entertainment&sort_order=ASC&page=1
http://store.steampowered.com/searc...=998&developer=KING Art&sort_order=ASC&page=1
http://store.steampowered.com/searc...1=998&developer=Deck 13&sort_order=ASC&page=1

And so are they: http://store.steampowered.com/search/?publisher=Wadjet Eye Games#category1=998&publisher=Wadjet%20Eye%20Games&sort_order=ASC&page=1

 

[Cowboy Moment]

The sad irony of the situation, is that Tim promised to make an old-school adventure game, while not intending to make one; backers enthusiastically pledged for an old-school adventure game, while not really wanting one; and so old-school adventure games stay as "dead" as they were at the time the kickstarter launched, while everyone seemingly walks away satisfied.

Normally I'd rage and call them disgusting subhumans, but really, it's just sad. I guess MRY was correct when he observed (in relation to Primordia) that most people who consider themselves adventure game fans don't really want adventure games, as they were in their prime. Rather, they want the experience of playing an adventure game without any of the effort they required. So in essence, it's still our old friend, the decline, wearing slightly different clothes. No wonder Telltale publishes all of their "new" games on consoles as well.

 

[Skunkpew]

Grim Fandango had way better puzzles in the first year than this game has. It also had more freedom and felt like it had more dialog nodes*.


*not sure about this, this game feels very constricting which makes it feel shorter than it is

I agree. All those games (and many others) had better puzzles. That can't really be debated. Broken Age did have some nice puzzle ideas, but the one-room, one-item, one-puzzle, one-click mechanic is just too simplistic. For instance, in older games, the player wouldn't be told so directly to use the

Spoiler

knitting needle with the Space Weaver.

To figure that out on your own would be a decent puzzle, especially if there was no direct hint that

Spoiler

the knitting needle was in fact a knitting needle

I would say though the boy's spaceship is theoretically on par with the amount of rooms in comparable sections of the classic adventure games. There are 12 rooms or more. But the spaceship is so empty and most rooms only need to be visited once, that there's no point to it being so large.

 

[MRY]

Normally I'd rage and call them disgusting subhumans, but really, it's just sad. I guess MRY was correct when he observed (in relation to Primordia) that most people who consider themselves adventure game fans don't really want adventure games, as they were in their prime. Rather, they want the experience of playing an adventure game without any of the effort they required. So in essence, it's still our old friend, the decline, wearing slightly different clothes. No wonder Telltale publishes all of their "new" games on consoles as well.

I'm looking forward to giving Broken Age a whirl all the same, but I'll probably wait till the whole thing is done. I do think it's a shame that it was marketed as an old-school game; by all reports, it sounds like a wonderful thing (exactly what that thing is, who knows?) and I don't think Schafer had to sell it as old-school to raise the money.

 

[mindx2]

Just looking at the poll thread over on the DF forums: http://www.doublefine.com/forums/viewthread/12360/ (won't be able to access if your not a backer) show that about 1/3 of their backers* are not happy with what was delivered. Also, judging by those who posted they liked the game, many are still disappointed by the lack of good/ challenging puzzles.

*Yes, I know it's not a representative sample but interesting none the less.

edit: Here are the poll numbers so far from that thread-

So did the game meet you expectations?
Absolutely Yes 120
Mostly Yes 121
I feel that something was missing 75
Mostly Not 22
Absolutely Not 12
Total Votes: 350

 

[Sceptic]

All that shit talk about Tim braking a promise and lying to the backers is retarded and not true.

Quoting myself is always fun.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doublefine/double-fine-adventure

It says "a classic point-and-click adventure." Then, right under this, it has a still from Day of the Tentacle, with the following caption: "Tim’s Project Lead debut, point-and-click classic". Let's face it, the intent was pretty obvious.

 

[jfrisby]

Best of Auldwolf

Spoiler

Broken Age is exquisite in that it's like a childhood memory.

Imagine if you will something you ate as a child, its flavour stayed with you through your decades and you longed for it. It might have been something cooked for you by your mother, or grandmother. It had just the right combination of ingredients, and while you were supping upon this ambrosia, it was heaven.

