Style?
As I'm sure you all know, the style of the old Sierra adventures like King's Quest is drastically different from the "Exploration shouldn't be punished" philosophy employed by LucasArts (and later Telltale). The slightest step out of line can easily kill you, or even worse, render the game unwinnable, usually with the game's narrator making snarky jokes about your suffering.
I'm not trying to be another one of those complainers going "Telltale can't make a proper King's Quest game because they've never done something like that before!" Instead my question is...how do you want the game to be done? Would you like a return to full-on Sierra sadism, or for Telltale to stick with the friendly approach they've always used so far?
I'd personally like if there can be a little bit of both. Don't get me wrong, I want this game to be frustratingly hard, but stuff like unwinnable situations are just too much. And in the era of auto-saving, I think death should be treated the same way as in The Tomb of Sammun-Mak: you're immediately taken back to where you were before.
What do you think?
I'm not trying to be another one of those complainers going "Telltale can't make a proper King's Quest game because they've never done something like that before!" Instead my question is...how do you want the game to be done? Would you like a return to full-on Sierra sadism, or for Telltale to stick with the friendly approach they've always used so far?
I'd personally like if there can be a little bit of both. Don't get me wrong, I want this game to be frustratingly hard, but stuff like unwinnable situations are just too much. And in the era of auto-saving, I think death should be treated the same way as in The Tomb of Sammun-Mak: you're immediately taken back to where you were before.
What do you think?
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Comments
A narrator.
Every Telltale game has taken the LucasArts approach so far with the ego narrating everything. King's Quest needs a dedicated eloquent narrator.
I wholeheartedly agree. It is an integral part of the storybook/fairytale charm of those games. The humor needs to be handled more delicately as well. King's Quest games have humor, but they are not comedies, and the humor is not overtly sarcastic (that would be Space Quest or Leisure Suit Larry.)
A narrator in King's Quest also seems key for re-capturing the old style. Possibly not like they did in the old days where everything on the screen was clickable, but it could work if TT just replaces the ego's speech with a narrator when you're randomly exploring.
In terms of actual style, I want to see some middle ground. The avoidance of dead ends, of course - but deaths are always fun in these games. Just add a "TRY AGAIN" button.
The puzzles should also be plenty and challenging, but not completely illogical. Early KQ games never had practical or cartoony puzzle solutions - they always fell back on fairy tale logic. And if there were clues inside the TT game, those illogical fairy tales puzzles might seem logical for a change.
Either way, there should be a sense of wonder with this game. Not just a cartoony romp through a fantasy world. King's Quest is classic, and the end result of this game should feel classical.
And also a creepy forest. This is mandatory.
Referencing the musical works of Mark Seibert, Ken Allen, and Chris Brayman would not be unwelcome either.
Tim Curry.
I agree that a narrator can drone on in some games, though. And we don't want that.
One of the things that defined Kings Quest for me was that it tended to give you all its puzzles at the same time. You'd wander around Daventry (Or wherever) and encounter problem after problem that needed solving, but they could be done in a number of different orders in a number of different ways. You might know what you need, but not have it, or you might not even know what you need, but see the solution while working out a different puzzle.
Hey! How about that old point system? I'd love it if Telltale brought that back, opening up lots of ways to solve the puzzles, but giving the highest scores for the more clever solutions.
I know it would NEVER happen, and for many good reasons, but wouldn't it be awesome if Telltale could incorporate a text parser (Maybe as an advanced option?) I wouldn't know what a Uvula is today if I hadn't had to figure out what it was I needed to tickle back in Kings Quest IV. :^)
Like the scene with the cat, the rat, and the boot/stick. I mean come on. You've walked past that screen hundreds of times and only ONCE you see this cat chasing a rat. You can't walk during this sequence but you can use your eye, hand, and inventory objects. Obviously that means SOMETHING. And the fact that the cat catches the rat and runs off to leave you with nothing should automatically dawn the realization that you screwed up here somehow because that obviously wasn't supposed to happen. Honestly, the way I was brought up playing adventure games that's the first thing that would hit my head. I'd immediately restore back and try to figure out a way to stop that cat. And since I can't walk I must obviously have to throw something at the cat to stop it. What's a great inventory object to throw? Hmm a stick...a boot...both of those things work! And if I don't have them yet I'm obviously not ready for that scene and so I'll search around for some other inventory object that might work before I attempt going into that screen again.
