I've said several times that I am bang alongside the idea of fair death. I could be persuaded about fair deadends, but they're a little more questionable. I'm explicitly talking about unfair death and deadends, and I gave several examples in the lengthy post of the latter. Do you not think the bridge issue in KQ2 is unfair? If not, can you indicate to me how you gain the information you need to know *when* it's a good time to use one of your limited crossings? It's quite possible it is all adequately clued, and if so I apologise; my younger self wasn't smart enough to spot them.
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Telltale's games are 'Merciful', by Plotkin's scale. You are advocating 'Cruel'. I'm saying that there's a whole lot of space for a middle ground there to challenge without irritating
And here's the whole crux of the problem with your argument.
As people have said before, Sierra's games were about exploration and player learning. They didn't guide you by the hand through the game, so no...Other than text warning you that the bridge is rickety (and the art) they don't explicitly tell you 'you can only cross so many times before being stuck'.
Sierra expected players to learn from mistakes.
That's why even the very earliest Sierra game manuals included the "save early, save often" mantra (as did the death screens) as well as advice to take everything you possibly can as you don't know when (or if) it might be useful.
I'll also say your posts (and the post of the Telltale developer) illustrate exactly why Telltale trying to revive any Sierra series (let alone the "flagship" KQ series) just sounds like a really, really bad idea.
There's no way to reconcile the Sierra design philosophy with Telltale's design philosophy or desires to produce "accessible games" for the wider casual market.
Lucasarts games (and subsequently Telltale games as the company was initially a who's who of Lucasarts alumni) essentially marketed themselves as 'We're not Sierra'. In other words, there was an implied (and sometimes explicit) promise that you would never die by trying something, in most cases you'd never wander in to a dead end because you failed to pick up any item or if it was possible, you'd have plenty of advance warning that you were about to blunder in to a dead end, etc.
I'm just absolutely baffled by the King's Quest announcement.....All design philosophy aside...A commercial company saying they're bringing back King's Quest and not involving Roberta Williams is like trying to do Space Quest without Mark Crowe and/or Scott Murphy or Leisure Suit Larry without Al Lowe. (Magna Cum Laude, anyone?).
And given that the Williams' have repeatedly said the only way Roberta would be involved with a King's Quest game was if a company gave her a development team and full control, I kinda doubt she's involved in Telltale's "reboot/relaunch/sequel/spiritual successor/etc."
I don't know.....I hope I'm wrong, but it just seems to me that Telltale's going down some really bizarre paths lately in their pursuit of increased revenues.
And here's the whole crux of the problem with your argument.
As people have said before, Sierra's games were about exploration and player learning. They didn't guide you by the hand through the game, so no...Other than text warning you that the bridge is rickety (and the art) they don't explicitly tell you 'you can only cross so many times before being stuck'.
That's not quite the *specific* problem I have, actually. I'm okay with the finite (and unknown) number of crossings. What I'm not okay with is the fact that there's no reasonable way to deduce *when* it's okay to cross. You need information from the far side before you'll know what you need to bring over.
Sierra expected players to learn from mistakes.
From the Craft of Adventure I linked beforehand, the Bill of Player's Rights, #3 + #4.
Learning from mistakes is one thing. Mistakes reinforcing common sense or established parts of the world makeup, fine. Getting *crucial* information from the mistake that can be used to avoid the mistake is a very different thing.
Should a player *have* to fail (or be very, very lucky) in order to succeed? I say no; you say that it's a viable design trope. I think that's what this whole discussion ultimately boils down to.
Just to underline this: I am fine with it being possible for the player to fail. I have problems if said failure is required to progress.
One other piece of more general game design philosophy which I feel very strongly about, which I ought to bring up, and is related to the above: I don't think 'save' and 'restore' should be considered a valid part of *gameplay*. Metacommands like that should be used for convenience and continuity, but I think any game design that relies on the player to make use of them is fundamentally flawed.
That's not quite the *specific* problem I have, actually. I'm okay with the finite (and unknown) number of crossings. What I'm not okay with is the fact that there's no reasonable way to deduce *when* it's okay to cross. You need information before you'll know what you need to bring over.
Not really...The way the game's designed, you have sufficient crossings to cross over, get the clue, go find the corresponding key, etc. It just doesn't allow repeated back and forth if you didn't understand the clue and want to go back, for instance.
If you're referring to having the correct items on entering the endgame area, again...that goes back to the 'pick up everything you see that isn't nailed down and pry up anything that is nailed down' philosophy that originated with Infocom.
From the Craft of Adventure I linked beforehand, the Bill of Player's Rights, #3 + #4.
Learning from mistakes is one thing. Mistakes reinforcing common sense or established parts of the world makeup, fine. Getting *crucial* information from the mistake that can be used to avoid the mistake is a very different thing.
Should a player *have* to fail (or be very, very lucky) in order to succeed? I say no; you say that it's a viable design trope. I think that's what this whole discussion ultimately boils down to.
Just to underline this: I am fine with it being possible for the player to fail. I have problems if said failure is required to progress.
One factor I feel very strongly about, which I ought to bring up, and is related to the above: I don't think 'save' and 'restore' should be considered a valid part of *gameplay*. Metacommands like that should be used for convenience and continuity, but I think any game design that relies on the player to make use of them is fundamentally flawed.
Nelson's treatise is all well and fine for modern IF, however even the beloved Infocom encouraged players to save often (even lampooned a bit with Floyd's comments to the save command in Planetfall/Stationfall).
The bottom line is that Sierra games were heavily influenced by Infocom (as were many games back then). It might help to think of Sierra's various "Quest" series as being designed with similar philosophies as those in Infocom's "Advanced" and "Expert" adventures. Yes, Sierra adventures could be unwinnable if you failed to pick up an item at a certain point and yes, you could die very easily if you opened the wrong door or moved a certain direction at the wrong time (sequel police in the SQ4 skating rink).
But that's what made Sierra games. They had a reputation for being brutally unforgiving of mistakes, extremely difficult with sometimes illogical puzzles (and they had fantastic sound design when no one else thought it was important). And because of all that, they were insanely, frustratingly fun.
