This just sounds like genre hate to me. King's Quest doesn't have to be adventure all the time. Indeed, it isn't going to be now seeing as Telltale has the license.
o snap
Last time I checked, Telltale creates adventure games....And is pretty much the only major developer doing so. But keep on trying to kill the game before it comes out.
Last time I checked, Telltale creates adventure games....And is pretty much the only major developer doing so. But keep on trying to kill the game before it comes out.
Telltale creates "interactive episodic content" -- you can read their own definition of themselves here and nowhere does it say anything, in the present tense, about creating adventure games. They have been distancing themselves from the adventure genre in nearly every interview I've seen since JP and BTTF were announced. I'll buy that BTTF technically qualifies as an adventure game, but it was little more than a content delivery system. All the gameplay footage we have of JP, though, indicates that it is not an adventure game.
Even before the movie licenses, Puzzle Agent was a step away from adventure games -- why bother embedding the puzzles into a gameworld when all you really want to do is develop characters and present content?
To anyone who sees adventure games as primarily a storytelling medium, the above might seem like a distinction without a difference. But it is anathema for those of us who regard them as games, who enjoy them for the opportunity to explore virtual worlds and partake in stimulating puzzle-solving gameplay.
Roberta didn't like to think of her games as "adventure games' back in the day, but rather she tried to get people to call them 'Interactive fiction", "interactive stories" or "interactive movies", or variations of that. Ironic really.
That being said she still did use the term 'adventure game' quite often.
Roberta didn't like to think of her games as "adventure games' back in the day, but rather she tried to get people to call them 'Interactive fiction", "interactive stories" or "interactive movies", or variations of that. Ironic really.
Didn't you also just quote her as saying, "I've always felt that the adventure-game genre was sort of mine."?
Right she does use the term Adventure game when interviewed and asked about them, but she has at times said things like this;
From 1992 during development of KQ6 from Interaction magazine;
I hate to call them games. I think of them more as interactive stories. Every story has to be well-written and engaging but it's up to the designer to add the interactivity--the roundness of exploration and the challenge of puzzles."
You should read some of the things the Bill Davis used to say about 'Adventures'! He was Sierra's Creative Director for a few years. He was hired by Ken and Roberta to to help make computer game technology more and more theatrical, more like real films, animated and live action
He was also a major advocate of CD-Rom technology as it would allow the company to push towards a more realistic cinematic experience, allowing them to make the company's animation "fuller (more life-like), have more music and add things like speech."
One wonders what they would have done, if they had today's technology now! Some interviews they claim that some of the things they did with adventure games were based more on limitations in technology, not necessarily to improve 'gameplay'.
Telltale creates "interactive episodic content" -- you can read their own definition of themselves here and nowhere does it say anything, in the present tense, about creating adventure games. They have been distancing themselves from the adventure genre in nearly every interview I've seen since JP and BTTF were announced. I'll buy that BTTF technically qualifies as an adventure game, but it was little more than a content delivery system. All the gameplay footage we have of JP, though, indicates that it is not an adventure game.
Even before the movie licenses, Puzzle Agent was a step away from adventure games -- why bother embedding the puzzles into a gameworld when all you really want to do is develop characters and present content?
To anyone who sees adventure games as primarily a storytelling medium, the above might seem like a distinction without a difference. But it is anathema for those of us who regard them as games, who enjoy them for the opportunity to explore virtual worlds and partake in stimulating puzzle-solving gameplay.
I don't see a big difference between Layton style puzzles and traditional adventure game puzzles. I actually think Layton style puzzles are consistently more logical. But I don't think that necessarily distances them from being adventure games per se.
Well, Daisha, Layton style puzzles puts the games in the same genre as say Seventh Guest or 11th Hour, or Castle of Dr. Brain & Island of Dr. Brain and those games were considered Adventure Games, or the subgenre Puzzle-Adventure Games..
I say Roberta was wrong. I remember a decade ago when adventures were just about extinct and we all were complaining that games didn't have any stories or deep characters and adventures did it best. We all rioted at quotes like the one John Romero said about stories in games: "Video games are like porn. They have stories but they don't need them. That's not what it's all about. It's just something to carry the gameplay." Or something similar. He was going extreme in treating stories in games like nothing more than crutches (and Half-Life proved him wrong), but he was right in a way now that I look back. I was wrong in thinking that adventure games were all about story. They weren't. Telltale has shown me that. Adventure games struck the perfect balance between story and gameplay.
You can have the best story in the universe in a game. But you can't have the best gameplay without challenge. That's what I firmly believe.
I don't see a big difference between Layton style puzzles and traditional adventure game puzzles. I actually think Layton style puzzles are consistently more logical. But I don't think that necessarily distances them from being adventure games per se.
I don't know from Layton. I was talking about Puzzle Agent, in which the puzzles are not organic to the gameworld; you don't solve them by interacting with the environment but on a separate screen akin to a page in a printed puzzle book. That's what distances it from being a graphic adventure, where the player discovers the puzzles and works out their solutions through exploration and manipulation of the gameworld.
Of course the puzzles in Puzzle Agent (and presumably Layton?) are more logical, because those games are intended to be about -- wait for it -- logic puzzles! Graphic adventures can be, and often are, much more than that. Not only logic but creative thinking comes into play, making inferences, testing assumptions, exploring for clues and sometimes just finding the answer elsewhere in the gameworld.
(Quoting Roberta) "I hate to call them games. I think of them more as interactive stories. Every story has to be well-written and engaging but it's up to the designer to add the interactivity--the roundness of exploration and the challenge of puzzles." (emphasis added)
I think you need to look deeper into what she meant by "interactive fiction" and what Telltale means by "interactive content". The last part of that quote -- as well as the games themselves -- indicate that while Roberta might not have thought of KQ as games, she sure as hell didn't think of them as content to be consumed with as little effort as clicking or swiping to turn the page in an e-book. What's ironic is that Telltale is basically going in the direction that she explicitly disavowed:
(Quoting Roberta) "In all the previous games we explored a script-oriented approach to telling people an interactive story. I always felt like every game I did would have a more intricate story, a richer feel, more characterization, more music. But I think I went as far as you can go with the story approach and still be a game. If you go any further, you go into moviedom." (emphasis added)
This just sounds like genre hate to me. King's Quest doesn't have to be adventure all the time. Indeed, it isn't going to be now seeing as Telltale has the license.
o snap
I suspect it's not genre hate at work, he probably feels the same way I do - I don't hate any genres, I just avoid the ones I don't find interesting - but what I hate is when I fall in love with a series of games and then they suddenly decide to make a sequel in a completely different genre.
