I mean the objects that were needed to solve the puzzles in the episode could be carried over. Surely everyone would have picked those up, but if it's already been said that it won't happen I won't press the point.
I thought it was a good idea...
Thing is, I'm afraid of my current system specs not being up to par (haven't actually checked yet though) and I don't have a console system.
Well, just checked and it looks like my system is just above the bare minimum. But I still am afraid of a laggy experience. I will look into first thing when I get a new system (especially with OS X Leopard and Windows Vista coming), or (less likely) get one of those extremely expensive consoles.
Regarding the last DOTT puzzle--if I'm not mistaken, it involves Dr. Edison tied up, and the purple tentacle chasing you with a shrink-ray gun. To beat it, you simply tell Purple Tentacle to shoot Dr. Edison instead of you. I think the last puzzle in Culture Shock is very similar, but a bit more complex and difficult.
I mean the objects that were needed to solve the puzzles in the episode could be carried over. Surely everyone would have picked those up, but if it's already been said that it won't happen I won't press the point.
I thought it was a good idea...
Oh, it could be a great idea in certain circumstances. Certainly add to continuity between episodes.
Who's to say the spray can (for example) from Episode 1 won't be used agaiin in a later episode? But it's not as if someone who has only bought Episode 3 won't have access to the item, it would just be a standard item that people who have played the earlier episodes will recognise..
if it wasn't for the second to last, and last puzzle, i would have thought this game was a user paced story book interactive movie, more than an adventure game.
which is funny cause i was reading this interview with roberta williams who did kings quest, and she was trying to do just that, make an interactive story book, cept i'll bet the puzzles in kings quest one were a little harder. let's hope the next game ramps up, not by one but by 2 levels of difficulty muwahahaha
let our brains suffer... sufferrrrr... must find rope.
Irony is that I 'accidently' finished the last puzzle while just messing around with the options. I mean honestly.. I finished it and thought 'oh erm.. did I just miss an opportunity to think heavily on a puzzle?'
Honestly though, I understand Telltale are trying to focus on a large target audience but I think they need to make them a little more complicated. The game just flowed on automatically for me without really ever having to think for more than a few minutes. I loved the adventures where you'd really have to 'think' over possible solutions. Not too hard but just a little harder guys?
I just finished playing the game. It took me about four hours. I thought it was great. I like adventure games, played almost all the classics(including Hit the Road), but I am absolutely terrible at solving them; not only do I miss even obvious solutions, but I get frustrated far too quickly. Only once or twice have I ever completed a game without using a walkthrough - and this is one of the fortunate cases where I didn't need one. I got the whole season and am now eager for more.
Personally, I think the difficulty is just right for a product that Telltale wants to actually profit from - everything made sense, there were lots of clues, and just a few head-tweakers(the hypnosis dream and graffiti knockout segments got me for a little while, but I trusted myself to find the solution, which isn't always the case in a huge, sprawling adventure) The people moaning about easiness are the adventure hardcore - which like all gaming hardcore tend to overrepresent themselves. This isn't just an "adventure game problem" - over time all game genres have hardened up. Early space shooters like Space Invaders and Galaga are hardly as intense as stuff you saw later - Tempest, R-Type, Ikaruga. And it's true of fighting games and platform games and music games and strategy games and first-person games and flight sims and pretty much everything else on the market(there are even hardcore dating sims - and yes, I mind that kind as well!).
Why does it happen? Why is it different now? Why it happened is pretty easy to explain... retail economics dictate that stores can only profit by shelving the hottest sellers - if it moves slower than the hottest game, it's lowering their profit. Hence why today's sell window spans only a few weeks to months. Hot sellers in gaming are, generally, titles that contain a gameplay that is already known to players but is expanded upon - something that can be described in simple genre terms. High production values can help substantially, but if the gameplay is new to players, they are not as likely to hear about it, and neither are they as likely to be immediately interested. So in the arcades and retail, the market for "introductory" games of any kind started losing weight in the second half of the 1980s, and then practically disappeared during the 1990s. This is why Japan's game market has measurably grown smaller in the past few years - not enough new players, and too many dropping out of gaming entirely.
The online market is the cure, because there's no shelf acting as a bottleneck to harden genres. It's why casual gaming is a hit - casual-styled titles are the "introductory" games of our time; they don't carry groundbreaking technology or complexity. In fact, other than the production values, they're downright minimalistic. But they aren't all match-three puzzlers or Breakout clones either - those are just tried-and-true methods. Those styles of game happen to be easier to match difficulty to. Anyone can play a game of Minesweeper, while the world champions of the game can clear boards in mere moments. Both are happy.
In conclusion, I think what Telltale is doing is pioneering casual adventure. Because of the nature of the genre(fixed puzzle difficulty with very little flexibility), the hardcore segment will probably always feel underserved by them, but I don't think that's a reason to get angry. In the future, as a result of the popularity of games like the new Sam and Max, a new market for difficult adventure games may appear. Whether or not Telltale is the one making them, you'll stand to benefit a few years down the line. In the meantime, there are plenty of classic and extremely difficult adventure games around. Surely you haven't played them all?
if it wasn't for the second to last, and last puzzle, i would have thought this game was a user paced story book interactive movie, more than an adventure game.
which is funny cause i was reading this interview with roberta williams who did kings quest, and she was trying to do just that, make an interactive story book, cept i'll bet the puzzles in kings quest one were a little harder. let's hope the next game ramps up, not by one but by 2 levels of difficulty muwahahaha
let our brains suffer... sufferrrrr... must find rope.
Roberta Williams is married to the devil who carries his enormous genatalia around in a wheelbarrow. And if you thought I stole that from Old Man Murray, you'd be absolutely right. She's responsible for making adventure games so mind numbingly stupid in the first place and she's never to be mentioned again. Who wants to die in an adventure game? Who wants to solve stupid illogical puzzles? Who wants to play the next in a series of stupid, clichéd fantasy games which make you feel like a dork for calling yourself a gamer? I hold her personally responsible for the downfall of the popularity of Adventures. Also, she always gives the impression of thinking she's better than you. And that's MY thing!
Aww, come on leave the Old Lady be, this is absurd.
RTF has a good, well demonstrated point, in the fact that Telltale + Sam&Max + Online Distribution is good alchemy for the Genre. We've been fussing about the difficulty a whole lot, but can't we just take a look and applaud Telltale for what we were all waiting for : the Rebirth of Adventure (and don't tell me about Runaway please, it's crap)? Who cares if Culture Shock feels more like an interactive animated cartoon? Our Eldorado is back!
It can grow in different manners now, easy or Ikaruga-esque, whatever. It's a genre, there can be different "branches" of it (think about the gap between Red Orchestra & Quake 4 in the FPS genre, for example).
Now, let's see what Jane Jensen does with Grey Matter!
For perspective on Pvt. Public's comments, this is basically Roberta Williams's theory on the downturn of the genre:
Back when I got started, which sounds like ancient history, back then the demographics of people who were into computer games, was totally different, in my opinion, then they are today. Back then, computers were more expensive, which made them more exclusive to people who were maybe at a certain income level, or education level. So the people that played computer games 15 years ago were that type of person. They probably didn't watch television as much, and the instant gratification era hadn't quite grown the way it has lately. I think in the last 5 or 6 years, the demographics have really changed, now this is my opinion, because computers are less expensive so more people can afford them. More "average" people now feel they should own one.
Irony is that I 'accidently' finished the last puzzle while just messing around with the options. I mean honestly.. I finished it and thought 'oh erm.. did I just miss an opportunity to think heavily on a puzzle?'
Honestly though, I understand Telltale are trying to focus on a large target audience but I think they need to make them a little more complicated. The game just flowed on automatically for me without really ever having to think for more than a few minutes. I loved the adventures where you'd really have to 'think' over possible solutions. Not too hard but just a little harder guys?
That's interesting because that's exactly how I finished the Dream Sequence.
As For Roberta Williams, I guess she never heard of the commodore 64 for under $200.00.. Roberta's theory has several holes in it, because her theory does not account for the dwindling sales of Adventure Games. according to her theory, the Genre would at least have stayed stagnant, thus making the games still profitable, just not by as much as the new segment of games. That's a critical flaw in her thinking because she, like other game designers, don't want to admit the truth.
What has hurt adventure games more than anything is the appalling number of BAD ones that have been released. People get tired of wasting their money on BADLY written and executed Adventure Games. For every 1 good adventure game, 10 bad ones are released. Take a look at any adventure gaming forum and you'll see a LOT of people say the same thing "I'm not buying it until I hear from a trusted source that it is good, because I have spent too much money on bad adventure games."
