7 ms·

Why Adventure Games Suck (1989)

47 points by ZeljkoS 4y ago

drunkenmagician 4y ago
article from 2004. Title update?
- chrismorgan 4y ago
  Hmm, could fairly be labelled 2004 or 1989. Previous submissions here have been labelled (1989). March 19 2020, 150 points, 104 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22625578 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22625578
- dang 4y ago
  It's a wave-particle, but the bulk of the page is an article written in 1989, without which the submission wouldn't be here, so we've gone with 1989.
BlargMcLarg 4y ago
What even is the definition of 'adventure game' used here? Dozens of adventure games were released in the 10 years prior to 2004. One of the most wellknown series, Legend of Zelda, never stopped producing. Is LoZ not considered an adventure series by these critics?
- cammikebrown 4y ago
  Adventure games have always been a somewhat specific genre. Whether through text , 2D, or 3D, they're generally puzzle-driven, choose-your-own-adventure style narrative outings. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventure_game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventure_game
  - anthk 4y ago
    >choose-your-own-adventure style narrative outings. Not in this context.
- vanderZwan 4y ago
  I think Legend of Zelda series is considered an "action-adventure game", not an "adventure game". The former tends to occupy the "gameplay space" of an action RPG with little to no stats or loot/inventory juggling, optionally with platforming (if 3D). It's a bit tricky because the definition of "action-adventure" broadened as LoZ added more gameplay elements, and more games became "LoZ adjacent" (although it's not as muddled as the definition of "rogue-like", which got all messed up because of Spelunky being a surprise hit). Adventure games are almost always narrative driven and puzzle-oriented though, and without RPG elements (because if they had strong RPG elements they'd just be called RPGs).
  - lucideer 4y ago
    > Adventure games are almost always narrative driven and puzzle-oriented though LoZ is highly puzzle-oriented. Not so narrative driven though so if both are required, that fits... but: > and without RPG elements (because if they had strong RPG elements they'd just be called RPGs). What are RPG elements in this context if not narrative?
    - ehnto 4y ago
      Most RPG's really boil down to point accumulation and skill trees that don't affect the plot at all. Which is a shame, because roles and skills could play a huge role in narrative if developers are able to put in the time. Some games do, the Fallout series often gives you different paths through the story depending on the abilities you've acquired.
      - vanderZwan 4y ago
        You hit the nail on the head and I should have been more clear about that, thanks.
      - lucideer 4y ago
        Ah this is all a good point, yeah. I guess I was more thinking of the presence of/emphasis on a narrative (quantity of dialogue, cut-scenes, character personalities, etc.) rather than the direct bearing that narrative has on gameplay (you're right that it's often relatively little). I hadn't really thought of Fallout as an RPG, nor e.g. Deus Ex, I guess the FP nature makes them seem more different. Witcher is more of one, but I guess they all 3 have commonalities.
- msh 4y ago
  He thinking things like kings quest, monkey island and so on. I would not consider zela an adventure game in this genre.
- talideon 4y ago
  No, the LoZ series aren't adventure games in the original sense, which encompassed text adventures (now termed "interactive fiction") and point-and-click adventures. You also have the extra hint that this is Ron Gilbert's site, and if you know anything about him, the context for "adventure game" is pretty clear. Such games are story and puzzle heavy rather than having much in the way of action.
- eloisant 4y ago
  He is talking about "point and click" adventure games like Monkey Island, the Sierra games, etc. Legend of Zelda clearly isn't a point and click game.
- ehnto 4y ago
  The term Adventure has been overloaded, but it used to be a fairly concrete concept. Something like Legend of Zelda has adventure game elements in it, but it's much more action, combat and movement, something "traditional" adventure games don't have. Text adventure games are really the best example of the concepts that an adventure game usually has, even though they can also be graphical, like Monkey Island or Full Throttle. A more recent game series like Deponia fits the bill as well. I would say that there are a lot more games with old school adventure mechanics coming out than people might realise. A lot of them get bundled into the "Walking Simulator" category, but are far more Adventure game than anything else.