That's not genre hate, is it?
It's a very natural reaction in my opinion... it's not unreasonable to expect a sequel to a game you love to fall in the same genre.
Imagine if the next... say the next Need for Speed game... if that turned out to be a completely dry and overly complex management game... I imagine a lot of Need for Speed fans would dislike that particular entry in the series.
I mean I'm not saying I don't like traditional ones either. I mean I'm playing King's Quest III right now for the first time in a long time. I think I just took a minor issue with implying that puzzle adventure games (Thanks Baggins) were not adventure games.
I suspect it's not genre hate at work, he probably feels the same way I do - I don't hate any genres, I just avoid the ones I don't find interesting - but what I hate is when I fall in love with a series of games and then they suddenly decide to make a sequel in a completely different genre.
That's not genre hate, is it?
It's a very natural reaction in my opinion... it's not unreasonable to expect a sequel to a game you love to fall in the same genre.
Imagine if the next... say the next Need for Speed game... if that turned out to be a completely dry and overly complex management game... I imagine a lot of Need for Speed fans would dislike that particular entry in the series.
Now this I really get and thanks for putting it in a way I didn't think out enough. Take Parasite Eve. I love part one because it's this hybrid RPG with action elements but still really customizable equipment and weapons with eery horror elements. Then they transformed it into Resident Evil. If I wanted to play Resident Evil (and I do like that series) then I'd play Resident Evil.
I say Roberta was wrong. I remember a decade ago when adventures were just about extinct and we all were complaining that games didn't have any stories or deep characters and adventures did it best. We all rioted at quotes like the one John Romero said about stories in games: "Video games are like porn. They have stories but they don't need them. That's not what it's all about. It's just something to carry the gameplay." Or something similar. He was going extreme in treating stories in games like nothing more than crutches (and Half-Life proved him wrong), but he was right in a way now that I look back. I was wrong in thinking that adventure games were all about story. They weren't. Telltale has shown me that. Adventure games struck the perfect balance between story and gameplay.
You can have the best story in the universe in a game. But you can't have the best gameplay without challenge. That's what I firmly believe.
In all the previous games we explored a script-oriented approach to telling people an interactive story. I always felt like every game I did would have a more intricate story, a richer feel, more characterization, more music. But I think I went as far as you can go with the story approach and still be a game. If you go any further, you go into moviedom." (emphasis added)
Actually I think she realized her folly, considering how non-interactive aspects of Phantasmagoria are. In 1992 she was just thinking of Scary Tales which would become Phantasmagoria, she even mentions it in that article.
Remember its a matter of 1992 and 1997. She had time to change her opinion.
How she saw games in 1992 is not necessarily how she saw games in 1997.
You say, look at the context between the comments. I say there is no context between the two disparate comments made 4-5 years apart. That's just silly!
Roberta also was clearly not into keeping the same style with each game. She wanted to mix things up a bit each time. People didn't understand that someone who made Mixed-Up Mother Goose could make a slasher with rape scenes. But she did that believing that her stories are more about "good vs. evil" and there are different ways to tell that type of story. Violence was one way. She didn't want to limit her self to telling that kind of story in a clean wholesome non-violent way, when there are other ways to tell the story.
In the same way, she believed she could tell a story of good vs. evil, that fits within the world of KQ, with a Tolkienesque hero who slays dragons, as opposed to just scaring them away. Again this was another way she was trying to prevent herself from being type-casted as the Mixed-Up Mother Good adventure game designer.
The Davidsons didn't like the idea of her violence though, apparently... They were actually trying to purge it from the game, and ordering managers to ignore Roberta. Even though Roberta never intended the 'violence' to be Phantasmagoria type violence. It's much more wholesome in comparison.
I mean I'm not saying I don't like traditional ones either. I mean I'm playing King's Quest III right now for the first time in a long time. I think I just took a minor issue with implying that puzzle adventure games (Thanks Baggins) were not adventure games.
It wasn't an implication. Not all puzzle games are adventure games. You can wrap a story around any old kind of puzzle-solving gameplay -- and casual game companies are doing just that by the dozens! (I'm waiting for a retelling of War and Peace with sudoku puzzles) -- but it doesn't add up to an adventure game without some, you know, adventure taking place in a gameworld.
I suspect it's not genre hate at work, [Chyron] probably feels the same way I do - I don't hate any genres, I just avoid the ones I don't find interesting - but what I hate is when I fall in love with a series of games and then they suddenly decide to make a sequel in a completely different genre.
That's not genre hate, is it?
It's a very natural reaction in my opinion... it's not unreasonable to expect a sequel to a game you love to fall in the same genre.
Imagine if the next... say the next Need for Speed game... if that turned out to be a completely dry and overly complex management game... I imagine a lot of Need for Speed fans would dislike that particular entry in the series.
Yes. This was my point exactly.
I love the King's Quest series, and whether or not MoE is a decent game on its own merit (which is still debatable), the fact that it strays so far from the core series' genre yet isn't officially marketed as a spin-off (KQ8 it is not) is almost a slap in the face to the adventure gaming commmunity at large, as we were apparently not a big enough niche market to be worthy of making a proper KQ8 game for.
I suspect it's not genre hate at work, he probably feels the same way I do - I don't hate any genres, I just avoid the ones I don't find interesting - but what I hate is when I fall in love with a series of games and then they suddenly decide to make a sequel in a completely different genre.
That's not genre hate, is it?
It's a very natural reaction in my opinion... it's not unreasonable to expect a sequel to a game you love to fall in the same genre.
Imagine if the next... say the next Need for Speed game... if that turned out to be a completely dry and overly complex management game... I imagine a lot of Need for Speed fans would dislike that particular entry in the series.