The fact that Sodoku is so popular among so many people proves that there are a lot of people out there who still crave difficult puzzles to solve and other types of Mind exercises. They just choose not to get it from Adventure games anymore because they have been ripped off so much in the past by bugware.
In a very REAL sense, Adventure Games have been responsible for killing their own Genre. I can guarantee you it wasn't because of hard puzzles. It was due to poor design and execution, and the fact that a lot of the adventure games out there are just plain boring because Game developers focus on eye candy instead of the writing and dialogue. Which is always fatal when it comes to Adventure Games whose very souls rely on excellent and witty scripts/dialogues.
Example: Sony Online Entertainment said the same thing about their hard core gamers segment as well. They said "Our game is failing because we are catering to the hard core segment, so we are going to make the game accessible to casual players." (When in truth, the game was failing because even then they chose not to listen to their players, in fact Raph Koster openly admitted that he felt HE knew what was best, not us. Raph was wrong. heh).
The problem with this is that they completely alienated their loyal fan base, and they were quite surprised to see that loyal fan base totally desert them in the case of Star Wars Galaxies. They have been ailing from that for a year now and they have since admitted to making a "huge mistake" by alienating those players. But it's too late, we all moved on. We gave them ample warning and they didn't listen. Sony and Lucas Arts have lost a bundle on a game that should have been a MEGA-HIT from the very beginning and only grown in popularity.
Example: The Movie industry has made similar mistakes in the past because they thought they had to make "dumbed down" movies because their audiences were too stupid to "get it" And for a few years there every blockbuster that came out TANKED because of that kind of thinking.
When ANY company starts believing it knows what's best for it's customer, what they are REALLY saying is "We like our Ego's better than our Customers." And that translates into "We hate money." hehe. ALWAYS.
And I'll tell you something else.
It is confusing to me when they make adultish type jokes about an "organ"
And then give you puzzles that an 8 year old is going to have an easy time solving. There seems to be some confusion about where they want to take Sam & Max, and what Audience it is for.
As for the game being Linear, All games have a story to tell, this is true, but not all games make you feel like you are forced into it like I felt forced with Sam & Max. By it's very nature an Adventure game has to be more creative. If I just want to kill stuff I can easil Load up Call of Duty and go through the levels and follow the path that I am given. If I want to play and Adventure Game, I want there to be some kind of "adventure" about it, and that means giving me choices as to how I finish that game. The result has to be the same, I understand this, But should I have to follow one prescribed path to get there? Other successful adventure games have proven that this is not the case (Some have even offered alternate endings, if I remember correctly.)
I liked the game, but there is room for a lot of improvement here. I hope the peeps at TellTale are listening, it would be a boon for them if they did.
"A Good adventure game is a good thinking game. It is the modern version of Chess. It requires Strategy, Thought, and Patience to win out." -- Me, Right Now.
Yeah, Episode 2 (and the following) definitly need more challenging puzzles. I just got through my first run and had no problems at all. Only the last one could actually count as a riddle in my opinion.
Culture Shock has excellent characters, locations and dialogues but to make it perfect, it definitly needs more riddles that require actually some brains so to speak. Making it easier for the "crowd" is no excuse. There are always ways to help people with a riddle ingame so they'll eventually come to it and since we've two characters here, it's obvious how it could work.
Perhaps that's one of the faults in the whole "episodic"-thing (since I haven't encounter that problem in other blockbuster adventures lately released like Secret Files Tunguska or Ankh). In a continues game you can begin with easy riddles and then slowly go to more challenging things but since every episode needs to stand for itself...
I hope you guys at Telltale come up with something. Sam 'n Max Hit the Road wasn't only a success because of the surroundings, the riddles were good and challenging too (also I admit that it's one of the easier LucasArts Adventures).
Just because you think that any 8-year old can solve them, doesn't make it true. The fact that Telltale is more or less hitting it's targeted game length for it's episodic game (check out the poll on the forum) is pretty tremendous. Look at the interviews with Dan Connors that you can find on the web, and you'll see that this is probably where they want to be in terms of length.
...there is a critical mass around episodic gaming that needs to be achieved, so that it's not foreign to consumers. The more things that pull people into playing an episode, and sustaining that episodic feel where you're always getting new content and stories, that's growing. You know, on Monday I can play Sam & Max, on Tuesday I can play Half-Life, on Wednesday I can play Penny Arcade, and on Thursday maybe I can play the new Simpsons game. It starts to validate it as a way of getting content in a way that's an intelligent evolution from television, gaming, web surfing--bringing it all together. There is a critical mass approaching.
They are hoping to make this the beginning of an episodic gaming trend that expands so that the vision in that quote can come true. Make the puzzles too difficult and you lengthen the game to a point where you spend a week on the game, and that destroys the vision already--not to mention all the things I and others have said before about getting frustrated and annoyed with puzzles and eventually having to use a walkthrough, even in the well-designed classics.
There seems to be some confusion about where they want to take Sam & Max, and what Audience it is for.
Have you ever watched a Pixar movie? The critical reaction to them usually are that adults and children love the movies, but for different reasons. If you think that Pixar movies are for kids only, it would be really weird to know why Steve Purcell, the creator of Sam and Max, works for them.
And Sam and Max used to be a children's TV show, it'd be way too discontinuous for them to target only adults with the IP.
Just because you think that any 8-year old can solve them, doesn't make it true. The fact that Telltale is more or less hitting it's targeted game length for it's episodic game (check out the poll on the forum) is pretty tremendous. Look at the interviews with Dan Connors that you can find on the web, and you'll see that this is probably where they want to be in terms of length.
The problem is that I and many others do that already. A lot of people are playing 3-4-5 games at once. Having the game be shorter doesn't really help that at all. It does however help the game developer because they see profits a lot quicker than designing a feature length game. Also I don't feel that Telltale has really given the Episodic adventure enough time to see if it is a success or not. So far they've released a total of 3 episodic adventures, and two of them were "first on the block" meaning the first Bone game and the first Sam & Max game are of course expected to have high sales numbers. Bone because it was the first Episodic adventure and Sam & Max because it was a popular feature length game at one time. Another issue concerns the time frame. Sure on Monday I can play sam & max. But what about the monday after that, and the monday after that. What do I get to fill that "timeslot" until the next one comes out? With a feature length game, I can go back to that game every monday for a month if I want to. So In a sense a feature length game provides a better "season" than an Episodic game due to the length of time involved between each episode.
In fact many times these games already provide chapters and I usually found it very convenient to end my playing session when i reached a new chapter, to continue it on at a later date. I don't believe there is anyone out there who feels forced into playing 25 hours straight to finish a "full" length feature because it is "too long". I have never heard anyone complain that an adventure game was "too long" In fact the major complaints for adventure games have ALWAYS been "Too Short.", "Boring.", and "Buggy."
They are hoping to make this the beginning of an episodic gaming trend that expands so that the vision in that quote can come true. Make the puzzles too difficult and you lengthen the game to a point where you spend a week on the game, and that destroys the vision already--not to mention all the things I and others have said before about getting frustrated and annoyed with puzzles and eventually having to use a walkthrough, even in the well-designed classics
I agree, it's what telltale wants to happen, but I think eventually they will have to develop feature length games if they want to survive. Episodic gaming is very limited in it's scope. Those same ADHD kids that Episodic games appeal to will be the same ones who get tired of waiting a month or two for the next one to come out, they will move on and forget about it.
I've had to use walkthroughs before, several times, I don't find it "frustrating" to use one, what I found is that upon using one, I realized that I "should have" figured that out on my own. There were very FEW times when I resorted to a walkthrough for help and thought to myself. "Well that was totally illogical and I would have never gotten that." Though it has happened, it has been so rare I could count the times on a single hand.
Have you ever watched a Pixar movie? The critical reaction to them usually are that adults and children love the movies, but for different reasons. If you think that Pixar movies are for kids only, it would be really weird to know why Steve Purcell, the creator of Sam and Max, works for them.