That's how I feel about certain games from the '80s and '90s -- adventure games especially. I remember them for being bold and clever, they weren't tied to expectations of what a setting or genre should be, and every game was an individual which presented you with such an alien world, each taking you to a new place that you couldn't have imagined on your own. It was like being a traveller through time, space, and their relative dimensions. You were the wild-eyed adventurer, and your computer was your TARDIS.

I have vivid memories of being a noir werewolf detective, a travel agent for the Department of Daeth, a wanderer propelled through various worlds (each stranger than the last) at the touch of a book's page...

Then it all sort of went away.

The rise of the Western mainstream implied a certain safeness and dullness of mind and wit. It brought with it familiarity where there was once novelty, predictability where there was once imagination, it brought greys and browns where there were once colours.

Then, somewhere around perhaps '08 or '09, thenoveltystarted trickling in again. With the end of 2013 behind us, that novelty now seems to bepouring in. Is this what Terrence McKenna was talking about in regards to a wave of novelty in his Timewave Zero theory? I'd imagine not, but I appreciate this nonetheless. For a time, I felt that I was lost in a sea of flavourless molasses, I remembered the vibrant tastes of my youth but I was unable to recapture them. Everything was so safe, now, so safe. So risk averse.

It got really bad somewhere around '07 because genres had become so stratified. If you were to mention sci-fi or fantasy to someone, into their minds would spring these rigid, unchanging visions of what those were.Spaceships, in my fantasy?Inconceivable!Magic, in my sci-fi?Inconceivable! We were all a certain Sicilian now, and embodied his tragically small world view. Skyrim was a sad state of affairs because even the dwemer technology had to be Tolkienified, and even then it was seen as an affront by some people to their 'fantasy experience.'

And then along comes broken age. The smell permeates the nostrils and reawakens old dreams. The flavour revitalises and energises. This was it. I was a kid, again. Here I was, my PC and I. My PC had become my TARDIS, leading me into bizarre worlds beyond imagining, walking the minds of infinitely creative and clever people, and seeing their beauty.

I think 'masterpiece' is entirely fair.

Broken Age cared not for staid understandings of genre. It had so many elements from so many things and they all came together to form this cohesive world, as believable as it was impossible. And that was the magic of those worlds of the '80s and '90s, they were believable yet impossible, and their impossible nature was magical. It truly felt like another world, another place, another time. And experiencing this, interacting with it, was like nothing else.

I'mstilltrying to percolate the finer plot points of Broken Age, as I feel there are still a number of things I don't understand. I could share them with you, but I feel that this would rob you of the chance to come to these conclusions by yourselves. And the more I think about it, the cleverer it seems, and the more respect I have.

Not everyone can craft a world like this. Not everyone has that capacity.

So, to Tim Schafer and Double Fine... thank you for giving me a taste of my youth and the brilliance I'd thought was long forgotten. Let this be a giant vault door opening into present day so that the novelty might once again flood in. Genre? Expectations? Rules? Who cares?! Let's just bebrilliant, because that's what Broken Age did. It was simply brilliant. It doesn't need your rules, man.

I feel like I've caught the tail of a dragon when I play a game like Broken Age, and I'm riding it high, but eventually I'll have to come back down to earth again and partake of the endless monotony that passes for entertainment.

Hopefully, though, games like Broken Age have awoken this passion in others.

Can we all say that this is something we want more of?

Enough with the tasteless, bland porridge all ready. I'm done with that. Just spoon another mouthful of the impossible into me. And another. And another.And another.
Last edited byAuldWolf; 2 hours ago

Spoiler

@OP

I wouldn't say you're alone, though you might (surprisingly) be in a minority here?

I'd say that you're just incapable of wonder, which is a pity, honestly. A child has wonder, yet sometimes, as we grow up we lose that. Not everyone, but some people do, and they just get lost in the daily grind and the routine of life, they trade in their self awareness for their monthly pay and they never really meditate upon anything, think about anything, or question anything. They never dare to be different, but most importantly, they never dare to dream.