This is what I mean about active thinking as far as adventures are concerned. Sure some things are illogical in the real world, but in an adventure game there is a whole new set of logical reasonings that you play with. Half the problems people have with Sierra-style games they have because they don't have this mindset of explore everything, save all the time, leave no stone unturned, take notice of everything. Even the game manuals say these exact words for crying out loud! It's not like they were utterly cruel about it. They presented a game they wanted players to explore and discover and figure out on their own .And that experience is far better than being handed everything.
I realise this isn't popular nowadays because people (obviously) don't have these mindsets anymore and that's sad. But at least take a step towards that with this KQ reboot. I don't want a movie game with a Telltale King's Quest. I want an interactive story that can go in either direction, that has consequences for actions (or inactions), and with dangers around the corner that I don't know exist. That's an adventure game, or more importantly, that's a true King's Quest.
Dead ends persisted until KQ5, after which were largely phased out (thankfully). Restarting at the same spot after death was *only* present in KQ7 I believe, of the entire Sierra catalog.
I would be very happy with something like this. KQ7 is my favourite, maybe just because of this function.
I never got this scene unless I was abl to save the rat. I don't think it triggers unless you have the items you need to get rid of the cat.
I actually take this a step further - I feel that most of the Telltale games I've played, and most adventure games in general over the last decade, have way too much spoken language of every type including dialogue. I have often thought the same thing you believe about long blocks of text in the old days possibly being okay - when you're reading, you're engaged. When you're sitting and looking at characters speak on a computer screen, you're not. You absolutely cannot have as much spoken text in a game now as there was written text in games 20 years ago.
There's the old adage "show, don't tell", generally referring to movies. In other words, try to have things happen visually or in the natural course of the plot rather than having characters explain things. With video games, this should arguably be "play, don't show". Telltale is behind even where motion pictures are, let alone games.
That said, I don't mind if this new King's Quest by Telltale has deaths. I don't even care if you don't restart at the same spot or you have to pick a previously saved game (or restart all over if you didn't saved at all). Usually, Telltale's games have several autosave points. I think a good solution would be to go back to the last autosave point if you die.
But please, please, PLEASE: No dead ends!!!
This is true. That scene isn't really a good example of a dead-end. The dead ends in KQ5 were:
Deaths
Narration
Deaths
Hard puzzles
Deaths
A nice (not overly complicated) fable as a story
Did I mention deaths?
I think there is very little chance the new games will have dead ends. That is one thing from the old Sierra games I am happy to see the back of. The other potentially outmoded design element - death scenes - can be made perfectly non-frustrating with the "Try Again" option.
In my view the key difference between Sierra and Lucasfilm/LucasArts was never the ability to die (or lack thereof). For me, the main difference (aside from the narrator) was that in Sierra games you could interact with pretty much everything on screen.
LucasArts drastically limited the player's ability to explore by sometimes having as little as a single hotspot in a location (for example, the back alley in The Secret of Monkey Island).
I want to look at, examine and rummage through it all!
I think you can get back into the inn through the other door once you opened it from the inside.
And you forgot one dead end: Don't help Cedric on the island of the harpies. You can choose to leave him there but you cannot get back to him once you leave the island and you cannot finish the game without him alive and kicking
I think we can all agree on that one.
Name one. Other than Mask of Eternity. Every Sierra game worth anything had a narrator.
I respect your opinion on this, but mine just happens to be that many of the narratorless games were great. Agree to disagree?
Actually, I enjoyed pretty much every Sierra game I ever played, including Mask of Eternity and Dragonfire, which are the only two I can think of that didn't have narrators. I'm asking that question out of legitimate curiosity, because I simply can't think of any Sierra adventure games, other than the aforementioned two, that didn't have narrators.
And although I personally enjoyed those games, there's no denying that they are considered by most the low points of their respective series (for reasons other than just not having narrators.)
Oh, and KQ7 didn't either, now that I think of it.
Here are some Sierra games that had no narrators (in addition to the three you mentioned):
Gabriel Knight 2
Gabriel Knight 3
Phantasmagoria
Phantasmagoria 2
Torin's Passage
There may be more, but these are off the top of my head. (And like you, I have enjoyed pretty much every Sierra game I have played.)
Well, there you go. Yet another reason why it's not as brutal as people think. You had everything you needed! If you didn't do anything about the scene than that's pretty much your own fault.
Dead ends make you think harder and be more attentive to your surroundings. I appreciate them. A game without dead ends makes you lazy. I blame LucasArts ultimately for the eventual dumbing down of the adventure genre by removing deaths and dead ends. I honestly think they make you a better player. Do they punish the player? Yes. Is that really a bad thing? Not to me. You learn more after every such mistake.