Yes, Pixar has done some good work. I'll note however they were recently bought out by Disney thanks to Steve Jobs, and they were losing money because their last couple of movies didn't do so well. They moved away from their own formula a bit and it cost them. (Not that this applies at all to this conversation, but in general computer animation is becoming too perfect on screen and because of this is becoming less desirable. The Incredibles would have been much better off being Live Action, and Cars, as much as I like it, I think we could have done without it all together. Pixar needs to stick with movies like Monsters Inc. and Finding Nemo, to keep churning out those profits. Over The Hedge by Dreamworks felt more like a Pixar animation than did either of the Pixar movies I just mentioned.) The problem is that the main FEATURE of the Adventure game is the puzzles. If they are not difficult enough, then people will eventually decide that the puzzles are too trivial to waste their time on. A LOT of people have felt that the puzzles for all three of their episodic releases have been too simple by far, and the game's length for each one, too short. I happen to think that telltale is aiming too low, if this is their target, and others do agree with me.
Episodic games have a lot of hurdles to overcome as many people have pointed out, If TellTale is not careful, they are going to start losing sales. I would guess that the great cow race did not sell as well as Bone did, because people are still complaining about the simplicity of the puzzles.
And forgive me for pointing out that most adventure gamers are grown adults now. Grown adults usually tend toward a desire to be challenged. The Challenge is what keeps them entertained.
The average computer gamer is around 25 years old now.
And Sam and Max used to be a children's TV show, it'd be way too discontinuous for them to target only adults with the IP.
Again, The Sam & Max Episode "I" played had witticisms that weren't meant for the age bracket that the puzzles were targeted at. In this sense I have a strong feeling that the game developers and writers are confused about their target audience. I feel at the very least that they are trying to target too wide of an audience and that in the end it is going to bite them on the butt as it has for so many others in the past.
I think we have to simply agree to disagree here. I find a lot of problems with the episodic format that are going to become much more telling as time wears on if TellTale doesn't make an attempt to overcome them. And you seem to find the game very fine just the way it is.
At the very least, for Episodic Gaming to last long term, the pace of the games need to be picked up. The story line, the puzzles, etc, it all MOVES like a feature length game, when it needs to be moving like a much shorter game. I really felt like I didn't even get a full chapter's worth of play out of Sam & Max: Culture Shock.
That's an interesting forum post in another part of the site, and my rough overview of it is that most of the posters basically were 8-12 years old when they first started playing adventure games. (10 year olds playing Leisure Suit Larry? Scandalous!) Of course most of those people are now in their 20s-40s, so here is one problem that is really difficult with adventure games: If you appeal too much to the experienced gamers, you make the barrier of entry too high for introductory gamers, and your market will eventually literally die out.
As to what to do in-between episodes, the quote says that "there is a critical mass around episodic gaming that needs to be achieved" implying that the critical mass has not yet been achieved. And Telltale will be introducing both the interim theater as well as machinama S&M shorts in between episodes. If you use Gametap to play Sam and Max (and they do intend to eventually be Worldwide, as Telltale said in a forum post) you get to watch a "new" episode of the classic cartoon every week.
And I've had to use a walkthrough in every adventure game I've played (except for Culture Shock!) because I don't have the time to spend 1-2 hours clicking up item combinations to find the solution to what really is just the equivalent to a key to a door.
Adventure games have been the victim of FPS/MMORPG games/companies consolodating the "industry's" finances into a very small, very concentrated core of products, just as much as they have been the victim of any staleness of design.
Numerous genres, from Strategy to RPG to Adventure to Simulation, have been victims of the FPS/MMORPG rampage of the last 10+ years.
Adventure games have been the victim of FPS/MMORPG games/companies consolodating the "industry's" finances into a very small, very concentrated core of products, just as much as they have been the victim of any staleness of design.
Numerous genres, from Strategy to RPG to Adventure to Simulation, have been victims of the FPS/MMORPG rampage of the last 10+ years.
From a personal standpoint and from what I have read from others on other forums, this is simply not true. It is a truth that game developers would like to believe, very much so, I think, but the truth of the matter is the Adventure Gaming community is inundated with horrible adventure games to the point where many of us are not willing to spend their money on one until we KNOW it's good.
Most FPS shooters are pretty good, some are better than others, and only a very few have been truly horrible, and they ended up not selling so well.
Same with RTS style games, and every other game out there.
However, Finding a good FPS game is really easy for someone to do, they read a few reviews, and go buy it.
Finding a good adventure game sometimes is like finding a needle in a haystack. This, in large part, is why this segment suffers as it does. My guess is if 80% of the adventure games out there were good or better, a lot more copies would be sold.
Strategy Games like Age of Empires, RPG games like NeverWinter Nights, Knights of the Old Republic, etc, none of these games have ever had a problem selling copies. In fact these games are just as famous in their segment as Halflife is in it's segment. Your view, I think, is very narrow.
Bioware in fact has produced some of the best games in the RPG Genre. Knights of the Old Republic was a HUGE success, as was it's sequel. And one of the reasons for that is because you as a player had a choice. You could go with the dark side, or go with the light side, how you played the game determined the outcome. And all of Bioware's RPG's have been made in such a way that the games have huge replayability value, despite the fact that most RPG's are like most adventures. You play them once usually and put them away. Players never felt forced into one role or another to succeed, and interestingly enough, to make a "classic" adventure, this has to be included into it as well.
That's an interesting forum post in another part of the site, and my rough overview of it is that most of the posters basically were 8-12 years old when they first started playing adventure games. (10 year olds playing Leisure Suit Larry? Scandalous!) Of course most of those people are now in their 20s-40s, so here is one problem that is really difficult with adventure games: If you appeal too much to the experienced gamers, you make the barrier of entry too high for introductory gamers, and your market will eventually literally die out.
But if you don't appeal to them at all, you'll lose everything too. Sam & Max is a strong worldwide license (much stronger than Bone) which "Hit the Road" helped with significantly. Now 13years later, many people who played the original (me too), are desperate to get a worthy successor. But as desperate as we are we still have expectations and one of them are original and challenging puzzles. If they don't appeal to us well enough, many of us won't come back for episode 3 (some perhaps even't won't return for Ep2).
There was once an article at GameSpy.com where they asked different decisionlayers how important hardcore gamers are and they all agreed that they are necessary for a game to be really and totally successful.
But in any case: Age is not the real problem here. We were once young too, that didn't stop us from beating the games back then and won't stop the new generation from beating the new ones, if they really want to.
As to what to do in-between episodes, the quote says that "there is a critical mass around episodic gaming that needs to be achieved" implying that the critical mass has not yet been achieved. And Telltale will be introducing both the interim theater as well as machinama S&M shorts in between episodes. If you use Gametap to play Sam and Max (and they do intend to eventually be Worldwide, as Telltale said in a forum post) you get to watch a "new" episode of the classic cartoon every week.
I don't want to watch films (also I do long for a DVD-edition of the series here in europe) I want to play A GAME. They are a nice addition but they can't replace the experience of controling the characters and progressing with them.
And I've had to use a walkthrough in every adventure game I've played (except for Culture Shock!) because I don't have the time to spend 1-2 hours clicking up item combinations to find the solution to what really is just the equivalent to a key to a door.
Then adventures aren't your genre. It sounds hard but it seems to be so. If you aren't willing to spend hours to solve a game, then go watch a televisionseries. There you get your experience without any effort on your side.
Of course there are riddles in some adventures that are totally of scale in ways of difficutly but that's still no excuse for making it too easy. As long as a puzzle remains logic and thus beatable, there is no reason not to implent it. If that's scares a gamer away, he wouldn't have liked it anyway.
A game is NOT ONLY a story that is told. The mechanics are important too. Even MORE important. If the mechanics are good, I don't necessarily (depends on the genre) need a story but if I don't have good mechanics, no good story can truely save a game. And one mechanic of a PnC are challenging puzzles.
Culture Shock makes nearly everthing right but the big points which cost it dearly are the too easy difficulty of the puzzles and the too short playtime (even for a game of the "new" episodic age) which not only comes from that.
It seems that "fast fast" is a new problem in itself in the new generation of videogames and as someone who experienced the "good times" first hand, I don't like the way we're heading. It's the opposite of working -> working more hours for less pay and in episodic gaming you pay more for less hours (in the original shareware [which already was episodic gaming] days back with Doom and co. you got this all for FREE).
If I want the fast food experience I go to McDonalds not to a fine restaurant. And for me Sam & Max resides in the latter, so I expect some challenge for my money, even at that low price. And that why I also want the series to be a huge success. Thats the reason why I write these lines, so that Telltale sees what's going on and that they can use one of the advantages of the episodic format and make Ep2 better.
That's an interesting forum post in another part of the site, and my rough overview of it is that most of the posters basically were 8-12 years old when they first started playing adventure games. (10 year olds playing Leisure Suit Larry? Scandalous!) Of course most of those people are now in their 20s-40s, so here is one problem that is really difficult with adventure games: If you appeal too much to the experienced gamers, you make the barrier of entry too high for introductory gamers, and your market will eventually literally die out.