It's sad that a human can be reduced to such an automaton, where their connection with their sense of wonder, their own imagination and cleverness, has been so brutally severed. I give you the phenotypes ofThe Doctor and The General. (I probably very specifically have the second Doctor in mind, here. Of Doctor Who, yes.)

The Doctor sees the world with an odd sense of wonder, travelling through it with a confident gait, rarely obeying any behavioural codes (let alone dress codes). And the strange is met with a mad grin and wide-eyes, eager to learn despite his age. Sadly,The General sees anything outside of the status quo as a threat to it, there must always bethe routine, where yesterday is the same as tomorrow. Deviances must be exterminated.

'Course, the Doctor eventually brings the General around.

You need a Doctor, you need a friend through whom you can vicariously experience wonder, because you've had it programmed out of you. Just because you, however, have lost this gift, it doesn't mean that we all have. You do mention children, and (funnily, considering that I'm likely a good three times your age) I'll say that not everything about being young is bad.

When you're young, you ask questions. You don't obey, you question.

I never lost that. I still have my sense of wonder, I'm still wild-eyed and crazy, I'm still fun! And I still ask questions -- about day to day life, the nature of reality, and of how I perceive things. And Broken Age heaped a number more upon me, and I'm glad to explore them.

So, are you alone in being incapable of wonder? Sadly, no. In the day to day world, sleepers are common, those who never question anything or wonder about anything. Their life is a dreamless sleep of endless monotony and repetition. But is a game going to bring the more self aware flocking to it? I'd say so. It invites wonder. And if that makes me the same as a child, tehn so be it. There's much to admire about the wonder of a child.

Spoiler

@OP

Oh, zombie gamers.

I'm always disappointed to see that someone will dismiss a game based upon such trite criteria as mechanics or length. I've said in the past that there are games which, I feel, judge the player as much as the player is judging the game. And the opinion the player has of the game is often a direct indictment of their own critical capacities.

You are given beauty, imagination, and novelty.

You are given peerless efforts of intrigue, character, and writing.

You are given charismatic eccentricities aplenty.

You are given the kind of profound cleverness that would make a timelord blush.

You are given intelligent, high-brow humour (warp and woof is a fabulous pun).

You are given what is hands-down one of the most genuinely fascinating and engaging settings to ever grace a game.

And you admonish it because you can't pigeonhole it into your ever-so-quaintly rigid notions of what an adventure game must be? That it didn't satisfy your need for that particularly repugnant brand of inventory puzzles where one would have to be wasted on booze and DMT to even begin to understand what the developers were thinking?

This shows your character flaws.

So, it didn't have inventory puzzles dreamed up by happy home inmates, instead choosing to be a beautiful thing that everyone could enjoy. And? That doesn't make it a bad game, it just means that you're too outdated to appreciate it.

What's worse is that you're probably bloody half my age, and I was likely playing text adventures when you were in diapers.

And because of that, should I admonish your favourite adventures because they don't require an incredibly comprehensive understanding of word-play (sometimes in more than one language)? Of course not!

Broke Age is a brilliant game.

You're just not a brilliant enough of a person to be able to appreciate it. You're limited, staid, and just not self aware enough. If you were able to enjoy it for what it was, it would have brought you joy, as it did so for me. And, frankly, you were never advertised ridiculous invenotry puzzles at all, I know this as I was with the Kickstarter from the beginning, too. That's just something you've implied.

So... do try to wake up. Be a better person, and enjoy one of the better games to have been released in a good while. Though you'll probably continue to be a zombie and my words will fall on deaf ears, you'll remain blissfully asleep to the rest of the self aware world, living in the past, whilst everyone else moves on without you.

You're like Rush Limbaugh to my Stephen Fry.
Last edited byAuldWolf; 12 hours ago

 

[mindx2]

Best of Auldwolf

Spoiler

Broken Age is exquisite in that it's like a childhood memory.

Imagine if you will something you ate as a child, its flavour stayed with you through your decades and you longed for it. It might have been something cooked for you by your mother, or grandmother. It had just the right combination of ingredients, and while you were supping upon this ambrosia, it was heaven.