That may very well be. But Chyron was saying that King's Quest is "supposed to be an adventure game." Which is also a baseless argument to make for why MOE isn't a good game, which was the topic of discussion.
the fact that it strays so far from the core series' genre yet isn't officially marketed as a spin-off (KQ8 it is not) is almost a slap in the face to the adventure gaming commmunity at large, as we were apparently not a big enough niche market to be worthy of making a proper KQ8 game for
Again you have to blame Roberta for that, she wanted the game to be Doom-like back in 1994! She had ideas for adding in action and combat back in 1995 even (she was looking at games from all types of genres) !
She felt the series would die if she didn't 'evolve' it, with new features.
The Davidsons apparently wanted to cut that 'violence' out of the game due to their conservative Christian beliefs (and a belief it was going to be another 'immoral' Phantasmagorial), if they had completed their version, the game may have been closer to older games, but wouldn't have been Roberta's vision, and she would have had her name removed from the game.
So if you feel your face was slapped, it was slapped by the hands of Roberta!
Ken Williams himself thought Adventure gaming was dead, and when he owned the company, he was thinking of ending the development of them, and going into more 'profitable' endeavors. That's why he supported Roberta's new ideas for 'evolving' KQ into the next generation of games, rather than see it be killed off completely.
Honestly, what you thought KQ8 'should be", and what Roberta thought KQ8 "should be" are two very different things!
You have to understand back then, even the best adventure games, such as Grim Fandango were losing money. Grim Fandagon only sold half as much as KQ8. I don't even think it made back the money they put into it...
Then the few that were successful... Phantas cost something like 4 million to make. It was making it back, but the Davidsons stopped marketing it because they believed it was satanic and violent... So they pretty much ruined the possibility of more Phantas sequels after the second one...
That may very well be. But Chyron was saying that King's Quest is "supposed to be an adventure game." Which is also a baseless argument to make for why MOE isn't a good game, which was the topic of discussion.
Still haven't played through it. Everyone says it was the last great adventure game, though. I did say "almost extinct".
Storywise I think it's the most ambitious. I don't know if I'd say it's the last great one, I think there have been great ones since then, but in terms of scope I never played anything else quite like it. It retained all the classical adventure puzzling, figuring out what combined with what to manipulate in your inventory and environment, but it always had a really robust storyline going on behind it that really didn't let up even to the last scene.
Again you have to blame Roberta for that, she wanted to that to the game to be Doom-like back in 1994! She had ideas for adding in action and combat back in 1995 even (she was looking at games from all types of genres) !
She felt the series would die if she didn't 'evolve' it, with new features.
The Davidsons apparently wanted to cut that 'violence' out of the game due to their conservative Christian beliefs (and a belief it was going to be another 'immoral' Phantasmagorial), if they had completed their version, the game may have been closer to older games, but wouldn't have been Roberta's vision, and she would have had her name removed from the game.
So if you feel your face was slapped, it was slapped by the hands of Roberta!
Ken Williams himself thought Adventure gaming was dead, and when he owned the company, he was thinking of ending the development of them, and going into more 'profitable' endeavors. That's why he supported Roberta's new ideas for 'evolving' KQ into the next generation of games.
Honestly, what you thought KQ8 'should be", and what Roberta thought KQ8 "should be" are two very different things!
Baggins, Roberta herself said there wasn't another team designing an alternate KQ8.
Ken Williams himself thought Adventure gaming was dead, and when he owned the company, he was thinking of ending the development of them, and going into more 'profitable' endeavors. That's why he supported Roberta's new ideas for 'evolving' KQ into the next generation of games.
Honestly, what you thought KQ8 'should be", and what Roberta thought KQ8 "should be" are two very different things!
Correct. But Roberta never really thought of adventure games as being strictly no combat, no violence, etc. From what we see, her definition of the genre was rather loose--She often times called it an interactive story. And her definition of what makes a KQ was loose too.
Having loose boundaries is good for a series to survive and prosper. The fans were just too close minded to accept anything that wasn't KQ6 Part II.
I don't think Roberta wanted to change KQ8 to combat to a 3D game with action because that's what surveys said were the best thing to do. In 1994, when she decided KQ8 was going to be 3D and probably have combat, Doom was just a fad--Nothing more. Myst was selling much, much greater than Doom and even became the best selling game of all time the very next year.
I think Roberta went with combat and 3D in KQ8 not to "sell out", but simply because it's what she wanted to do.
That may very well be. But Chyron was saying that King's Quest is "supposed to be an adventure game." Which is also a baseless argument to make for why MOE isn't a good game, which was the topic of discussion.
It's not baseless. The King's Quest core series should be an adventure game series. If they want to make a spin-off, then so be it. They didn't. They made a game with an extremely different feel to it and tried to market it to the adventure gaming community--for which the series is so popular--when it is not an adventure game, by trying to market the game as the next game in the series.
It would be akin to making a "The Sims:King's Quest 9" game. I don't hate the genre but it's not the droids I'm looking for.
It's not baseless. The King's Quest core series should be an adventure game series. If they want to make a spin-off, then so be it. They didn't. They made a game with an extremely different feel to it and tried to market it to the adventure gaming community--for which the series is so popular--when it is not an adventure game, by trying to market the game as the next game in the series.
It would be akin to making a "The Sims:King's Quest 9" game. I don't hate the genre but it's not the droids I'm looking for.
Define an adventure game. More to the point, define a King's Quest.
I personally think the person who basically created graphic adventure games, and who created the KQ series, is the best at defining at what it is, and what it should be. And she laid it out very clearly in 1997 for the fans.
Not only that, but it's not like there was any secret made of there being combat in KQ8. It wasn't like Sierra trotted it out as just another KQ until the day of release. I don't see how it can be considered a "slap in the face to the fans."
When Roberta removed text from the KQ series and made everything point and click, was it a slap in the face? How about when the series went a little darker and less family friendly with KQ6? Or the overhaul that KQ7 was?
Was it a slap in the face when Roberta removed the option to kill innocent creatures from the series in KQ4? What if I want the option to do violence in a KQ game?
PS--A group of fans already made a Sims version of a King's Quest game. It's called TSL.
The King's Quest core series should be an adventure game series. If they want to make a spin-off, then so be it. They didn't. They made a game with an extremely different feel to it and tried to market it to the adventure gaming community--for which the series is so popular--when it is not an adventure game, by trying to market the game as the next game in the series.
You keep on saying, "they", but it's Roberta Williams, you can also stretch that to Ken Williams.