Would Sierra's design philosophy go over well today? If it were anyone else, probably not.
However, the reverse of that is would a Sierra "Quest" game be well received if it were designed with today's standard design philosophy and focus on "accessible gameplay"?
I think for a significant number here on the forum that grew up with Sierra games, the answer is a resounding 'NO!'.
Doing a successful revival of a franchise that is considered the core of Adventure Gaming is going to be Telltale's greatest achievement if they get it correct.
Not really...The way the game's designed, you have sufficient crossings to cross over, get the clue, go find the corresponding key, etc. It just doesn't allow repeated back and forth if you didn't understand the clue and want to go back, for instance.
Are you sure? I was under the impression you had exactly the number of crossings required for the solution, allowing no time for exploration and information-gathering. It's been a very long time, though.
Nelson's treatise is all well and fine for modern IF, however even the beloved Infocom encouraged players to save often (even lampooned a bit with Floyd's comments to the save command in Planetfall/Stationfall).
I'd also add mention of Suspended's "Impossible" difficulty... which really was.
But that's what made Sierra games. They had a reputation for being brutally unforgiving of mistakes, extremely difficult with sometimes illogical puzzles (and they had fantastic sound design when no one else thought it was important). And because of all that, they were insanely, frustratingly fun.
But is that *because* they were brutal, or because we didn't know any better?
Would Sierra's design philosophy go over well today? If it were anyone else, probably not.
Well, the IF community still accepts the like of A Change In The Weather and Varicella, both of which are pretty nasty; but then, they also accept Photopia, which is anything but. On the other hand, that's people predisposed to liking them.
That said, there are some niche difficult games doing remarkably well at the moment. I played through La Mulana (with *extensive* help!) and massively enjoyed it. Demon's Souls is currently a small hit over on the PS3. Super Meat Boy has some massively challenging platforming in it. Donkey Kong Country Returns isn't quite so tough but still difficult, with family-friendliness ladled over the top. Perhaps it's time for a difficulty renaissance?
Ultimately: You make concessions towards the modern gaming environment, or you don't sell. It's a harsh reality of the industry as it stands today, but it's a realistic one.
HOWEVER: Making concessions does not *necessarily* mean rejecting all the design tropes from the past out of hand. I think it's possible to make - quoting from an Etrian Odyssey review - an "Old-school tough, new-school fair" Sierra-style adventure. It's a challenge, I don't disagree. But I don't believe it's insurmountable.
The two items that are perceived as "unfair" in the old Sierra games are deaths and dead ends.
Others have already suggested the obvious fix for deaths: just auto-save the game before any death scene, and reload automatically. People will actually have fun looking for all of the possible ways to die then.
Dead ends can be much more annoying however. They introduce an interesting game mechanic, by forcing you to consider all possible options available to you in the past to solve a puzzle in addition to the current options. Which also means that you cannot just click everything on everything to solve puzzles, you need to use reasoning & memory.
However, even when you do figure out what you should have done to solve the current puzzle, you still have to replay from scratch a part of the game (possibly the entire game, if you made the mistake of overwriting a previously saved game with an unwinnable state) - and this is just boring.
Nobody has suggested a solution for this issue so far, except for "remove dead ends".
I still think that removing the dead end altogether is the best solution for stuff like "I forgot to pick up a fundamental item at the beginning of the game". Just leave the starting locations accessible until the end of the game. If you think about it, restoring a savegame in a previously explored location to search for items you may have overlooked doesn't add any gameplay value compared to walking back to the same location to explore it again.
I also think that dead ends like "Oops, I just destroyed a fundamental item" should be removed and punished with instant death + auto-restore instead. Any 'old-school adventurer' would anyway restore the game immediately after destroying any item...
However, I just had an idea to integrate other types of dead ends in a modern game without the boring "replay" part. Anyone familiar with a version control system heard about "branching" and "merging" - the same thing could also be used for adventure games.
The game could automatically "branch" the state of the game world before any game choice potentially leading to a dead end. Then, at any time, you could select from a "what if" menu a scene from the past to replay. Once you finish the scene, the game automatically advances to the present again, but the state of the "alternate past" is merged into the current state without having to replay all of the game in the middle.
This will work for "interesting" dead ends, like "I chose the wrong item to solve a previous puzzle" or "I failed to save this character in time".
If somebody objects that this "alternate past" stuff breaks immersion in the game, I can reply that restoring the game and replaying everything in the middle breaks immersion even more. In certain fantasy or sci-fi settings involving virtual reality or parallel universes, it could even make sense in the game world
If somebody objects that this "alternate past" stuff isn't really a dead end because past choices can always be reversed, I can reply that the same is true if you follow the "old-school adventurer's mantra" and save the game in a different slot every 2 minutes - the only difference is that in the second case you have to do it manually...
Are you sure? I was under the impression you had exactly the number of crossings required for the solution, allowing no time for exploration and information-gathering. It's been a very long time, though.
You had exactly the number of crossings required to win the game, but this also included a mandatory first crossing used only for exploration and information gathering. IIRC,
you could only meet the mermaid that started the quest for the first key after crossing the bridge for the first time and reading the clue on the first door.
I like the way how QFG and the later KQ titles handles some puzzles by giving alternate routes.
What I mean is if the player doesn't have the ideal item to pass a puzzle, a substitution or another path can be used.
In theory, this can eliminate unavoidable dead-ends. For example, if you miss out on an important item at the start of the game, you can use a substitute item found at the dead or skip the area and and go on a different route
Getting *crucial* information from the mistake that can be used to avoid the mistake is a very different thing.
I remember a specific case where even this "unfair" treatment was fun.
If you did a certain action, you would die completely unexpectedly, but dying was also the only way to find out what you should have done instead. The game managed to make a joke out of this, so it was actually funny instead of irritating.
It's the "pin in the food" puzzle in Leisure Suit Larry 2. The only way to find out that there's a pin in the food served at the airport is to eat the food and choke to death. If you restore the game and "get the pin" instead of eating the food you obtain this fundamental item, and the game jokes about the fact that you get a strange feeling of deja-vu.