That's how I feel about certain games from the '80s and '90s -- adventure games especially. I remember them for being bold and clever, they weren't tied to expectations of what a setting or genre should be, and every game was an individual which presented you with such an alien world, each taking you to a new place that you couldn't have imagined on your own. It was like being a traveller through time, space, and their relative dimensions. You were the wild-eyed adventurer, and your computer was your TARDIS.

I have vivid memories of being a noir werewolf detective, a travel agent for the Department of Daeth, a wanderer propelled through various worlds (each stranger than the last) at the touch of a book's page...

Then it all sort of went away.

The rise of the Western mainstream implied a certain safeness and dullness of mind and wit. It brought with it familiarity where there was once novelty, predictability where there was once imagination, it brought greys and browns where there were once colours.

Then, somewhere around perhaps '08 or '09, thenoveltystarted trickling in again. With the end of 2013 behind us, that novelty now seems to bepouring in. Is this what Terrence McKenna was talking about in regards to a wave of novelty in his Timewave Zero theory? I'd imagine not, but I appreciate this nonetheless. For a time, I felt that I was lost in a sea of flavourless molasses, I remembered the vibrant tastes of my youth but I was unable to recapture them. Everything was so safe, now, so safe. So risk averse.

It got really bad somewhere around '07 because genres had become so stratified. If you were to mention sci-fi or fantasy to someone, into their minds would spring these rigid, unchanging visions of what those were.Spaceships, in my fantasy?Inconceivable!Magic, in my sci-fi?Inconceivable! We were all a certain Sicilian now, and embodied his tragically small world view. Skyrim was a sad state of affairs because even the dwemer technology had to be Tolkienified, and even then it was seen as an affront by some people to their 'fantasy experience.'

And then along comes broken age. The smell permeates the nostrils and reawakens old dreams. The flavour revitalises and energises. This was it. I was a kid, again. Here I was, my PC and I. My PC had become my TARDIS, leading me into bizarre worlds beyond imagining, walking the minds of infinitely creative and clever people, and seeing their beauty.

I think 'masterpiece' is entirely fair.

Broken Age cared not for staid understandings of genre. It had so many elements from so many things and they all came together to form this cohesive world, as believable as it was impossible. And that was the magic of those worlds of the '80s and '90s, they were believable yet impossible, and their impossible nature was magical. It truly felt like another world, another place, another time. And experiencing this, interacting with it, was like nothing else.

I'mstilltrying to percolate the finer plot points of Broken Age, as I feel there are still a number of things I don't understand. I could share them with you, but I feel that this would rob you of the chance to come to these conclusions by yourselves. And the more I think about it, the cleverer it seems, and the more respect I have.

Not everyone can craft a world like this. Not everyone has that capacity.

So, to Tim Schafer and Double Fine... thank you for giving me a taste of my youth and the brilliance I'd thought was long forgotten. Let this be a giant vault door opening into present day so that the novelty might once again flood in. Genre? Expectations? Rules? Who cares?! Let's just bebrilliant, because that's what Broken Age did. It was simply brilliant. It doesn't need your rules, man.

I feel like I've caught the tail of a dragon when I play a game like Broken Age, and I'm riding it high, but eventually I'll have to come back down to earth again and partake of the endless monotony that passes for entertainment.

Hopefully, though, games like Broken Age have awoken this passion in others.

Can we all say that this is something we want more of?

Enough with the tasteless, bland porridge all ready. I'm done with that. Just spoon another mouthful of the impossible into me. And another. And another.And another.
Last edited byAuldWolf; 2 hours ago

Spoiler

@OP

I wouldn't say you're alone, though you might (surprisingly) be in a minority here?

I'd say that you're just incapable of wonder, which is a pity, honestly. A child has wonder, yet sometimes, as we grow up we lose that. Not everyone, but some people do, and they just get lost in the daily grind and the routine of life, they trade in their self awareness for their monthly pay and they never really meditate upon anything, think about anything, or question anything. They never dare to be different, but most importantly, they never dare to dream.

