Things That Disappeared from Third-Person Adventure Games

[MRY]

Hopefully this is not repeating an existing thread. (I believe there was a thread along these lines about RPGs.) For something I'm mulling, I was curious to see whether I am forgetting any features that once existed but now largely do not in third-person adventures -- which is to say, point-and-clicks, their progenitors, and their successors. I am deliberately excluding Myst-like games.

The ones that seem most obvious to me:
- Parser.
- Verb bar (whether Sierra or Lucas), or, put another way, a large number of ways of interacting with a given hotspot.
- Death.
- Dead ends / walking-dead scenarios (i.e., where an earlier mistaken decision makes it impossible to complete the game no matter how you proceed, but it is not apparent to the player that he has lost).
- Mazes.
- Large inventories.
- Fairly open worlds.

I would also say that there has been a shift toward more elaborate dialogue.

Any big stuff I'm missing?

 

[jfrisby]

Full screen, click anywhere, look/interaction responses.

 

[MRY]

Not sure I understand what this one is -- do you mean it used to be that the hotspots were concealed, such that the player could click anywhere on the scene and expect some kind of interaction (either the "fall through" response if there was no hotspot, or the relevant, but concealed, hotspot)?

(This would be like a Sierra feature from KQV through KQVI era, right?)

 

[jfrisby]

Yeah, the concealed hotspots of Sierra-likes from that era. A few other companies did that too... I remember Backpacker did it, amongst others.

I think having hover-able hotspots generally led to less of them:

This is a count of "unique" responses. (crappy hotspot labels, I know...)

 

[Infinitron]

I would also say that there has been a shift toward more elaborate dialogue.

I think there's been a shift from protagonists who are at least partly meant to be understood as quasi-player avatars to protagonists who are truly characters in their own story.

Compare what you learn about the inner life and history of a playable character in Technobabylon compared to any golden age adventure. Even Gabriel Knight, which presaged the more modern type of adventure game protagonist, doesn't reveal as much of the titular character's personal history as the average Wadjet Eye adventure. If GK was a Wadjet Eye adventure there'd be flashback scenes of him as a kid after his parents died or in high school with Mosely or something.

 

[MRY]

Yeah, the concealed hotspots of Sierra-likes from that era. A few other companies did that too... I remember Backpacker did it, amongst others.

I think having hover-able hotspots generally led to less of them:

(crappy hotspot labels, I know...)

Wow, I'd never seen such a demonstration. It's funny, it's been so long since I played a Sierra game -- let alone a Sierra game without knowing what to do -- that I'd forgotten how many hotspots there are. I definitely think that there was been a drop in hotspots, but until seeing this, I had no idea how big a drop. I always thought Primordia was excessively generous with a dozen in a scene, whereas this has 34!

Are there such graphics for other games or did you just whip this up?

Infinitron I agree, though I think this was a change taking place already during the Golden Age of Sierra/Lucas games.

 

[MRY]

Do you mean like how you could speed up or slow down the game with a slider?

 

[MRY]

I couldn't remember if it was a walk-speed slider or a game-speed slider. I remember even as a kid finding it a little silly because at high speeds the character looked so goofy.

 

[V_K]

For something I'm mulling, I was curious to see whether I am forgetting any features that once existed but now largely do not in third-person adventures -- which is to say, point-and-clicks, their progenitors, and their successors. [...] Any big stuff I'm missing?

Puzzles.

 

[MRY]

 

[Blackthorne]

I was definitely the kind of adventure gamer that loved interaction with the screen. When I was a kid, playing earlier Sierra games, typing things into the parser was half the fun - discovery. I'd spend a lot of time in just one room, looking for secret things, things I'd missed, etc. It wasn't always about rushing through the game so quick - and when you DID discover something hidden - be it useful or just a joke/easter egg, it was amazing.

I was really into that when making Quest for Infamy - we tried to put in so many hotspots and interactions. The narrator dialogue was just loaded with responses to exploring things. There's still bits people haven't found in QFI that I'm waiting to hear about. Making Space Quest 2 really fueled this as well - not only did the original AGI game have a lot of interactions, we added the taste and smell icons to the point & click interface, so we had to write all those interactions and that was really a lot of fun. I definitely miss that in adventure games.

The lack of death is another one; we had deaths in Quest for Infamy and we had a lot of fun with them. You had to have them in a game like that - it's an RPG adventure, there's combat, etc. We tried to avoid a lot of ridiculous adventure game death, but I do think you need that sense of "danger".

We did a game with no deaths in it (Order of the Thorne: The King's Challenge) as an experiment, really. In the initial design, we had some deaths, but we saw that modern adventure gamers didn't "like deaths" so as a challenge to ourselves, we made a game without it. It led to some design challenges and I appreciated that - but I do wish we'd had deaths in that game. In fact, I still muse over doing an update of the game where you can choose a mode that has deaths if you like - which can lead to some alternate gaming situations and scenarios. If I get some time in the future, I may still do that. In our next installment of OotT, I'm definitely having deaths. (I'll either have auto-save or "replay" for the whingers).

I'm also a fan of the parser, but it's a pain in the ass to program. Only in its time consumption, really, though. If you had a team with like one guy who JUST did the parser, it'd be cool.


Bt