King's Quest NEEDS to have deaths.
There needs to be at least one way to trigger an elaborate and utterly arbitrary death cutscene on every single screen.
Am I wrong?
(Bonus points if the narrator mocks your corpse with cheesy wordplay afterwards.)
Am I wrong?
(Bonus points if the narrator mocks your corpse with cheesy wordplay afterwards.)
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Let's just hope that's the only thing that moves over. Keep the Puzzles difficult, but intuitive, Telltale. Sierra Logic has no place in 2011. (except for a shoutout puzzle where you have to pwn a yeti with a custard pie.)
Why should people not be allowed to think anymore? I think they should at least make it more difficult than any current Telltale game. That would be a start.
I guess that's true.
And I like KQ V the most for that alone. And for the screams of King graham when he falls and for Cedric of course.
I have an idea though. Remember in Curse of Monkey island how they had a reqular mode (which was easy) and a Mega Monkey mode (which was crazy hard) and I think they did this in a few other games as well. Why not do that? Have an easy mode for people who've never played a King's Quest game before and a Hard mode for the KQ veterans.
I think it would be a better way of easing the new fans into the franchise.
(A "try again" option is an okay compromise. But when you get into sequences where the death happens quickly and you can't figure out in time how to avoid it, that gets tiresome. I'm thinking of some of the scenes in KQ7, like the one with that giant beetle/scorpion thing... my god, Valanice, STOP SCREAMING AND DO SOMETHING!)
But Quest for Glory would be a lesser experience if you could not fail at picking your nose when playing as a Thief.
Using this example to illustrate the idea of making the death scenes optional, this scene could play out fatally with the death scenes enabled and non-fatally with them disabled.
So with the off setting, Graham would just say something like, "I don't need to pick my own brain," and that would be that; and with the death scenes enabled, he would go ahead, the death scene would play and then the action would automatically return to the moment before the fatal act.
If Telltale can get Josh Mandel to write for the game, it will absolutely be a day-one purchase for me, regardless of any other reservations I might have about the game.
Do you think Mandel should also return to voice Graham?
Part of me says yes, even if only for nostalgia...but I've heard he's not a fan of his own performance, and I could see the merit in hiring a more professional voice actor for the role.
But I will do whatever it takes to get them to bring Robby Benson back as Alexander.
Why are you diametrically opposed to anyone other than Scott Murphy working on a Space Quest game, but are fine with Josh Mandel rather than Roberta Williams for King's Quest?
I'm with you on that! It's all about King's Quest 5 for me.. thats the level/style Telltale need to hit
Because Josh Mandel understands the importance of preserving an established style and staying consistent with it, and is still very interested in gaming, both from a design and business standpoint. Roberta, on the other hand, is retired, doesn't have any desire to get back into the business, and frankly, was always a little too focused on fixing things that weren't broken to begin with from a game design standpoint, hence the abomination that is Mask of Eternity.
I would like TT to get Jane Jensen over Josh Mandel since I firmly believe she is the sole reason why King's Quest 6 was written so well. The last I have heard, she created a game for a french company.
True, but Josh Mandel is the reason the KQ1 SCI remake was written so well. I really love to see them both involved with the project.
I'm not sure if I'd lobby for Jane Jensen to work on a King's Quest game. I mean, I love KQ6 and I think a large part of why I love it is due to her involvement. But I think she's at her best when she's telling a darker type of story and KQ tends to be more family friendly.
That I did not know
Not as overrated as Roberta Williams. ;P
Ha! I will agree with that.
I am pretty sure we wouldn't be sitting here discussing King's Quest if she would not exist.
It would be the same if I said: "Ron Gilbert is overrated. Curse was far better than anything he had his paws in".
Now I need to wash my brain with soap. Even thinking something like that makes me feel dirty.
Roberta has said in the past that Josh Mandel is the one other person that truly understands King's Quest. And he's proved it. He's a great game designer. He designed King's Quest I SCI and rewrote all the dialogue and a couple of the puzzles. It was fantastic. I trust him with King's Quest.