Interesting logic there... so what your saying is all the people who played the 'really hard' adventures when they were 12 and now want the same level of difficulty in the new S&M games are excluding the younger gamers who want a lower level of difficulty... but surely we all had that level of difficulty in the first place? Are kids today not as intelligent as we were? Maybe their just so used to looking at pretty colours they cant be bothered to solve intricate puzzles...
I look at at slightly differently, and imagine if Hit The Road was released today instead of 13 years ago, many of the experienced Adventure Gamers would an all likelihood find it too easy.
We've all had 13 years of game playing and life experience since 1993. Many of us have gone from being kids/teens to adults.
What was a difficult game for us back in 1993 when we were kids might not be so difficult for us in 2006 as adults, yet people are wanting to experience the same sort of challenge Hit The Road presented to them back in the day.
To do that and keep up with the player's growth and experience, the new game would need to be substantially harder than Hit The Road, wouldn't it? -and that's where the barrier to new players that numble mentions would occur.
Then adventures aren't your genre. It sounds hard but it seems to be so. If you aren't willing to spend hours to solve a game, then go watch a televisionseries. There you get your experience without any effort on your side.
Sicarius: That is awfully elitist of you to say. Not everybody has hours to spend to solve puzzles. To those that bring up the popularity of Sodoku, it is popular mostly because people can do it when they're on the train or waiting in line for something, if sodoku required a cumulation of 20 hours (or even 4-5) in front of a computer, I doubt it would be as popular.
There have been med students and grad students and other busy folk that have posted on this forum saying that Culture Shock fits right into their busy schedules, that it took 4-5 days to set aside the 3-4 hours required for Culture Shock, and if it were a longer game they wouldn't be able to find time for it.
I'd like to share a quote about a whole bunch of people that you'd also dismiss and wish would just go watch a television series instead of muddying up adventure games.
So I'd like to share a little story with all of you guys at telltale. As one of the lead testers at GameTap, I was sent to Digital Life this past weekend in NYC with the job of demonstrating Sam & Max: Culture Shock to the happy convention-goers. Having spent many many MANY hours testing the game, I felt pretty confident that the public reactions would be nothing less than amazing. The game is just that good. Even expecting such a positive reaction, I was blown away by the public response. As expected, fans of the series came by in droves, but what I didn't expect was how many non-gamers became consumed by the game. People who had long ago written off video games as "not for me" ended up staying for up to an hour completely enthralled by the game, and considering we were right next to American Idol's karaoke competition, that is nothing short of amazing. Some people even saved their game and patiently waited while we gave the presentation to a new group. You guys have done an amazing job and I can't wait to see more.
Sincerely,
Will Armstrong
Gametap: Lead Alpha Tester
I agree with Sicarius. If I could beat hit the road when I was 13, why couldn't a 13 year old of today beat a new challenging sam and max game. I watched my 7 year old nephew beat bone quite easily.. This whole "making the game more difficult will lose telltale its audience" argument is a myth. If they made it more difficult they would sell more copies!!
A game is NOT ONLY a story that is told. The mechanics are important too. Even MORE important. If the mechanics are good, I don't necessarily (depends on the genre) need a story but if I don't have good mechanics, no good story can truely save a game. And one mechanic of a PnC are challenging puzzles.
I think what sets an adventure game apart from another type is that the story is indeed more important than the mechanic. "PnC" is not a genre, it's an interface, and neither it nor the puzzles are the star of a story game, even if they happen to have played a large role in the oldies. The story, the characters, and the writing were the foundation of those games, and what hold up when you replay them. If my main concern was for adventure games to preserve the puzzle difficulty and let the important stuff take a back seat, I'd probably be a bigger fan of a lot of current "adventures" than I am.
I think what sets an adventure game apart from another type is that the story is indeed more important than the mechanic. "PnC" is not a genre, it's an interface, and neither it nor the puzzles are the star of a story game, even if they happen to have played a large role in the oldies. The story, the characters, and the writing were the foundation of those games, and what hold up when you replay them. If my main concern was for adventure games to preserve the puzzle difficulty and let the important stuff take a back seat, I'd probably be a bigger fan of Myst or a lot of current "adventures" than I am.
Telltale have already got the story/writing & characters right. Why cant we ask them to get the puzzles at the same level of excellence?
I think we will just continue to argue past each other, people clearly have different views, and as Udvarnoky pointed outed, the most hardcore of you are basically arguing that the puzzles are more important than the story.
A game is NOT ONLY a story that is told. The mechanics are important too. Even MORE important.If the mechanics are good, I don't necessarily (depends on the genre) need a story but if I don't have good mechanics, no good story can truely save a game. And one mechanic of a PnC are challenging puzzles.
EDIT: To summarize:
But I am slightly curious as to what everyone else thinks, since this thread has mushroomed into nearly 3000 views. I am aware that the only the most hardcore and biased individuals (myself included) usually post on game forums--(just take a look at the comments at kotaku or joystiq... I guarantee you that most of the ideas propounded in any of the wii/ps3 posts will show themselves to be inaccurate when those systems actually launch).
My point has always been that yes, I expect the games to be more difficult in the future, but not insanely difficult that it breaks up the concept of episodic gaming that they are trying to pioneer. No, I do not agree that increasing a game's difficulty will make a game sell more copies. No, I do not have the time to spend 2 or more hours to solve one puzzle, but I don't think that means I'm some uncouth individual that should not be playing adventure games. I think a lot more people have trouble with adventure game puzzles then some of you think--see all the people asking for hints in the forum (for puzzles any 8 year old can solve!!!) or more indirectly, get the Google toolbar that guesses what you want to search for--type in any classic adventure game and Google will guess that you are looking for the walkthrough.
My views on almost everything Telltale and adventure-related can practically be gleaned from all other previous posts. If presented with evidence to the contrary, I will admit that I am wrong, but the decline in adventure games over the years as a non-niche genre has made conclude the things that I conclude, and I appreciate the tremendous efforts that this little Telltale start-up is making to both bring back adventure gaming as a mainstream genre, encouraging a new class of people to embrace video games, as well as really pioneering the idea of truly episodic gaming. Those are tall measures indeed, and they will be making a lot of innovations as well as taking lots of risks along the way. But to those that simplify all these issues to "if they made it more difficult they would sell more copies!!" I'm politely inclined to disbelieve you.
and as Udvarnoky pointed outed, the most hardcore of you are basically arguing that the puzzles are more important than the story.
And let me just clarify that I really only believe this to be the case with story-driven games. In another genre a great story and great writing are wonderful additions and can benefit any game, but a racing game has to be a good racing game first and foremost. A shooter has to nail what makes a shooter game great before adding frosting elsewhere. And an adventure game's core is its story and characters. Let the puzzles or however you move through the game serve that, not the other way around. Compare a true story game like Monkey Island to a puzzle game like Myst. Both are widely considered "adventure games," but how are they different in focus?
But I am slightly curious as to what everyone else thinks, since this thread has mushroomed into nearly 3000 views. I am aware that the only the most hardcore and biased individuals (myself included) usually post on game forums
I think it's interesting to read the comments of gamers, but not necessarily adventure gamers posted elswhere on the net. Still not representative of the people the GameTap guy was demo-ing to recently, but a litte less biased than our good selves..
I just finished it. To be honest, I hadn't expected it to be as amazing as it turned out to be. I can't really think of anything bad to say about it. The 3d graphics work surprisingly well, and Sam & Max have some of the best 3d animation that I've seen. If only the characters in Dreamfall had been this expressive... You know, this is probably one of the advantages of making episodic games. The developers spend more time on each individual part of the game so in the end the game ends up more detailed as a whole. They're able to spend the time to do things like make sure that each scene is animated properly instead of inserting boring generic animations. Also, I love the red and black title sequences and the dream sequences were top notch.
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Just finished it and it is suprinsgly good : I have some stuff to bitch about in terms of loading times and small freezes when characters enter the scene but on the content it is nearly flawless... which suprises me 'cause I really couldn't get into Hit the Road.
On the whole, I feel like it is the first truly episodic game in the sense that it takes a great deal of advantages from the format and plays with it quite smartly. I'm surprised and happy that Telltale is the first to get that right.
What pleases me most about Telltale and Culture Shock is to see them strip the adventure genre from the superficial : nearly everything revolves around dialogs and story, making most of the puzzles just a deal of understanding the circumstances and playing like the character would. I'm really greatful for the disappearance of object combinations and object chase.