Of course, in this case it's not irritating because you can immediately restore and try again.
Honestly, I think we should concentrate our efforts at asking for something feasible from TTG.
Respecting the worlds and styles of each series? That's feasible.
More difficult puzzles than what TTG offered us so far? Most certainly. Lechuck's Revenge and the Curse Of Monkey Island had that nice option to set the game difficulty to easy or hard, bring that back. Those who want to enjoy the story can play it on easy, those who want some extra challenge can play it on hard.
The possibility to die? Yes, both to maintain tension (the climaxes of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and Fate Of Atlantis wouldn't have been the same if you couldn't die in them) and because sometimes they can be outright hilarious when handled correctly, like anyone who played Space Quest can attest. Anyone here remember that scene in Leisure Suit Larry I, where you get killed and suddenly the sidewalk where your body is lying begins to lower, revealing a huge underground industrial complex, where your body is thrown in a blender, mashed, reshaped into human form, painted, clothed, given an electric shock then thrown on another elevator that lifts you back on the sidewalk? That scene was brilliant.
But dead ends? Be serious. Those that claims it wouldn't be faithful to Sierra's style forget that even Sierra got a clue that everyone but a minority of ultra hardcore players hated those and got rid of those in their later games. AGDI's King's Quest II+ had no dead ends. Did that cause a ruckus?
-Nope. Is it still considered by most to be their finest game and one of the best King's Quest game ever made?
-Yes. Did anyone accuses AGDI of betraying Sierra's style and legacy because it didn't have dead ends?
It's probably as faithful to the good old Sierra as anyone ever got in recent time. When people accused them of betraying the style and legacy of Sierra it was because they modified the story in their remake, not because they removed the dead ends.
Honestly, there are better ways to make adventure games more difficult than bring back cruel mechanics that only a handful of ultra hardcore fans actually like, and that comes from someone who wants TTG to make more difficult games. What's next? Should they bring back mazes that took hours to map? Or pixel hunting? Or those stupid sequences where you have to walk on narrow ledges where one pixel in the wrong direction makes you plummet to your death, which were present in all early King's Quest games? Where do you draw the line between which stupid adventure games mechanics that we got rid of is part of Sierra's style and which isn't?
Let's concentrate our efforts on asking TTG for something that has good chances to happen. Respecting the style is feasible, they do have a mystery person on board who acts as consultant. Deaths have good chances to be implemented because you can be killed in Jurassic Park. As for more challenging puzzles, Dave Grossman worked on Lechuck's Revenge and Day Of The Tentacle in the past, two games featuring harder puzzles than what TTG got us used to thus far, the first giving you the choice between easy and hard puzzles, the second featuring some of the best puzzles ever designed in an adventure game: logical but not dead easy, creative but not "WTF WERE THEY THINKING??!" frustrating. But asking for the inclusion of dead ends, just to please a minority of ultra hardcore fans, to the detriment of the casual and hardcore-but-not-ultra-hardcore fans, not to mention the financial success of their endeavor and their chances to work on other Sierra IPs (let's not forget that Sierra had more than just King's Quest), is hardly feasible and ill-advised if you want my opinion.
I second this once again, and realistically, I think the chances of Telltale including dead ends are vanishingly small...
Dead ends have never stopped me playing a good adventure game (playing Martian Memorandum right now) and I can appreciate the edginess their looming presence generates - but I still have no wish to see them in new releases.
Not advocating railroading, just the common-sense approach of always leaving the player the possibility to return to an earlier location to retrieve that crucial item, for example.
One thing I haven't seen mentioned in the "dead ends" vs. "no dead ends" discussion:
- LucasArts adventures up to Indy3 in 1990 featured dead ends like Sierra adventures.
- KQV released in 1990 is also the last Sierra game to feature dead ends all over the place; in later games, they are either infrequent or absent completely.
Dead ends have nothing to do with the "style" of the company, and both companies got to the same design decision of getting rid of dead ends more or less at the same time (independently or not, it doesn't matter).
We simply see more dead ends in Sierra adventures because they released more titles in the 1980s!
One thing I haven't seen mentioned in the "dead ends" vs. "no dead ends" discussion:
- LucasArts adventures up to Indy3 in 1990 featured dead ends like Sierra adventures.
- KQV released in 1990 is also the last Sierra game to feature dead ends all over the place; in later games, they are either infrequent or absent completely.
Dead ends have nothing to do with the "style" of the company, and both companies got to the same design decision of getting rid of dead ends more or less at the same time (independently or not, it doesn't matter).
We simply see more dead ends in Sierra adventures because they released more titles in the 1980s!
All well and good, except that's not really true.
Take Space Quest 4, for instance. Released in 1991, I believe, and it was full of dead ends though for the most part they were rather mild as they became evident quickly for the most part. Still, if you hadn't been saving regularly, you could lose a lot of time.
I'd also point to Police Quest 3, one of my absolute favorite Sierra games of all-time and one that has a potential dead end within the first few minutes of the game that doesn't become evident until literally the very end of the game.
I seem to recall something similar with PQ4 as well, though I don't think it was quite as severe as PQ3's example.
So...Really, Sierra made pretty extensive use of dead ends up until the CUC buyout at the very least and of course I don't really think the CUC/Vivendi era Sierra can really be considered Sierra.
After all, I don't think they really had many (if any) typical Sierra games released from that point to Vivendi folding and selling to Activision.
They didn't "fold", they essentially brought Activision. Activision-Blizzard is basically Vivendi Games except with Kotick at the head.
Fair enough.
I just recall Vivendi Universal Games was in some financial trouble as CUC/Cendant's "creative accounting" had been somewhat more severe than it had initially seemed.
Take Space Quest 4, for instance. Released in 1991, I believe, and it was full of dead ends though for the most part they were rather mild as they became evident quickly for the most part. Still, if you hadn't been saving regularly, you could lose a lot of time.
I wouldn't call it 'full' of dead ends. I can only really think of two in the whole game, and one of those could still be solved if you knew a code already -- and was also really hard to miss.