Space Quest, on the other hand, is an entirely different animal. Space Quest is very easy to miss the mark on what it's all about. Only Scott Murphy truly knows how to grasp the Space Quest and Roger Wilco concept. Even Josh Mandel (who designed Space Quest 6) didn't catch it quite right.\
I'm not coming from the viewpoint that whoever created the franchise should be the ones handling it, rather I'm coming from the viewpoint of who does the franchise best.
And Jane Jensen didn't design anything to do with KQ, as far as I know. She was a co-writer for KQ6, but she did not design it. I'd rather she keep her overdramatic fingers out of the KQ lead game designer's pie.
Let's elaborate:
-Dead ends. I hope you grabbed that pie at the beginning of the game, or you can't kill the yeti. Want to go back and get it? Too bad, you'll die if you try!
-Ridiculous (and quite easy) ways to die. Death itself is not necessarily bad; but stupid, arbitrary, easy-to-find death most certainly is. I should not die because I fell into a two-foot-deep stream.
Roberta LOVED this trope. Witness the absurd number of spiral staircases and twisty paths, all of which it was stupidly easy to fall from and die, in KQ2 through KQ4. And the arrow-key control mechanism only made it worse.
-Complete puzzle illogic. Should you kill the snake with your sword? No, otherwise you'll miss out on an item key to survival later in the game. Instead throw a bridle at it so that it magically and totally unexpectedly transforms into a winged horse!
(And don't get me started on the pie and the yeti again.)
-Get it right the first time or die/get locked into unwinnable limbo. I hope you haven't crossed that rickety bridge in KQ2 even one more time than you need to! Or you die! And in KQ4, you need to dig up five graves in a cemetery, and can dig up ONLY five graves before the shovel breaks. Dug up a wrong grave by mistake? Unwinnable game!
(And it occurs again in KQ4. You have Cupid's bow and two arrows. You need each arrow to hit a target, one early in the game, one much later. Waste an arrow while hitting the first target and you're screwed--but you won't know it until much later.)
-Random encounters that kill you/make the game unwinnable. A constant fear in KQ1 through KQ5 is that you might suddenly walk onto a screen and be killed by a randomly appearing monster. The only solution is to save often and reload when it appears, hoping it won't show up next time.
KQ1's random dwarf encounters (which robbed you of a crucial treasure, making the game unwinnable); KQ4's random instant-death troll caves; and KQ5's sneaking around in Mordack's castle (where if the cat randomly appeared, you'd be inevitably killed a few screens later) were particularly egregious in this regard.
I credit Jane Jensen with removing many of these terrible design flaws from KQ6. She may not be the best adventure game creator ever (as some would have you believe), but she's miles more merciful as a designer than Roberta Williams ever was. Personally, I don't think we need to bring Roberta back.
And for those of you doubting how much influence Jensen had on KQ6: apparently she wrote most of the story while Roberta was on a two-month holiday in France. Roberta wasn't altogether satisfied with Jensen's dark take on the KQ6 Realm of the Dead, which is why she did something entirely different in Mask of Eternity.
Not to say the characters should never die. Sam & Max 302 got this right, where the characters could die, but it just immediately and automatically went back to the point before you made the bad decision. You can even have a few decisions between the bad one and the death scene if you want. Just don't make us play the whole blasted thing again.
How can you not like Roberta? Anyone who is on the cover of Softporn Adventure and Mixed up Mothergoose is pretty much a superhero.
Many of the elements that are now considered to be terrible gameplay conventions (random deaths, events that make the game unwinnable, etc.) were necessary at the time to make the games bigger and (ironically) more fun. When designers had very little to work with technology-wise (not much space, low screen resolutions, simplistic graphics), those were conventions that made the games longer and harder. I don't like them anymore, but I don't think their very existence proves that anyone who used them back in the day was a bad designer.
The AGI King's Quest I can be solved in about 15 minutes if you know what you're doing. Including elements like death, dead ends, and hideously unfair puzzles (Rumpelstiltskin anyone?) turned a relatively small game into one that took people months to figure out.
Also, Roberta didn't exactly invent these conventions. The text adventures that came before King's Quest used them, too. You can't fault her for designing the type of experience the audience at the time expected and that she herself had experienced in games she'd played and enjoyed.