I see the zealot has recovered his faith.So basically LucasArts was the original 'new shit' and arguably dumbed down the genre, which is why faggots who don't like challenging games are more fond of them?
I see the zealot has recovered his faith.
Ultimately, illogical puzzles and surprise deaths are not "challenge" in any meaningful sense,* any more than a game of Russian roulette is "challenging," any more than popamole combat with HP bloat is challening. The best Lucas puzzles were much more interesting and engaging than the best Sierra puzzles. Not even Sierra fans believe that the stereotypical Sierra kind of "challenge" was good: hence Codename: Iceman's being singled out for scorn. Nor do most Sierra fans prefer the parser games: it's the Lucas-chasing verb bar SCI games that most people remember fondly. In any case, I'm not sure why liking Monkey Island should preclude liking QFG, or vice versa. Both companies made some well-crafted adventures.
(* Incidentally, that doesn't mean that illogical puzzles and surprise deaths are purely negative. The deaths in SQ, for example, are a key part of the fun.)
I guess I have two qualms with this line of argument.I think it was Lucas Arts' focus on getting a tale told that paved the way to companies like TellTale.
Don't discount the fact that Lucasarts existed as a company far later. That allows a company to expose its games to new audiences, since people will take a second look at any game from a company they trust.
But then, there's also the changing philosophy of games. All of the old adventure game companies - not just Sierra - made games with crazy death and screwable puzzles. Infocom's titles, for one, were loaded down with that stuff. It was part of the philosophy of making them games. When Lucasarts started doing its thing, there was a big debate about whether their titles were even games at all, since you couldn't lose them. And something you can't lose, how is it a game?
There were people who refused to even buy Lucasarts titles for that reason alone.
But times change. The great war of game versus not game was won by Lucasarts.
Don't discount the fact that Lucasarts existed as a company far later. That allows a company to expose its games to new audiences, since people will take a second look at any game from a company they trust. Sierra may have sold more in the day, but Lucasarts has had a much longer reach. That has been a factor in the memories of many companies.
But then, there's also the changing philosophy of games. All of the old adventure game companies - not just Sierra - made games with crazy death and screwable puzzles. Infocom's titles, for one, were loaded down with that stuff. It was part of the philosophy of making them games. When Lucasarts started doing its thing, there was a big debate about whether their titles were even games at all, since you couldn't lose them. And something you can't lose, how is it a game?
There were people who refused to even buy Lucasarts titles for that reason alone.
But times change. The great war of game versus not game was won by Lucasarts. These days, no fail state is an advantage. It's desired. Having to be careful, to be mindful of your environment, to pay attention to little clues, and to have backup saves - these are seen as bad things today. And not only that, those who were on the wrong side of the Lucasarts debate were mostly an older crew, and many of them just left the hobby when the other adventure game companies all died. So, they're not even around to see the revival.
I see the zealot has recovered his faith.
Ultimately, illogical puzzles and surprise deaths are not "challenge" in any meaningful sense,* any more than a game of Russian roulette is "challenging," any more than popamole combat with HP bloat is challening. The best Lucas puzzles were much more interesting and engaging than the best Sierra puzzles. Not even Sierra fans believe that the stereotypical Sierra kind of "challenge" was good: hence Codename: Iceman's being singled out for scorn. Nor do most Sierra fans prefer the parser games: it's the Lucas-chasing verb bar SCI games that most people remember fondly. In any case, I'm not sure why liking Monkey Island should preclude liking QFG, or vice versa. Both companies made some well-crafted adventures.
(* Incidentally, that doesn't mean that illogical puzzles and surprise deaths are purely negative. The deaths in SQ, for example, are a key part of the fun.)
Almost a good theory, except, you know, most of old Lucas Arts catalogue was basically abandonware for better part of last 15 years.
That on the other hand, is a good theory. That's exactly what I meant, when I said that after first MI Sierra was left playing catchup. Sierra games may won the sales, but on the front of design philosophy, Sierra was annihilated. Lucas Arts, for better worse, created a template for entire genre which persists to this very day.
edit: I can't english.
Lucasarts existed as a company making games for all those years. Sierra lived on only in zombie mode after Chainsaw Monday.LucasArts stopped making adventures in 2000, Sierra stopped making adventures in 1999. Their adventure game careers ended roughly the same time, and as far as companies go, Sierra existed until 2008 as an actual company. LucasArts until 2013. Not that big of a gap.
This is one of those tricky things about fans and companies. A company can build up trust with its fanbase. Once that trust is there, when people see that logo, they will give that item a second look. Two games, both with dated graphics that are a turnoff to McModern Dude. But one has the logo. That one just got a second look. McModern still might not buy, because he is after all a McModern, but that second look is all-important for the potential to exist for a buy.Telengard said:Don't discount the fact that Lucasarts existed as a company far later. That allows a company to expose its games to new audiences, since people will take a second look at any game from a company they trust.