Take Space Quest 4, for instance. Released in 1991, I believe, and it was full of dead ends though for the most part they were rather mild as they became evident quickly for the most part. Still, if you hadn't been saving regularly, you could lose a lot of time.
True, there are some minor dead ends also in SQIV. You can miss a few time travel codes. At least you don't need to replay the whole game in that case - just restore a previously saved game, get the code, then restore the latest game again.
I'd also point to Police Quest 3, one of my absolute favorite Sierra games of all-time and one that has a potential dead end within the first few minutes of the game that doesn't become evident until literally the very end of the game.
I seem to recall something similar with PQ4 as well, though I don't think it was quite as severe as PQ3's example.
I stand corrected then - I never played PQ3 or PQ4.
So...Really, Sierra made pretty extensive use of dead ends up until the CUC buyout at the very least
Sorry, this isn't really true. I still stand by my previous statement that most of the games released after KQV didn't rely extensively on dead ends.
KQVI has a few dead ends but they were mostly confined to the Labyrinth. KQVII, LSL5, Freddy Pharkas, SQV and SQ6 don't have any AFAIK. GK1 and GK2 also have few or none. All of these games were released before the CUC buyout in 1996.
I wouldn't call it 'full' of dead ends. I can only really think of two in the whole game, and one of those could still be solved if you knew a code already -- and was also really hard to miss.
I don't know....There were quite a few dead ends as I recall....The thing is, there was also a ton of apparent dead ends that weren't really dead ends as well
What I mean by that is, unless you figured out you could return to the streets of Xenon in 'SQ XII', for instance, it was possible to "miss" a lot of items like the pocket pal, batteries, acid, etc and think you needed to restart.
But there were also plenty of real dead ends as well such as the one you mention which could be overcome with prior knowledge, or the item taken from a tank on the street that would end your game shortly thereafter (while giving you points for taking it).
Granted, with the time hopper allowing travel between times, it's not as bad as it could have been, but still....
Sorry, this isn't really true. I still stand by my previous statement that most of the games released after KQV didn't rely extensively on dead ends.
KQVI has a few dead ends but they were mostly confined to the Labyrinth. KQVII, LSL5, Freddy Pharkas, SQV and SQ6 don't have any AFAIK. GK1 and GK2 also have few or none. All of these games were released before the CUC buyout in 1996.
I dunno.....I've never played KQ 7, so I can't speak as to how it was though I'd be surprised if it had many dead ends.
Freddy Pharkas, on the other hand, had its share that really irritated me. It was really bizarre too, because you'd have an act that had absolutely none which would leave you thinking 'cool...don't have to worry about it' and then you'd run in to the wall in the next act.
SQ6, I think you're right. I can't think of anything offhand that couldn't be solved by backtracking because I'm pretty sure you couldn't be rescued without taking what you needed from the apartment.
SQ5 has been a while, but I do recall a dead end or two, I want to say involving the ambassador later in the game and something or other on that planet with the "deserted" outpost.
That isn't a dead end, you can put back the item in the tank. You even get +5 points in the process (+25 for picking it up -20 for putting it back).
It's arguable, I'd say. Certainly makes the game unwinnable if you don't know you're not supposed to keep it up. Especially since it take a while to figure out what happened as the delayed consequence doesn't make it immediately evident that the item was the cause.
Fortunately it's at the very beginning of the game so you don't lose too much time, but...
LucasArts gave up on dead ends with Loom in 1990, made it an official policy with Secret Of Monkey Island, in the same year.
The earliest games without dead ends for Sierra were in their adventure line for kids (Mixed Up Fairy Tales, EcoQuest, Pepper's Adventure In Time...)
Although one accidental dead end managed to slip in Leisure Suit Larry V, starting with that game Al Lowe made an effort not to put any dead ends in his games, I know there are none in his last two Leisure Suit Larry games, I'm not sure for Torin's Passage.
There were still dead ends:
In all Police Quest games,
In King's Quest VI, I don't know if there were any in King's Quest VII,
In all Space Quest games until Space Quest VI (1995), although they were polite in Space Quest V, when you got in an unwinnable state the game would kill you and tells you why you screwed up, making finding where you screwed up less painful.
Lighthouse (1996) had one, which occurred 15 minutes into the game, it only became obvious you screwed up 20 hours of Myst like puzzles later.
I'm sure someone who played more Sierra's games than I did will be able to tell us more, but in the last batch of games that Sierra made, I got a strong impression that dead ends were on the way out from the ones I played.
KQ7 and Torin's Passage were dead-end free. I think all three Gabriel Knight games were also devoid of dead ends - but you'd still have to save in case of death.
I think dead ends should not be tolerated in modern gaming. Call it blasphemy or whatever, the dead ends weren't design choice, they were there because of limitations. These, oddly enough, could've been fixed quite simply by not allowing the player to leave an area without a the items necessary to win the game.
I think one thing that should be fixed were some of the insane "puzzles" in KQ. There's a difference between a logic puzzle and puzzles that are "lucky guess" scenarios. You need an example, how about killing a yeti with a pie, need i say more?
I think dead ends should not be tolerated in modern gaming. Call it blasphemy or whatever, the dead ends weren't design choice, they were there because of limitations.
But not ALWAYS. It's been a while, and I don't remember all the specifics, but I know that you could blow the first King's Quest by killing the goat, and I know there were lots of key items you could eat or use too early and prevent completion. It wasn't always not finding the items. Sometimes it was about wasting them.
Edit to add: Am I the only person who naturally went for the pie when trying to kill the Yeti the first time? And what does that say about me?
Personally, I'm all for it for TTG to try their hands on King's Quest and I don't even mind if it's a reboot. For me, personally, the first actually good KQ game is KQ3, as it has a proper plot and the puzzles are good, so I don't mind if they try to tell a more coherent story of how Graham becomes the king of Daventry, as the first game is mainly loosely together stitched puzzles.
As for dead ends and sudden deaths. I am for death scenes for sure, as they have always been a part of a bit dark humour of Sierra games. But dead ends are more of an annoyance really.
One possibility would be to use alternative solutions on those cases. When done correctly, the game would be smooth sailing, but if some thing were to be missed, the latter puzzles would be more difficult.