With most of the King's Quest games the dead ends were really part of the style. First of all, each KQ game had points that you collect. If you didn't collect them all by the end of the game you realised that you missed some things and went back to find them. Dead ends are kind of an extension of that. Personally I don't think any Sierra game left you high and dry if you missed something important that you needed early on. There are always enough hints, death messages, and such to push you in the right direction if you pay attention to everything and look at everything.
Someone mentioned a good point early up in that in LucasArts games you can't really interact with EVERYTHING, only what the game lets you. This makes you think a little lazier. In a Sierra game you can interact with pretty much anything. That might seem like a bit much for some people, but back in the day this was normal and paramount. I really was a huge interactive world where absolutely anything could happen, for all you know, and interacting with every object didn't mean that that object was necessarily important to the game in any way. But this forced you to look and try to interact with anything you see out of blind curiosity. And if you did this consistently enough in a game you'd find everything you need to continue without being forced into a dead end situation later on.
That was the mindset and the norm of the day. Like I said, I blame LucasArts (as great as they were) for dumbing this down and causing what we now know of as the Telltale style. Sierra games were for people who loved adventures. LucasArts (and now to a much greater extent Telltale) were more or less for people who didn't want to think as hard and just enjoy an easier game. Not that LucasArts games weren't hard, but there weren't any consequences for your actions that forced you to think a certain way during the game. Like it or not, it caused a bit of laziness in one's thinking because they didn't have to watch their own backs because the game did that for you. And that's one of the biggest differences between LucasArts/Telltale and Sierra. Sierra games were about punishing the player for his or her own good. Now everybody looks at it as a terrible design decision. "OMG! It makes me think?? BAD!"
Like the temple. Only common sense to me as an adventure gamer would tell me that since I have a time limit there's something important in this room. And since I'll never be able to come in here again I'm going to look around for anything I can pick up because there won't be just one thing, I'm sure. But even if there was only one item to get I'd still want to look around just in case. It's that thought process of watching your own back and taking out insurance on all your decisions that makes beating a King's Quest game a lot more worthwhile than beating any Telltale game.
Those dead ends really aren't as brutal as some people make them out to be. I mean the crowbar is right there. Cedric is right there (why WOULDN'T you pick him up??), eating the pie doesn't give you game points so obviously that's a mistake, I already covered the temple, if you're not exploring every facet of this new room in the inn that you've never seen before then you're already not thinking properly (plus you can always go back in this room via the side door), with the cheese....again a very noticeable hole in the wall that a mouse consistently moves in and out of and if you're not looking at everything in a new room there's something wrong with the way you're thinking. Also, you can always go back and get the cheese by going through the labyrinth or getting caught by the blue thing again. There is another dead end where Cassima will not help you out of the dungeon if you don't give her the locket (something shiny in a certain temporary scene that you should have picked up if you had any sense at all), but then why wouldn't you try to help Cassima out early on anyway?
So the winged ones brought you down to the bottom of the mountain and you just went back up again? True you don't really know what you're supposed to get before going in, but after you've been in and you find you don't have what you need then you just restore back and look for it first. Sierra games were never meant to be played straight through without consequences to your actions. And personally, I would have scoured everything I was able to pick up or every puzzle I could possible solve before going into a an area I can't get out of again. That's the nature of a good adventure game.
This! God, how I miss this in adventure games!
-The narrator who describes everything you look at/do/etc. The narrator-based style of object description always differentiated Sierra games from those of LucasArts, which had the protagonist describe everything he sees out loud to an empty room. Plus, the narration increased the storybook, fairy-tale feel. I'd love to see Telltale's KQ have a narrator.
-The ability to look at (if not interact with) EVERYTHING. I love that in Sierra games, you had the option to look at every single pixel on screen. If there wasn't any specific object that you'd clicked on, you'd get a description of the overall environment. This was cool and increased immersiveness.
-The range of atmosphere, setting, and tone in Sierra's various games. I remain impressed by how Sierra managed to put out a wide variety of games, each with its own style and tone. Some titles were humorous, some were serious, others were both at once; and certain games were adult-oriented, while other Sierra works were clearly family games.
King's Quest, despite the whimsical nature of certain puzzles throughout the series, generally took itself seriously as a fantasy game, and it also sought to be family-friendly.
