Does anyone play adventure games anymore ?

First I just want to say, that I am a HUGE adventure game fan but I know that there is a limited market for this game genre it is almost non-existant on consoles (except for Indigo Prophecy). But, ive always loved the early Lucas Arts games (Monkey Island, Sam Max, Zak McKraken, Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle Maniac Mansion) I was wondering if anyone can see adventure games becoming popular again if It would be worth the time effort to make a "traditional" adventure game with Unity??

 

Well, both Monkey Island and Sam Max episodes are planned. I think there is definitely an audience for them still.

 

I know that the Sam Max and Monkey Island games are still popular a select few PC adventure games but most of the successes are because they are franchises sequels, but what about the genre as a whole?

 

I think it's on the rise again but it will never reach the popularity it used to have.

 

A lot of the conventions present in classic adventure games were down to hard limits on what you could actually do in a game. Studios like Sierra and LucasArts hit on a formula that allowed them to pack a 'big' story into a game in such a way that it would actually run on computers of the era, and of course it was a big hit.

Once machines were powerful enough to really simulate worlds in a more thoroughly realized way, the genre quickly lost a lot of appeal outside of a niche audience, and I don't know if it will ever become mainstream again. There's still a place for classic-style adventure games though, and it's never really gone away, they're just not high profile titles like they used to be.

Studios like Cyan Worlds (Myst), Revolution Software (Broken Sword), Microïds (Syberia), and even indies like Amanita Design (Samarost) may not have topped sales with their games, but they've all done respectably in recent years making very traditional adventure games.

 

I've often wondered if the text adventure concept could be revived with modern technology. Basically the same concept, but with atmospheric illustrations, narration, music/sound effects and motion graphic effects for the text, a bit like they use on TV.

 

.. I smell a Wumpus!

 

Wasn't that essentially what those old WorldBuilder games for the Mac were?

I'll never forget how cool it was when I took the menu option for 'swing foot' and heard a nifty sound effect. I wouldn't quite call it immersion, but it sure was fun at the time.

 

I liked a couple of the more recent 3D adventure games. like Farenheight (indigo Prophecy) and Broken Sword 3.

Those were a lot of fun. Farenheit made good use of realtime 3D and had some interesting simple simon type reflex sequences in the action parts.

I used to like the old school text adventures. Monkey Island and older games like Twin Kingdom Valley on the BBC model B. But I really couldn't get into the Monkey Island game again when I played it last year. Felt that it was best left back in history where it belonged.

Here's an action sequence from indigo prophecy if you never played the game

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awa_ZhEBWv4

 

i have the impression that it's quite the opposite...
Don't forget that many Hidden Objects Games are more and more incorporating classic adventure elements....
And there is a good number of adventures released regurarly - besides the already mentioned Sam&Max and Tales of Monkey Island Episodes.
I think because of the smaller marketing budgets they slip easily under ones radar if you are not searching for them activley...

just a bunch of current PC-titles...

* Black Mirror 2
* Legend of Crystal Valley
* Treasure Island
* Dark Fall: Lost Souls

 

I think the adventure genre in a broad sense still has immense potential. The first thing developers need to do - and this is the easy part - is to think outside of the Leisure Suit Larry (or Monkey Island if you prefer) box. Then you need to come up with a new model for the genre that will work with your budget.

Anyway, thats my opinion. If you want to make another Monkey Island because you enjoy that kind of game, then you should. BUT keep in mind that it is not likely a commercially viable project. You should do it primarily because you enjoy the process of making it.

Amongst the adventure games mentioned in the thread I think The Last Express should be included. Its a rare gem with a Myst style interface that is reliant on its story in which the passage of time is fully realized, and your play opens up a vast array of alternate endings (most of which are failures, but more than one is a success).

I think many of the Infocom games pulled of the same very well in text: time passes, and so the story unfolds whether you pull a particular lever or not. If you want to check these out try the detective games: deadline, suspect, and witness. They are brilliant if you can handle the text interface.

Myst and Riven by comparison are essentially just complicated state machines and the worlds just sit there waiting for you to do something.

 

Don't get me wrong, I love a good adventure game. I just meant to say that the "classic" adventure game is largely a niche genre now, though they do still exist. If you take a broader definition of the adventure genre, there are actually a lot of really good offerings that appear now and again.

Quantic Dream, for example, has done some great work in breaking new ground for the genre and keeping it relevant. I thought Fahrenheit was great (and Omikron before that), and their upcoming Heavy Rain looks brilliant - I just wish it wasn't PS3 only!

Frictional Games was another one - the first two Penumbra games were excellent, and really showed what a modern adventure game could be (Requiem was kind of weak, though).

