"Pick up", "Push", "Open" and other lost verbs

Opa-Opa

My native language is Portuguese, and that was a bit of an impediment for playing some games when I was a kid, but I believe Lucasarts adventure games thought me most of my English. I really can't remember when I knew it well enough to play those games, but I do remember playing them with my brother when I was 7 or 8 and he was 12 or 13 and that being very significant. Before that, all I could read was "press start button", "options", "easy", "hard", "game over", "congratulations", "thank you for playing", "the book is on the table", those kind of things. That learning is pretty understandable, and it's been several years since I realized that. Adventure games back in the day not only obligated you to read full dialogues to find out what you had to do next, but you also had to choose what you'd say and make sense with that. It also thought you to verbalize, creating full sentences for your actions ("Pick up mug", "use mug with barrel o' grog", "walk to the sun"). Later, since Sam and Max Hit the Road, I believe, with those games becoming more and more intuitive and getting rid of the HUD filled with verbs, that was lost. Nowadays you have no verbalizing of any kind, with the same kind of click doing the "look", "pick up" and "use", and that makes sense, I mean if you click a door you probably want to open it, close it or go through it, but I always felt that some richness there was lost. It also made those games a lot easier, since you have many times less possibilities for your actions.

Kroms

Losing the verbs made them a lot less frustrating, and not necessarily easier. Easier != bad, anyways.

Voodoomaster

Kroms wrote: »

Losing the verbs made them a lot less frustrating, and not necessarily easier. Easier != bad, anyways.

I totally agree, but maybe a good compromise was the Curse dobloon. However, I love the TellTale interface. It make the designer focus on the complexity and fantasy in gameplay, and not to the "discover the right verb" challenge. However not all the TellTale game designers in TellTale are able to use properly this simple interface as a way to build an alternative challenge with the making of various and fantasy puzzles. Grossman for example with his "Lair" did it perfectly. Darin a bit less...

JohanShogun

It's actually a tiny bit of a shame we lost the verbs, perhaps not from a playing point of view but as a way for people to learn English, from what I heard the most effective way to learn a language is to form sentences with verbs (just like you do in for example the secret of monkey island). It's supposed to create a deeper understanding of the language quickly or something like that

Friar

To be honest, i was never a fan of having a huge list of verbs, But i lve having more than one. Curse struck the perfect balance. But if Tales had done a similair thing, it would double the size of the voice acting needed, which would cause further delays, bigger files, and no wiiware version (or at the very least an even more compressed version). Telltales way is more then satisfactory, and makes the games easier to pick up for series newbs. I would still like to be able to have different options for Look at, and pickup/use though (left & right click maybe, like in broken sword?)

Scrawffler

I think the way it's often done now (without the verbs) is a more practical approach* but I must add that I do enjoy all those older games where you can interact using so many different verbs, just to see what the character's reaction is! It was often a good way to add a bit of extra challenge too, (not to say that adventure games are always easier without the verbs, of course). Both ways work in their own ways though.

*By "more practical approach" I don't mean purely hiding the verbs like they did in SMI:SE - that may have looked nice on screen but was a bit tricky to get used to! (well, I thought so!)

PecanBlue

I actually like the idea of the multiple verbs but this could be because I'm a fan of those incredibly old text-based adventure games. I had some trouble with the verbs when playing the old games (especially since I started with Special Edition, which didn't indicate at all that I had a list of multiple verbs and it took me forever to realize I can alternatively pick stuff up >:I) but I got used to it fast around MI2.

Rather Dashing

Haha, nine verbs to choose from? Amateurs.

PecanBlue

>Throw baby

EDIT: Also, I was going to mention this funny thing that happened with a text-based game named "Zork" that some friends and I loved playing. There was one point in the game we couldn't get past for a long time because we couldn't type the proper action, and it was something completely obvious. I'll just copy and paste the whole ordeal from our chat's "traditional phrases" page:

Climb Down the Cliff Wall
There's not much story behind this one. There's a text adventure game named Zork out there where at some point during the game you are confronted by a cliff you must climb down. Nothing seemed to work at first. "Climb down cliff", "go down cliff", "climb down"... none seemed to work. However, it turned out that the incredibly obvious answer was "Climb down the cliff wall". We all felt really stupid after that one, boy howdy.