In contrast, Space Quest was a sarcastic, snarky parody of science fiction with a decidedly un-prestigious hero. Quest for Glory was an adventure-RPG hybrid that told the epic tale of a hero's rise over five adventures in a sprawling fantasy world; yet it was also packed with wacky characters, barrages of puns, and an ever-present sense of humor. Gabriel Knight was a dramatic and mature horror/mystery tale set in 1990s New Orleans. Leisure Suit Larry was an unabashedly adult adventure game whose hero's goal is to get laid. I could go on.
For any new King's Quest, the storyline should capture the tone Sierra instilled in this particular series: that is, it should be relatively serious and dramatic in nature. In particular, KQ6 pulled this off very well. There are small individual moments of levity (e.g. the puns on the Isle of Wonder) but crucially important bits, including a journey to the Realm of the Dead and the final confrontation with the villain, are full of drama played straight.
Telltale games, like LucasArts games, are generally more consistently humorous than Sierra titles. This needs to be dialed down in a King's Quest game. Fortunately, if Jurassic Park is any indication, Telltale is already trying to break its design molds and come up with games that vary markedly in tone, much as Sierra did.
-The ability to die. This is something that, for all of LucasArts' railing against it, isn't necessarily bad at all. If done well, and not gratuitously, it can increase the feeling of tension in a dramatic situation (see LucasArts' Fate of Atlantis). Or, it can provide comedy gold, as in Space Quest (though I don't think this style of death would be appropriate for KQ).
Later Sierra games, like KQ7 and SQ6, allowed you to revive yourself immediately after you died, in a "second chance" option. This is very similar to The Tomb of Sammun-Mak, which always resurrects you right after you've died. I'm struck by how Telltale here unwittingly managed to follow Sierra's lead, so I think they can pull it off again for KQ.
Things about Sierra games I don't like, and don't want to see return:
-Dead Ends. We don't need to bring these back. Death is one thing, dead ends are quite another. Sierra's dead ends were often particularly cruel to the player.
King's Quest V, for instance, has a point where main character Graham, while exploring the snowy mountains, gets hungry. He is carrying a leg of lamb and a pie. (At least he is if the player solved every puzzle in the valley below, before entering the mountains. If the player didn't get these items, he'll die of hunger. And after a certain point, which comes before Graham gets hungry, return to the valley becomes impossible.)
If he eats the pie, he'll satisfy his hunger, but he'll die later on because he needs the pie to kill a Yeti (!). He should instead eat the leg of lamb, because he eats only half of it and saves the rest. There is no way to figure out the proper solution except by eating either item, which gives you a 50% chance of creating an unwinnable state.
And of course, Graham later meets a starving eagle (soon before he encounters the Yeti). The solution is to give the eagle your remaining lamb meat; if he doesn't, Graham will much later be killed by a monster the eagle would otherwise save him from. Again, he can give the eagle the pie instead and continue playing, only to die at the Yeti's hand not long afterward. There is no clue not to do this; players find out only by hitting a dead end.
I completely agree with all of this. Very well said and explained. If Telltale could capture the majority of these elements in their KQ game, AND give the player a significant puzzle challenge, they'll have struck gold.
The one thing I would slightly disagree with is that the tone of a KQ game should be dramatic and serious. The game are light-hearted more than they are dark, for sure. In general they take themselves seriously within their own plots, but they are nothing like the Gabriel Knight series for example. Even the story in The Silver Lining is much darker than the usual tone of the old games (to its detriment, in my opinion.) The correct balance of seriousness, drama, high fantasy, fairytales, and whimsical humor is a delicate mixture that MUST be done right in order for the game to feel like King's Quest.
Yep. We weren't always the brightest of children. :P
That's the thing--we thought we HAD gotten everything it was possible to get before entering the labyrinth, and we kept dying at the "If only Alexander could've seen what was coming" room. Originally we were thinking there was a way to salvage some leftover invisible ink, but then we finally realized we needed the hole in the wall. So we tried every random item we could on the hole, and only found the right solution to the puzzle by accident. To this day, we still refer to puzzles we solve through luck, trial, and error instead of actual thought as a "Flute on the Flowers". :P
You're right, though, that comparing KQ and GK is apples and oranges. Even KQ6, the most dramatic of the lot, worked within the traditional KQ fairytale motifs by including a spin on Beauty and the Beast. Moreover, KQ strove to be an all-ages title. In practice, this amounted to a certain idealism of story and character: heroes are pure of heart, maidens are chaste, and villains always get their comeuppance. Gabriel Knight is a far darker, more adult title.