There's some alternative solutions on some of the puzzles in KQ1, like you could bribe the rat with gold instead of cheese, but giving it the gold cost you points as well.
NO. Not with this company. Not with this direction. Telltale IS NOT SIERRA.
Not even on their BEST DAY.
They do not have the design philosophy of Sierra. They do not have the humor of Sierra. They do not have the art direction of Sierra. They have never made a Sierra-style game and they have proven time and time again that a game worthy of a license that is SO INGRAINED IN THE HISTORY OF THE ADVENTURE GENRE.
And no, CONTRARY TO WHAT SOME PEOPLE MAY BELIEVE, LucasArts and, by extension Telltale, is not a BETTER ALTERNATIVE to Sierra that "fixed" and "evolved" the genre by removing all the bad aspects of it left in by Sierra. Sierra was a powerfully distinct entity, with its own philosophy and approach that couldn't be more different from the LucasArts or modern Telltale way of doing things.
I agree, and that quote from Dave Grossman doesn't help me feel better at all either.
I agree, and that quote from Dave Grossman doesn't help me feel better at all either.
Dave Grossman never said they made bad games, he just said he basically just didn't agree that infinite amounts of random game-ending deaths and dead ends were very good design choices.
KQ7 and Torin's Passage were dead-end free. I think all three Gabriel Knight games were also devoid of dead ends - but you'd still have to save in case of death.
And coincidentally the Gabriel Knight trilogy are the best games Sierra ever made. :cool:
I'm cool with deaths in adventure games and I think Gabriel Knight is an example of deaths done right (to continute my gushing over GK). In each game, there is no way to die or otherwise screw yourself over until the later chapters, which helped to build suspense and drive home the point that things were getting serious.
As opposed to the early King's Quest games that had really stupid deaths like clicking on the wrong pixel on a stairwell and having Rosella fall three feet and break her neck. Not to say that KQ was nothing but unreasonable deaths, because it wasn't- it's perfectly reasonable for Graham to keel over in the desert after wandering around aimlessly for several dozen screens. And that's what I would prefer to see: if you do something blazingly stupid, then yeah, death is a perfectly viable punishment.
Dead ends meanwhile just feel like poor design or oversights and are pretty much the one thing that kept KQ5 from being my favorite in the series (PIIIIIIIE). It was great that the KQ games were fairly non-linear, but it seemed kind of counterproductive to punish the player for taking advantage of it.
Why always the pie as an example? You ate it and got no points for that so you know that you must have done something incredibly stupid. Especially since money is rare in the game and you just spent your only silver coin on it.
° needed to get caught
° there was no hint what so ever you would need cheese
° even then it can easily be missed the only time you could get it and continue the game.
° needed to get caught
° there was no hint what so ever you would need cheese
° even then it can easily be missed the only time you could get it and continue the game.
The whole ending sequence of KQ5 is the main reason that 6 is my favorite in the series and not vice-versa. It is a massive clusterf*ck of random deaths, potential dead-ends, and clue-less puzzles. The rest of the game is pretty fantastic.
Why always the pie as an example? You ate it and got no points for that so you know that you must have done something incredibly stupid. Especially since money is rare in the game and you just spent your only silver coin on it.
I think it is exactly because of what you said.
Seems there is no story reason, no ingame reason, the only indicator is something external (no getting points, so "the game told me I did wrong").
Dead ends meanwhile just feel like poor design or oversights
Not necessarily - I liked how "dead ends" were tied into the design of Conquests of the Longbow. The game was structured as a series of missions, and had multiple endings based on your overall performance throughout the game.
I think it was almost always possible to reach one of the endings - but of course, if you screwed up too many missions you would be stuck with the bad ending.
Since it was quite obvious when you had screwed up, you could always go back and try to replay the same mission better.
Comments
And here's the whole crux of the problem with your argument.
As people have said before, Sierra's games were about exploration and player learning. They didn't guide you by the hand through the game, so no...Other than text warning you that the bridge is rickety (and the art) they don't explicitly tell you 'you can only cross so many times before being stuck'.
Sierra expected players to learn from mistakes.
That's why even the very earliest Sierra game manuals included the "save early, save often" mantra (as did the death screens) as well as advice to take everything you possibly can as you don't know when (or if) it might be useful.
I'll also say your posts (and the post of the Telltale developer) illustrate exactly why Telltale trying to revive any Sierra series (let alone the "flagship" KQ series) just sounds like a really, really bad idea.
There's no way to reconcile the Sierra design philosophy with Telltale's design philosophy or desires to produce "accessible games" for the wider casual market.
Lucasarts games (and subsequently Telltale games as the company was initially a who's who of Lucasarts alumni) essentially marketed themselves as 'We're not Sierra'. In other words, there was an implied (and sometimes explicit) promise that you would never die by trying something, in most cases you'd never wander in to a dead end because you failed to pick up any item or if it was possible, you'd have plenty of advance warning that you were about to blunder in to a dead end, etc.
I'm just absolutely baffled by the King's Quest announcement.....All design philosophy aside...A commercial company saying they're bringing back King's Quest and not involving Roberta Williams is like trying to do Space Quest without Mark Crowe and/or Scott Murphy or Leisure Suit Larry without Al Lowe. (Magna Cum Laude, anyone?).
And given that the Williams' have repeatedly said the only way Roberta would be involved with a King's Quest game was if a company gave her a development team and full control, I kinda doubt she's involved in Telltale's "reboot/relaunch/sequel/spiritual successor/etc."
I don't know.....I hope I'm wrong, but it just seems to me that Telltale's going down some really bizarre paths lately in their pursuit of increased revenues.
That's not quite the *specific* problem I have, actually. I'm okay with the finite (and unknown) number of crossings. What I'm not okay with is the fact that there's no reasonable way to deduce *when* it's okay to cross. You need information from the far side before you'll know what you need to bring over.
From the Craft of Adventure I linked beforehand, the Bill of Player's Rights, #3 + #4.
Learning from mistakes is one thing. Mistakes reinforcing common sense or established parts of the world makeup, fine. Getting *crucial* information from the mistake that can be used to avoid the mistake is a very different thing.
