This is probably one of the most retarded and damaging articles in the history of the Gaming industry.
http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...dventure-games-die.104725/page-2#post-4250952
Oh shut up, he's right on the money.
Yes, I know what you want to do with me. I read your "rant". Your rant is missing perspective because you're missing an important piece of the picture:
Adventure games were purposefully designed to be obtuse, to have convoluted and illogical solutions to their puzzles. It's in their roots. (Note that it's only once adventure games start moving away from that fact, that they really start to become popular. More on that later.)
Why is that? Because they weren't originally designed by committee to appeal to the lowest common denominator, they were designed by the handful of people that actually had the talent to code and write above fan-fiction level, for an 'audience' that maybe numbered a couple thousand people back then. But none of the people involved there were game designers... mainly because it would take another 15 years before someone could stake a legitimate claim to that title!
The first of these obtuse, illogical puzzles is found in the granddaddy of all Adventure games... Colossal Cave Adventure. Solve this puzzle without looking it up online (an aspect of adventure gaming I'll get to later):
You are in a secret canyon which exits to the north and east.
A huge fierce green dragon bars the way!
The dragon is sprawled out on a persian rug!
The goal of Colossal Cave Adventure is to get as much treasure as possible. That persian rug is treasure, but you can't get it while there's a living green dragon about. So the dragon has to go. IIRC every puzzle solution in Colossal Cave Adventure is straightforward, sensible and realistic: To traverse darkness you need light, otherwise you'll trip and kill yourself. The light runs on batteries that need replacing if they run out, so you need to find a vendor that has batteries, etc. So following the established logic of the game (and to play on fantasy tropes) an obvious suggestion is to type
>kill dragon ... if only to see what happens.
The game responds:
With what? Your bare hands?
That's the game's first attempt at humor, and it suggests that you need an item to slay the dragon with.
Or do you?!?
The solution to this puzzle makes sense when you think about it, but it doesn't make sense within the confines of the game because it goes against the established logic: Straightforward, sensible and realistic.
Want more examples? King's Quest 1. There's a gnome there that wants you to guess his name, which is a direct reference to Rumplestiltskin. (Then again so is every relevant thing in the game, as the entire game is based on well-known fairy tales.) So obviously someone is gonna put two and two together and guess Rumplestiltskin. Except that's not the right answer, and the only further clue you're given is that this guess is close. An in-game note found in a gingerbread house (more fairy tales) says that "it may be wise to think backwards", though it never refers to any specific puzzle or course of action for that wisdom. So of course someone will eventually try to guess his name backwards. Except that's also wrong.
What else is needed?
You also have to reverse the entire alphabet, then type out the name.
While that second step of the puzzle follows the clues given, it's also a step too far as it's completely unnecessary.
Unless...
Unless you're Roberta Williams and you're just making it all up, based on fairy tales you were taught as a kid. And having the puzzles directly based on those fairy tales is too easy, and will thin out your game. So you take it a step further, for no other reason than to give players something to do and pad out your game.
This is how games were made in the 1980s. And strangely enough, the gamers of the 1980s liked it that way. For two reasons: It's all that they knew, and they were a small, niche group of people that were actually smart enough to be able to use computers back then. They
wanted games that challenged their intellect.
So adventure game developers saw reason to put obtuse, illogical puzzles in their game, because that's what sold back then.
Then some greedy fucker thought that there's money to be made in there somewhere, and that's where clue books and later the hint lines, enter the picture. Having trouble with an adventure game puzzle? Just plonk down $20 for a pamphlet that has all the answers! That too much for you? Then dial a 1-800-number and you get all the answers you need... at a price that may actually surpass that $20. As the devs/publishers wanted people to buy those clue books and call those hint lines, they purposefully made the puzzles in their games
even more obtuse and illogical. And that piece of 'game design', to purposefully make your game hard while selling the solution for a price on the side, became the main driving point for Adventure Games from then onwards.
Except three things happened which exposed this little racket: Games became more user-friendly, the computers running them became more accessible, and the gamer demographic shifted dramatically. In other words, LucasArts, Windows and Doom happened. And behind all three of them lies the same underlying force: Money.
Now adventure game players suddenly found that they had a choice: Play an adventure game that punishes them mercilessly for trying to force-solve its obtuse puzzles, or play an adventure game that doesn't. Combined with the shift from a parser-based interface to a point 'n' click one, adventure games suddenly found themselves being played by millions more people than they had previously. This is why Sierra On-Line lost the crown to LucasArts. But these new millions weren't actually as smart as the 1980s gamers - they were just smart enough to use the next generation of computers, the ones where they could use a GUI to get a mouse-operated game up and running. And these not-so-smart gamers aren't really that fond of games that challenge their intellect, and they outnumber the ones that do. Then Doom hits and the corporate suits suddenly realize that there's real money to be made in the computer gaming market (as opposed to the console gaming market) and the quirky little anomaly known as the Adventure Game was doomed.
Adventure Games had to adapt or die. The hint line racket was dying out, and a larger audience meant more obtuse puzzles would be required. At least clue books were still a thing... until something called the Internet came about and someone realized that you can post the contents of a cluebook somewhere online without charging a dime for it. Finding the solution to a puzzle in an Adventure Game became easier than ever.
All of those events happening all at once should have killed the Adventure Game genre stone dead as early as 1995, but what gave Adventure Games a few year's reprieve was the arrival of the CD-ROM, probably the best form of copy protection the PC has ever seen. Just add a little extra charge on top of the game's retail value, and the genre was able to hang on for a few more years against an ever-growing number of gamers whom had an ever-decreasing desire to play intellectual games, as well as the constant demand for better, more realistic 3D graphics. But the final blow, the deathknell of the Adventure Game, was that it refused to change itself to adapt to the times. It was following de facto standards established in the mid-to-late 1970s, 20 years prior, in a market where 3 years marked an entire generation. Oh sure, it changed the graphics, added action sequences and cinematic cut-scenes, but the core aspect of the obtuse and illogical puzzles meant to challenge the intellects, remained. The culmination of that refusal to change is found in Gabriel Knight 3. That is what Old Man Murray is pointing out, the puzzles became too obtuse and too illogical even for the intellectuals.
Face the facts, Adventure Games were the proverbial Dodo-bird in a climate of constant evolution. They were kangz and sheet at one point, but once the predators and the masses showed up, it was only a question of time when they died out... as a mainstream genre. As has been proven several times since, Adventure Games can still find a market today as long as they think small and think clever... but even now the cycle is coming full circle again. In the deluge of shovelware titles we're seeing released today, there's already too many pixelated point 'n' click graphical adventure games rolling about. Adventure Games are about to die out... again.
Dexter's rant of "WE DIDN'T ASK FOR THIS" is the cry of the minority of players that still liked to have their intellects challenged in the late 1990s, against a force that doesn't care one bit about the concerns of
any minority. Doom made the gaming market shift its focus to appeal to the
lowest common denominator, and the lowest common denominator in gaming is too stupid to even spell those three words right. Tough titties, but there you go. Smash as many bottles in my face as you wish, IT DOES NOT CHANGE THE FACTS.
I can make similar Durandal-esque posts about several other genres: Dungeon crawlers, puzzle games, turn-based games, abstract games, etc. It's a long list, and it always comes down to the same conclusion: When forced to adapt or die, they chose not to adapt.
So they died.
The end.