It's sad that a human can be reduced to such an automaton, where their connection with their sense of wonder, their own imagination and cleverness, has been so brutally severed. I give you the phenotypes ofThe Doctor and The General. (I probably very specifically have the second Doctor in mind, here. Of Doctor Who, yes.)

The Doctor sees the world with an odd sense of wonder, travelling through it with a confident gait, rarely obeying any behavioural codes (let alone dress codes). And the strange is met with a mad grin and wide-eyes, eager to learn despite his age. Sadly,The General sees anything outside of the status quo as a threat to it, there must always bethe routine, where yesterday is the same as tomorrow. Deviances must be exterminated.

'Course, the Doctor eventually brings the General around.

You need a Doctor, you need a friend through whom you can vicariously experience wonder, because you've had it programmed out of you. Just because you, however, have lost this gift, it doesn't mean that we all have. You do mention children, and (funnily, considering that I'm likely a good three times your age) I'll say that not everything about being young is bad.

When you're young, you ask questions. You don't obey, you question.

I never lost that. I still have my sense of wonder, I'm still wild-eyed and crazy, I'm still fun! And I still ask questions -- about day to day life, the nature of reality, and of how I perceive things. And Broken Age heaped a number more upon me, and I'm glad to explore them.

So, are you alone in being incapable of wonder? Sadly, no. In the day to day world, sleepers are common, those who never question anything or wonder about anything. Their life is a dreamless sleep of endless monotony and repetition. But is a game going to bring the more self aware flocking to it? I'd say so. It invites wonder. And if that makes me the same as a child, tehn so be it. There's much to admire about the wonder of a child.

Spoiler

@OP

Oh, zombie gamers.

I'm always disappointed to see that someone will dismiss a game based upon such trite criteria as mechanics or length. I've said in the past that there are games which, I feel, judge the player as much as the player is judging the game. And the opinion the player has of the game is often a direct indictment of their own critical capacities.

You are given beauty, imagination, and novelty.

You are given peerless efforts of intrigue, character, and writing.

You are given charismatic eccentricities aplenty.

You are given the kind of profound cleverness that would make a timelord blush.

You are given intelligent, high-brow humour (warp and woof is a fabulous pun).

You are given what is hands-down one of the most genuinely fascinating and engaging settings to ever grace a game.

And you admonish it because you can't pigeonhole it into your ever-so-quaintly rigid notions of what an adventure game must be? That it didn't satisfy your need for that particularly repugnant brand of inventory puzzles where one would have to be wasted on booze and DMT to even begin to understand what the developers were thinking?

This shows your character flaws.

So, it didn't have inventory puzzles dreamed up by happy home inmates, instead choosing to be a beautiful thing that everyone could enjoy. And? That doesn't make it a bad game, it just means that you're too outdated to appreciate it.

What's worse is that you're probably bloody half my age, and I was likely playing text adventures when you were in diapers.

And because of that, should I admonish your favourite adventures because they don't require an incredibly comprehensive understanding of word-play (sometimes in more than one language)? Of course not!

Broke Age is a brilliant game.

You're just not a brilliant enough of a person to be able to appreciate it. You're limited, staid, and just not self aware enough. If you were able to enjoy it for what it was, it would have brought you joy, as it did so for me. And, frankly, you were never advertised ridiculous invenotry puzzles at all, I know this as I was with the Kickstarter from the beginning, too. That's just something you've implied.

So... do try to wake up. Be a better person, and enjoy one of the better games to have been released in a good while. Though you'll probably continue to be a zombie and my words will fall on deaf ears, you'll remain blissfully asleep to the rest of the self aware world, living in the past, whilst everyone else moves on without you.

You're like Rush Limbaugh to my Stephen Fry.
Last edited byAuldWolf; 12 hours ago

liberals

 

[Darth Slaughter]

The sad irony of the situation, is that Tim promised to make an old-school adventure game, while not intending to make one; backers enthusiastically pledged for an old-school adventure game, while not really wanting one; and so old-school adventure games stay as "dead" as they were at the time the kickstarter launched, while everyone seemingly walks away satisfied.