Roberta didn't want to make a spinoff. There was never an intent to make a spinoff. She had an idea for a new kind of 'adventure' game, the '3D Adventure', that she hoped would help save an already 'dead' genre. It was always her intent for it to be a core game in the series.
Again your definition of what the series was supposed to be and her 'definition' are two very different things.
By the way, did you know there were Interactive Fiction (Infocom) purists that didn't like Graphic Adventures, seeing them as an abomination to the pure nature of the old Infocom text-adventure games?
Did you know there were people who thought KQ5 wasn't a true adventure game because of the 'parser' was removed?
You keep on saying, "they", but it's Roberta Williams, you can also stretch that to Ken Williams.
Roberta didn't want to make a spinoff. There was never an intent to make a spinoff. She had an idea for a game, that would help save an already 'dead' genre. It was always her intent for it to be a core game in the series.
Again your definition of what the series was supposed to be and her 'definition' are two very different things.
In fact, didn't fans ask her if KQ was getting too old around 1996 or 1997 and she said no? It doesn't seem to me like she ever felt that KQ8 was anything but KQ8. She could've easily given up on KQ entirely and started a brand new series. There was no need for Mask to be called KQ8 if she didn't feel it was one. Look at Phantasmagoria--Different series but it sold over a million in the first month and was Sierra's biggest seller of all time. The Roberta Williams' name was very big in the '90s, big enough that if she wanted to do a spin-off, or simply make another series, she could've.
I mean, Roberta's not one to sell a product that she doesn't feel fits in it's series. She's always liked change. Every KQ game--with perhaps the exceptions of KQ2 and KQ6--took radical steps technologically.
Yes, Anakin. I already posted a quote from an interview in 1997. Where they were asking her why she even bothered to make anymore KQ games. They thought they were outdated, and unoriginal.
KQ2 and KQ6
KQ2 actually did push the technology in several ways at the time. Mainly in size of the game, the introduction of a proper introduction cutscene, and dynamic changing world (characters appear or change, based on actions completed in the game). It also packed in more music apparently, required a little more memory and resources.
KQ6 pushed the technology through its fully rendered introduction scene, very dynamic scripted storytelling, multimedia aspects (CD-rom version especially), and multiple endings.
Define an adventure game. More to the point, define a King's Quest.
I personally think the person who basically created graphic adventure games, and who created the KQ series, is the best at defining at what it is, and what it should be. And she laid it out very clearly in 1997 for the fans.
Not only that, but it's not like there was any secret made of there being combat in KQ8. It wasn't like Sierra trotted it out as just another KQ until the day of release. I don't see how it can be considered a "slap in the face to the fans."
When Roberta removed text from the KQ series and made everything point and click, was it a slap in the face? How about when the series went a little darker and less family friendly with KQ6? Or the overhaul that KQ7 was?
Was it a slap in the face when Roberta removed the option to kill innocent creatures from the series in KQ4? What if I want the option to do violence in a KQ game?
When a core series has carried on long enough with a certain style, a certain feel, fans have an expectation that the next official installment for the core series will have a certain feel to it. If the franchise is to make a significant enough change that its target market is significantly different, then such a change should be marketed as a spin-off.
What if I was watching Star Trek: The Next Generation, and the seventh season took place exclusively on Deep Space Nine, with only a handful of token cameos from the TNG cast? DS9 is a good show, but I would still be greatly annoyed.
[EDIT:] okay. I got one. Star Trek: Enterpise. The series finale for the show Enterprise (called "These are the voyages...") was just a holodeck program that Riker was running on the Enterprise-D during the TNG episode "Pegasus," and during one scene the NX-01 Enterprise crew has a toast "to the next generation." As I recall, fans were enraged by all of this to the point that Rick Berman has since said to consider it as a coda rather than a true finale.[/edit]
In fact, didn't fans ask her if KQ was getting too old around 1996 or 1997 and she said no? It doesn't seem to me like she ever felt that KQ8 was anything but KQ8. She could've easily given up on KQ entirely and started a brand new series. There was no need for Mask to be called KQ8 if she didn't feel it was one.
Puzzle-adventure games are a sub-genre of adventure games.
Adventure games and puzzle games have puzzle-solving gameplay in common, so the term "puzzle-adventure game" is utterly meaningless. I don't believe there is any widely accepted division of the adventure game genre into subgenres.
Puzzle-adventure was a genre created to describe games like Seventh Guest, and Castle of Dr. Brain. In that "puzzles" were more than fetch/item style puzzles, but rather involved the traditional definition of 'puzzle'. Like board game/style puzzles, or jigsaw puzzles, or slider puzzles, or ring and peg style puzzles, etc. You know the puzzles that existed before there were computer games?
Puzzle adventure
Puzzle adventures are adventure games that put a strong emphasis on puzzle solving, at the expense of elements such as item gathering, item use, character interaction, or plot. Instead, they typically emphasize exploration and deciphering the proper use of complex mechanisms, often resembling Rube Goldberg machines.
The plot of these games can be obscure, and may be conveyed only through interaction with the puzzles. Many puzzle adventures are played from a first person perspective with the player "moving" between still pre-rendered 3D images, sometimes combined with short animations or video. Examples of the genre include Schizm, Atlantis: The Lost Tales, Riddle of the Sphinx, Zack & Wiki: Quest for Barbaros' Treasure, and Myst, which pioneered this game style.
One kind of puzzle adventure is the Escape the room sub-genre, consisting of short games where the sole object is to find a way to escape from a room. These games are typically implemented in a graphic point-and-click style, which (owing to their popularity on the Internet) are often delivered in Adobe Flash format. Examples of the sub-genre include Submachine-series, Mystery of time and space and Crimson room.
Fetch/inventory giving are not puzzles of the traditional sense... In RPG's they would be called 'fetch quests'.
When a core series has carried on long enough with a certain style, a certain feel, fans have an expectation that the next official installment for the core series will have a certain feel to it. If the franchise is to make a significant enough change that its target market is significantly different, then such a change should be marketed as a spin-off.
What if I was watching Star Trek: The Next Generation, and the fourth season took place exclusively on Deep Space Nine, with only a handful of token cameos from the TNG cast? DS9 is a good show, but I would still be greatly annoyed.