 

I think also there is still the idea that adventure games are very difficult to play. Even the most popular well known ones will leave you stuck in the same place unless you find a certain object that unlocks another event in the game, and being "stuck" for hours realizing that the "key" or the "book" or whatever was IN YOUR FACE the whole time is enough to make you give up on the genre completely. I personally dont feel this way but ALOT of people do and I think thats what really hurts it. I think that people want more freedom in there games.

 

Wouldn't games like KOTOR sort of be considered along the line of Adventure game? I know it incorporates a lot of other elements, but it's still very much in the vein of adventure. It's not quite a Zork or Loom, but if you took out the combat elements, it probably would be. However the combat scenes are very much secondary to the gameplay and interwoven into the story.

I'd say the genre is very much alive and as popular as ever. It may have evolved quite a bit though. I'd love to see Loom redone (maybe it was... I haven't looked)

...mind wanders back to the countless hours of playing Day of the Tentacle.

 

Although I like Infocom's games, I think Zork is one of the games that doesn't need to be redone. A maze full of puzzles held together by a thread of humor was novel in 1979 but ... yeah ... Infocom's other games are world's more mature than the first Zork.

And this I think leads back to Eleventh's point about how hard these games can be.

You've got a few problems:
First problem is whether a player who doesn't like puzzles plays your game and has a bad experience. As long as you make it clear that your game has puzzles in it, then do not worry about their reaction. Thats their problem. Your job is to make it clear what kind of experience they can expect. After that its up to them.

Second problem is that you need well designed puzzles for your players that enjoy them. The puzzle that requires some random object to solve or whatever is a very bad puzzle in my opinion. They are easy to design, and painful to solve. Random trial and error should not be the primary way to solve a puzzle. I think as long as the problems have solutions that flow naturally and logically from them then you've got a good one. Basically the player needs to feel that the solution makes sense. No matter how hard a puzzle is, if the solution makes sense out of what you have given to the player, then its a good experience.

Third problem is to provide a mix of puzzles in a manner that is fun for a wide enough audience that lots of puzzlers buy your game, and your sequels.

 

They did redo Zork, with 'Return to Zork'. That one was developed by Activision in 93. It was a decent game at the time. It had more of a Myst type quality to it. Though, I just barely remember, as it was a long time ago. I remember it being a short game, that I beat in a couple of days. Which is unsual for me. Typically I never finish a game, so it must have been easy.

I was always more of a fan of the games that were a series of quests that built upon eachother, rather than games that were straight up puzzles. Like 7th Guest, which was really just a series of puzzles and cut scenes. That game might not really count as an adventure game though.

 

Infocom also did Beyond Zork before Activision took over, but I don't consider these games actual remakes. Zork I - III were scavenger hunts in which you had to solve puzzles for each item, and to win you had to collect all of the items. They were simply puzzles to solve in the middle of a vast maze like environment. Thats the aspect that doesn't need to be remade in my opinion.

My first thought when you mentioned quests was RPGs (which can be like adventure games). But when you describe 7th Guest, I was wondering if there was anything more to this than just solving puzzles in the game play? Thats good for them for recombining those elements in

I guess the integral piece of the adventure game is the environment. Exploring the environment is fun, and thus the motivation for the player to keep going. I think however that interactive fiction put a twist on this so that rather than explore an environment, you can explore a story. In other words, as you solve the "puzzles" in the story you unlock alternate branches of the narrative or reveal more back story than you knew before etc....

Its a fluid genre. You basically explore a structure to achieve the win condition. That structure can be a story or it can be a virtual reality or a combination of the two. All of those I think are "adventure" games.

 

Not RPG, I was thinking more of how 'Day of the Tentacle' worked. Where you'd come in contact with player or situation and you'd need to sort of solve the quest before you code proceed with that section. Like going back in time, and chopping down a tree, so that it wasn't in the way in the future. (Classic adventure game, imho)

As apposed to 7th Guest, which was literally puzzles. You'd click on the cake, and then it turned into a rubix cube type of cake game. Once you beat it, a cut scene would happen, and a new door would open up. In another room the floor would turn into a chess game, and you'd have to beat it. To me it was less adventure, because the puzzles were so far removed from the game.

I really like the whole adventure game genre, I wonder if it has more mass appeal when you add elements of action, sort of the way it was done with the 'Alone in the Dark' series.

 

Probably one of the grand dads of them all, is still one of the most challenging game I've ever played, and it had no graphics. The original Wizardry on the Commodore64.

