MRY
Wormwood Studios
This is inevitably going to come out the wrong way, but I'm curious how old you are. At least in my recollection, adventure games were by far the best visuals in their era.No, I did not agree with that. I agreed that in general, adventure games had aesthetically pleasing visuals. That does not mean they had 'better graphics' than other genres. And it only applies to backgrounds. They definitely did not have better animations than other genres, at least not obviously so.We agree that for at least a decade, adventure games had better graphics than any other genre.
For instance, Loom came out in 1990. This is what Loom looked like:
(Of course I'm cherry-picking.)
And here's a big budget RPG of the same era:
Of course there were other good looking games, but adventure games really were at the very top.
Oh, sure, I was using graphics as shorthand. Pick your own lingo! Adventure games developers tended to care a ton about aesthetics, and the best-remember adventure games tended to be the most aesthetically pleasing. Those games were also, often, technically advanced from a graphical standpoint too.Aesthetically pleasing/good graphics != defined by graphics though
I took your premise to be that adventure gamers care less about visuals (graphics, aesthetics, <SystermUser> is welcome to select his own terminology) than other genre fans. A kind counter-indicator is that capitalist adventure game developers poured huge amounts of resources into visuals and were always trying to be cutting edge -- pushing technical limits as well as striving for aesthetics.We went from acknowledging something that was generally done well to somehow assuming its the most defining feature ? How and by what virtue ?
¯\_(ツ)_/¯Well, the budget thing is funny. Like I've mentioned before, adventure games are generally static, have a well-defined state machine, and not reactive, so programming and QA'ing them obviously doesnt take a genius or a huge team.
I'm sure people can do great adventures using wintermute or adventure game engine or whatever is popular right now. Adventure games are low-cost if you don't do graphics/animation. or voice acting.
Primordia had a lot more testers than artists, that's for sure.
Really, if you make a VGA adventure game, none of it is very expensive. You probably could hire people to make a standard WEG game for ~$60k.
I think we're talking past each other. I'm not saying that adventures should be about graphics, merely that nothing about the genre's history suggests its fans are more tolerant of bad visuals than are fans of other genres.Sure, big studios spent most of their budget on making good graphics because they could and those games were in demand back then. So obviously good graphics will cost the most in making an adventure game.
Simply because for most of those other (ie, non graphics) things they had things in place. Listening to Schafer talk about GF, they had lots of problems moving to the new engine, yet they still had tons of things in-house to help them with that. And that's with a very risky move to improve graphics which ultimately probably cost them in mainstream as it was a market flop.
I would like to think (again, Im not one, so obviously it's just speculation) the modern day indie adventure developer spends more time thinking about dialogues, setting, story, characters, puzzles, etc. They are easier to make than great graphics
I disagree pretty strongly. The number of adventure games with spectacular visuals in the past twenty years is significant. Even just looking at very small indies, you have Stasis, Paradigm, Dropsy, the WEG catalog, etc. The baseline expectation is that an indie adventure game will be roughly comparable visually to adventure games from the 1990s onward. When was the last adventure game that was as well designed as those games? I can't think of any.
Everyone thinks that game design is a joke because we know we can't draw or make music but don't know we can't design puzzles or write well.
[/quote]atmosphere != graphics. graphics is a subset of atmosphere.
if I can get 'atmosphere' reading a book or playing a text adventure game, then atmosphere can surely exist on its own. no doubt graphics contribute to it, but it's not a dependency.
Of course, I said as much myself. But other genres are not dependent on atmosphere at all.
I like puzzles too and am something of an evangelist for them in their waning days in the P&C genre. But even really great P&C puzzles, like the spitting puzzle in MI2, is only cool in the context of its atmosphere.that's arguable and probably subjective. I would disagree, but I am a puzzle lover though, so I am biased and I will not argue here.It's puzzle solving, but the puzzles aren't particularly interesting without atmosphere.
(Again, true puzzle-oriented games like Myst are different.)
So you agree, the less you are forced to DEPEND on graphics, the better you have to make other components ? That's precisely what I want from adventure games. Other components. I can replace the background with my imagination if everything else is great. Sure, in some cases, it'd be tough - it would be tough to replace Blade Runner or TLJ cyberpunk visuals with ugly pixels, but I would think it's more than possible due to strength of them as games first and not photoalbums with interactivity. If a picture is worth a thousand words, so instead of relying on that picture to say only 10 words, if every developer and designer uses their skills to the maximum and produces 1000 words for that picture (and if thats the tradeoff, make the picture worse), the picture's worth would be less and at some point it would be replaceable.
The saying that a picture is worth a thousand words is a shorthand for saying words can't replace pictures, not a proposal to replace visual media with long-winded text.
Yes, without good visuals adventure games need to draw their atmosphere from elsewhere. But since good visuals are relatively easy -- easier in fact than other forms of evoking atmosphere -- I'm not sure this is a solution. A lot of mediocre words don't make up for nice visuals.