We're dealing with a series with 8 games. Let's take the first 7:
KQ1--Wide open world. Basic narrator. Ability to kill. Your first objective is to arm yourself with a dagger in fact. You can kill both bad guys and good guys, and one of your main "quests" is to kill a witch. You're not the King until the end.
KQ2--Wide world world. Basic narrator. Ability to kill once again. You can kill Dracula and the Lion if you so choose.
KQ3--World open world. Again, killing is still an option here. You have to use magic--for the first time ever in a KQ game--to survive. Half the game is spent just trying to survive being blasted by Mordack. You use all sorts of magic spells, which Roberta considered "black magic". You have to kill a Yeti and a three headed dragon.
KQ4--Now we begin to get some changes. The world is still wide open. However, non-violence becomes more of a rule than an objective. However, the series takes a creepy turn and is probably the darkest entry in the whole series. Everything around you wants to kill you, pretty much. You deal with zombies, ghosts, mummies, evil witches, trolls, ogres etc. You dig amongst the dead to recover objects for them. It's a very dark game in terms of tone. Day and Night cycle, never before done in KQ. And you kill Lolotte in a very violent way--by shooting her in the heart with an arrow.
KQ5--Does away TOTALLY with text. Is lighter in tone than KQ4. The world is no longer open; the game and game world is very linear. There's a whole icon based interface, a gigantic overhaul from previous games. Interactions with characters are much more limited than in past games. You can't look at everything in sight or interact with the narrator as much. Mazes are introduced. However, violence is still a factor; You have to kill a Yeti and Mordack. Dead ends galore in this game. Ridiculous puzzles which would seem
KQ6--Introduces more of a darker tone. A very linear game world in which you spend most of your time travelling back and forth between lands. However, now, you have the option to end the game in multiple ways. A 3D intro opens the game for the first time ever. You still have to kill the Minotaur by fooling it into a fiery pit, causing it to burn to death. It goes back to the dark tone of KQ4, once more with zombies. A more detailed narrator. More subplots. Mazes still persist here.
KQ7--Does away with the narrator. Does away with the icon based interface. The game's gameplay consists of a single cursor. Does away with any real "death"--you can literally just pick up where you left off, even if you didn't save. The game, unlike any other KQ game, is broken up into chapters, and you can pick any chapter you want, out of order. You basically can skip to the end of the game right off the bat. Mazes are done away with. Puzzles are made easier. You have two protagonists instead of one. For the first time ever, the game is styled like that of a Disney movie, and opens with a Disney-esque song.
I keep seeing this argument over and over, slightly rephrased but with the same point - that it's somehow impossible to define what makes an adventure game.
While I agree there aren't completely restrictive lines of what makes up an adventure game, I still think an adventure game needs at least a sizable chunk of what has traditionally been considered adventure game elements.
The problem with the argument you're using here is that it's often used in regard to wildly different games, so they're all deemed adventure games even when the games have very little in common.
It almost seems to me that as long as a game has a storyline longer than a few lines... it can be considered an adventure game because of that alone.
Anyway, some essential things an adventure game should include, in my opinion, are -
* the games should be highly story focused - I don't mean the storylines have to be very good or anything like that, just that the game has to be based around a storyline and that it should be implemented properly into the game and not only be a few lines in the manual
* the games should have plenty of characters to talk to, and have at least a reasonable amount of dialogue (none of these are strictly required, which is probably the case for all of these points - the thing is I think an adventure game should include at least *some* of these things)
* the games should have puzzles. This is pretty much a requirement... they don't have to be difficult puzzles but they have to be there
* if there is combat or action/arcade sequences - these should be a minor part of the game compared to the puzzles/character interaction/dialogue. The games can have action, but it should not become the focus of the game
* there should not be many parts requiring good eye-hand coordination/navigational skills/etc... in other words, the games should not have many difficult jumping puzzles or other navigational obstacles that require simple reflexes and coordination to complete, they should rather focus on mental challenges
I realize games such as the Myst series would not fit under this definition, but I've personally never considered them adventure games - they were always puzzle games to me, only with some adventure game elements.
For some reason it seems acceptable to completely water down the adventure game genre so that a lot of very different games can fall under this genre... much more so than with other genres... that's my impression anyway.
It seems it's rather common to take the word 'adventure' too literally, and apply the adventure game label to any game that has 'adventurous' elements... which when you think of it makes out a very large chunk of the games out there.
First objective in KQ1, is actually is to bow and talk to the king! But you have to figure out the fact, that you need to enter the castle.
Actually killing Dracula is required for full points in KQ2, much like the witch in KQ1.
And Armakuni, your definitions don't even fit into industry definitions really! But arguebly the industry never agrees on finer points of different genres even!
Most of the puzzle types for example, such as "jumping puzzles" actually originated in adventure games before there were 3D action-adventures. Box puzzles are something that originates out of adventure games as well, you can take it back to Zork 3 for example.
Though sometimes these types of puzzles were parts of stand alone puzzle or action games, like "Boxxle", or Frogger (Sierra made the original btw!)
I'd say one thing 3D games tend to overuse those types of puzzles ...
The adventure game genre (be it parser, point and click, or click and drag) was evolving throughout, and often as a result of, the life of the King's Quest series. MoE is not an adventure game. It does not evolve the adventure gaming genre. It is a third-person action-adventure-rpg, of an almost completely disparate style from the rest of its core series.
Dragon Age:Origins has a narrator. What if Sierra had made KQ9 as a first-person RPG-shooter?
The adventure game genre (be it parser, point and click, or click and drag) was evolving throughout, and often as a result of, the life of the King's Quest series. MoE is not an adventure game. It is a third-person action-adventure-rpg.
Dragon Age:Origins has a narrator. What if Sierra had made KQ9 as a first-person RPG-shooter?
But wait a minute. If the adventure genre was evolving throughout the life of and often as a result of the KQ series, why couldn't MoE be an adventure game?
Adventure games are and were third person. RPGs, at least in the era of KQ8 and now, take their cue in many ways from adventure games.
I personally consider KQ8 an adventure game, with action elements.
You have to remember that many of the 3D action games of the period were not at all story driven. The action and 3D and killing came first; story second.
The action in KQ8 is kind of like a puzzle in previous KQ games; a means to an end. KQ8 has a story, a rather deep one, which drives the whole game, and like the other games, is a story firmly grounded in folklore, mythology, with some elements of literature thrown in. Action is not the main driving facet of KQ8, nor are the puzzles in the previous games. They're just a means to get from here to there.
