I love old Sierra games, but there is no way I want to be penalised for getting immersed in the story. Saving the game is nothing to do with the story. Just the opposite, having to do it manually breaks the immersion for most of us. I say "most of us" because I believe there are not many gamers out there who still want this gameplay mechanic in new games. There are a few very vocal defenders of (only) manual saving on this forum, but I very much doubt there are more of them among gamers at large than there are those who want the game to take care of this aspect.
The argument that having to save manually makes the deaths have consequences is not very persuasive in my view, because in that case the consequences are no more part of the story than they would be with the "Try Again" option enabled. I would say it is consequence enough to see the player character (and possibly others) die! And I agree with those who have said that it is silly for people to complain about the option to either have "Try Again" enabled or not. If they want to punish themselves, they are free not to utilise that option. Just don't ask everyone else (not to mention the game's sales) to suffer for you...
Just don't ask everyone else (not to mention the game's sales) to suffer for you...
Lol...hyperbole much? I would call this a bit of an overstatement, especially considering EVERY Telltale game so far has had manual save-game mechanics in place.
Saving the game is nothing to do with the story. Just the opposite, having to do it manually breaks the immersion for most of us.
No it doesn't. Seriously, watch this part of a KQ6 Let's Play and tell me how long it takes to save your game. Was the immersion broken for the guy playing? No. It took 4 seconds to save. Did he have to backtrack? No. He was careful. What if he hadn't saved before he did that? Well, I guess he'd say "oh crap" (or another expletive) and learn to be more careful next time. It still would have immersed him further into the gameplay by making him feel stupid for not having saved.
This isn't about being immersed in the story, it's about being immersed in the game. It's a game, not just a story. The save mechanic affects the gameplay, and the gameplay is important. Being held responsible for your own gameplay choices is important. If you walk into a dangerous situation without having saved in a long time and then get killed, kicking yourself for not having saved may break the story a small bit, but it immerses you in the gameplay by teaching you a lesson for being foolish. If you're going to quit playing a game and say it sucks because you hadn't saved in over an hour and have to retrace your steps (albeit taking 10 minutes the second time because now you know where everything is) then that sounds rather a childish way to react to what is clearly your own mistake.
If they want to punish themselves, they are free not to utilise that option. Just don't ask everyone else (not to mention the game's sales) to suffer for you...
Really? I'd like to know how much the BTTF game's sales have suffered because that game is so intent on keeping you from breaking the story for any reason. A meaningful gameplay experience is equally as important as a meaningful story.
Chyron, that clip hardly proves my belief wrong. The length of time it takes to save a game is not the issue for me, it is having to do it at all when I would rather spend that time on something more meaningful than mechanical repetition. Even if it only took 4 seconds a time (and you know it takes longer in many newer games), a mere fifteen saves would already mean a minute of one's life irrevocably lost. I grew up saving early, saving often, but I do not want to grow old doing it.
You are describing your own experience when you say that habituating yourself to save regularly enhances your immersion in the game. (Or story. For me, it is primarily a story, an interactive one.) But it does not work that way for everyone. Personally I do not mind the constant saving with older games, since the choice there is either to accept it or not to experience these wonderful games at all, but my preference for new games is to let the game keep track of saving, for the same reason that I feel relieved to use the iPad to write down notes knowing that everything is always saved automatically.
Lambonius, you may have misinterpreted my statement if you thought it was an exaggeration. I was saying that everyone other than those who want only manual saving (no "Try Again") would be likely to find such a system archaic and off-putting. I may be wrong, but that is my feeling. The comparison with earlier Telltale games is not valid, as you could not die in most of them (at least the ones I have played).
Anyway, I have stated my opinions to my satisfaction, and I am not going to change my views any more than you are, Chyron and Lambonius. Clearly we have each formed our respective views based on extensive personal experience and consideration.
I reckon the results of the poll reflect the likely preference of the public at large. I think the solution suggested in the original post is very good.