The point is, Tim was lucasarts. Adventure point and click games were never actually dead, in fact they only got made by obscure and independent companies. Some are good, some are bad, all of them with different levels of difficulty and absurddity. They are out there, but they're not made by sierra or Lucasarts, which is part of the status quo of point and click adventure. The closer a company ever got to that status was telltale in the beggining, specially because they made sequels to lucasarts franchises, but they succumbed to the new age.

So, the whole promise tim made was for nothing, because people were getting what he promise even before. What people subcounsciously got was a promise for an adventure with the lucasarts pedigree. And remember ron gilbert revealed some ideas about a monkey 3 game he could make in this generation, that it would be different than the monkey 3 he would end up making had he never left lucas arts in the first place? So, If tim and ron and people at telltale were at lucasarts today, still making adventure games, they would end up being games like broken age. So, tim failed delivering Old School, but Broken Age is the Lucasarts standard it would eventully become had it survived. I belive that's why some people feel satisfied. They're somehow sure how a lucasarts game in 2014 would be just like this.

From Double fine, I played psychonauts, which is really a master piece, and brutal legend was Ok. But today I downloaded the broken age, from that swedish shop, and thank god I didn't back this.

Played for about 20 minutes. I can now confirm the puzzles are not easy as people are saying. They're not easy because sor far they're NON-EXISTENT! You click and you never miss, everything looks so obvious... and that wolf marek... he tells me everything I have to do: go throug that hole over there (zoom in on the hole), the dialogue is to handholding. If it were designed as a puzzle, marek would say: you have to leve and fint the navigator room, it's in this ship. try to not get caught, and leave to the player the chance to try to find the exit themselves. Even when you get an item, the descriptions shay give about them are so "the solution for the 'puzzle'". Congratulations tim schafer, you managed to put quest compass in adventure games...

The story may be nice, i didn't get beyond saving those little sackboys from little big planet, not because I was stuck, but because after these 20 or so minutes, I haven't smiled, or cried or have any emotional or phisical response from the game, I can't eve get the rage of felipepepe, then again, I didn't spend any money on this. Got bored... but I still have interest in how the story unfolds, maybe there's something out there...

 

[Tigranes]

I have to say, Full Throttle is hardly engaging in the first half hour. The opening cutscene is miles cooler than Broken Age, OK, but then in terms of environmental interaction and puzzles there's not much of note in the bar, a rather extravagant but zero-gameplay crash scene, and then a bunch of talking with the mechanic lady that feels like Quest Giver IX. The only thing FT has over BA in that half hour is a much more gripping premise.

Both games get better after that half hour, of course. Problem is, as has been mentioned before, it feels like BA blew all its small budget on animations and now all the good bits where 'it really gets going' don't really exist.

 

[Dexter]

Interview with Tim Schafer: http://www.joystiq.com/2014/01/17/super-joystiq-podcast-081-tim-schafer-interview-broken-age-ri/
Around ~1:09:01 he talks about "puzzles" (he is seemingly of the opinion that they were great and it was a question if they "should have gotten rid of them altogether and focused on walking through a story") and how he played Machinarium (a game he brings up a lot) on iPad and that was a target market (01:10:05).
1:34:45 he's talking about the money and publishers

 

[DeepOcean]

So, If tim and ron and people at telltale were at lucasarts today, still making adventure games, they would end up being games like broken age. So, tim failed delivering Old School, but Broken Age is the Lucasarts standard it would eventully become had it survived. I belive that's why some people feel satisfied. They're somehow sure how a lucasarts game in 2014 would be just like this.

Yeah, watching what Ken Levine, Warren Spector, John Romero and others had become, only shadows of their former selves that wouldn't be surprising at all. I don't think is only a problem of trying to reach a population of retards, I don't know if they got themselves burned out and nowdays are cynical and just making games for the money, I don't know. You see a hostility against gameplay systems coming from those people, a lack of ideas, imagination and passion.