Techinically KQ1 is open ended enough that getting a dagger isn't necessarily the first thing you do... It really depends if you go left or right from the castle, and figure out that the rock hides the dagger.
Comments
Last time I checked, Telltale creates adventure games....And is pretty much the only major developer doing so. But keep on trying to kill the game before it comes out.
Lighten up dude, I was joking.
So was Mixed-Up Mother Goose...
Which one had more compelling puzzles?
Note: Both have similar character-driven in-game hint systems.
Right, Little Tommy Tucker...
Telltale creates "interactive episodic content" -- you can read their own definition of themselves here and nowhere does it say anything, in the present tense, about creating adventure games. They have been distancing themselves from the adventure genre in nearly every interview I've seen since JP and BTTF were announced. I'll buy that BTTF technically qualifies as an adventure game, but it was little more than a content delivery system. All the gameplay footage we have of JP, though, indicates that it is not an adventure game.
Even before the movie licenses, Puzzle Agent was a step away from adventure games -- why bother embedding the puzzles into a gameworld when all you really want to do is develop characters and present content?
To anyone who sees adventure games as primarily a storytelling medium, the above might seem like a distinction without a difference. But it is anathema for those of us who regard them as games, who enjoy them for the opportunity to explore virtual worlds and partake in stimulating puzzle-solving gameplay.
That being said she still did use the term 'adventure game' quite often.
Didn't you also just quote her as saying, "I've always felt that the adventure-game genre was sort of mine."?
From 1992 during development of KQ6 from Interaction magazine;
You should read some of the things the Bill Davis used to say about 'Adventures'! He was Sierra's Creative Director for a few years. He was hired by Ken and Roberta to to help make computer game technology more and more theatrical, more like real films, animated and live action
He was also a major advocate of CD-Rom technology as it would allow the company to push towards a more realistic cinematic experience, allowing them to make the company's animation "fuller (more life-like), have more music and add things like speech."
One wonders what they would have done, if they had today's technology now! Some interviews they claim that some of the things they did with adventure games were based more on limitations in technology, not necessarily to improve 'gameplay'.
So imo, the irony is palpable.
I don't see a big difference between Layton style puzzles and traditional adventure game puzzles. I actually think Layton style puzzles are consistently more logical. But I don't think that necessarily distances them from being adventure games per se.
You can have the best story in the universe in a game. But you can't have the best gameplay without challenge. That's what I firmly believe.
I don't know from Layton. I was talking about Puzzle Agent, in which the puzzles are not organic to the gameworld; you don't solve them by interacting with the environment but on a separate screen akin to a page in a printed puzzle book. That's what distances it from being a graphic adventure, where the player discovers the puzzles and works out their solutions through exploration and manipulation of the gameworld.
Of course the puzzles in Puzzle Agent (and presumably Layton?) are more logical, because those games are intended to be about -- wait for it -- logic puzzles! Graphic adventures can be, and often are, much more than that. Not only logic but creative thinking comes into play, making inferences, testing assumptions, exploring for clues and sometimes just finding the answer elsewhere in the gameworld.
I think you need to look deeper into what she meant by "interactive fiction" and what Telltale means by "interactive content". The last part of that quote -- as well as the games themselves -- indicate that while Roberta might not have thought of KQ as games, she sure as hell didn't think of them as content to be consumed with as little effort as clicking or swiping to turn the page in an e-book. What's ironic is that Telltale is basically going in the direction that she explicitly disavowed:
That's not genre hate, is it?
It's a very natural reaction in my opinion... it's not unreasonable to expect a sequel to a game you love to fall in the same genre.
Imagine if the next... say the next Need for Speed game... if that turned out to be a completely dry and overly complex management game... I imagine a lot of Need for Speed fans would dislike that particular entry in the series.
Now this I really get and thanks for putting it in a way I didn't think out enough. Take Parasite Eve. I love part one because it's this hybrid RPG with action elements but still really customizable equipment and weapons with eery horror elements. Then they transformed it into Resident Evil. If I wanted to play Resident Evil (and I do like that series) then I'd play Resident Evil.
Did you like Longest Journey?
Remember its a matter of 1992 and 1997. She had time to change her opinion.
How she saw games in 1992 is not necessarily how she saw games in 1997.
You say, look at the context between the comments. I say there is no context between the two disparate comments made 4-5 years apart. That's just silly!
Roberta also was clearly not into keeping the same style with each game. She wanted to mix things up a bit each time. People didn't understand that someone who made Mixed-Up Mother Goose could make a slasher with rape scenes. But she did that believing that her stories are more about "good vs. evil" and there are different ways to tell that type of story. Violence was one way. She didn't want to limit her self to telling that kind of story in a clean wholesome non-violent way, when there are other ways to tell the story.
In the same way, she believed she could tell a story of good vs. evil, that fits within the world of KQ, with a Tolkienesque hero who slays dragons, as opposed to just scaring them away. Again this was another way she was trying to prevent herself from being type-casted as the Mixed-Up Mother Good adventure game designer.
The Davidsons didn't like the idea of her violence though, apparently... They were actually trying to purge it from the game, and ordering managers to ignore Roberta. Even though Roberta never intended the 'violence' to be Phantasmagoria type violence. It's much more wholesome in comparison.
It wasn't an implication. Not all puzzle games are adventure games. You can wrap a story around any old kind of puzzle-solving gameplay -- and casual game companies are doing just that by the dozens! (I'm waiting for a retelling of War and Peace with sudoku puzzles) -- but it doesn't add up to an adventure game without some, you know, adventure taking place in a gameworld.
Minesweeper is a puzzle game, but not an adventure game.
Jane Jensen's BeTrapped is Minsweeper mixed with an Adventure game, and thus a puzzle-adventure.
Layton is several genres, its a Puzzle-adventure, and also a visual novel/interactive novel (Very popular sub-genre of adventure games in Japan).
Puzzle Agent is more or less the same genres.
Yes. This was my point exactly.
I love the King's Quest series, and whether or not MoE is a decent game on its own merit (which is still debatable), the fact that it strays so far from the core series' genre yet isn't officially marketed as a spin-off (KQ8 it is not) is almost a slap in the face to the adventure gaming commmunity at large, as we were apparently not a big enough niche market to be worthy of making a proper KQ8 game for.
