Monday, January 17, 2005

Jon Tells It Like It Is

Over at Grumpy Gamer they're talking about why there are no adventure games being made anymore.

Now this is the topic of almost all comment threads over there, the Grumpy Gamer being Ron Gilbert of Monkey Island and Maniac Mansion fame, but as I read it I realised that I have a somewhat unique opinion about this issue.

I think the two reasons that no adventure games are made anymore are that 1) The classic adventure game interface is archaic, and 2) 'Adventure games don't sell' is a deeply held belief of the industry.

Lets start with the second point – adventure's like Kings Quest and Monkey Island were once the best selling franchises in the business, but as PC hardware improved they were eventually surpassed by more fast paced and acronym-mungus genres like FPS and RTS. This followed the trend of the gamer demographic moving from old geeks to 14 year olds who wanted blood and boobies. So it was understandable that the adventure genre declined. Nowadays the mainstream companies view it as a dead medium. But when was the last time one of them ever put out a real adventure game? The last one I can think of was Gabriel Knight 3, and that was over 5 years ago. While it wasn't a huge seller like Halo or Grand Theft Auto, it didn't exactly flop either. Look at The Longest Journey, one of the only attempts in recent times to make a classic adventure game. It was published by a small developer, in an unpopular genre, but still managed to get copies on store shelves even in New Zealand.(On top of all that it was a shit game too).

With the demographics of gamers broadening so much in recent years, you'd think that there would be a large potential audience for a more cerebral, less action-oriented style of gaming. But no, conventional wisdom says 'Halo and GTA made lots of money, lets do that!'. The end of Gabriel Knight 3 involved a series of jumping/timing action puzzles, in contrast to the logic and reasoning based puzzles throughout the rest of the game. Jane Jenson, the writer, said after releasing it that she felt like she had to put those last bits in, because any gameplay element that wasn't immediately obvious to understand made the company execs nod off during their demonstrations, they knew that only Action! and Danger! sold games.

My first point is just that one of the things that turns the modern gamer off recent attempts at the adventure genre is the antiquated interface. In the olden days an adventure game would let you indicate what to do by having a huge list of verbs at the bottom of the screen, (and you'd usually end up trying each of them in order on every object you could find when you were stuck). In later days these were combined into a single mouse pointer which could be changed into a variety of different modes in order to represent different ways of interacting with something. While it kind of made sense at the time, compared to other games out there at the moment, it's very non-intuitive, fiddly, and obstructive to gameplay. No one likes it when you realise 'Oh, I should have used 'turn' on the door handle instead of 'open'. Even Gabriel Knight 3 and The Longest Journey used the same kind of UI, despite their ambitions to break out of the adventure ghetto.

So, if I were given lots of money and told to make an adventure game, here's what I'd do:

  1. License the Doom3 engine (or maybe Source). We need lots of nifty graphics to impress the unwashed masses of the gaming press and the coke snorting suits who're paying us to make a game.

  2. Get someone with an established reputation like Ron Gilbert or Jane Jenson on board as a writer, to make sure we do end up with a game worth playing!

  3. Make sure the damn interface is good! My suggestion would be something along the lines of Splinter Cell. You walk up to something, and a list of potential actions appears. Get rid of the inventory too! No one likes having to try every object on every other one, because there's some obscure combination that will reward you with the solution to the puzzle. If you've got the right object in your position, it just brings up another option in the list when you get wherever you're supposed to use it.

It might not outsell The Sims, but I reckon there's no reason a game made along those lines wouldn't make money.

No comments: