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Why Adventure Games Suck (1989)
- rightbyte 2y agoLike, how can he be so pessimistic when Grim Fandango was released some years ago? The game design advices seems fine though. [edit, some years ago compared to 2002]
- nottorp 2y ago"I wrote this back in 1989 while I was designing Monkey Island." The first Monkey Island. Of course the design advice seems fine, since he (and the old LucasArts) applied it in several acclaimed titles that make all the "best computer games ever" lists after the article was written :)
- soapdog 2y agoGrim Fandango was released in 1998, it is literally 26 years old… also at that time Adventure Games were being eaten by RTS, JRPG, and soon after shooters. It was easy to feel low when looking at the scene.
- nebulous1 2y agoI think the adventure game portion of Lucas Arts was in the process of dying at that point. They didn't release another adventure game after Escape from Monkey Island in 2000. They would have already cancelled a Full Throttle sequel. They had a couple of attempts after this but they were both also cancelled within a couple of years. Grim Fandango was very good, but honestly the genre got worse after it, not better. Overall the introduction of 3d to the adventure genre had a pretty shaky start. Although there were a couple of exceptions, the genre in general backpedalled for a while.
- rightbyte 2y agoYe in retroperspective he was right. It was at first some years ago with the 'indie' studios publishing on Steam I've played nice adventure games again. 'We Were Here'. Quite good but not very polished. I think the early 3d mix of 2d backgrounds and 3d characters was allright. Like Grim Fandango or Resident Evil. But ye many of the early pure 3d games didn't work out at all.
- tempodox 2y ago> Real time is bad drama That paragraph recounts the reasons why RTS games never work for me. When I'm gaming, I want to do things in my own time, not be on someone else's clock.
- nottorp 2y agoI read that as "time limits are bad drama", not how the game is presented. It can be badly done in a turn based game too, see XCom 2. If you don't like RTS games you don't like RTS games, but this is more about, say, a RTS where you also have a fixed time limit for missions.
- lifeisstillgood 2y agoI understand it as the game can adjust the time behaviour of NPCs to improve the players experience. If you are a spy who needs to meet your contact at the cafe at 1pm then getting delayed by an interesting side quest and arriving at 1:20, in the real world you screwed up and your mission is done. If you do that in a game then it’s boring and you probably won’t realise and wait hours at a cafe. Instead the NPC can simply arrive 20 minutes late. There were games then that had the real world clock approach and would be hard to play - I think for monkey island he actually built a scheduler to avoid this
- nottorp 2y agoI've played both monkey islands multiple times and I don't remember any time limit. Everything went at the speed of plot.
- crb 2y agoAs opposed to Maniac Mansion, where you could die if you drained the pool and waited too long to refill it. (Among many other ways, which you can find here: https://www.maniacmansionfan.50webs.com/waystolose.html https://www.maniacmansionfan.50webs.com/waystolose.html)
- Andrew_nenakhov 2y ago> Real time is bad drama Not necessarily. The ending sequence with the plane on a motorway in "Full Throttle" had me on the edge of my seat when I played it for the first time, and on replays, too.
- nox101 2y agoI see this is a 2004 post of a 1989 article. Still, I'm not sure what the definition of "Adventure Game" is. To me, it's usually a game with graphics at the top (not required but most common), and 4 or so lines of text at the bottom. Some times you walk a character around. Other times you just type "exit door", "open drawer", "take key" (or pick from a menu) Those games might have been dead in some form (King Quest, Monkey Island, etc...) but the basic form has been alive and kicking (a) in the form of Japanese story games and (b) as indie games on places like itch.io. It's covered with "story adventure games" Of course most of those games would benefit from this list of rules.
- amiga386 2y agoIt's boom and bust. When adventure games became graphical, they became massively popular, one of the top-selling genres of games. But since 2000 they were in decline, almost to the point of death. Gamers wanted 3D shoot-em-ups or simulators or other genres, more than they wanted the old point'n'click adventures they'd been playing for the past decade. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventure_game#Decline_(2000%E2%80%932010) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventure_game#Decline_(2000%E... They haven't really come back, in that form, except as appeals to afficionados. Deponia (2012-2016), Syberia (2002-), Dreamfall (1999-2017) did quite well, but I don't know how many people who hadn't played an adventure game before would willingly pick them up. Then there are nostalgia-bait games which Ron Gilbert is especially guilty of, e.g. Thimble Park, The Cave, Return to Monkey Island. You could also add the remake of Riven to that list. If by Japanese story games you mean visual novels... they're not really the same genre, even if technically they have you moving around the place collecting things to solve puzzles. I'd also argue that anything David Cage has done (Farhenheit, Heavy Rain, etc.) are not adventure games, he chases after "interactive movies" as mentioned in the article.