And then, obviously, the dialog : god, I usually smile at funny games, but this one made me laugh out loud ... and this something even Pyshonauts couldn't do. What's even greater is that they really got the animations right this time, it's really a huge leap from the Bone games : I'd even say I can't remember a game in which 3D animation looked as handcrafted as this, like 2D animation oftenly does. Meaning, even outside the dialogs, the SodaPoppers and the Inconvenicence store guy really exists as living characters.
Jeez...I'm really surprised I responded so well to it!
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Absolutely loved it! Agree with everything said here, that it's the most solid episodic adventure yet. Really had the feeling that I'd finished something, when it ended (Unlike Out from Boneville) And it actually felt lengthy, because I wasn't expecting much after getting rid of the Soda Poppers.
And while I thought Sam's voice acting wasn't up to par with Max's, I did get used to him and started laughing out loud at some of the things he said. And yes, the animations were awesome. And the camera system was flawless, it seems. Always showing you some funny background detail when the characters were talking or you were loading in between scenes.
Yeah, awesome game! Best adventure game I've played for a long time..
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I just finished the episode and it completely surpassed by expectations, those high reviews weren't hyperbole after all (of course the game is short but that's the expectation for the format).
It's weird being back in a proper adventure game.
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You'll see similar sentiment in amongst the Slashdot Sam & Max comments.
I think this is getting a bit heated. I really enjoyed the game and look forward to the next one being just as good... if not better. I do think its not as complicated as it was in hit the road and it suffers for that, im sure telltale are aware there are a large number of people who feel that way, I think its becoming unproductive to keep going on about it though. Cant wait to see what the next ones like and i think one thing were all agreed on is that the new S&M game is going to have us coming back for more. Well at least 90 percent and thats pretty good going. Well done telltale!:o
Compare a true story game like Monkey Island to a puzzle game like Myst. Both are widely considered "adventure games," but how are they different in focus?
Very good point. I'm pretty happy with the level of difficulty in the games because I played Sam & Max for entertainment: They make me laugh, I enjoyed the story and puzzles weren't bad either.
In this day and age you simply cannot have a game that stops because the user has got stuck. It doesn't work. Everything has to continue moving forward.
How many of you REALLY want "difficult" puzzles? A puzzle that you have to go away and think about for a few days. There's no gameplay while you're thinking, in fact you literally can't play the game until you progress further by solving the puzzle. Does that sound like fun?
The clever way that Monkey Island got around this problem was to allow the user to complete several different puzzles/tasks at one time: If the user got stuck on one, they could move onto another. Sam & Max: Culture Shock used this a little for the
knocking out of the soda jerks
puzzles, but even then you can get stuck on the final puzzle and be unable to continue.
Do people really want that? Because I imagine it's pretty difficult to gauge a puzzle so that everyone gets stuck just the right amount of time, so it doesn't become too frustrating.
Who knows, maybe they WILL up the challenge a bit in the next game... I imagine they didn't want to alienate anyone with a difficult/annoying puzzle in chapter one, anyway!
From a personal standpoint and from what I have read from others on other forums, this is simply not true. It is a truth that game developers would like to believe, very much so, I think, but the truth of the matter is the Adventure Gaming community is inundated with horrible adventure games to the point where many of us are not willing to spend their money on one until we KNOW it's good.
Most FPS shooters are pretty good, some are better than others, and only a very few have been truly horrible, and they ended up not selling so well.
Same with RTS style games, and every other game out there.
However, Finding a good FPS game is really easy for someone to do, they read a few reviews, and go buy it.
Finding a good adventure game sometimes is like finding a needle in a haystack. This, in large part, is why this segment suffers as it does. My guess is if 80% of the adventure games out there were good or better, a lot more copies would be sold.
Strategy Games like Age of Empires, RPG games like NeverWinter Nights, Knights of the Old Republic, etc, none of these games have ever had a problem selling copies. In fact these games are just as famous in their segment as Halflife is in it's segment. Your view, I think, is very narrow.
Bioware in fact has produced some of the best games in the RPG Genre. Knights of the Old Republic was a HUGE success, as was it's sequel. And one of the reasons for that is because you as a player had a choice. You could go with the dark side, or go with the light side, how you played the game determined the outcome. And all of Bioware's RPG's have been made in such a way that the games have huge replayability value, despite the fact that most RPG's are like most adventures. You play them once usually and put them away. Players never felt forced into one role or another to succeed, and interestingly enough, to make a "classic" adventure, this has to be included into it as well.
Well, I have to disagree. I worked at retail during the period FPS/MMORPG games started to affect the "industry" and I, personally, saw a decrease in sales of "older" or more "cerebral" genres. In the early 00s this reversed as people fell out of infatuation with the new online technology and went back to old buying habits, not to mention a generation of grown up console gamers (used to single player games) ready to buy new PC games.
The fact that my old store went out of business because there were fewer and fewer products, and more and more people sitting at home playing the same product endlessly (HL online, UO/EQ), speaks to some truth in the interpretation.
I could be completely wrong, but I don't think I am. And I'm not interested in picking apart your post, asserting my position, and defending it. Really it would be difficult to quantify anyways, so we'd be stuck at opinion and assertion.
I have an interview with Tim Schafer in one of my copies of PCPowerPlay where he says the reason adventure games are dead are because they haven't gone out and tried to evolve for many years. The fact that at least 75% of the posts in this forum demand that Telltale remake Hit the Road or at least make the new games more like it only strengthen this idea.
Which is why I applaud (not literally) when Adventures try something new such as interactive movie styled games (like Fahrenheit or "The Indigo Prophecy" for you silly Americans) or combine them with other genres (like Psychonauts) or even just go and make the game with a decent 3D engine (like Bone and BS3 & 4). Obviously we need to fine tune things a little still (The pathfinding in BS4 was abysmal and having the ability to both use OR look should always be allowed) but it's time we stopped demanding everything the same and try and add in some more constructive criticism.
So you don't like the puzzles. Would you perhaps like easy, medium and hard modes for the next games? Rather than just "I want the harder puzzles 'cause I been playing adventure games since I was a foetus!" think about whether you want more puzzles or maybe some really polished puzzles with some optional ones to see extra stuff. Then calmly, politely, and with decent use of grammar and spelling make your suggestions. Then don't get annoyed if Telltale ignores them Them's the breaks!
Oooh, yessir, Fahrenheit was quite nice. The narration, the mix of genres... And the game did "flow" pretty nicely. But it was still short and very straightforward.
Open-endedness is something that hurt the adventure games too. Since GTA (and maybe before), people want freedom, variety, constant distractions, etc. Who today wants to stay stuck in the same three rooms with a couple objects (except us)? Games or becoming bigger and bigger in virtual surface. People want to be in credible virtual worlds.
I can easily imagine an adventure game with GTA's freedom.
The problem, I think, is that adventure games need to be more polished than other genres. Every pixel, every text must be right. It would probably take a decade to make an Adventure-Universe. Damn!
Tim Schafer
People’s memories of past games are a challenge. Because as the years go by, people romanticize old games. They make them kind of perfect in their head. Or they mix them up with their memories of being a kid. So someone says, oh I “LOOOVED” that game, really what they just miss is being 13 and not having anything to worry about except what game to play next. So when you make a new game, you’re not just trying to top your previous games. You’re trying to top peoples idealized and selective memories of what’s gone before.
Comments
Each game is meant to be played standalone, which would be impossible if you needed to have picked up an object from Episode 1 to use it in Episode 3.
I thought it was a good idea...
Thing is, I'm afraid of my current system specs not being up to par (haven't actually checked yet though) and I don't have a console system.
Well, just checked and it looks like my system is just above the bare minimum. But I still am afraid of a laggy experience. I will look into first thing when I get a new system (especially with OS X Leopard and Windows Vista coming), or (less likely) get one of those extremely expensive consoles.
Oh, it could be a great idea in certain circumstances. Certainly add to continuity between episodes.
Who's to say the spray can (for example) from Episode 1 won't be used agaiin in a later episode? But it's not as if someone who has only bought Episode 3 won't have access to the item, it would just be a standard item that people who have played the earlier episodes will recognise..
which is funny cause i was reading this interview with roberta williams who did kings quest, and she was trying to do just that, make an interactive story book, cept i'll bet the puzzles in kings quest one were a little harder. let's hope the next game ramps up, not by one but by 2 levels of difficulty muwahahaha
let our brains suffer... sufferrrrr... must find rope.