Should a player *have* to fail (or be very, very lucky) in order to succeed? I say no; you say that it's a viable design trope. I think that's what this whole discussion ultimately boils down to.
Just to underline this: I am fine with it being possible for the player to fail. I have problems if said failure is required to progress.
One other piece of more general game design philosophy which I feel very strongly about, which I ought to bring up, and is related to the above: I don't think 'save' and 'restore' should be considered a valid part of *gameplay*. Metacommands like that should be used for convenience and continuity, but I think any game design that relies on the player to make use of them is fundamentally flawed.
Not really...The way the game's designed, you have sufficient crossings to cross over, get the clue, go find the corresponding key, etc. It just doesn't allow repeated back and forth if you didn't understand the clue and want to go back, for instance.
If you're referring to having the correct items on entering the endgame area, again...that goes back to the 'pick up everything you see that isn't nailed down and pry up anything that is nailed down' philosophy that originated with Infocom.
Nelson's treatise is all well and fine for modern IF, however even the beloved Infocom encouraged players to save often (even lampooned a bit with Floyd's comments to the save command in Planetfall/Stationfall).
The bottom line is that Sierra games were heavily influenced by Infocom (as were many games back then). It might help to think of Sierra's various "Quest" series as being designed with similar philosophies as those in Infocom's "Advanced" and "Expert" adventures. Yes, Sierra adventures could be unwinnable if you failed to pick up an item at a certain point and yes, you could die very easily if you opened the wrong door or moved a certain direction at the wrong time (sequel police in the SQ4 skating rink).
But that's what made Sierra games. They had a reputation for being brutally unforgiving of mistakes, extremely difficult with sometimes illogical puzzles (and they had fantastic sound design when no one else thought it was important). And because of all that, they were insanely, frustratingly fun.
Would Sierra's design philosophy go over well today? If it were anyone else, probably not.
However, the reverse of that is would a Sierra "Quest" game be well received if it were designed with today's standard design philosophy and focus on "accessible gameplay"?
I think for a significant number here on the forum that grew up with Sierra games, the answer is a resounding 'NO!'.
Are you sure? I was under the impression you had exactly the number of crossings required for the solution, allowing no time for exploration and information-gathering. It's been a very long time, though.
I'd also add mention of Suspended's "Impossible" difficulty... which really was.
But is that *because* they were brutal, or because we didn't know any better?
Well, the IF community still accepts the like of A Change In The Weather and Varicella, both of which are pretty nasty; but then, they also accept Photopia, which is anything but. On the other hand, that's people predisposed to liking them.
That said, there are some niche difficult games doing remarkably well at the moment. I played through La Mulana (with *extensive* help!) and massively enjoyed it. Demon's Souls is currently a small hit over on the PS3. Super Meat Boy has some massively challenging platforming in it. Donkey Kong Country Returns isn't quite so tough but still difficult, with family-friendliness ladled over the top. Perhaps it's time for a difficulty renaissance?
Ultimately: You make concessions towards the modern gaming environment, or you don't sell. It's a harsh reality of the industry as it stands today, but it's a realistic one.
HOWEVER: Making concessions does not *necessarily* mean rejecting all the design tropes from the past out of hand. I think it's possible to make - quoting from an Etrian Odyssey review - an "Old-school tough, new-school fair" Sierra-style adventure. It's a challenge, I don't disagree. But I don't believe it's insurmountable.
Others have already suggested the obvious fix for deaths: just auto-save the game before any death scene, and reload automatically. People will actually have fun looking for all of the possible ways to die then.
Dead ends can be much more annoying however. They introduce an interesting game mechanic, by forcing you to consider all possible options available to you in the past to solve a puzzle in addition to the current options. Which also means that you cannot just click everything on everything to solve puzzles, you need to use reasoning & memory.
However, even when you do figure out what you should have done to solve the current puzzle, you still have to replay from scratch a part of the game (possibly the entire game, if you made the mistake of overwriting a previously saved game with an unwinnable state) - and this is just boring.
Nobody has suggested a solution for this issue so far, except for "remove dead ends".
I still think that removing the dead end altogether is the best solution for stuff like "I forgot to pick up a fundamental item at the beginning of the game". Just leave the starting locations accessible until the end of the game. If you think about it, restoring a savegame in a previously explored location to search for items you may have overlooked doesn't add any gameplay value compared to walking back to the same location to explore it again.
I also think that dead ends like "Oops, I just destroyed a fundamental item" should be removed and punished with instant death + auto-restore instead. Any 'old-school adventurer' would anyway restore the game immediately after destroying any item...
However, I just had an idea to integrate other types of dead ends in a modern game without the boring "replay" part. Anyone familiar with a version control system heard about "branching" and "merging" - the same thing could also be used for adventure games.
The game could automatically "branch" the state of the game world before any game choice potentially leading to a dead end. Then, at any time, you could select from a "what if" menu a scene from the past to replay. Once you finish the scene, the game automatically advances to the present again, but the state of the "alternate past" is merged into the current state without having to replay all of the game in the middle.
This will work for "interesting" dead ends, like "I chose the wrong item to solve a previous puzzle" or "I failed to save this character in time".
If somebody objects that this "alternate past" stuff breaks immersion in the game, I can reply that restoring the game and replaying everything in the middle breaks immersion even more. In certain fantasy or sci-fi settings involving virtual reality or parallel universes, it could even make sense in the game world
If somebody objects that this "alternate past" stuff isn't really a dead end because past choices can always be reversed, I can reply that the same is true if you follow the "old-school adventurer's mantra" and save the game in a different slot every 2 minutes - the only difference is that in the second case you have to do it manually...
What do you think about this?
You had exactly the number of crossings required to win the game, but this also included a mandatory first crossing used only for exploration and information gathering. IIRC,
What I mean is if the player doesn't have the ideal item to pass a puzzle, a substitution or another path can be used.
In theory, this can eliminate unavoidable dead-ends. For example, if you miss out on an important item at the start of the game, you can use a substitute item found at the dead or skip the area and and go on a different route
I remember a specific case where even this "unfair" treatment was fun.