- cubefox 2y agoA few years ago, adventure games had a revival on smartphones, especially with The Room series and the Cube Escape / Rusty Lake games. They were greatly helped by the fact that A) adventure games have no action and B) most action games do not work well with touchscreens.
- asimovfan 2y agoI agree with this and don't worry friends! I am going to make the best adventure game ever soon! Have the plot ready already.
- luqtas 2y agoyou could make it with any violent elements ^-^
- thaumasiotes 2y ago> Have the plot ready already. The article stresses that the game shouldn't be thought of as a movie, but... having played some high-budget adventure games and some low-budget adventure games, it's clear that the quality of the game is basically just the quality of the plot. Good writing and bad art and software make for a good adventure game. Bad writing and good art and software make for a terrible adventure game.
- YurgenJurgensen 2y agoAs long as the puzzles are at least acceptable in quality. No amount of writing could save, say, puzzles of the quality of Colony Ship for Sale, Cheap.
- scotty79 2y agoOut of modern takes I really liked the game "The Captain" that's like a chain of old point and click adventures strung together with sort of rougelite like mechanics.
- nebulous1 2y agoLooks good. Gemini Rue is good if you're looking for something adventure gamey. Return of the Obra Dinn is good if you're looking for something related but different.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- zokier 2y agoIt's interesting how this was republished just at the cusp of the rise of indie games. And indie games certainly have been exploring lot of the ideas mentioned.
- wslh 2y agoCurious about how LLMs for generating graphics can revive adventure games and have a second thought about this article. Generating images in Adventure Games was a bottleneck since they were mainly static and fixed within a small set. Now you can generate original images based on the adventure situation.
- Gormo 2y agoAdventure games have already been revived -- this article is from 20 years ago, and there was a sustained resurgence in the genre that began only a few years later. LLMs are terrible for this sort of thing.
- Ekaros 2y agoI almost question did they ever went away if you were a genre consumer. Not getting the big reviews in mainstream gaming media, but still looking list of titles there is decent games for most of the years if not nearly all.
- diffuse_l 2y agoHe wrote this piece in 1989, and then went on and designed Monkey Island 2, which did things like having solutions to puzzels depend on other puzzels in differnet islands in the most annoying way possible, on purpose. So you have that...
- layer8 2y agoThat’s really ironic. I liked the idea of the LucasArts adventures very much, but they generally turned out to be too “puzzly” for me, in that you got stuck if you didn’t “get” what the puzzle wanted from you, you missed some object you needed to pick up, or you didn’t mindlessly try out every object-verb-item combination or every dialog path. And very often, things I wanted to try that seemed sensible weren’t possible.
- lo_zamoyski 2y ago> they generally turned out to be too “puzzly” for me Loom, I think, was like that sometimes, but Monkey Island wasn't too bad. Sierra's King's Quest series, however, was notorious in this respect, where the thing to do was something arbitrary you could not reason to in a million years. That's the kind of thing that sucks in adventure games. In real life, I can be creative to a very large degree because reality has content, specifically, to the degree that I grasp that reality. A ball of clay is a ball of clay, and because I understand what clay is, I know what I can do with it. But in a game, a ball of clay is just a symbol. There is no ball of clay. It is a nominal entity, an image or word plus some code that simulates maybe some aspects of it in very constrained ways (in adventure games, this is truly very narrow, as in, if user clicks these two things with this action, then show picture and display text, the end). And this might be okay if the author has arranged things sensibly, but sometimes you end up with truly bizarre ideas. You wonder how these things passed QA.
- jamie_ca 2y agoThe worst was King's Quest V, which you could play for 3-4 hours and soft lock yourself by deciding to go east into the mountains before you had done _everything_ possible in town and west in the desert. It didn't warn you you couldn't return, and if you didn't have an extra save it was back to the beginning.
- freetanga 2y agoI think the genre has gotten smaller, but higher quality. Games are more a work of love than a marketing hype. Thimbleweed Park, Kathy Rain, whispers of a machine, Disco Elyseum, Unusual Findings, Sexy Brutale, Darside Detective, blacksad, obra-dimm, takes two, Orwell, unheard, shadows of a doubt, 12 minutes… I actually enjoy these slow-burn games a lot
- ykonstant 2y agoI do agree the quality has increased significantly; we view old adventure games through quite a bit of rose-tint and tend to ignore significant warts. To add to your great selection, I think the whole Blackwell series is a modern adventure game masterpiece.
- pfdietz 2y ago> blacksad Is that based on the comic?