It was cool, scary and frustrating all at the same time. You could be on an adventure, 30 levels down in a complex dungeon with characters you honed over weeks or months of game play only to have them wiped out for good. I remember the sheer horror of realizing you were not going to win this fight, and your sorely earned characters would be killed and written to disk as dead immediately. (Unless you were fast enough to flip open the 5 1/4" floppy drive before it could record the deaths...lol

Your only option then was either to hope you had one character left to get back up to the surface and bring down a powerful enough cleric to raise the dead, or a retrieval party to pick through all the corpses for their magical weapons. And all this with only text... That was pure determination.

B.

 

KOTOR is a RPG.

Wizardry had graphics; they were just kinda primitive.

--Eric

 

I LOVED the classic point´n´click adventures back in the day, Maniac Mansion 12, The Monkey Island Games, Grim Fandango, Sam Max etc etc.
I buy the Sam Max episodes and the Monkey Island ones, too now, its not on the same level as the classic games but pretty nice for what it is.
dawvee and the others mentioned some good points for why its much more difficult to get mainstream appeal in huge way with a classic point and click adventure:
-One can explore worlds in much more (technically) evolved way in modern games than by showing a static screen like in old adventure games, back then those games were graphically top notch, nowadays they are usually among the lower end of what´s tolerable to many gamers.
-Since we live in the internet ages for a while, many have shorter attention spans, they jump from one thing to the other and if they get stuck with a puzzle many either give up or consult gamefaqs for the rest of the game.
I don´t blame anyone, i´ve done so myself in between =)
But yeah makes it difficult when designing a classical adventure game: add in really challenging puzzles or not, what to do when the player gets stuck etc.

On the other side there are meanwhile also more options for releasing games and some of those fit better to classic adventure games, as shown with the very successful episodic form download delivery of the Sam Max or Monkey Island episodes now. And then there are also more platforms which have controls options suited to classic adventure games.

Then there´s also the side that game genres are melting together anyway.
Most modern US rpgs or action adventures have many classic point click adventure concepts in them usually, just like the Sims series and many others offer plenty of comparison and connection points.
So yeah, even if a total classic point click adventure in old style delivered on old formats in old delivery ways maybe never will have a huge spotlight again, in many other ways there´s sure still a lot of possibilities for em and desire for all or some of the gameplay concepts in them =)

A few friends and me made a point click adventure in flash a few years ago, too. It was under rush as it was for a contest, would be cool to make something a bit bigger and more evolved on that end in unity =)

 

My first experience with game creation was with a text adventure writing program called Adventure Writer on my Commodore 64. You could make games similar to Infocom games without any coding. You just typed all your rooms and objects into database style text fields and applied conditions to them, like

Item name: Flashlight
Is item a light source? Yes/No: Yes
Is item a container? Yes/No: Yes
Contents of item on open: Batteries

and so forth.

There was a similar program for making Ultima style RPGs which I can't remember the name of. I still have them somewhere.

On whether anyone plays adventure games anymore: I think Funcom's Dreamfall was a fairly big hit wasn't it? Funcom is using Unity now so maybe they'll use it to make the sequel!

The Nancy Drew adventure series is quite popular (there are about 20 different games in the series.)

The Adventure Company seems to be the biggest publisher of adventure games these days:
http://www.adventurecompanygames.com/index.php

I bought this compilation of their games a couple of weeks ago and have been having fun with it:

http://www.amazon.com/1-Adventure-C...TF8&coliid=I2DCRBSOM9ZF30&colid=1RVF8JKQEHRMC

It was only about $6 when I bought it so was quite a bargain for 5 games. Dead Reefs is the only stinker in the package.

 

Personally, I like the games that mix adventure with the survival horror genre. I played Scratches, Dark Fall, Penubra 2, The Black Mirror Darkness Within awhile ago, I really enjoyed them because they reminded me of the Silent Hill first 2 Resident Evil games except with more puzzles. So, nowadays these are the types of adventure games that I am most interested in playing because even when you get stuck the game provides an unsettling atmosphere which is entertaining. Oh, I forgot to mention the Lurking Horror, one of the most scary text adventures.

 

Well, I still have insult fights with people I know from all four Monkey Island games.

All the LucasArts titles were amazing, and despite working with Al Lowe himself, I've actually not played much of the Sierra titles. (I'll get to it..)

However, I've had nothing but bad experiences with other people who've tried to replicate the art. The games lack the same sort of humour, or they try too hard, the graphics aren't as good or the puzzles aren't as.... 'smart' *

I was over the moon (there should even be a thread in these very forums where i jumped up and down about the new Monkey Island Tales... But then I played the first one...