Honestly though, I understand Telltale are trying to focus on a large target audience but I think they need to make them a little more complicated. The game just flowed on automatically for me without really ever having to think for more than a few minutes. I loved the adventures where you'd really have to 'think' over possible solutions. Not too hard but just a little harder guys?
Personally, I think the difficulty is just right for a product that Telltale wants to actually profit from - everything made sense, there were lots of clues, and just a few head-tweakers(the hypnosis dream and graffiti knockout segments got me for a little while, but I trusted myself to find the solution, which isn't always the case in a huge, sprawling adventure) The people moaning about easiness are the adventure hardcore - which like all gaming hardcore tend to overrepresent themselves. This isn't just an "adventure game problem" - over time all game genres have hardened up. Early space shooters like Space Invaders and Galaga are hardly as intense as stuff you saw later - Tempest, R-Type, Ikaruga. And it's true of fighting games and platform games and music games and strategy games and first-person games and flight sims and pretty much everything else on the market(there are even hardcore dating sims - and yes, I mind that kind as well!).
Why does it happen? Why is it different now? Why it happened is pretty easy to explain... retail economics dictate that stores can only profit by shelving the hottest sellers - if it moves slower than the hottest game, it's lowering their profit. Hence why today's sell window spans only a few weeks to months. Hot sellers in gaming are, generally, titles that contain a gameplay that is already known to players but is expanded upon - something that can be described in simple genre terms. High production values can help substantially, but if the gameplay is new to players, they are not as likely to hear about it, and neither are they as likely to be immediately interested. So in the arcades and retail, the market for "introductory" games of any kind started losing weight in the second half of the 1980s, and then practically disappeared during the 1990s. This is why Japan's game market has measurably grown smaller in the past few years - not enough new players, and too many dropping out of gaming entirely.
The online market is the cure, because there's no shelf acting as a bottleneck to harden genres. It's why casual gaming is a hit - casual-styled titles are the "introductory" games of our time; they don't carry groundbreaking technology or complexity. In fact, other than the production values, they're downright minimalistic. But they aren't all match-three puzzlers or Breakout clones either - those are just tried-and-true methods. Those styles of game happen to be easier to match difficulty to. Anyone can play a game of Minesweeper, while the world champions of the game can clear boards in mere moments. Both are happy.
In conclusion, I think what Telltale is doing is pioneering casual adventure. Because of the nature of the genre(fixed puzzle difficulty with very little flexibility), the hardcore segment will probably always feel underserved by them, but I don't think that's a reason to get angry. In the future, as a result of the popularity of games like the new Sam and Max, a new market for difficult adventure games may appear. Whether or not Telltale is the one making them, you'll stand to benefit a few years down the line. In the meantime, there are plenty of classic and extremely difficult adventure games around. Surely you haven't played them all?
Roberta Williams is married to the devil who carries his enormous genatalia around in a wheelbarrow. And if you thought I stole that from Old Man Murray, you'd be absolutely right. She's responsible for making adventure games so mind numbingly stupid in the first place and she's never to be mentioned again. Who wants to die in an adventure game? Who wants to solve stupid illogical puzzles? Who wants to play the next in a series of stupid, clichéd fantasy games which make you feel like a dork for calling yourself a gamer? I hold her personally responsible for the downfall of the popularity of Adventures. Also, she always gives the impression of thinking she's better than you. And that's MY thing!
RTF has a good, well demonstrated point, in the fact that Telltale + Sam&Max + Online Distribution is good alchemy for the Genre. We've been fussing about the difficulty a whole lot, but can't we just take a look and applaud Telltale for what we were all waiting for : the Rebirth of Adventure (and don't tell me about Runaway please, it's crap)? Who cares if Culture Shock feels more like an interactive animated cartoon? Our Eldorado is back!
It can grow in different manners now, easy or Ikaruga-esque, whatever. It's a genre, there can be different "branches" of it (think about the gap between Red Orchestra & Quake 4 in the FPS genre, for example).
Now, let's see what Jane Jensen does with Grey Matter!
That's interesting because that's exactly how I finished the Dream Sequence.
As For Roberta Williams, I guess she never heard of the commodore 64 for under $200.00.. Roberta's theory has several holes in it, because her theory does not account for the dwindling sales of Adventure Games. according to her theory, the Genre would at least have stayed stagnant, thus making the games still profitable, just not by as much as the new segment of games. That's a critical flaw in her thinking because she, like other game designers, don't want to admit the truth.
What has hurt adventure games more than anything is the appalling number of BAD ones that have been released. People get tired of wasting their money on BADLY written and executed Adventure Games. For every 1 good adventure game, 10 bad ones are released. Take a look at any adventure gaming forum and you'll see a LOT of people say the same thing "I'm not buying it until I hear from a trusted source that it is good, because I have spent too much money on bad adventure games."
The fact that Sodoku is so popular among so many people proves that there are a lot of people out there who still crave difficult puzzles to solve and other types of Mind exercises. They just choose not to get it from Adventure games anymore because they have been ripped off so much in the past by bugware.
In a very REAL sense, Adventure Games have been responsible for killing their own Genre. I can guarantee you it wasn't because of hard puzzles. It was due to poor design and execution, and the fact that a lot of the adventure games out there are just plain boring because Game developers focus on eye candy instead of the writing and dialogue. Which is always fatal when it comes to Adventure Games whose very souls rely on excellent and witty scripts/dialogues.
Example: Sony Online Entertainment said the same thing about their hard core gamers segment as well. They said "Our game is failing because we are catering to the hard core segment, so we are going to make the game accessible to casual players." (When in truth, the game was failing because even then they chose not to listen to their players, in fact Raph Koster openly admitted that he felt HE knew what was best, not us. Raph was wrong. heh).
The problem with this is that they completely alienated their loyal fan base, and they were quite surprised to see that loyal fan base totally desert them in the case of Star Wars Galaxies. They have been ailing from that for a year now and they have since admitted to making a "huge mistake" by alienating those players. But it's too late, we all moved on. We gave them ample warning and they didn't listen. Sony and Lucas Arts have lost a bundle on a game that should have been a MEGA-HIT from the very beginning and only grown in popularity.
Example: The Movie industry has made similar mistakes in the past because they thought they had to make "dumbed down" movies because their audiences were too stupid to "get it" And for a few years there every blockbuster that came out TANKED because of that kind of thinking.
When ANY company starts believing it knows what's best for it's customer, what they are REALLY saying is "We like our Ego's better than our Customers." And that translates into "We hate money." hehe. ALWAYS.
And I'll tell you something else.
As for the game being Linear, All games have a story to tell, this is true, but not all games make you feel like you are forced into it like I felt forced with Sam & Max. By it's very nature an Adventure game has to be more creative. If I just want to kill stuff I can easil Load up Call of Duty and go through the levels and follow the path that I am given. If I want to play and Adventure Game, I want there to be some kind of "adventure" about it, and that means giving me choices as to how I finish that game. The result has to be the same, I understand this, But should I have to follow one prescribed path to get there? Other successful adventure games have proven that this is not the case (Some have even offered alternate endings, if I remember correctly.)
I liked the game, but there is room for a lot of improvement here. I hope the peeps at TellTale are listening, it would be a boon for them if they did.
"A Good adventure game is a good thinking game. It is the modern version of Chess. It requires Strategy, Thought, and Patience to win out." -- Me, Right Now.
Culture Shock has excellent characters, locations and dialogues but to make it perfect, it definitly needs more riddles that require actually some brains so to speak. Making it easier for the "crowd" is no excuse. There are always ways to help people with a riddle ingame so they'll eventually come to it and since we've two characters here, it's obvious how it could work.
Perhaps that's one of the faults in the whole "episodic"-thing (since I haven't encounter that problem in other blockbuster adventures lately released like Secret Files Tunguska or Ankh). In a continues game you can begin with easy riddles and then slowly go to more challenging things but since every episode needs to stand for itself...
I hope you guys at Telltale come up with something. Sam 'n Max Hit the Road wasn't only a success because of the surroundings, the riddles were good and challenging too (also I admit that it's one of the easier LucasArts Adventures).
And I mostly agree with Jokieman.
They are hoping to make this the beginning of an episodic gaming trend that expands so that the vision in that quote can come true. Make the puzzles too difficult and you lengthen the game to a point where you spend a week on the game, and that destroys the vision already--not to mention all the things I and others have said before about getting frustrated and annoyed with puzzles and eventually having to use a walkthrough, even in the well-designed classics.