One thing, is to try and help popamolers, another thing is to throw gameplay through the window. Bio Infinite for example suffers of the same problems of Broken Age, lack of gameplay hidden behind great visuals with a big focus on the story at expense of gameplay and it didn't needed to be that way even considering the necessity to include popamolers (what is questionable in case of Broken Age as it was sold as a classic point and clicker and isn't.). It is like the old game designers hated to design gameplay and just wanted to write stories and make expensive cartoons/movies.

One game, recently that I played that do this popamolers/ interesting gameplay balance almost right is Dishonored (there are many problems in the game but it's still a good game), there was nothing stopping Bio Infinite to reach that same level of gameplay and keeping the story as there was nothing stopping broken age to have decent puzzles, not even the popamolers. It was like: Fuck, it's time to do this boring gameplay stuff, let's just copy what other games had done and finish this, I have better things to do. I don't know what happened with Tim and others, I don't know if it's the fact of him having a legion of cocksuckers around him that makes him blind or its the cynical aspect of pure money chasing as the passion is long gone.

 

[DeepOcean]

"should have gotten rid of them altogether and focused a story"

 

[Darth Roxor]

You know, there is also one thing that pisses me off and I see it being cited very often in relation to this game. For example in the RPS piece

While I want more Day Of The Tentacle as much as the next sane human, I didn’t want it from this game. I’m so delighted that Schafer has developed this doleful tone, a desire to ask more difficult questions of the universe than how to get the fake barf from the ceiling. Questions about identity, purpose and the trappings of circumstance.

It's the "I'm glad they ditched silly humour and DEVELOPED into 2deep4u!". Developed? Every damn ignorant nigga that says this has never even heard of The Dig, of which I wasn't very fond of in terms of puzzles, but it posed excellent "difficult questions about the universe" and more. But hey, they are all VETERAN ADVENTURE GAMERS that have SEEN IT ALL and are REFRESHED to see something NEW from former LucasArts, amirite?!

 

[evdk]

The people making that claims also usually report getting stuck during BA several times. How can you expect such veterans of the genre to know about a game that was admittedly a commercial failure? Tim did not mention it in his KS video, how are they really supposed to know it exists, Wikipedia?

 

[Redlands]

I really don't get why people seem to be happy about having no challenging puzzles in an adventure game.

Okay, well I do really. It's down to human nature of not wanting to feel like a failure, and being incredibly self-centered and egotistical.

A player consulting a walkthrough can generally a failure of someone: either the developer made a poor puzzle, game engine, etc., or alternatively it's the player not having the intelligence, knowledge, patience, whatever to tough it out and see it through to the end.

The two problems are:

• most people try to avoid assigning the blame to themselves when it can be laid on other people's feet, and
• most people seem to have the belief that everything needs to be made for them.

I think this is why a lot of people complain about old games being "too difficult" and having "illogical puzzles". There have been very, very few instances in my adventure gaming experience where a puzzle really was illogical, and even in that case I've managed to solve some of them on my own (the rubber ducky puzzle, for instance). However, I'm the type of person who's more than willing to write down every word of dialogue spoken in Ultima 5 to keep track of what's going on, or work out my own maps and "best walkthrough" for Zork 1.

This tends to suggest to me that - outside of the rare instances where they may be needed - using a walkthrough is down to the player admitting defeat. However, they aren't willing to accept that either that they may be at fault, or that maybe they're not really into this type of game. Walkthroughs being freely available could have been a good way of increasing the challenge of puzzles, with people skipping over them when they couldn't figure it out; but because of the stigma, and people assigning blame to developers for "illogical" (read: possibly illogical, more likely too difficult for my pudding brain) puzzles, and fucking Old Man Murray AGAIN we get no challenging puzzles at all.

Glad I wasn't a huge fan of LucasArts or Schafer, because if I had backed this I would have been even more pissed than I am after having read through that Steam thread.

 

[Direwolf]

You know, there is also one thing that pisses me off and I see it being cited very often in relation to this game. For example in the RPS piece

While I want more Day Of The Tentacle as much as the next sane human, I didn’t want it from this game. I’m so delighted that Schafer has developed this doleful tone, a desire to ask more difficult questions of the universe than how to get the fake barf from the ceiling. Questions about identity, purpose and the trappings of circumstance.