Anyway, if you want thousands of words and no visuals, a bunch of us are doing a long-winded interview with Chris Picone about adventure game design, which someday will be posted. Here's my take on puzzles, though my responses my change as the editing process goes on:
One of the great tragedies of the point-and-click adventure game scene of the past 20 years has been the flight from puzzles. The Old Man Murray “adventure games killed themselves” thesis has become so ingrained that it is now conventional wisdom that 1990s adventure game puzzles were all hopelessly illogical and impossible to fathom even with hindsight and hint-lines. But if you probe someone complaining about “moon logic” and ask them to give examples of “illogical” puzzles, they usually can’t get past Gabriel Knight 3’s cat-fur moustache. The same is true of the “pixel hunting” complaint. Even avid adventure gamers would be hard pressed to come up with more than a couple instances where it was really an issue. “Moon logic” has become shorthand for “I got stuck at a puzzle”; “pixel hunting” for “I missed an object.”
When a valid particularized criticism hardens into a truism about the genre as a whole, it blinds critics. It blinds gamers. And then it blind developers. In fact, the overwhelming majority of classic adventure game puzzles did not suffer from moon logic. Instead, the overwhelming majority either employed straightforward logic (distracting a monkey with a moving banana) or alluded to established tropes in the game’s particular genre (using ants to find a needle in a haystack in King’s Quest V or using smoke to reveal lasers in Space Quest IV). And the best of them (the very best being the spitting puzzle in Monkey Island 2) involved overlapping elements of environmental observation, study of the “rules” governing some phenomenon, experimentation with those rules, and lateral thinking. Moreover, almost all of these puzzles served as a way to showcase the protagonist’s personality -- whether Graham’s gentleness in King’s Quest V or Bobbin’s sorcerer’s-apprentice bumbling in Loom or the literal rigidity of Sonny Bonds in Police Quest.
The craft that lay behind the puzzles involved both science and art, and like other fields of endeavour, its output provides a repository of hard-won wisdom. If we write these puzzles off as bullshit, trolling, or idiocy, we may feel better about ourselves in contrast to our forebears, but the price of that smug satisfaction is high for designers (and consumers) of adventure games. We pay in our own ignorance.
The gulf between the research and analysis (and resulting sophistication) of the best “amateur” text adventure developers, folks like Emily Short or Andrew Plotkin, and the relative ignorance of contemporary point-and-click developers is startling. Indeed, that gulf is equally vast if you compare the research and analysis that, say, Ben Chandler of WEG gives to adventure game artwork to the utter lack of comparable research and analysis from any adventure game designer of our generation.
The fact of the matter is, modern point-and-click puzzle design is terrible compared to either modern text adventure puzzles or classic point-and-click puzzles. I include myself most of all in that criticism; Primordia’s puzzles are generally mediocre “use A on B,” “ask A about B,” or “combine A with B” stuff, and some of them are genuinely bad because they break character (Horatio sawing off Goliath’s finger and shoving it up his nose) or internal logic (Crispin tying the cable when he has no hands) or external logic (needing to adhere the bomblet to the dome door in order to blow the door open).
Unfortunately, there are few incentives to improve in this regard. Because of the entrenched anti-puzzle truism, because studying and developing puzzles is very hard work, because professional reviewers are happier when they can breeze through a game, because Let’s Play streams work better when the LPer isn’t sitting there stumped, because frustrated players leave negative reviews while unchallenged players seldom do (though I was pleased to recently received such a negative review on Steam!), it is easier to simply remove puzzles -- to subtract something good -- than to preserve and improve upon them.
That is a real loss to the genre, and it’s a real loss to the players who, I think, could learn to overcome their anti-puzzle prejudice and rediscover the special joy of solving P&C puzzles -- that strange sense that you have reached across time and space to shake hands with the designer, that his or her puns and veiled references and train of logic may be distinctive, but they are comprehensible. Equal to the flash of satisfaction in that aha moment is the flash of recognition: solving a puzzle in an adventure game, like reading a scene in a book, can reveal that the player’s apparent idiosyncrasies are in fact shared by an author somewhere out there in the world. “You are not alone.”
On that point, I think it’s no surprise that the stock adventure game protagonist for most of the golden age was lonely. The most dramatic examples might be Bobbin Threadbare, “Gwydion,” and Brandon, but Larry Laffer, Roger Wilco, Guybrush Threepwood and many others are essentially lonely outsiders as well. This was not a Sierra or LucasArts trope; it was pan-developer. These characters appealed to the designers and players because I suspect many of them sometimes felt out of sync, and out of the in-group, in their day-to-day lives. The quasi-communicative act of solving a puzzle posed by the game’s designer was a form of recognition. That was true for me, at any rate. When Bobbin and I solved a puzzle the same way, I felt a kinship not just with him but with Brian Moriarty. Puzzles and puzzle solutions were also something to talk about and share with similarly offbeat friends.
Of course, my general view is that all game development is a blessing (a word with its etymological roots, rightly, in “bloody”) and that we should celebrate every game. The last thing I would do is suggest that games that eliminate or derogate puzzles shouldn’t be made; every developer has his own devil or muse or genius whispering in his ear, and that counsel should be heeded above my tantruming. But I worry that uprooting puzzles from adventure games isn’t so much a matter of weeding as of wholesale transformation, a transformation that ends with replacing challenge and exploration and even self-realization with the comforts of a manicured garden.