- elondaits 4y ago
  I would call Legend of Zelda an action RPG. Although it has some puzzles, the main activity is exploring and fighting, your equipment and skills improve as you advance (allowing you to face against tougher monsters) and part of the challenge is administering consumable resources (e.g. healing items). There’s always been a big overlap between adventures and rpgs… but the article talks about issues characteristic of the purest examples of the adventure genre (most Infocom text adventures, Sierra, Lucasarts, etc)
- dwighttk 4y ago
  “I wrote this back in 1989 while I was designing Monkey Island. It is now the futuristic year of 2004 and we are all driving around in flying cars and wearing sliver jumps suits.”
TheFattestNinja 4y ago
Related discussion from Yathzee (an internet-famous videogame critic) (possibly NSFW language) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0gQ0ed8R6A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0gQ0ed8R6A
cammikebrown 4y ago
What an interesting article. In 2004, I also agreed that adventure games were dead, and I was 15 at the time. As it turns out, we were both right. I loved the famous ones, like Myst and Monkey Island, along with a bunch of random games (does anyone remember The Journeyman Project? My absolute favorite! And Titanic Adventure Out of Time, and so many other unique projects). I also was able to play/replay a lot of classic text adventures, like Zork and the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (which, let's be honest, aren't always the most intuitive games). However, since 2016, when The Witness came out, I've given them another chance, and I really have hope. There are a lot of indie games which I hope others can go into detail about, and, most exciting of all, I saw that Ron Gilbert (the author of this piece) was making Return to Monkey Island, and I'm delighted to see that the reviews are great. PS: It's been awhile, but some of the IF (text adventure) games I've seen in the last decade have really been pushing the genre to new limits. Check em out!
- talideon 4y ago
  They never died out in Europe, and they were paricularly popular in Germany. Interactive fiction had an underground renaissance, and some of the beat work in the genre were produced when it was technically a dead one. I agree that people should check out the IF Archive, and take a look at the state of tooling for creating them, which have made producing games much more accessable.
- JackMorgan 4y ago
  "Looks like... nasty weather." I remember playing Journeyman Project 2 and being so confused by it all. Time travel, aliens, disguises? Fascinating game.
user3939382 4y ago
The only game I really enjoyed in the past 15 years was an adventure-type interactive fiction game called Vespers. Everything else might be good enough for a distraction but I wouldn’t say I was actually intrigued.
- bspammer 4y ago
  I would highly recommend Disco Elysium if you want a more recent interactive fiction game. My personal game of the decade for the 2010s :)
izacus 4y ago
This was written before the best adventure game of all time, Disco Elysium, was released.
- quchen 4y ago
  You just made me realize it’s an adventure game. It’s also an RPG and choose-your-adventure game and so much else, that I filed it as »Disco Elysium« without ever thinking about genres.
  - izacus 4y ago
    It's kinda amazing how many wishes from the original post it covers isn't it? I really love the modern evolution of the genre - we have old style point-and-click games, new style Telltale games, experiments like Disco and Detroit: Become Human. The genre has expanded a lot.
  - nwellnhof 4y ago
    The game is branded as RPG and there are a few "meta" dialogues where it's explicitly declared that you're playing an RPG, but I found that a bit strange. It always felt like a point-and-click adventure to me. But don't get me wrong, the RPG elements are excellent and it's one of the most innovative games ever.
- bilvar 4y ago
  Disco Elysium itself suffers from those problems. Spoilers ahead: From the very first couple hours in the game you know the most important thing you should do is visit that 'island' - but the game does not give you any option to do so. You have to go through a very tedious grind to unlock the option, even though there is no real reason you shouldn't be able to. The game just doesn't allow you to do so. Personally, after I managed to get there, I realised the rest of the game was pointless.
  - revolvingocelot 4y ago