I always played the games over several days. I know a lot of you cave dwellers like to boot it up, and play it till you beat it, bleeding eyeballs be damned, but stopping to go to bed never "ruined" the immersion for me. Neither did taking four seconds to save.
Geez, it's not that bad to have to save manually. And getting penalized for everything you do was a big Sierra tradition. I'd say if you don't like it don't play it. That's part of King's Quest. Of course, you'll probably get your way anyway and that's incredibly sad...
You are describing your own experience when you say that habituating yourself to save regularly enhances your immersion in the game. (Or story. For me, it is primarily a story, an interactive one.)
This is the issue (at least for me). If you want an interactivce movie or story or whatever, go play BttF. That is the complaint many have had. It isn't an adventure game. As an interactive movie, it is quite good, but it was advertised as an adventure game, and by doing so, TellTale deceived many gamers who probably would not have purchased it if they had know what it really was.
Kings Quest IS an adventure game and if it is made into an interactive movie, that will really piss people off because it will go against what the game is and should remain. The "story immersion" argument works well for an interactive story as you put it, but not so much for kings quest.
You have to understand that as much as LucasArts-type adventure fans would think that they're trying to stick their Sierra-fingers into Telltale's development, Sierra-type adventure fans feel the same vice versa. And that was all well and good for franchises like Monkey Island and Sam & Max because those WERE LucasArts type games. King's Quest, on the other hand, is our baby. Not just any baby, the flagship of what made Sierra-type adventures what they are. It's like a betrayal if anything but the original game design philosophy is used.
As much as you wouldn't probably enjoy King's Quest by Telltale as much as others if it followed this design philosophy, we didn't enjoy BTTF which employs your philosophy.
Please do not put words in my mouth, my fellow King's Quest lovers!
I will be buying Telltale's King's Quest, no matter what. The saving system is not a deal-breaker for me (but anyone who definitely will not buy the game if the wrong saving system is adopted, please raise your hand...), nor is it even in the top ten of elements I consider vital to the success of King's Quest.
I am as big a fan of Sierra as anyone else here. So King's Quest is also "my" baby, if a property can ever be said to be the audience's baby. I have been playing computer games since the mid-80s, adventure games since 1987. So my opinions are not due to my not being enough of a fan of Sierra. I say all this because there seems to be this assumption that any "true" fan of Sierra and King's Quest, anyone who has been dedicated to these games for long enough, will automatically be of the opinion that manual saving only is the way to go.
Well, guess what... I am a huge Sierra fan and I disagree with that. My opinion is based on as much experience as anyone else's around here. Once it was traditional to have games on floppies. It was traditional to wait for quite some time for a game to load. And it was traditional to have to pay for a hintbook rather than go online for free help. These changes have all been for the better, in my opinion, and the earlier circumstances were not an important aspect of the experience for me.
I am also open to more gameplay mechanics than some others appear to be, including interactive movies, automatic saving, and manual saving. Like I said, the saving system is not a huge deal for me, but that is because I am an experienced gamer. Thinking beyond just myself (though taking into consideration my preference for future games, rather than just what I have been used to), I think it would be a poor commercial decision for Telltale not to include some kind of automatic saving system in case they do include sudden deaths in the game (which I hope they do).
(One of the potential problems with manual saving only is that this would lead to some less experienced players using a single saved game and then getting stuck half-way through the game because they saved in a position from which it was impossible to recover. This would lead to some of them giving up in disgust, in turn leading to them not bothering to buy the next episode, in turn possibly leading to no more King's Quest. Even for those of you who dislike the idea of a "Try Again" button, is it really too high a price to pay to have more people onboard for the duration?)
The Beast Within is an adventure game for me, and an adventure game is just a variety of interactive story as far as I am concerned. What matters to me about interactive stories is the content, not the gameplay mechanics. Gameplay mechanics are only there as the interface between me and the story. Of course I wish the mechanics to be such that I get as much enjoyment out of the experience as possible, but that is it.