Have you ever watched a Pixar movie? The critical reaction to them usually are that adults and children love the movies, but for different reasons. If you think that Pixar movies are for kids only, it would be really weird to know why Steve Purcell, the creator of Sam and Max, works for them.
And Sam and Max used to be a children's TV show, it'd be way too discontinuous for them to target only adults with the IP.
The problem is that I and many others do that already. A lot of people are playing 3-4-5 games at once. Having the game be shorter doesn't really help that at all. It does however help the game developer because they see profits a lot quicker than designing a feature length game. Also I don't feel that Telltale has really given the Episodic adventure enough time to see if it is a success or not. So far they've released a total of 3 episodic adventures, and two of them were "first on the block" meaning the first Bone game and the first Sam & Max game are of course expected to have high sales numbers. Bone because it was the first Episodic adventure and Sam & Max because it was a popular feature length game at one time. Another issue concerns the time frame. Sure on Monday I can play sam & max. But what about the monday after that, and the monday after that. What do I get to fill that "timeslot" until the next one comes out? With a feature length game, I can go back to that game every monday for a month if I want to. So In a sense a feature length game provides a better "season" than an Episodic game due to the length of time involved between each episode.
In fact many times these games already provide chapters and I usually found it very convenient to end my playing session when i reached a new chapter, to continue it on at a later date. I don't believe there is anyone out there who feels forced into playing 25 hours straight to finish a "full" length feature because it is "too long". I have never heard anyone complain that an adventure game was "too long" In fact the major complaints for adventure games have ALWAYS been "Too Short.", "Boring.", and "Buggy."
I agree, it's what telltale wants to happen, but I think eventually they will have to develop feature length games if they want to survive. Episodic gaming is very limited in it's scope. Those same ADHD kids that Episodic games appeal to will be the same ones who get tired of waiting a month or two for the next one to come out, they will move on and forget about it.
I've had to use walkthroughs before, several times, I don't find it "frustrating" to use one, what I found is that upon using one, I realized that I "should have" figured that out on my own. There were very FEW times when I resorted to a walkthrough for help and thought to myself. "Well that was totally illogical and I would have never gotten that." Though it has happened, it has been so rare I could count the times on a single hand.
Yes, Pixar has done some good work. I'll note however they were recently bought out by Disney thanks to Steve Jobs, and they were losing money because their last couple of movies didn't do so well. They moved away from their own formula a bit and it cost them. (Not that this applies at all to this conversation, but in general computer animation is becoming too perfect on screen and because of this is becoming less desirable. The Incredibles would have been much better off being Live Action, and Cars, as much as I like it, I think we could have done without it all together. Pixar needs to stick with movies like Monsters Inc. and Finding Nemo, to keep churning out those profits. Over The Hedge by Dreamworks felt more like a Pixar animation than did either of the Pixar movies I just mentioned.) The problem is that the main FEATURE of the Adventure game is the puzzles. If they are not difficult enough, then people will eventually decide that the puzzles are too trivial to waste their time on. A LOT of people have felt that the puzzles for all three of their episodic releases have been too simple by far, and the game's length for each one, too short. I happen to think that telltale is aiming too low, if this is their target, and others do agree with me.
Episodic games have a lot of hurdles to overcome as many people have pointed out, If TellTale is not careful, they are going to start losing sales. I would guess that the great cow race did not sell as well as Bone did, because people are still complaining about the simplicity of the puzzles.
And forgive me for pointing out that most adventure gamers are grown adults now. Grown adults usually tend toward a desire to be challenged. The Challenge is what keeps them entertained.
The average computer gamer is around 25 years old now.
Again, The Sam & Max Episode "I" played had witticisms that weren't meant for the age bracket that the puzzles were targeted at. In this sense I have a strong feeling that the game developers and writers are confused about their target audience. I feel at the very least that they are trying to target too wide of an audience and that in the end it is going to bite them on the butt as it has for so many others in the past.
I think we have to simply agree to disagree here. I find a lot of problems with the episodic format that are going to become much more telling as time wears on if TellTale doesn't make an attempt to overcome them. And you seem to find the game very fine just the way it is.
At the very least, for Episodic Gaming to last long term, the pace of the games need to be picked up. The story line, the puzzles, etc, it all MOVES like a feature length game, when it needs to be moving like a much shorter game. I really felt like I didn't even get a full chapter's worth of play out of Sam & Max: Culture Shock.
That's an interesting forum post in another part of the site, and my rough overview of it is that most of the posters basically were 8-12 years old when they first started playing adventure games. (10 year olds playing Leisure Suit Larry? Scandalous!) Of course most of those people are now in their 20s-40s, so here is one problem that is really difficult with adventure games: If you appeal too much to the experienced gamers, you make the barrier of entry too high for introductory gamers, and your market will eventually literally die out.
As to what to do in-between episodes, the quote says that "there is a critical mass around episodic gaming that needs to be achieved" implying that the critical mass has not yet been achieved. And Telltale will be introducing both the interim theater as well as machinama S&M shorts in between episodes. If you use Gametap to play Sam and Max (and they do intend to eventually be Worldwide, as Telltale said in a forum post) you get to watch a "new" episode of the classic cartoon every week.
And I've had to use a walkthrough in every adventure game I've played (except for Culture Shock!) because I don't have the time to spend 1-2 hours clicking up item combinations to find the solution to what really is just the equivalent to a key to a door.
Numerous genres, from Strategy to RPG to Adventure to Simulation, have been victims of the FPS/MMORPG rampage of the last 10+ years.
From a personal standpoint and from what I have read from others on other forums, this is simply not true. It is a truth that game developers would like to believe, very much so, I think, but the truth of the matter is the Adventure Gaming community is inundated with horrible adventure games to the point where many of us are not willing to spend their money on one until we KNOW it's good.
Most FPS shooters are pretty good, some are better than others, and only a very few have been truly horrible, and they ended up not selling so well.
Same with RTS style games, and every other game out there.
However, Finding a good FPS game is really easy for someone to do, they read a few reviews, and go buy it.
Finding a good adventure game sometimes is like finding a needle in a haystack. This, in large part, is why this segment suffers as it does. My guess is if 80% of the adventure games out there were good or better, a lot more copies would be sold.
Strategy Games like Age of Empires, RPG games like NeverWinter Nights, Knights of the Old Republic, etc, none of these games have ever had a problem selling copies. In fact these games are just as famous in their segment as Halflife is in it's segment. Your view, I think, is very narrow.
Bioware in fact has produced some of the best games in the RPG Genre. Knights of the Old Republic was a HUGE success, as was it's sequel. And one of the reasons for that is because you as a player had a choice. You could go with the dark side, or go with the light side, how you played the game determined the outcome. And all of Bioware's RPG's have been made in such a way that the games have huge replayability value, despite the fact that most RPG's are like most adventures. You play them once usually and put them away. Players never felt forced into one role or another to succeed, and interestingly enough, to make a "classic" adventure, this has to be included into it as well.
But if you don't appeal to them at all, you'll lose everything too. Sam & Max is a strong worldwide license (much stronger than Bone) which "Hit the Road" helped with significantly. Now 13years later, many people who played the original (me too), are desperate to get a worthy successor. But as desperate as we are we still have expectations and one of them are original and challenging puzzles. If they don't appeal to us well enough, many of us won't come back for episode 3 (some perhaps even't won't return for Ep2).
There was once an article at GameSpy.com where they asked different decisionlayers how important hardcore gamers are and they all agreed that they are necessary for a game to be really and totally successful.
But in any case: Age is not the real problem here. We were once young too, that didn't stop us from beating the games back then and won't stop the new generation from beating the new ones, if they really want to.
I don't want to watch films (also I do long for a DVD-edition of the series here in europe) I want to play A GAME. They are a nice addition but they can't replace the experience of controling the characters and progressing with them.
Then adventures aren't your genre. It sounds hard but it seems to be so. If you aren't willing to spend hours to solve a game, then go watch a televisionseries. There you get your experience without any effort on your side.
Of course there are riddles in some adventures that are totally of scale in ways of difficutly but that's still no excuse for making it too easy. As long as a puzzle remains logic and thus beatable, there is no reason not to implent it. If that's scares a gamer away, he wouldn't have liked it anyway.
A game is NOT ONLY a story that is told. The mechanics are important too. Even MORE important. If the mechanics are good, I don't necessarily (depends on the genre) need a story but if I don't have good mechanics, no good story can truely save a game. And one mechanic of a PnC are challenging puzzles.
Culture Shock makes nearly everthing right but the big points which cost it dearly are the too easy difficulty of the puzzles and the too short playtime (even for a game of the "new" episodic age) which not only comes from that.
