Why did adventure games die?

[Muty]

Starship Titanic

 

[Kefka1134]

Think they were just co-opted into the Visual Novel point and click adventure game.

 

[Skunkpew]

If 5% of a population of gamers like adventure games, why even make a game for that 5% when you have a 95% that you can potentially sell a game to? To me, it's that simple. Thus if you want to keep adventure games alive, you're left relying upon 'artists' or people with integrity who still believe it worthwhile to sell games to those 5%. But obviously most of these people have been shoved aside, as we willingly allow these soulless companies to make games for us.

Then even in a more general sense, if 5% of a population are gamers and 95% are not, why not then create games for that 95% of non-gamers? Which is exactly what they've managed to do by having games focus more on the emotional impact it causes to the individual's belief structure rather than the mechanics and game-systems, etc. So when a trailer for a game comes out, these egoists can only then tweet about how it challenges or defies their beliefs instead of making a comment about the game itself. Because these people are not gamers. So of course they lack any will or ability to speak on the game. But everyone can speak about how it makes them feel. Ultimately, the actual games themselves become secondary, and truly don't even matter anymore except as a vehicle for drawing out this fake emotion and turning people into these worthless obsessives who are constantly focused on games but absurdly also care nothing about them (i.e. the gaming press in general, Anita Sarkeesian, etc). As an example of this, look at the latest Star Wars movie trailer, and the general uproar over the black actor or the female lead, versus any talk of potential plot or such. It's all marketing to hook you emotionally and market the stuff to people who normally don't care.

Ultimately then, how can an adventure game that is all about logic survive in a world that is all emotion based?

 

[Cadmus]

Dunno if they were ever good but the ones I played were almost universally carried by the writing and art direction, ambience, etc.. The game part was usually totally fucking retarded. It's ok for a while but I suspect people get tired of it real fast, plus the art direction universally declined across all the genres with the emergence of 3D, etc.

 

[Absinthe]

I think Tim Schafer's Grim Fandango had something to do with it. Watching a game that's a critical success and a commercial disaster probably convinced a lot of publishers there's no future to be had in adventure games.

 

[Burning Bridges]

I played Adventures when they were the shit, like Maniac Mansion, Zak McCracken or Indiana Jones.
Today I think there is not really that much I would get from playing adventures. It's all just a big illusion, try and error. When I read Point&Click these days, I skip to the next game.

 

[Tom Selleck]

Obligatory Old Man Murray Article

 

[Redlands]

Obligatory Old Man Murray Article

 

[Aeschylus]

Obligatory Old Man Murray Article

Fuck that article and fuck you.

 

[tuluse]

I think Tim Schafer's Grim Fandango had something to do with it. Watching a game that's a critical success and a commercial disaster probably convinced a lot of publishers there's no future to be had in adventure games.

The game sold 500k copies and was profitable for Lucas Arts.

But it wasn't a *huge* success. This was the era when the market just exploded. If you were a company you could invest in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater and sell 7 million copies or Grim Fandango and sell 500k.

 

[Blackthorne]

Adventure games are funny; what some people loathe in them is what I love about them, at times.

Sure, you can't sell a million copies of an adventure game, but at least they're still be made for the 5% of us who like them. I have to chuckle, though, because a lot of us who like them end up making them because we have to!


Bt

 

[Korgoth of Barbaria]

Adventure games are funny; what some people loathe in them is what I love about them, at times.

Sure, you can't sell a million copies of an adventure game, but at least they're still be made for the 5% of us who like them. I have to chuckle, though, because a lot of us who like them end up making them because we have to!


Bt

What are some of the things people loathe about them that you love?

Myself, what I love most about adventures is the level of interactivity and the illusion of this huge expansive world they give me, especially in the VGA and onward games were the games offer these amazing landscapes and everything is pretty clickable. I like the fact that you can fuck with pretty much ANYTHING, even the smallest little pixel, in some of these games and get some kind of response. KQV, while not the highest in click bait, I've always loved as you know because it *feels* like an epic journey due to the very varied landscapes and wild cast of characters and even differing tones it offers all over the course of one game. I don't get as engrossing an experience with any other game experience outside of well-written RPGs. I also enjoy being stumped, which is something modern games don't really offer (especially modern adventures).

 

[Forest Dweller]

Obligatory Old Man Murray Article

Fuck that article and fuck you.

 

[Sceptic]

Korgoth might be a terrible troll but his Drog-style threads are great moron detectors, people keep falling for them.

 

[Azrael the cat]

Thing is, for all the disagreements about pixel-hunting v highlight everything, inventory puzzles v streamlining, interactive movie v game, when Adventure Games were going strong, there was enough variety to cover all of those styles. The interactive movies didn't stop you from finding puzzle games.

I think, in part, it's for the same reason that space-sims died. They became too easy from a tech viewpoint, which made them a poor investment for an AAA franchise. Why sink fuckloads of money into developing and promoting a AAA franchise (and promotion costs are a big chunk of AAA costs) when every 2-bit studio can pump out copies of your tech design? There's no room for building a sustainable competitive advantage, which means that even a high-selling franchise is going to have minimal IP value.