So there is no hard and fast rule for me that a King's Quest positively needs to use any of the gameplay mechanics from the past. To be perfectly clear: I am a long-time Sierra fan and I feel the artistic and story content is what made Sierra what it was. It was not the gameplay mechanics. It was Graham and Daventry, so to speak, not manual saving or sudden deaths (even though I like the latter, as I said). The gameplay mechanics (aside from such aesthetically important points as interaction density and optional interactivity), including the saving system, were incidental, in my opinion, a product of the times and subject to the technological and software limitations thereof.
I have no idea whether Back to the Future utilises the kind of saving system I meant or not because I have not played any of the series. But since I have indeed not played it or even mentioned it in this context, I feel it is not appropriate to associate my name with it the way you did, Brandon. It would be as inappropriate for me to say that Hopkins FBI "employs your philosophy". Do you see the problem? But probably it was just a bad choice of words.
The frequent Back to the Future comparisons are not terribly relevant, anyway. We know BttF was designed to appeal primarily to non-gamers, because the brand is a film series first and and foremost. We can also be pretty darn sure Telltale will be aiming King's Quest for a different demographic, because King's Quest was always a game series first and foremost.
P.S. chucklas, you seem to have not understood what is meant by immersion in a game. It involves interaction. I might as well tell you to go play baseball if you want a game and not a story. :rolleyes: And no, I am not going anywhere. Sheesh!
Ok, you're a big Sierra fan. My bad. All I'm saying is there are just as large a community of people on both sides; those who want manual saving and those who don't. And the BTTF example still holds. When I said "your philosophy" I meant the lack of a manual saving system being ok.
I never thought that King's Quest was about story so much as gameplay, as opposed to LucasArts games. It was about the adventure. The journey. The puzzles. The danger. The story was just the starting point and the goal. Yes, even in KQ6. You found out stuff along the way and helped people in side stories but it wasn't all about story.
You have to understand that as much as LucasArts-type adventure fans would think that they're trying to stick their Sierra-fingers into Telltale's development, Sierra-type adventure fans feel the same vice versa. And that was all well and good for franchises like Monkey Island and Sam & Max because those WERE LucasArts type games. King's Quest, on the other hand, is our baby. Not just any baby, the flagship of what made Sierra-type adventures what they are. It's like a betrayal if anything but the original game design philosophy is used.
As much as you wouldn't probably enjoy King's Quest by Telltale as much as others if it followed this design philosophy, we didn't enjoy BTTF which employs your philosophy.
I don't think it's quite so simple as "us and them". And I think it's rather unfair to say BTTF employs a LucasArts design philosophy. I sure never played an oldschool LucasArts game like that. There is simply no comparison between games like The Secret of Monkey Island and BTTF.
If I'd had to choose back in the day between Sierra and LucasArts, I would've gone with Sierra. I certainly considered myself a Sierra fan. I played plenty of manual-save-only, die-and-you're-dead Sierra games. And maybe I was a little late to the party, but many of the Sierra games I grew up with did have a retry-on-death option, as far as I recall. I can't remember exactly because it's never been terribly important to me. I suppose from my angle, I see the move away from "manual saves only" as a design evolution rather than pandering to a less patient audience. That's how I see the move away from dead-end possibilities too.
Personally I feel that dead ends are simply poor design, and "manual save only / no retry on death" is a personal preference rather than a creator-designed immersion technique. Even with auto-saves and retry options, I still create my own manual saves. But that's just second nature to me, not an integral part of the immersion.
Anyway, to each their own. I highly doubt the save mechanism is a make-or-break purchasing decision for any of us.
Only KQ7, SQ6, and maybe one or two other sierra adventures ever had a try again button. And those were the later hi-res games in around 95/96 when their touch was waning.
Only KQ7, SQ6, and maybe one or two other sierra adventures ever had a try again button. And those were the later hi-res games in around 95/96 when their touch was waning.
Aye, the ones I remember as having retries would be mid-nineties-ish. But they are Sierra games nonetheless (including an entry in the KQ series), so I don't think its fair to say "Sierra = death" as an absolute. Anyway, as I said, it never mattered much to me either way.
