Most Sierra's games are full of examples of bad designs and player's death is one of them.
In fact they reminded me the deaths in those old gamebooks where the player arrived at a crossroad.
The player had no info whatsoever about the correct path and must choose between 2 paths one of which kill him instantly and the other let him continue on his quest.
Many Sierra's games have plenty of similar deaths.
One of the reasons that most Sierra's games are pretty much unplayable now while many of LucasArts are perfectly playable.
Just because Gilbert does and say plenty of stupid things doesn't mean that some ideas of his didn't actually improved the genre.
That why (at least for me) his "betrayal" hurt that much. He actually could further improve the genre but instead choose to do damage.
I did write Ron's article had many good points and wasn't really faulting him for having his own personal design philosophy. I was moreso talking about how that personal design philosophy apparently became a widespread or universal design philosophy, or at least has been largely perceived as one. What works well for Ron may not work well for others, depending on the type of game they are making.
The phenomenon of Ron's article becoming gospel-like is similar to the Old Man Murray article about the cat mustache puzzle in Gabriel Knight 3. Yes, it's not a very good puzzle, and the OMM article is an entertaining deconstruction of why that is. Yet somehow over the years general audiences who have not played GK3 or even any adventure games would cite the cat mustache puzzle as the death of the genre because, well, that one article that everyone else references said so.
"Death in adventure games bad. Monkey Island guy said so."
Larry 6 even had a button that let you restart on the same screen after death. Just undo the action that killed you. Simple.
And most of the deaths were so hilarious you'd often deliberately trigger them just to see the funny death sequence.
I don't see how this is bad in any way. Functionally, due to the handy little undo button, it's as if death doesn't really exist anyway. But removing the scenes entirely would be detrimental to the game's humor.
Designers who go by a "bible" that clearly spells out what you can or cannot do force themselves into a creative straitjacket that prevents thinking outside the box.
Yes exactly, I'd rather see people do what they want rather than do what makes Ron Gilbert happy.
I mentioned Broken Sword, so I'd like to use the puzzle regarding the manuscript at the hotel as an example. I think that scene works well in that when you leave with the manuscript, the two thugs search George, and toss him into the river in a burlap sack. Now the player knows the stakes and has essentially received a fail clue AFTER making a mistake.
If there was no death, then George would probably say something like, "Hmm, I don't think I should leave just yet." Or, "I can't leave with the manuscript. Those guys will search me for it. I need to find a way to get it past them." Instead of seeing through the consequence of making a particular mistake, the game prevents you from doing so and gives you a hint BEFORE you make said mistake. Now you don't really know if those thugs would really kill George. Preventing death limits how much the game can communicate the threat of danger from antagonists.
It's a personal preference but in most cases I'd prefer the former option (death, retry) over the latter option (no death, game railroads you). Of course it depends on the tone and style of the game. The "no deaths" philosophy works well for Monkey Island's tone. It wouldn't work for Police Quest.
Yes, older games could be unforgiving and frustrating, but that was bad design and inexperience rather than a fundamental flaw of having death as part of the gameplay.
As a designer, I had a lot of fun finding and planning ways to kill the player in Quest for Infamy - I wanted to try to make the deaths part of the experience, not just an annoyance. It's a line, but I think having consequence in an adventure game ups the stakes and makes for a more interesting game. With the ability to save games AND the ability to make auto-saves, I don't think it's as much as an annoyance as it may have once been. But that's me.
I have the same opinion, that game-ending consequence need not be an annoyance or impediment to enjoying the game. Nowadays, and for probably over two decades, death in adventure games has been little more than a minor nuisance. It doesn't have to be limited to timing/action puzzles, either.
Maybe I've just never played the Sierra games you're complaining about, but I've never seen Sierra have you pick a path and die if you picked the wrong one. Oh, there were adventure games that did that, especially in the horror genre, but that wasn't Sierra's problem. Unless you're talking about things like walking into the moat? Surely you wouldn't be taking a joke as some kind of serious design flaw...? Sierra's problem, after the early days when they were basically the only game in town, was that sometimes they made games that were designed to sell hint books. King's Quest V is the worst of it. Of course, people often forget that Sierra's games had alternative solutions and some of the more annoying puzzles were entirely optional. Sierra was a bit ahead of the curve in that regard.
One early example could be the bridge in King's Quest 2. I think the game warns you that the bridge looks unsafe but you otherwise don't really get any feedback that you can only cross a limited number of times before you die and potentially have to replay most of the game. That's a bad design by modern standards, not because of being able to die but because the player can unknowingly progress to a dead end or unwinnable state.