If you did a certain action, you would die completely unexpectedly, but dying was also the only way to find out what you should have done instead. The game managed to make a joke out of this, so it was actually funny instead of irritating.
Of course, in this case it's not irritating because you can immediately restore and try again.
Respecting the worlds and styles of each series? That's feasible.
More difficult puzzles than what TTG offered us so far? Most certainly. Lechuck's Revenge and the Curse Of Monkey Island had that nice option to set the game difficulty to easy or hard, bring that back. Those who want to enjoy the story can play it on easy, those who want some extra challenge can play it on hard.
The possibility to die? Yes, both to maintain tension (the climaxes of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and Fate Of Atlantis wouldn't have been the same if you couldn't die in them) and because sometimes they can be outright hilarious when handled correctly, like anyone who played Space Quest can attest. Anyone here remember that scene in Leisure Suit Larry I, where you get killed and suddenly the sidewalk where your body is lying begins to lower, revealing a huge underground industrial complex, where your body is thrown in a blender, mashed, reshaped into human form, painted, clothed, given an electric shock then thrown on another elevator that lifts you back on the sidewalk? That scene was brilliant.
But dead ends? Be serious. Those that claims it wouldn't be faithful to Sierra's style forget that even Sierra got a clue that everyone but a minority of ultra hardcore players hated those and got rid of those in their later games. AGDI's King's Quest II+ had no dead ends.
Did that cause a ruckus?
-Nope.
Is it still considered by most to be their finest game and one of the best King's Quest game ever made?
-Yes.
Did anyone accuses AGDI of betraying Sierra's style and legacy because it didn't have dead ends?
It's probably as faithful to the good old Sierra as anyone ever got in recent time. When people accused them of betraying the style and legacy of Sierra it was because they modified the story in their remake, not because they removed the dead ends.
Honestly, there are better ways to make adventure games more difficult than bring back cruel mechanics that only a handful of ultra hardcore fans actually like, and that comes from someone who wants TTG to make more difficult games. What's next? Should they bring back mazes that took hours to map? Or pixel hunting? Or those stupid sequences where you have to walk on narrow ledges where one pixel in the wrong direction makes you plummet to your death, which were present in all early King's Quest games? Where do you draw the line between which stupid adventure games mechanics that we got rid of is part of Sierra's style and which isn't?
Let's concentrate our efforts on asking TTG for something that has good chances to happen. Respecting the style is feasible, they do have a mystery person on board who acts as consultant. Deaths have good chances to be implemented because you can be killed in Jurassic Park. As for more challenging puzzles, Dave Grossman worked on Lechuck's Revenge and Day Of The Tentacle in the past, two games featuring harder puzzles than what TTG got us used to thus far, the first giving you the choice between easy and hard puzzles, the second featuring some of the best puzzles ever designed in an adventure game: logical but not dead easy, creative but not "WTF WERE THEY THINKING??!" frustrating. But asking for the inclusion of dead ends, just to please a minority of ultra hardcore fans, to the detriment of the casual and hardcore-but-not-ultra-hardcore fans, not to mention the financial success of their endeavor and their chances to work on other Sierra IPs (let's not forget that Sierra had more than just King's Quest), is hardly feasible and ill-advised if you want my opinion.
Dead ends have never stopped me playing a good adventure game (playing Martian Memorandum right now) and I can appreciate the edginess their looming presence generates - but I still have no wish to see them in new releases.
Not advocating railroading, just the common-sense approach of always leaving the player the possibility to return to an earlier location to retrieve that crucial item, for example.
- LucasArts adventures up to Indy3 in 1990 featured dead ends like Sierra adventures.
- KQV released in 1990 is also the last Sierra game to feature dead ends all over the place; in later games, they are either infrequent or absent completely.
Dead ends have nothing to do with the "style" of the company, and both companies got to the same design decision of getting rid of dead ends more or less at the same time (independently or not, it doesn't matter).
We simply see more dead ends in Sierra adventures because they released more titles in the 1980s!
All well and good, except that's not really true.
Take Space Quest 4, for instance. Released in 1991, I believe, and it was full of dead ends though for the most part they were rather mild as they became evident quickly for the most part. Still, if you hadn't been saving regularly, you could lose a lot of time.
I'd also point to Police Quest 3, one of my absolute favorite Sierra games of all-time and one that has a potential dead end within the first few minutes of the game that doesn't become evident until literally the very end of the game.
I seem to recall something similar with PQ4 as well, though I don't think it was quite as severe as PQ3's example.
So...Really, Sierra made pretty extensive use of dead ends up until the CUC buyout at the very least and of course I don't really think the CUC/Vivendi era Sierra can really be considered Sierra.
After all, I don't think they really had many (if any) typical Sierra games released from that point to Vivendi folding and selling to Activision.
Fair enough.
I just recall Vivendi Universal Games was in some financial trouble as CUC/Cendant's "creative accounting" had been somewhat more severe than it had initially seemed.
I wouldn't call it 'full' of dead ends. I can only really think of two in the whole game, and one of those could still be solved if you knew a code already -- and was also really hard to miss.
True, there are some minor dead ends also in SQIV. You can miss a few time travel codes. At least you don't need to replay the whole game in that case - just restore a previously saved game, get the code, then restore the latest game again.
I stand corrected then - I never played PQ3 or PQ4.
Sorry, this isn't really true. I still stand by my previous statement that most of the games released after KQV didn't rely extensively on dead ends.
KQVI has a few dead ends but they were mostly confined to the Labyrinth. KQVII, LSL5, Freddy Pharkas, SQV and SQ6 don't have any AFAIK. GK1 and GK2 also have few or none. All of these games were released before the CUC buyout in 1996.
I don't know....There were quite a few dead ends as I recall....The thing is, there was also a ton of apparent dead ends that weren't really dead ends as well
What I mean by that is, unless you figured out you could return to the streets of Xenon in 'SQ XII', for instance, it was possible to "miss" a lot of items like the pocket pal, batteries, acid, etc and think you needed to restart.