For the record, I would certainly like to have a manual saving option in addition to the automatic retry option. And I would not even mind having both options optional for the really HC among us.
Where the manual saving only would become a fairly large annoyance for me personally is on replays after the first time through. That is when I like to try everything possible. If there were many deaths lurking in wait and a lot of flags to be triggered, it would become a chore to save after almost every step (but necessary in order to preserve the flag states).
But I thought the purpose of this thread was to see if the compromise suggested in the original post was acceptable to most of us? I think the answer to that has been established as positive. I do confess to still failing to see the rationale of opposing leaving this up to the player.
We can also be pretty darn sure Telltale will be aiming King's Quest for a different demographic, because King's Quest was always a game series first and foremost.
We can?!? You're taking that for granted because you don't care (about gameplay). We do care, and all the signs we see point to a real concern that TTG will neglect gameplay. The whole tenor of this sub-forum would be entirely different if we weren't pretty darn NOT sure.
P.S. chucklas, you seem to have not understood what is meant by immersion in a game. It involves interaction. I might as well tell you to go play baseball if you want a game and not a story.
This counterpoint to chucklas' comment is untenable. King's Quest is a game -- you acknowledged that yourself ("KQ is a game series first and foremost") -- so we're not the ones who should go elsewhere to look for the kind of product, ie. game, we enjoy. Just because you personally turned a video game into an interactive story doesn't mean it's not fundamentally, unmistakeably a game. KQ has all the markings of a game. There are challenges involved. There is a predefined set of actions and rules you employ to meet those challenges. You can succeed or fail at those challenges. There is a point system to track your progress. Telltale can put their own spin on it, but the challenges part -- real, honest-to-god gameplay, not just "interactivity" -- is not optional in a video game, especially one calling itself King's Quest and capitalizing on its legacy.
thom-22, your definition of "game" is limited, moreso than accepted dictionary definitions. One of the definitions from Oxford Dictionaries is "an activity that one engages in for amusement". Anything that matches this description fulfils the dictionary definition. Clearly any kind of interactive movie is not outside the definition, nor are regular films or books, for that matter.
All games are limited to a greater or lesser extent. You can only do things that have been made possible by the creators of the game. Therefore, the difference between an interactive movie such as The Beast Within and a real-time 3D game such as Outcast is quantitative, not qualitative. All the content has been preprogrammed in both cases and you are simply engaging with it via different gameplay mechanics and interfaces and rendering systems.
There is a loud contingent among hardcore adventure gamers who say that interactive movies are not true adventure games, and there is a loud contingent among hardcore gamers who say that adventure games are not even real games, that adventure games "play themselves". I think this is silly snobbery that has its roots in a recognised psychological phenomenon:
People tend to feel the need to establish that they are better than or at least very different from their immediate neighbours and near-equals, especially when they feel in danger of getting lumped together with them, but not so often when it comes to people further away, people who are not close to them in status or wealth or caste or whatever (since there is less chance of getting mixed up with these groups). In light of this, defensiveness about game genre boundaries is an implicit admission that indeed adventure games and interactive movies and shooters are closely related, certainly inasmuch as the physical activity of playing is concerned. There is far less difference between us adventure gamers and shooter fans and casual gamers and wedding or other "life" gamers than we tend to think.
Or, for an alternative response to this point: I meant, "gameplay mechanics ... including those collectively constituting what are frequently termed interactive movies".
We can?!? You're taking that for granted because you don't care (about gameplay). We do care, and all the signs we see point to a real concern that TTG will neglect gameplay. The whole tenor of this sub-forum would be entirely different if we weren't pretty darn NOT sure.
Well, in that case I should say that I am pretty darn sure and leave it at that. I do care about gameplay mechanics. As I said: "Of course I wish the mechanics to be such that I get as much enjoyment out of the experience as possible ..." I was only disagreeing about the claim that what made Sierra games great was the specific gameplay mechanics involved. (That is a matter of subjective opinion, so not really worth arguing about. We can all state our own views on this, but it is not a testable matter. Analysis of the past is only useful up to a point, anyway. After identifying what inspired us, we ought to, ideally, try to incorporate those things in what we create ourselves. I am sure the Telltale designers will be doing just that. And of course all this analysis may be helpful in figuring out those great things.)