 

[Blackthorne]

I like pixel hunts and inventory puzzles. I enjoy the challenge - some pixel hunts blow chunks, but sometime I enjoy pouring over a background and seeing what I can do. Inventory puzzles can be really fun, if done well. People bitch about both like they're automatically bad, and I think with some reasonable thought and design, both can be fun mechanics in an adventure game. If I don't want either of those things, I'll play Mega Man.


Bt

 

[Korgoth of Barbaria]

Also deaths. Lots of deaths.

 

[FeelTheRads]

What exactly are you doing here? Just being a moron like usual with your "hurr duuur but ackshun adventurs r not dead?"

 

[JarlFrank]

I like pixel hunts and inventory puzzles. I enjoy the challenge - some pixel hunts blow chunks, but sometime I enjoy pouring over a background and seeing what I can do. Inventory puzzles can be really fun, if done well. People bitch about both like they're automatically bad, and I think with some reasonable thought and design, both can be fun mechanics in an adventure game. If I don't want either of those things, I'll play Mega Man.


Bt

I'm not a fan of pixel hunts but inventory puzzles can be awesome and are, for me, one of the very points of adventure games. What is the gameplay if you don't pick up shit and combine it? Figuring out how to solve problems by using the shit in your inventory is the whole point of adventures.

 

[Melan]

Obligatory Old Man Murray Article

Yes.

Also: in the mid-90s, as FPS games took off, adventure games were increasingly thought of as stagnant and technologically backwards. For one reason or another, multiple publishers decided that the way forward would be found in ditching pixel art for FMV sequences, and moving towards games that were either more purely focused on puzzles (The 7th Guest, MYST) or semi-interactive cinematic storytelling (the Tex Murphy series). These attempts to rejuvenate adventure gaming were initially successful, but proved to be creative dead-ends. Nothing in the history of gaming has aged worse than expensive multi-CD games full of long, badly acted video sequences with poorly designed games wrapped around them. Few people nowadays remember them, while the pixel classics are still known and discussed.

These projects also had enormous budgets for their time, making them costly and complicated to produce. There was more money elsewhere, like the FPS and RTS fields. People got bored with their new multimedia toys and moved on to other things, and the companies followed them.

 

[DraQ]

Being a genre effectively devoid of mechanics adventure games effectively killed themselves by refusing to adapt and grow some, meaning that:

• They didn't gain anything from new tech, if anything it put them at a huge disadvantage (much more content creation effort, no smart shortcuts possible)
• They didn't expand from their initial near-nil replayability.

A game without mechanics, that relies entirely on canned solutions to canned problems is pretty much dead on arrival. It takes atmosphere/story/humour/art direction of truly titanic proportions merely to make such a game merely salvageable.
With improved tech and expectations for more elaborate or advanced content the combinatorial explosion nips any attempts at more freeform approach in the bud shortly before it gets at the main puzzles-strung-along-story backbone itself.

Which is a damn fucking shame as I would definitely appreciate some games focusing on atmosphere and non-repetitive gameplay, but to really accomplish that and reestablish themselves adventures must embrace the notion of mechanics and think long and hard about how to make one that can actually support gameplay driven by diverse solutions to diverse problems, and yes, it will be hard.
They must also embrace player figuring out different potential solutions rather than trying to win the guess-the-script game.

I think a neat if primitive prototype of such a nu-adventure was AzT, shame it got wrecked as far as sales are concerned when it collided with Quake.

 

[belowmecoldhands]

Adventure Games were the leading genre of PC gaming until around the late 1990s. Myst came out in 1993 and in 1995 became the highest selling PC game of all time until the year 2000; Before that, King's Quest V held that title from 1990 through 1995. Adventure games in the early - middle 1990s especially were huge; even as late as 1997, games like the Curse of Monkey Island were hits. My two questions are thus:

Why did Adventure games die then?

Why have they seen a revival the past few years?

They didn't die. Some were renamed as RPGs. Instead of calling them RPG-lite. Some were reclassifed action-adventure. Some are survival horror now or other. It's really all over the place honestly.

Here's great example of recent adventure game:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L.A._Noire

I just went over to gamestop and most of the adventure games are under the "action" heading. If you google you'll find many or most of them have a action-adventure classification, like this one:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassin's_Creed_IV:_Black_Flag

Another one:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batman:_Arkham_Knight

Another (I'm serious there're craploads of these action-adventure):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_Cause_3

 

[hpstg]

I don't know what you mean by "adventure", but only L.A. Noire could pretend to be one, from all the games in the above list.

 

[Dexter]

The really excellent adventure games had good art direction and atmosphere, and that clouded the main problem which was the retarded, nonsensical "puzzles". Meanwhile other genres started delivering in the story/atmosphere that adventure games were known for, without the retardation of having to shape your ass hairs in a specific shape to fit the tavern lock so that you can get the ring of fate that allows you to speak to the bird that holds the secret.

Obligatory Old Man Murray Article

Fucking newfags regurgitating that retarded article by proto-RPS, I might as well Copy/Paste my extended rant from the Broken Age thread here: http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...ter-adventure-game.69252/page-75#post-3062420

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:


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".

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/search/?developer=KING Art#category1=998&developer=KING Art&sort_order=ASC&page=1
http://store.steampowered.com/search/?developer=Deck 13#category1=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

 

[Infinitron]

The paragraph about Daedalic might be out of date now.