That may very well be. But Chyron was saying that King's Quest is "supposed to be an adventure game." Which is also a baseless argument to make for why MOE isn't a good game, which was the topic of discussion.
Still haven't played through it. Everyone says it was the last great adventure game, though. I did say "almost extinct".
She felt the series would die if she didn't 'evolve' it, with new features.
The Davidsons apparently wanted to cut that 'violence' out of the game due to their conservative Christian beliefs (and a belief it was going to be another 'immoral' Phantasmagorial), if they had completed their version, the game may have been closer to older games, but wouldn't have been Roberta's vision, and she would have had her name removed from the game.
So if you feel your face was slapped, it was slapped by the hands of Roberta!
Ken Williams himself thought Adventure gaming was dead, and when he owned the company, he was thinking of ending the development of them, and going into more 'profitable' endeavors. That's why he supported Roberta's new ideas for 'evolving' KQ into the next generation of games, rather than see it be killed off completely.
Honestly, what you thought KQ8 'should be", and what Roberta thought KQ8 "should be" are two very different things!
You have to understand back then, even the best adventure games, such as Grim Fandango were losing money. Grim Fandagon only sold half as much as KQ8. I don't even think it made back the money they put into it...
Then the few that were successful... Phantas cost something like 4 million to make. It was making it back, but the Davidsons stopped marketing it because they believed it was satanic and violent... So they pretty much ruined the possibility of more Phantas sequels after the second one...
Storywise I think it's the most ambitious. I don't know if I'd say it's the last great one, I think there have been great ones since then, but in terms of scope I never played anything else quite like it. It retained all the classical adventure puzzling, figuring out what combined with what to manipulate in your inventory and environment, but it always had a really robust storyline going on behind it that really didn't let up even to the last scene.
Baggins, Roberta herself said there wasn't another team designing an alternate KQ8.
Correct. But Roberta never really thought of adventure games as being strictly no combat, no violence, etc. From what we see, her definition of the genre was rather loose--She often times called it an interactive story. And her definition of what makes a KQ was loose too.
Having loose boundaries is good for a series to survive and prosper. The fans were just too close minded to accept anything that wasn't KQ6 Part II.
I don't think Roberta wanted to change KQ8 to combat to a 3D game with action because that's what surveys said were the best thing to do. In 1994, when she decided KQ8 was going to be 3D and probably have combat, Doom was just a fad--Nothing more. Myst was selling much, much greater than Doom and even became the best selling game of all time the very next year.
I think Roberta went with combat and 3D in KQ8 not to "sell out", but simply because it's what she wanted to do.
It's not baseless. The King's Quest core series should be an adventure game series. If they want to make a spin-off, then so be it. They didn't. They made a game with an extremely different feel to it and tried to market it to the adventure gaming community--for which the series is so popular--when it is not an adventure game, by trying to market the game as the next game in the series.
It would be akin to making a "The Sims:King's Quest 9" game. I don't hate the genre but it's not the droids I'm looking for.
Define an adventure game. More to the point, define a King's Quest.
I personally think the person who basically created graphic adventure games, and who created the KQ series, is the best at defining at what it is, and what it should be. And she laid it out very clearly in 1997 for the fans.
Not only that, but it's not like there was any secret made of there being combat in KQ8. It wasn't like Sierra trotted it out as just another KQ until the day of release. I don't see how it can be considered a "slap in the face to the fans."
When Roberta removed text from the KQ series and made everything point and click, was it a slap in the face? How about when the series went a little darker and less family friendly with KQ6? Or the overhaul that KQ7 was?
Was it a slap in the face when Roberta removed the option to kill innocent creatures from the series in KQ4? What if I want the option to do violence in a KQ game?
PS--A group of fans already made a Sims version of a King's Quest game. It's called TSL.
Roberta didn't want to make a spinoff. There was never an intent to make a spinoff. She had an idea for a new kind of 'adventure' game, the '3D Adventure', that she hoped would help save an already 'dead' genre. It was always her intent for it to be a core game in the series.
Again your definition of what the series was supposed to be and her 'definition' are two very different things.
By the way, did you know there were Interactive Fiction (Infocom) purists that didn't like Graphic Adventures, seeing them as an abomination to the pure nature of the old Infocom text-adventure games?
Did you know there were people who thought KQ5 wasn't a true adventure game because of the 'parser' was removed?
In fact, didn't fans ask her if KQ was getting too old around 1996 or 1997 and she said no? It doesn't seem to me like she ever felt that KQ8 was anything but KQ8. She could've easily given up on KQ entirely and started a brand new series. There was no need for Mask to be called KQ8 if she didn't feel it was one. Look at Phantasmagoria--Different series but it sold over a million in the first month and was Sierra's biggest seller of all time. The Roberta Williams' name was very big in the '90s, big enough that if she wanted to do a spin-off, or simply make another series, she could've.
I mean, Roberta's not one to sell a product that she doesn't feel fits in it's series. She's always liked change. Every KQ game--with perhaps the exceptions of KQ2 and KQ6--took radical steps technologically.
KQ2 actually did push the technology in several ways at the time. Mainly in size of the game, the introduction of a proper introduction cutscene, and dynamic changing world (characters appear or change, based on actions completed in the game). It also packed in more music apparently, required a little more memory and resources.
KQ6 pushed the technology through its fully rendered introduction scene, very dynamic scripted storytelling, multimedia aspects (CD-rom version especially), and multiple endings.
When a core series has carried on long enough with a certain style, a certain feel, fans have an expectation that the next official installment for the core series will have a certain feel to it. If the franchise is to make a significant enough change that its target market is significantly different, then such a change should be marketed as a spin-off.
What if I was watching Star Trek: The Next Generation, and the seventh season took place exclusively on Deep Space Nine, with only a handful of token cameos from the TNG cast? DS9 is a good show, but I would still be greatly annoyed.
[EDIT:] okay. I got one. Star Trek: Enterpise. The series finale for the show Enterprise (called "These are the voyages...") was just a holodeck program that Riker was running on the Enterprise-D during the TNG episode "Pegasus," and during one scene the NX-01 Enterprise crew has a toast "to the next generation." As I recall, fans were enraged by all of this to the point that Rick Berman has since said to consider it as a coda rather than a true finale.[/edit]
I would greatly have preferred that she had.