RockNRoll

i miss the verbs. or at least the variety of ways to interact, and the lack of hand-holding. AGs are just way too easy these days, TMI might be some of the easiest adventures I've ever played which is a bummer. Without all the verbs it felt like a lot was missing from the gameplay.

SubSidal

YeaH, the loss of verbs really compromised the interactivity. I mean now our option is "to click or not to click?". In TMI lots of stuff Guybrush picked up I clicked just for the sake of clicking and not because I actually wanted him to pick up... Best way would be for the default click to be "look", and if you wanted to interact of pick up you'd have to tell the game to do it. Besides I really enjoyed Guybrush's comments about other characters before actually speaking to them.

(Off-topic: So Opa-Opa, portuguese hein? Me too )

Leak

SubSidal wrote: »

(Off-topic: So Opa-Opa, portuguese hein? Me too )

Well, I could have sworn he was from Fantasy Zone...

youmaycallmemurray

RockNRoll wrote: »

i miss the verbs. or at least the variety of ways to interact, and the lack of hand-holding. AGs are just way too easy these days, TMI might be some of the easiest adventures I've ever played which is a bummer. Without all the verbs it felt like a lot was missing from the gameplay.

I agree

Lup

I liked the way it was in Curse best... it was not that complicated but it kinda gave you more freedom in what you were doing like "Do I wanna take this with me or do I just wanna look at it first?"
Klicking randomly on things and having guybrush do the talking, picking up and looking at on his own feels kinda like an aimbot for adventures...

Eduardo

I will only add this: "adumbrate the elephant".

Guinea

The verbs prevented me from accidently solving puzzles like it happened countless times in TMI.
I randomly clicked an object to examine it, but Guybrush immediately did something with it and I was like "umm ok..."
It's a bit like if you play Super Mario, but regardless if you touch the enemy from the top or from any other side, you automatically defeat it because "that's what most players would want to do anyway"

12 verbs like in SMI, 9 verbs like in MI2, maybe for today's market that's a bit too much, ok.
But CMI and the 3 verbs is the best interface I've yet seen in an adventure game, and even most other games (Runaway etc.) have at least TWO actions, one of which is "look" and the other "interact".

StarEye

I personally think the 9 verb interface in MI2, Fate of Atlantis and Day of the Tentacle were the best so far, but I'm sure they could shrink it a bit. It DOES bring more challenge, 'cause there's more stuff you can do. I think, while a universal "action" command is a good idea, it removes some of you own thinking. There are several times in newer games where I used the action/interact command to do something specific with it, but ending up doing something entirely different that I hadn't thought of myself. When that happens, I feel a little let down that the game couldn't let me figure out that by yourself. The game just assumes what you want to do, but people think differently, and it's sad to see that adventure games have been dumbed down like that. I'd like to see adventure games have difficulty setting like in MI2 and 3. But not by changing the puzzles, just increasing the amount of verbs. If you have more options, you have more room for failure, so increased verb count would almost certainly increase the difficulty. That way, people who thinks more verbs are frustrating, they can play the more streamlined mode.

SubSidal

Guinea wrote: »

It's a bit like if you play Super Mario, but regardless if you touch the enemy from the top or from any other side, you automatically defeat it because "that's what most players would want to do anyway"

Excelent example!

Otis

I think that Telltale should get rid of the present item combining mechanism. It is very slow to use and all in all there were very few times when u needed to combine two items in your inventory. The present system is also annoying because the item u click has to go straight in the box or otherwise you have to start all over again, so actually im glad that there were only few times in the whole season where u needed to combine stuff.

CMI had the best item combining system as it was easy and quick to go through you inventory and check if some items could be combined