- cmiller1 2y agoTo be entirely fair, the guy who wrote this article CREATED Thimbleweed Park.
- soneca 2y agoThe linked post about who killed adventure games is pretty good too: https://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/79.html https://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/79.html
- andrewstuart 2y agoOff topic but I find gendered writing really jarring and every time I read “she” instead of “he” I get jerked out of the flow of understanding. I get why the authors do it …. they don’t want to be sexist, so they flip he to she. It’s much easier to read the gender neutral “they” rather than “she”. For me anyway.
- susam 2y agoThe article is from 1989 and this used to be one of the common writing styles back then. Of course, times have changed now and (at least to my ears) "they" sounds more natural than "she" in the current century.
- andrewstuart 2y ago>> The article is from 1989 and this used to be one of the common writing styles back then I’m from the past and that’s not my recollection.
- relaxing 2y agoYou probably blocked it out in an act of small-minded cognitive dissonance.
- TillE 2y agoTabletop RPG books c. 1989 were doing all kinds of stuff with generic pronouns. I believe Vampire (1991) primarily but not exclusively used "she". Other games would use "she" for the GM and "he" for players, stuff like that.
- illusive4080 2y agoClassically ‘he’ was used to be more universal. It was always understood to include women as well. But that language is frowned upon. When I read ‘they’ I think plural people not singular like ‘he.’
- oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
- twoodfin 2y agoNot an adventure game, but it’s amusing the degree to which Infocom & Douglas Adams flaunted rules like this to the extreme of high art for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
- oneeyedpigeon 2y agoI wondered if at least some of Gilbert's criticism was aimed at HHGttG. I'm sure there's at least one case of "pick it up early on or you'll later find out you've wasted most of the game" and one of his 'bad puzzle' descriptions sounded like it could have been a nod to the infamous Babel fish puzzle. HHGttG was incredibly well written and creative, but I think it was probably a bit 'mid' as an adventure game.
- egypturnash 2y agoInfocom made (almost) nothing but adventure games. From 1980-1989 they made no less than thirty-nine text adventures. And a database. Which lead directly to their downfall. They never made a point-and-click adventure game, but they were the kings of the adventure game when you could make a pretty compelling argument that the images the home computers of the time could produce were much cruder than what words could evoke in the mind of the player.
- djur 2y agoInfocom games were adventure games, just text adventures. The tricks in Hitchhiker's are fun but not really great for playability. The Interactive Fiction community has spent the last few decades trying to figure out ways to get that same kind of surprise and lateral thinking into a game without making it feel unfair. Most of those games are for people far more advanced in their puzzle thinking than I. ("flouted" not "flaunted")
- pteraspidomorph 2y agoI appreciate the dig at Sierra games and their reliance on missable items. But he wrote that puzzles should make sense, and went on to give us the rubber chicken with a pulley in the middle!
- oneeyedpigeon 2y agoI think that chicken was a satirical dig along the very same lines. IIRC, it clearly described the pulley and the resulting puzzle - using a pulley on a wire - isn't exactly cryptic.
- robinsonb5 2y agoAs opposed to, say, the "monkey" wrench in MI2?
- davidgay 2y agoThat one's particularly terrible for non-Americans, as I (a native English speaker) had never heard the term. I forget how we figured that one out...
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- BeetleB 2y agoI prefer to call them interactive narratives as opposed to interactive movies. Aside: What Remains of Edith Finch is perhaps the most powerful narrative game ever. Not an adventure game per se. But extremely powerful storytelling.
- ykonstant 2y agoI love it too; I also love the secret layouts of the house.
- o11c 2y agoFull title is much less click-baity: Why Adventure Games Suck And What We Can Do About It (1989)
- jncfhnb 2y agoInteresting parallels to games today. > It is bad design to put puzzles and situations into a game that require a player to die in order to learn what not to do next time. I feel like this is not good advice anymore. Nowadays dying is more common in games and less intrusive. In some games it’s even canonical that the character is dying. It’s become less intrusive and thus more ok. Even for puzzles I think this is bad advice. Puzzles probably engage the player more when they’re solved right or solved wrong; vs when they’re either solved right or in limbo of not being solved yet. It encourages feedback on your solving path.
- jprete 2y agoThe modern version would be "don't severely penalize players for failures they can't prevent". I think in 1989 having to start over was considered less of a punishment, because games tended to clock in at low-single-digit hours with perfect play (assuming the game could even be finished).
- Auracle 2y agoNobody wants to replay the portion that they’ve figured out again and again to get to the part they haven’t. It took game developers a long time to figure that one out, for some reason. Heck, they still sometimes put a checkpoint too far back, but that probably comes down to testing. I’d say Super Meat Boy was probably a big turning point as far as that goes.