It's the "I'm glad they ditched silly humour and DEVELOPED into 2deep4u!". Developed? Every damn ignorant nigga that says this has never even heard of The Dig, of which I wasn't very fond of in terms of puzzles, but it posed excellent "difficult questions about the universe" and more. But hey, they are all VETERAN ADVENTURE GAMERS that have SEEN IT ALL and are REFRESHED to see something NEW from former LucasArts, amirite?!

I think The Dig was the only adventure game I actually enjoyed.
After playing about 2 hours of BA I remembered that I actually hate adventure games and backed DFA because of Psychonauts.

 

[Darth Slaughter]

Glad I wasn't a huge fan of LucasArts or Schafer, because if I had backed this I would have been even more pissed than I am after having read through that Steam thread.

I am a huge fan of LucasArts, and I really loved psychonauts, so I had all reasons to back this, right? Well... when tim lauched the kickstarter and others followed up, I was still skeptical about the concept. I only startd giving money to crowdfunding projects a year ago. But I didn't get excited at all since the beginning, because anybody could see that adventure games were constantly being released. The fact that it was being made by Tim Schafer was not enough for me, since he was just one of LA developers... And since his launch idea had nothing about the game itself, I couldn't care less.

 

[felipepepe]

I wish I had been that skeptic... Day of the Tentacle is my favorite adventure game ever, the moment a image of it there, I had to back it.

I'm trying for a refund, but if they deny me I guess I can sell the swag I got on MercadoLivre. Clearly DF fanboys are not few, so it shouldn't be hard to sell even in huehuehueland.

 

[J_C]

Interview with Tim Schafer: http://www.joystiq.com/2014/01/17/super-joystiq-podcast-081-tim-schafer-interview-broken-age-ri/
Around ~1:09:01 he talks about "puzzles" (he is seemingly of the opinion that they were great and it was a question if they "should have gotten rid of them altogether and focused on walking through a story")

He is just talking about the ideas of what makes an old school adventure game, looking at the adventure games of today. Is it the story? Is it the complex puzzles? Is it the verb using interface? Answering the "what is a old school adventure games" question is not easier than answering the "what's an rpg?" one. Would Broken Age be old school enough for you guys if it had more complex puzzles, but using the same one click interface? But what if it had the verb using interface, but still had easy puzzles (because verb interface is =/= complex puzzles)? Would it be old school if the enviroments had more stuff to temper with, but the puzzles and UI were the same?

This is why it is stupid to accuse Tim of broking his promise and not delivering the old school adventure you wanted. Because although it is not a hardcore old school game, it has all the elements of the old ones. Pre rendered backgrounds, point and click interface, inventory using, solving puzzles to progress, dialogues. The only thing Tim can be accused of (and I agree), that the puzzles are too easy. Nothing else.

 

[markec]

This is why it is stupid to accuse Tim of broking his promise and not delivering the old school adventure you wanted. Because although it is not a hardcore old school game, it has all the elements of the old ones. Pre rendered backgrounds, point and click interface, inventory using, solving puzzles to progress, dialogues. The only thing Tim can be accused of (and I agree), that the puzzles are too easy. Nothing else.

Just like Fallout 3 has all of the elements of old Fallouts like stats, skills, targeting, inventory using only its not hardcore old school RPG, it evolved in something better and only people who are stuck in the past cant understand that.

 

[J_C]

This is why it is stupid to accuse Tim of broking his promise and not delivering the old school adventure you wanted. Because although it is not a hardcore old school game, it has all the elements of the old ones. Pre rendered backgrounds, point and click interface, inventory using, solving puzzles to progress, dialogues. The only thing Tim can be accused of (and I agree), that the puzzles are too easy. Nothing else.

Just like Fallout 3 has all of the elements of old Fallouts like stats, skills, targeting, inventory using only its not hardcore old school RPG, it evolved in something better and only people who are stuck in the past cant understand that.

Except it wasn't isometric, was not turned based and was a hiking simulator, so this is a shitty comparison.

 

[Athelas]

I think he's being sarcastic...