After the forth or fifth time I selectes a zinger-line (you know, the most inappropriate conversation selection you had) and he didn't say that, he just said 'whatever he felt like' I snapped.

Those guys aren't Ron Gilbert, they honestly didn't 'get' Monkey Island the right way. How dare they deny me the right to say stupidly obscene things in my game!

Tales of Monkey Island is dead to me.

I'm not saying it couldn't be done again, but since the fall of Lucas/Sierra, i've yet to see anyone do a decent job of it.

(And yes, I did play beneath a steel sky, it too was awesome)

* Those puzzles that are IMPOSSIBLE to figure out, but the moment you do you're like 'oh my god it was so simple' because it used a very quirky sideways logic sort of thing.

 

Has anyone succeeded in making a point and click style adventure game with Unity yet? Even just a small experimental project?

This is one of the types of game I'm most interested in making but I doubt I'll ever succeed without a tutorial or example project to study.

 

I think a traditional point-and-click adventure game is probably one of the easiest to make(in technical terms, at least) in Unity. I'm surprised that there hasn't been much activity in that area. Of course, that might have something to do with the idea behind this thread. Fewer people are interested in playing those kinds of games, so fewer people are going to want to make them...

Really though, a lot of the heavy lifting has already been done for an adventure game. A bunch of cameras, a sprinkling of colliders, Camera.ScreenPointToRay, one of the several pathfinding packages posted on the forums, Unity Dialog Engine, the right art and a cool idea. Mix 'em all up with some scripts to tie it all together and that's basically it. In a really general sense, at least.

 

I'm glad to hear it's easily doable in Unity, but I would still need an example project to study or tutorial to figure out how to piece it all together.

Some people, including myself, are just doing this as a hobby out of a love of games so it doesn't matter too much how big the market is to us. Maybe one day someone who knows how will make a small adventure game experiment for fun and share it with the community (I can hope anyway).

 

The only one I've seen anyone do so far is "City of Secrets" in the showcase thread. But, there must be at least 1 or 2 more.

 

Ive been thinking alot about this, and I think it may be easiest to do a non-traditional adventure game in Unity. If you played "Penumbra:Black Plague", its more of a physics based game its in the 1st person perspective, so its actually a lot like playing Half Life 2. It is still considered an adventure game but the interface is a little different. Instead of clicking you must place objects near or inside other objects activating something.

 

I am actually working on a hobbyist pack for Unity for "exploration" games. I see time and time again where hobbyists want something more than the default Unity scripts and don't know/want to learn how to do much scripting. What they do want, though, is to bring an environment of their own creation into Unity and give it life.

The game mechanics which would be included would be basic key/door item collection. Environmental scripts would be for giving the land some "life" with event-based sounds, simple AI (for movement, dialog). Lastly, a GUI system (basic inventory) and clickable/tooltip for items.

I was intending this for hobbyists to make their virtual worlds, not for game developers, but in light of this topic, it would seem quite appropriate.

 

Please do!!! Alot of new users ( myself) would find this as big help. Also, will you be charging for these or will they be free to use (please say free).

 

That sounds like exactly what I've been wishing for. I would buy it right now if it was available.

 

Based on your description I decided to pick up a copy of this game (actually I got a pack from Amazon that has all three games in the series). It really is a unique way to play an adventure scenario. I don't think I've ever played a game quite like it.

 

Yea, not all adventure games have to be "point and click". And again, it would be very easy to make something like it in Unity.

 

By the way if anyone likes Colossal Cave Adventure...
http://jerz.setonhill.edu/if/gallery/adventure/index.html

 

'Colossal Cave Adventure', I thought, was an awful name... Had it not been for a Douglas Adams (Hitch Hikers Guide) quote in your signature, I'd not have gone there

Text adventures were awesome

 

Adventure game are completely fun. They are just a unique type of game. There is just one problem with them, and that is that there is no replay value.

 

Especially since multiple-gameplay paths is expensive, and procedurally generated stuff is formulaic

 

That's why sequels exist.

--Eric

 

Ya, but they don't have any replay value either.

 

That's why even more sequels exist.

--Eric

 

You just created an endless loop... The universe will implode.

 

Stupid imploding universe anyway. Hmm...someone should make an adventure game about that.

--Eric

 

That's where I'm from (Apple IIc early 80's: The Bard's Tale, Transylvania, Lucifer's Realm, Zork, the infamous "avventura nel castello" sequels by Enrico Colombini, Alice in Wonderland, even King's Quest)

that's where I'm going with Unity as a storyteller (tried for a time z-machine but it never boomed)

I do not think I'm even making a penny of that but it is still one important aesthetic pillar halfway from paper literature and electronic entertainment