Adventure games and puzzle games have puzzle-solving gameplay in common, so the term "puzzle-adventure game" is utterly meaningless. I don't believe there is any widely accepted division of the adventure game genre into subgenres.
Fetch/inventory giving are not puzzles of the traditional sense... In RPG's they would be called 'fetch quests'.
We're dealing with a series with 8 games. Let's take the first 7:
KQ1--Wide open world. Basic narrator. Ability to kill. Your first objective is to arm yourself with a dagger in fact. You can kill both bad guys and good guys, and one of your main "quests" is to kill a witch. You're not the King until the end.
KQ2--Wide world world. Basic narrator. Ability to kill once again. You can kill Dracula and the Lion if you so choose.
KQ3--World open world. Again, killing is still an option here. You have to use magic--for the first time ever in a KQ game--to survive. Half the game is spent just trying to survive being blasted by Mordack. You use all sorts of magic spells, which Roberta considered "black magic". You have to kill a Yeti and a three headed dragon.
KQ4--Now we begin to get some changes. The world is still wide open. However, non-violence becomes more of a rule than an objective. However, the series takes a creepy turn and is probably the darkest entry in the whole series. Everything around you wants to kill you, pretty much. You deal with zombies, ghosts, mummies, evil witches, trolls, ogres etc. You dig amongst the dead to recover objects for them. It's a very dark game in terms of tone. Day and Night cycle, never before done in KQ. And you kill Lolotte in a very violent way--by shooting her in the heart with an arrow.
KQ5--Does away TOTALLY with text. Is lighter in tone than KQ4. The world is no longer open; the game and game world is very linear. There's a whole icon based interface, a gigantic overhaul from previous games. Interactions with characters are much more limited than in past games. You can't look at everything in sight or interact with the narrator as much. Mazes are introduced. However, violence is still a factor; You have to kill a Yeti and Mordack. Dead ends galore in this game. Ridiculous puzzles which would seem
KQ6--Introduces more of a darker tone. A very linear game world in which you spend most of your time travelling back and forth between lands. However, now, you have the option to end the game in multiple ways. A 3D intro opens the game for the first time ever. You still have to kill the Minotaur by fooling it into a fiery pit, causing it to burn to death. It goes back to the dark tone of KQ4, once more with zombies. A more detailed narrator. More subplots. Mazes still persist here.
KQ7--Does away with the narrator. Does away with the icon based interface. The game's gameplay consists of a single cursor. Does away with any real "death"--you can literally just pick up where you left off, even if you didn't save. The game, unlike any other KQ game, is broken up into chapters, and you can pick any chapter you want, out of order. You basically can skip to the end of the game right off the bat. Mazes are done away with. Puzzles are made easier. You have two protagonists instead of one. For the first time ever, the game is styled like that of a Disney movie, and opens with a Disney-esque song.
While I agree there aren't completely restrictive lines of what makes up an adventure game, I still think an adventure game needs at least a sizable chunk of what has traditionally been considered adventure game elements.
The problem with the argument you're using here is that it's often used in regard to wildly different games, so they're all deemed adventure games even when the games have very little in common.
It almost seems to me that as long as a game has a storyline longer than a few lines... it can be considered an adventure game because of that alone.
Anyway, some essential things an adventure game should include, in my opinion, are -
* the games should be highly story focused - I don't mean the storylines have to be very good or anything like that, just that the game has to be based around a storyline and that it should be implemented properly into the game and not only be a few lines in the manual
* the games should have plenty of characters to talk to, and have at least a reasonable amount of dialogue (none of these are strictly required, which is probably the case for all of these points - the thing is I think an adventure game should include at least *some* of these things)
* the games should have puzzles. This is pretty much a requirement... they don't have to be difficult puzzles but they have to be there
* if there is combat or action/arcade sequences - these should be a minor part of the game compared to the puzzles/character interaction/dialogue. The games can have action, but it should not become the focus of the game
* there should not be many parts requiring good eye-hand coordination/navigational skills/etc... in other words, the games should not have many difficult jumping puzzles or other navigational obstacles that require simple reflexes and coordination to complete, they should rather focus on mental challenges
I realize games such as the Myst series would not fit under this definition, but I've personally never considered them adventure games - they were always puzzle games to me, only with some adventure game elements.
For some reason it seems acceptable to completely water down the adventure game genre so that a lot of very different games can fall under this genre... much more so than with other genres... that's my impression anyway.
It seems it's rather common to take the word 'adventure' too literally, and apply the adventure game label to any game that has 'adventurous' elements... which when you think of it makes out a very large chunk of the games out there.
Actually killing Dracula is required for full points in KQ2, much like the witch in KQ1.
And Armakuni, your definitions don't even fit into industry definitions really! But arguebly the industry never agrees on finer points of different genres even!
Most of the puzzle types for example, such as "jumping puzzles" actually originated in adventure games before there were 3D action-adventures. Box puzzles are something that originates out of adventure games as well, you can take it back to Zork 3 for example.
Though sometimes these types of puzzles were parts of stand alone puzzle or action games, like "Boxxle", or Frogger (Sierra made the original btw!)
I'd say one thing 3D games tend to overuse those types of puzzles
Dragon Age:Origins has a narrator. What if Sierra had made KQ9 as a first-person RPG-shooter?
Ah yes sorry I was thinking of KQ1SCI, where the meeting with the King is part of the intro.
It's funny though that the first thing you do at the start of your quest--In both KQ8 and KQ1SCI--is get a dagger.
But wait a minute. If the adventure genre was evolving throughout the life of and often as a result of the KQ series, why couldn't MoE be an adventure game?
Adventure games are and were third person. RPGs, at least in the era of KQ8 and now, take their cue in many ways from adventure games.
I personally consider KQ8 an adventure game, with action elements.
You have to remember that many of the 3D action games of the period were not at all story driven. The action and 3D and killing came first; story second.
The action in KQ8 is kind of like a puzzle in previous KQ games; a means to an end. KQ8 has a story, a rather deep one, which drives the whole game, and like the other games, is a story firmly grounded in folklore, mythology, with some elements of literature thrown in. Action is not the main driving facet of KQ8, nor are the puzzles in the previous games. They're just a means to get from here to there.