    !!! SPOILERS AHEAD !!! >From the very first couple hours I disagree. The plot thread you speak of isn't immediately apparent -- it takes hours to surface, and the likelihood of the island being the correct place to investigate is considered by Visual Calculus to be very low. We who have beaten it can opine about the ultimate conclusion being forgone, but the equally-important non-investigative plot threads took, at least in my case, enough time that I didn't really "notice" the ludic preventative of denying you a boat until endgame. !!! SPOLIERS END !!! >Personally, after I managed to get there, I realised the rest of the game was pointless I find this personally astounding. By contrast, I found the non-investigative plot threads, few of which have any real measureable outcome on the game's conclusion, to be the real stars of the show. When you watch police procedurals, do you just fast forward to the last ten minutes? Isn't the statefulness of the investigating characters interesting?
prvc 4y ago
What's the message behind this submission, being so soon after the release of an adventure game by this article's author?
nayroclade 4y ago
As much as I love text and point-and-click adventure games, there's always been an inherent contradiction to them. On the surface level, they promise nearly infinite freedom, more than any platform or first-person shooter game: That you can go anywhere, talk to anyone, perform and action on any object, and solve problems in whatever way you want. But in practice they're incredibly constrained. The world is an exquisitely constructed stage, with nothing beyond its margins, and there is only a very narrow, winding path to success. Puzzles have a single, usually somewhat tortured solution, and alternative approaches that would work in the real world are either not considered or declared impossible for spurious reasons. Beating an adventure game is often an exercise not just in problem solving, but in building an intuition about how the game designer(s) wanted you to approach puzzles. Tuning into the vibe of the game world and understanding what interactions and approaches are likely to work and which won't. The most you can hope for is that the solutions have at least some logic to them. It's a bit like learning to solve cryptic crosswords, where you need to learn a hidden language to unlock the actual problems. This can be an enjoyable and rewarding experience, but it is definitely not the infinite freedom that the genre seems to offer up front, and I suspect for as many people who fell in love with these games, there were many who gave up in frustration at their paradoxical constrictiveness.
- Zhyl 4y ago
  To this end, I really enjoyed "Don't Escape: 4 Days to Survive"[1] which was included in the recent Itch bundle for Ukraine. It mixes adventure game with escape room, and whilst there is still a puzzle element to the game, it is much more pragmatic in its combinations. You find a nail, a boarded up building or something that needs building and it's a hammer that will solve all of them. You know that you will die of heat at the end of the day, so you need to find things that will cool your house down. I think this means that the whimsy and jovial aspect of 90s adventure games is lost, but it feels much more satisfying to solve a puzzle when the solution makes sense. If we wanted an adventure games renaissance, I would look to this game as a case study in addition to the points outlined in Ron's article. [1] https://armor-games-studios.itch.io/dont-escape-4-days-to-survive https://armor-games-studios.itch.io/dont-escape-4-days-to-su...
- tgv 4y ago
eloisant 4y ago
I think the situation for point and click adventure games is much better now than in 2004. They rebirthed from their ashes as a healthy indies niche. We've have great adventure games in the recent years: Timbleweed Park, Deponia, Unavowed, and of course the recent Return of Monkey Island. Yes, they're no longer the dominating AAA genre, probably because their main draw have always been to tell a story (and a 2D platformer wasn't great for that), but now there are other genres that are also very good at telling a story. Basically the Action/Adventure/RPG/OpenWorld bucket.
pteraspidomorph 4y ago
It's interesting how the horror game genre is currently actually still making almost all of these mistakes, yielding the same predictably frustrating outcomes (and yet people keep making them).
FrankyHollywood 4y ago
I always loved adventure games, with Grim Fandango (1998) being one of my favourites. Nowadays Amanita design still makes great adventure and puzzle games, some are point & click. Really enjoyed them, and most are without text so my non-English speaking kids also love them https://www.amanita-design.net/ https://www.amanita-design.net/
MomoXenosaga 4y ago
Hollywood envy? Pretty funny now that the gaming industry has eclipsed Hollywood. Lot has happened since 1989!
elf25 4y ago