- Almondsetat 2y agoLudonarrative dissonance is, I think, my biggest turn off in gaming. Problem is, the vast majority of games have it because they try to be like movies with a set story and cutscenes and dialogue. So yes, to me Adventure games suck and utterly destroy my suspension of disbelief without fail
- sqeaky 2y agoI'm not familiar with that word, Ludonarrative, but yeah constant interruptions to suspension of disbelief are a huge pain in the ass. And the Wikipedia page on it goes into deep and nuanced examples when we have just basic failures. I'm not just talking point and click adventure games, I mean any game that breaks its own rules just gets on my nerves. If it's a Sci-Fi setting you tell me there's FTL, fine but then when I can't use that in a context where it it follows the other game rules to do a thing I want to do, that just ruins it for me. How many open World RPGs are there with just invisible walls in a place that looks totally passable? When in cutscenes or story elements the characters can just walk through that area or have no problem turning on the FTL. I know it's a lot of effort, but attention to detail hearing about the end result is the only real fix this kind of shit.
- giantrobot 2y ago> Ludonarrative This is describing the rules of a game as related to the narrative of the game. A ludonarrative dissonance would be the narrative of the game being "we need to hurry and rescue the thing!" but then the rules/mechanics of the game having no punishment for not actually hurrying and rescuing the thing or maybe no support for even understanding the time taken by the player. Similarly the mechanics of the game can clash with the narrative. The narrative says the player character is a strong hero but then with the game mechanics they're killed by a rat in the forest.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- parpfish 2y agoonce you learn that term, you see it everywhere in games. Two that always bug me: - game narrative introduces urgency (“we have to hurry up and catch X before it’s too late!”), but time doesn’t matter at all. And in fact you’re encouraged to grind away on sidequest and collect items before continuing that urgent main story - early game has a city surrounded by weak monsters and some local needs you to hunt down a few that have been bothering them. two towns over there’s another town of normal people surrounded by monsters 100x stronger but they don’t care or need your help.
- asimpletune 2y agoDoes anyone else think Guysbrush Threepwood is based off of Burt Lancaster?
- dang 2y agoRelated: Why Adventure Games Suck (1989) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32936015 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32936015 - Sept 2022 (57 comments) Why Adventure Games Suck (1989) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22625578 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22625578 - March 2020 (104 comments) Why Adventure Games Suck (1989) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15569221 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15569221 - Oct 2017 (1 comment)
- mancerayder 2y agoHas anyone tried Lucy Dreaming? It's first of all a British version of games like Monkey Island (which inspired it) including dry British wit Secondly the puzzles are hard but very very reasonable, as in I never felt they were unfair. I think they did that as a lesson from the classics, where sometimes Brute Force was the only way objects and environment needed to interact to unlock more of the game. An enormous amount of thought was put into it, and I hope more games come out like it. I'm truly tired of FPS, grinding 'work simulator ' type games, and multiplayer games which predominate on Steam.
- insane_dreamer 2y ago> at the beginning the player should have a clear vision as to what he or she is trying to accomplish. Nothing is more frustrating than wandering around wondering what you should be doing and if what you have been doing is going to get you anywhere. I disagree. Discovering what it is you're supposed to do is one of the most exciting parts of such games. Myst is the classic example of this. It's like those movies, like the Bourne Identity, where the character wakes up and doesn't know who they are or what they are supposed to do, and has to figure it out as they go along.
- antifa 2y agoI liked Hugo's house of horrors 1, 2, and 3 back in the day, but probably wouldn't play a modern version of it in this day and age. LLMs would be an interesting technology for the genre however.
- quitit 2y agoI love Ron Gilbert's games, he's vastly experienced, and his association alone is sufficient to get me to buy any new adventure title; but I cannot understand why he thought it would be ok to use Deus ex machina¹ for the ending of Monkey Island 2 and the relatively recent Return to Monkey Island. Both of these endings are ruinous to the world he so carefully and beautifully imagined. I just can't grasp what message he was trying to send by trashing his own IP that way. I would honestly like to know. Is it like Notch with Minecraft? Were Monkey Island fans endlessly harassing him? The purpose of Return to Monkey Island seemed to be to address that awkward ending, and (spoiler alert) he doubled down. ¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deus_ex_machina https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deus_ex_machina
- sgbeal 2y agoNoting that it's dated 2004 and starts with: > I wrote this back in 1989...
- lifeisstillgood 2y agoIt was a retrospective publication - after he “retired” the first time. The guy was making workd wide popular games while I was still at school, And write this as part of a mission to ground his next game design and shared it internally. Plus this was pre www! Then he republished it years later