But there were also plenty of real dead ends as well such as the one you mention which could be overcome with prior knowledge, or the item taken from a tank on the street that would end your game shortly thereafter (while giving you points for taking it).
Granted, with the time hopper allowing travel between times, it's not as bad as it could have been, but still....
I dunno.....I've never played KQ 7, so I can't speak as to how it was though I'd be surprised if it had many dead ends.
Freddy Pharkas, on the other hand, had its share that really irritated me. It was really bizarre too, because you'd have an act that had absolutely none which would leave you thinking 'cool...don't have to worry about it' and then you'd run in to the wall in the next act.
SQ6, I think you're right. I can't think of anything offhand that couldn't be solved by backtracking because I'm pretty sure you couldn't be rescued without taking what you needed from the apartment.
SQ5 has been a while, but I do recall a dead end or two, I want to say involving the ambassador later in the game and something or other on that planet with the "deserted" outpost.
That isn't a dead end, you can put back the item in the tank. You even get +5 points in the process (+25 for picking it up -20 for putting it back).
It's arguable, I'd say. Certainly makes the game unwinnable if you don't know you're not supposed to keep it up. Especially since it take a while to figure out what happened as the delayed consequence doesn't make it immediately evident that the item was the cause.
Fortunately it's at the very beginning of the game so you don't lose too much time, but...
The earliest games without dead ends for Sierra were in their adventure line for kids (Mixed Up Fairy Tales, EcoQuest, Pepper's Adventure In Time...)
Although one accidental dead end managed to slip in Leisure Suit Larry V, starting with that game Al Lowe made an effort not to put any dead ends in his games, I know there are none in his last two Leisure Suit Larry games, I'm not sure for Torin's Passage.
There were still dead ends:
In all Police Quest games,
In King's Quest VI, I don't know if there were any in King's Quest VII,
In all Space Quest games until Space Quest VI (1995), although they were polite in Space Quest V, when you got in an unwinnable state the game would kill you and tells you why you screwed up, making finding where you screwed up less painful.
Lighthouse (1996) had one, which occurred 15 minutes into the game, it only became obvious you screwed up 20 hours of Myst like puzzles later.
I'm sure someone who played more Sierra's games than I did will be able to tell us more, but in the last batch of games that Sierra made, I got a strong impression that dead ends were on the way out from the ones I played.
I think one thing that should be fixed were some of the insane "puzzles" in KQ. There's a difference between a logic puzzle and puzzles that are "lucky guess" scenarios. You need an example, how about killing a yeti with a pie, need i say more?
But not ALWAYS. It's been a while, and I don't remember all the specifics, but I know that you could blow the first King's Quest by killing the goat, and I know there were lots of key items you could eat or use too early and prevent completion. It wasn't always not finding the items. Sometimes it was about wasting them.
Edit to add: Am I the only person who naturally went for the pie when trying to kill the Yeti the first time? And what does that say about me?
Personally, I'm all for it for TTG to try their hands on King's Quest and I don't even mind if it's a reboot. For me, personally, the first actually good KQ game is KQ3, as it has a proper plot and the puzzles are good, so I don't mind if they try to tell a more coherent story of how Graham becomes the king of Daventry, as the first game is mainly loosely together stitched puzzles.
As for dead ends and sudden deaths. I am for death scenes for sure, as they have always been a part of a bit dark humour of Sierra games. But dead ends are more of an annoyance really.
One possibility would be to use alternative solutions on those cases. When done correctly, the game would be smooth sailing, but if some thing were to be missed, the latter puzzles would be more difficult.
There's some alternative solutions on some of the puzzles in KQ1, like you could bribe the rat with gold instead of cheese, but giving it the gold cost you points as well.
I am not sure about the original but in the VGA remake you can bribe the troll with one of the treasures too. You don't need the goat.
I agree, and that quote from Dave Grossman doesn't help me feel better at all either.
Dave Grossman never said they made bad games, he just said he basically just didn't agree that infinite amounts of random game-ending deaths and dead ends were very good design choices.
And coincidentally the Gabriel Knight trilogy are the best games Sierra ever made. :cool:
I'm cool with deaths in adventure games and I think Gabriel Knight is an example of deaths done right (to continute my gushing over GK). In each game, there is no way to die or otherwise screw yourself over until the later chapters, which helped to build suspense and drive home the point that things were getting serious.
As opposed to the early King's Quest games that had really stupid deaths like clicking on the wrong pixel on a stairwell and having Rosella fall three feet and break her neck. Not to say that KQ was nothing but unreasonable deaths, because it wasn't- it's perfectly reasonable for Graham to keel over in the desert after wandering around aimlessly for several dozen screens. And that's what I would prefer to see: if you do something blazingly stupid, then yeah, death is a perfectly viable punishment.
Dead ends meanwhile just feel like poor design or oversights and are pretty much the one thing that kept KQ5 from being my favorite in the series (PIIIIIIIE). It was great that the KQ games were fairly non-linear, but it seemed kind of counterproductive to punish the player for taking advantage of it.
Why always the pie as an example? You ate it and got no points for that so you know that you must have done something incredibly stupid. Especially since money is rare in the game and you just spent your only silver coin on it.
All right then. "Use cheese on machine."
Getting the cheese was cruel especially since you
° needed to get caught
° there was no hint what so ever you would need cheese
° even then it can easily be missed the only time you could get it and continue the game.
The whole ending sequence of KQ5 is the main reason that 6 is my favorite in the series and not vice-versa. It is a massive clusterf*ck of random deaths, potential dead-ends, and clue-less puzzles. The rest of the game is pretty fantastic.
I think it is exactly because of what you said.
Seems there is no story reason, no ingame reason, the only indicator is something external (no getting points, so "the game told me I did wrong").
Not necessarily - I liked how "dead ends" were tied into the design of Conquests of the Longbow. The game was structured as a series of missions, and had multiple endings based on your overall performance throughout the game.
I think it was almost always possible to reach one of the endings - but of course, if you screwed up too many missions you would be stuck with the bad ending.
Since it was quite obvious when you had screwed up, you could always go back and try to replay the same mission better.