47 points by ZeljkoS 4y ago

drunkenmagician 4y ago

article from 2004. Title update?

chrismorgan 4y ago
Hmm, could fairly be labelled 2004 or 1989. Previous submissions here have been labelled (1989). March 19 2020, 150 points, 104 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22625578 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22625578
dang 4y ago
It's a wave-particle, but the bulk of the page is an article written in 1989, without which the submission wouldn't be here, so we've gone with 1989.

BlargMcLarg 4y ago

What even is the definition of 'adventure game' used here? Dozens of adventure games were released in the 10 years prior to 2004. One of the most wellknown series, Legend of Zelda, never stopped producing. Is LoZ not considered an adventure series by these critics?

cammikebrown 4y ago
Adventure games have always been a somewhat specific genre. Whether through text , 2D, or 3D, they're generally puzzle-driven, choose-your-own-adventure style narrative outings. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventure_game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventure_game
- anthk 4y ago
  >choose-your-own-adventure style narrative outings. Not in this context.
vanderZwan 4y ago
I think Legend of Zelda series is considered an "action-adventure game", not an "adventure game". The former tends to occupy the "gameplay space" of an action RPG with little to no stats or loot/inventory juggling, optionally with platforming (if 3D). It's a bit tricky because the definition of "action-adventure" broadened as LoZ added more gameplay elements, and more games became "LoZ adjacent" (although it's not as muddled as the definition of "rogue-like", which got all messed up because of Spelunky being a surprise hit). Adventure games are almost always narrative driven and puzzle-oriented though, and without RPG elements (because if they had strong RPG elements they'd just be called RPGs).
- lucideer 4y ago
  > Adventure games are almost always narrative driven and puzzle-oriented though LoZ is highly puzzle-oriented. Not so narrative driven though so if both are required, that fits... but: > and without RPG elements (because if they had strong RPG elements they'd just be called RPGs). What are RPG elements in this context if not narrative?
  - ehnto 4y ago
    Most RPG's really boil down to point accumulation and skill trees that don't affect the plot at all. Which is a shame, because roles and skills could play a huge role in narrative if developers are able to put in the time. Some games do, the Fallout series often gives you different paths through the story depending on the abilities you've acquired.
    - vanderZwan 4y ago
      You hit the nail on the head and I should have been more clear about that, thanks.
    - lucideer 4y ago
      Ah this is all a good point, yeah. I guess I was more thinking of the presence of/emphasis on a narrative (quantity of dialogue, cut-scenes, character personalities, etc.) rather than the direct bearing that narrative has on gameplay (you're right that it's often relatively little). I hadn't really thought of Fallout as an RPG, nor e.g. Deus Ex, I guess the FP nature makes them seem more different. Witcher is more of one, but I guess they all 3 have commonalities.
msh 4y ago
He thinking things like kings quest, monkey island and so on. I would not consider zela an adventure game in this genre.
talideon 4y ago
No, the LoZ series aren't adventure games in the original sense, which encompassed text adventures (now termed "interactive fiction") and point-and-click adventures. You also have the extra hint that this is Ron Gilbert's site, and if you know anything about him, the context for "adventure game" is pretty clear. Such games are story and puzzle heavy rather than having much in the way of action.
eloisant 4y ago
He is talking about "point and click" adventure games like Monkey Island, the Sierra games, etc. Legend of Zelda clearly isn't a point and click game.
ehnto 4y ago
The term Adventure has been overloaded, but it used to be a fairly concrete concept. Something like Legend of Zelda has adventure game elements in it, but it's much more action, combat and movement, something "traditional" adventure games don't have. Text adventure games are really the best example of the concepts that an adventure game usually has, even though they can also be graphical, like Monkey Island or Full Throttle. A more recent game series like Deponia fits the bill as well. I would say that there are a lot more games with old school adventure mechanics coming out than people might realise. A lot of them get bundled into the "Walking Simulator" category, but are far more Adventure game than anything else.
elondaits 4y ago
I would call Legend of Zelda an action RPG. Although it has some puzzles, the main activity is exploring and fighting, your equipment and skills improve as you advance (allowing you to face against tougher monsters) and part of the challenge is administering consumable resources (e.g. healing items). There’s always been a big overlap between adventures and rpgs… but the article talks about issues characteristic of the purest examples of the adventure genre (most Infocom text adventures, Sierra, Lucasarts, etc)
dwighttk 4y ago
“I wrote this back in 1989 while I was designing Monkey Island. It is now the futuristic year of 2004 and we are all driving around in flying cars and wearing sliver jumps suits.”

TheFattestNinja 4y ago

Related discussion from Yathzee (an internet-famous videogame critic) (possibly NSFW language) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0gQ0ed8R6A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0gQ0ed8R6A

cammikebrown 4y ago

What an interesting article. In 2004, I also agreed that adventure games were dead, and I was 15 at the time. As it turns out, we were both right. I loved the famous ones, like Myst and Monkey Island, along with a bunch of random games (does anyone remember The Journeyman Project? My absolute favorite! And Titanic Adventure Out of Time, and so many other unique projects). I also was able to play/replay a lot of classic text adventures, like Zork and the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (which, let's be honest, aren't always the most intuitive games). However, since 2016, when The Witness came out, I've given them another chance, and I really have hope. There are a lot of indie games which I hope others can go into detail about, and, most exciting of all, I saw that Ron Gilbert (the author of this piece) was making Return to Monkey Island, and I'm delighted to see that the reviews are great. PS: It's been awhile, but some of the IF (text adventure) games I've seen in the last decade have really been pushing the genre to new limits. Check em out!

talideon 4y ago
They never died out in Europe, and they were paricularly popular in Germany. Interactive fiction had an underground renaissance, and some of the beat work in the genre were produced when it was technically a dead one. I agree that people should check out the IF Archive, and take a look at the state of tooling for creating them, which have made producing games much more accessable.
JackMorgan 4y ago
"Looks like... nasty weather." I remember playing Journeyman Project 2 and being so confused by it all. Time travel, aliens, disguises? Fascinating game.

user3939382 4y ago

The only game I really enjoyed in the past 15 years was an adventure-type interactive fiction game called Vespers. Everything else might be good enough for a distraction but I wouldn’t say I was actually intrigued.

bspammer 4y ago
I would highly recommend Disco Elysium if you want a more recent interactive fiction game. My personal game of the decade for the 2010s :)

izacus 4y ago

This was written before the best adventure game of all time, Disco Elysium, was released.

quchen 4y ago
You just made me realize it’s an adventure game. It’s also an RPG and choose-your-adventure game and so much else, that I filed it as »Disco Elysium« without ever thinking about genres.
- izacus 4y ago
  It's kinda amazing how many wishes from the original post it covers isn't it? I really love the modern evolution of the genre - we have old style point-and-click games, new style Telltale games, experiments like Disco and Detroit: Become Human. The genre has expanded a lot.
- nwellnhof 4y ago
  The game is branded as RPG and there are a few "meta" dialogues where it's explicitly declared that you're playing an RPG, but I found that a bit strange. It always felt like a point-and-click adventure to me. But don't get me wrong, the RPG elements are excellent and it's one of the most innovative games ever.
bilvar 4y ago
Disco Elysium itself suffers from those problems. Spoilers ahead: From the very first couple hours in the game you know the most important thing you should do is visit that 'island' - but the game does not give you any option to do so. You have to go through a very tedious grind to unlock the option, even though there is no real reason you shouldn't be able to. The game just doesn't allow you to do so. Personally, after I managed to get there, I realised the rest of the game was pointless.
- revolvingocelot 4y ago
  !!! SPOILERS AHEAD !!! >From the very first couple hours I disagree. The plot thread you speak of isn't immediately apparent -- it takes hours to surface, and the likelihood of the island being the correct place to investigate is considered by Visual Calculus to be very low. We who have beaten it can opine about the ultimate conclusion being forgone, but the equally-important non-investigative plot threads took, at least in my case, enough time that I didn't really "notice" the ludic preventative of denying you a boat until endgame. !!! SPOLIERS END !!! >Personally, after I managed to get there, I realised the rest of the game was pointless I find this personally astounding. By contrast, I found the non-investigative plot threads, few of which have any real measureable outcome on the game's conclusion, to be the real stars of the show. When you watch police procedurals, do you just fast forward to the last ten minutes? Isn't the statefulness of the investigating characters interesting?