Almost a good theory, except, you know, most of old Lucas Arts catalogue was basically abandonware for better part of last 15 years.
Also, a big difference between Sierra and LA wherein Sierra was dominant was in their level of interactivity. In most games, nearly everything on the screen was interactive in some way - a great holdover from the text adventure games. In the more mature games, this allowed for a high level of detail
Flashforward to KQ5, and almost all interaction with the environment is eliminated. No longer could you type the most zany things you could think of into the game; No, now your action was limited to four cursors which had a limited amount of responses to any given action - and in KQ5 in particular, clicking on many areas would result in a giant red X popping up, indicating the game wasn't interactive in this or that part of the screen; the game, while it didn't hold you by the hand, you were only able to do what the designers wanted for any given screen, and the list of available interactions for any given part of the screen was very limited.
But maybe you're not including KQ in the "most games."And no, everything was NOT clickable in KQ5 or KQ6. A lot of irrelevant crap like bushes and trees were in KQ6. The only thing which stood out to me about KQ6 as far as clickableness was if you clicked on a character; you then got Alexander's POV of that character - that was cool. But I've always found a lot of the text in KQ6 both clinically written, and irrelevant. There's a reason KQ5 succeeds even without as much clickbait.
The difference between Sierra puzzles and Lucas puzzles in my experience -- which is quite dated -- is that generally speaking the major part of Sierra puzzles was finding the items and avoiding death or walking-dead scenarios, whereas in Lucas games you had to figure out what you wanted to do, and observe the environment to figure out how to do that with the items you have. IMHO the best of these is the spitting puzzle in MI2, but there are plenty of them throughout the series. The lack of insta-death means that you can experiment to figure out what does what and how they interact, and with that information can work through the logic of the puzzles.Thing is, the illogical nature of the puzzles in Sierra games is oversold. You got more out of the moon logic in KQ than in the other series.
I'm not really sure what Lucas games you're thinking of in this regard. I don't remember finding Sierra games particularly more difficult than Lucas games -- if anything, I think I struggled more with the latter. It's just that the way I played Sierra games tended to involve constant saving and hotspot hoovering.Wracking your brain is a good exercise, it makes the game much more interactive, rather than "oh the solution is right here."
This is the kind of silly sloganeering that got you into trouble the last time. The notion that Sierra's games were somehow edgy, mature products compared to Lucas games is nonsensical. It's true that you had sophomoric stuff like LSL, but for the most part Sierra's games were incredibly adolescent in their humor and their drama. I mean, the pinnacle of Sierra's catalogue to most fanboys is KQ6, which manages to combine a yuk-yuk cross-dressing sequence with "a single tear." The best Sierra games are the ones least interested in the adolescent image of maturity: the Quest for Glory series.I've always looked at LucasArts as being the more accessible, family friendly Sierra. Safe games for safe people.
Well, you are entitled to consider the moon to be made of cheese, but I don't think you'd be right there, either. It's true that Loom has a couple dubious things ("Music by Tchaikovsky" struck me as pretentious even as a kid), but it's not even in the same ballpark as GK2. Honestly, I think you'd have to delve deep in jRPGs to find anything that could even brush up against GK2 in this regard.I consider Loom to be "self important".
Well, since Loom isn't a "space-themed adventure game" . . . .I find Space Quest to be a much more invigorating space-themed adventure game than say Loom.
?the stories they told were zany and more like a cartoonized version of real life than anything else
LucasArts' games are basically, in my opinion, Myst-type games with characters. No risk, no real reward.
I see a lot of lucasarts lovers complaining about 'instant death' like it's the major sin sierra made.
No. I don't see it. You can't have, say, QFG without 'instant death', and all those funny jokes making fun of the player for being a dumbass being gone.
I think it's exactly that the problem. Putting the player on a pedestal so that his mistakes and idiocy is rewarded with a pat on the head and a joke is the anomalous design zeitgeist. No game that calls itself a game allows a player to be dumb and essentially rewarded for it. Sierra deaths are funny, sometimes further the story and are punishing (if you're a idiot that doesn't save after major puzzles anyway).
Even if the result of the two is essentially the same (if you save), the feel is different. I don't like the feel that the gameworld is accommodating the MC.
Also a lucasarts 'puzzle reset' joke can be fun (but usually isn't) but it will never show a 'long perspective' of what comes after your MC is gone, which i quite like in the Sierra deaths.
Not a very convincing argument because many many games in both companies had 'open worlds'