It seems that "fast fast" is a new problem in itself in the new generation of videogames and as someone who experienced the "good times" first hand, I don't like the way we're heading. It's the opposite of working -> working more hours for less pay and in episodic gaming you pay more for less hours (in the original shareware [which already was episodic gaming] days back with Doom and co. you got this all for FREE).
If I want the fast food experience I go to McDonalds not to a fine restaurant. And for me Sam & Max resides in the latter, so I expect some challenge for my money, even at that low price. And that why I also want the series to be a huge success. Thats the reason why I write these lines, so that Telltale sees what's going on and that they can use one of the advantages of the episodic format and make Ep2 better.
Interesting logic there... so what your saying is all the people who played the 'really hard' adventures when they were 12 and now want the same level of difficulty in the new S&M games are excluding the younger gamers who want a lower level of difficulty... but surely we all had that level of difficulty in the first place? Are kids today not as intelligent as we were? Maybe their just so used to looking at pretty colours they cant be bothered to solve intricate puzzles...
We've all had 13 years of game playing and life experience since 1993. Many of us have gone from being kids/teens to adults.
What was a difficult game for us back in 1993 when we were kids might not be so difficult for us in 2006 as adults, yet people are wanting to experience the same sort of challenge Hit The Road presented to them back in the day.
To do that and keep up with the player's growth and experience, the new game would need to be substantially harder than Hit The Road, wouldn't it? -and that's where the barrier to new players that numble mentions would occur.
Sicarius: That is awfully elitist of you to say. Not everybody has hours to spend to solve puzzles. To those that bring up the popularity of Sodoku, it is popular mostly because people can do it when they're on the train or waiting in line for something, if sodoku required a cumulation of 20 hours (or even 4-5) in front of a computer, I doubt it would be as popular.
There have been med students and grad students and other busy folk that have posted on this forum saying that Culture Shock fits right into their busy schedules, that it took 4-5 days to set aside the 3-4 hours required for Culture Shock, and if it were a longer game they wouldn't be able to find time for it.
I'd like to share a quote about a whole bunch of people that you'd also dismiss and wish would just go watch a television series instead of muddying up adventure games.
I think what sets an adventure game apart from another type is that the story is indeed more important than the mechanic. "PnC" is not a genre, it's an interface, and neither it nor the puzzles are the star of a story game, even if they happen to have played a large role in the oldies. The story, the characters, and the writing were the foundation of those games, and what hold up when you replay them. If my main concern was for adventure games to preserve the puzzle difficulty and let the important stuff take a back seat, I'd probably be a bigger fan of a lot of current "adventures" than I am.
Telltale have already got the story/writing & characters right. Why cant we ask them to get the puzzles at the same level of excellence?
EDIT: To summarize:
But I am slightly curious as to what everyone else thinks, since this thread has mushroomed into nearly 3000 views. I am aware that the only the most hardcore and biased individuals (myself included) usually post on game forums--(just take a look at the comments at kotaku or joystiq... I guarantee you that most of the ideas propounded in any of the wii/ps3 posts will show themselves to be inaccurate when those systems actually launch).
My point has always been that yes, I expect the games to be more difficult in the future, but not insanely difficult that it breaks up the concept of episodic gaming that they are trying to pioneer. No, I do not agree that increasing a game's difficulty will make a game sell more copies. No, I do not have the time to spend 2 or more hours to solve one puzzle, but I don't think that means I'm some uncouth individual that should not be playing adventure games. I think a lot more people have trouble with adventure game puzzles then some of you think--see all the people asking for hints in the forum (for puzzles any 8 year old can solve!!!) or more indirectly, get the Google toolbar that guesses what you want to search for--type in any classic adventure game and Google will guess that you are looking for the walkthrough.
My views on almost everything Telltale and adventure-related can practically be gleaned from all other previous posts. If presented with evidence to the contrary, I will admit that I am wrong, but the decline in adventure games over the years as a non-niche genre has made conclude the things that I conclude, and I appreciate the tremendous efforts that this little Telltale start-up is making to both bring back adventure gaming as a mainstream genre, encouraging a new class of people to embrace video games, as well as really pioneering the idea of truly episodic gaming. Those are tall measures indeed, and they will be making a lot of innovations as well as taking lots of risks along the way. But to those that simplify all these issues to "if they made it more difficult they would sell more copies!!" I'm politely inclined to disbelieve you.
Is a puzzle's level of excellence directly related to its difficulty?
And let me just clarify that I really only believe this to be the case with story-driven games. In another genre a great story and great writing are wonderful additions and can benefit any game, but a racing game has to be a good racing game first and foremost. A shooter has to nail what makes a shooter game great before adding frosting elsewhere. And an adventure game's core is its story and characters. Let the puzzles or however you move through the game serve that, not the other way around. Compare a true story game like Monkey Island to a puzzle game like Myst. Both are widely considered "adventure games," but how are they different in focus?
I think it's interesting to read the comments of gamers, but not necessarily adventure gamers posted elswhere on the net. Still not representative of the people the GameTap guy was demo-ing to recently, but a litte less biased than our good selves..
IdleThumbs discussion
You'll see similar sentiment in amongst the Slashdot Sam & Max comments.
Harsh!
Have any S&M game developers posted in this thread yet?
Very good point. I'm pretty happy with the level of difficulty in the games because I played Sam & Max for entertainment: They make me laugh, I enjoyed the story and puzzles weren't bad either.
In this day and age you simply cannot have a game that stops because the user has got stuck. It doesn't work. Everything has to continue moving forward.
How many of you REALLY want "difficult" puzzles? A puzzle that you have to go away and think about for a few days. There's no gameplay while you're thinking, in fact you literally can't play the game until you progress further by solving the puzzle. Does that sound like fun?
The clever way that Monkey Island got around this problem was to allow the user to complete several different puzzles/tasks at one time: If the user got stuck on one, they could move onto another. Sam & Max: Culture Shock used this a little for the
Do people really want that? Because I imagine it's pretty difficult to gauge a puzzle so that everyone gets stuck just the right amount of time, so it doesn't become too frustrating.
Who knows, maybe they WILL up the challenge a bit in the next game... I imagine they didn't want to alienate anyone with a difficult/annoying puzzle in chapter one, anyway!
Well, I have to disagree. I worked at retail during the period FPS/MMORPG games started to affect the "industry" and I, personally, saw a decrease in sales of "older" or more "cerebral" genres. In the early 00s this reversed as people fell out of infatuation with the new online technology and went back to old buying habits, not to mention a generation of grown up console gamers (used to single player games) ready to buy new PC games.
The fact that my old store went out of business because there were fewer and fewer products, and more and more people sitting at home playing the same product endlessly (HL online, UO/EQ), speaks to some truth in the interpretation.
I could be completely wrong, but I don't think I am. And I'm not interested in picking apart your post, asserting my position, and defending it. Really it would be difficult to quantify anyways, so we'd be stuck at opinion and assertion.
Personally I'm just happy to see Sam & Max again!
Which is why I applaud (not literally) when Adventures try something new such as interactive movie styled games (like Fahrenheit or "The Indigo Prophecy" for you silly Americans) or combine them with other genres (like Psychonauts) or even just go and make the game with a decent 3D engine (like Bone and BS3 & 4). Obviously we need to fine tune things a little still (The pathfinding in BS4 was abysmal and having the ability to both use OR look should always be allowed) but it's time we stopped demanding everything the same and try and add in some more constructive criticism.
So you don't like the puzzles. Would you perhaps like easy, medium and hard modes for the next games? Rather than just "I want the harder puzzles 'cause I been playing adventure games since I was a foetus!" think about whether you want more puzzles or maybe some really polished puzzles with some optional ones to see extra stuff. Then calmly, politely, and with decent use of grammar and spelling make your suggestions. Then don't get annoyed if Telltale ignores them
Oooh, yessir, Fahrenheit was quite nice. The narration, the mix of genres... And the game did "flow" pretty nicely. But it was still short and very straightforward.
Open-endedness is something that hurt the adventure games too. Since GTA (and maybe before), people want freedom, variety, constant distractions, etc. Who today wants to stay stuck in the same three rooms with a couple objects (except us)? Games or becoming bigger and bigger in virtual surface. People want to be in credible virtual worlds.
I can easily imagine an adventure game with GTA's freedom.
The problem, I think, is that adventure games need to be more polished than other genres. Every pixel, every text must be right. It would probably take a decade to make an Adventure-Universe. Damn!