prvc 4y ago

What's the message behind this submission, being so soon after the release of an adventure game by this article's author?

nayroclade 4y ago

As much as I love text and point-and-click adventure games, there's always been an inherent contradiction to them. On the surface level, they promise nearly infinite freedom, more than any platform or first-person shooter game: That you can go anywhere, talk to anyone, perform and action on any object, and solve problems in whatever way you want. But in practice they're incredibly constrained. The world is an exquisitely constructed stage, with nothing beyond its margins, and there is only a very narrow, winding path to success. Puzzles have a single, usually somewhat tortured solution, and alternative approaches that would work in the real world are either not considered or declared impossible for spurious reasons. Beating an adventure game is often an exercise not just in problem solving, but in building an intuition about how the game designer(s) wanted you to approach puzzles. Tuning into the vibe of the game world and understanding what interactions and approaches are likely to work and which won't. The most you can hope for is that the solutions have at least some logic to them. It's a bit like learning to solve cryptic crosswords, where you need to learn a hidden language to unlock the actual problems. This can be an enjoyable and rewarding experience, but it is definitely not the infinite freedom that the genre seems to offer up front, and I suspect for as many people who fell in love with these games, there were many who gave up in frustration at their paradoxical constrictiveness.

Zhyl 4y ago
To this end, I really enjoyed "Don't Escape: 4 Days to Survive"[1] which was included in the recent Itch bundle for Ukraine. It mixes adventure game with escape room, and whilst there is still a puzzle element to the game, it is much more pragmatic in its combinations. You find a nail, a boarded up building or something that needs building and it's a hammer that will solve all of them. You know that you will die of heat at the end of the day, so you need to find things that will cool your house down. I think this means that the whimsy and jovial aspect of 90s adventure games is lost, but it feels much more satisfying to solve a puzzle when the solution makes sense. If we wanted an adventure games renaissance, I would look to this game as a case study in addition to the points outlined in Ron's article. [1] https://armor-games-studios.itch.io/dont-escape-4-days-to-survive https://armor-games-studios.itch.io/dont-escape-4-days-to-su...
tgv 4y ago

eloisant 4y ago

I think the situation for point and click adventure games is much better now than in 2004. They rebirthed from their ashes as a healthy indies niche. We've have great adventure games in the recent years: Timbleweed Park, Deponia, Unavowed, and of course the recent Return of Monkey Island. Yes, they're no longer the dominating AAA genre, probably because their main draw have always been to tell a story (and a 2D platformer wasn't great for that), but now there are other genres that are also very good at telling a story. Basically the Action/Adventure/RPG/OpenWorld bucket.

pteraspidomorph 4y ago

It's interesting how the horror game genre is currently actually still making almost all of these mistakes, yielding the same predictably frustrating outcomes (and yet people keep making them).

FrankyHollywood 4y ago

I always loved adventure games, with Grim Fandango (1998) being one of my favourites. Nowadays Amanita design still makes great adventure and puzzle games, some are point & click. Really enjoyed them, and most are without text so my non-English speaking kids also love them https://www.amanita-design.net/ https://www.amanita-design.net/

MomoXenosaga 4y ago

Hollywood envy? Pretty funny now that the gaming industry has eclipsed Hollywood. Lot has happened since 1989!

elf25 4y ago