As I said, I am confident that Telltale will not neglect gameplay by any reasonable standards. They will certainly not please everyone, particularly the most HC on this forum, because those demands pretty much equate to pretending the world has not moved on since a whole generation ago. As far as I can see, the tenor of this forum is so negative because a lot of us have extremely fixed ideas from our childhood about what King's Quest should be like (more fixed than any ever had by, say, Roberta Williams herself) and because a lot of things are getting either assumed or blown out of proportion.
I mean, it seems like many assume, for example, that there will not be the option for manual saving in the new game just because Back to the Future apparently did away with manual saving (if I understood correctly). There is no reason that I can see to suppose that this game will share a similar design philosophy to that of BttF, yet that assumption keeps getting dredged up all the time. Have Telltale said anything that links their respective approaches to KQ and BttF? (Maybe they have and I simply missed it.)
Yes, of course King's Quest is a game series. I never disputed that. I want it to be a game series. The problem seems to be that our definitions of neither "game" or "story" match. For me, King's Quest is a playable story and all adventure games are playable stories. We can each of us form our own interpretations of what a "game" is (as you did with the characteristics listed in your last paragraph), but those are subjective matters and as such cannot be disputed as erroneous or counterfactual.
I guess we have all heard the catchphrase "the story is the puzzle" (or variations thereof)? That is almost how I see the true potential of adventure games as a viable storytelling medium with an unlimited expected lifespan, with this modification: "the story is the game" (or "the game is the story"). If the story (and there is no reason to assume a story needs to be fixed or unflexible or passively observed!) is woven effectively and densely and dynamically enough (and I would hope it involves great freedom of exploration, not storytelling on strict rails), and if it generates a sense of playfulness and fascination and involvement, it will be a game and a story at the same time. Then there will be no need to shoehorn in artificial puzzles or "challenging gameplay".
Games like The Colonel's Bequest went a long way towards the goal of making the interactive story sufficiently playable and enjoyable and explorable without very many traditional "gameplay challenges". As we all know, Roberta Williams continued exploring this territory of "pure story" with Phantasmagoria, so clearly it was something that intrigued her. I believe she too grew tired of the contrived puzzles when she mostly wanted a living story. Just my impression, of course.
But please note, everyone, that I am not trying to make anyone else change their views on any of these things! I simply felt the need to weigh in with an opposing viewpoint to that of many of the most frequent posters on this forum, from someone with an equal amount of love for Sierra yet who has not arrived at the same conclusions. Unfortunately the forum is now so polarised that anyone who expresses an opinion that even vaguely sounds like one of the polar opposites is automatically assumed to hold just that extreme of opinion, with no allowance made for our individual nuances of thought and viewpoint. At least I definitely felt that way looking at the reactions to my posts in this thread.
But like a Zen master said, only gardening is important in this life, and even that is not very important... In other words, none of this will make or break any of our lives or (I reckon) enjoyment of the coming game. So again, peace to everyone and I hope this mammoth post (if read at all) is taken in the spirit in which it was written: as nothing more than an attempt to take part in a useful and constructive discussion that hopefully Telltale will be able to use in gauging the variety of opinions out there, and that may have been of some positive interest or value to the individual posters (as the posts of others have been to me).
I mean, it seems like many assume, for example, that there will not be the option for manual saving in the new game just because Back to the Future apparently did away with manual saving (if I understood correctly). There is no reason that I can see to suppose that this game will share a similar design philosophy to that of BttF, yet that assumption keeps getting dredged up all the time. Have Telltale said anything that links their respective approaches to KQ and BttF? (Maybe they have and I simply missed it.)
Really? You think people don't like BttF because of manual saves? Really? I think BttF is a great interactive movie. It was advertised as an adventure game, and I feel as though that was quite misleading. I believe this is the gripe with BttF. It has nothing to do with save game mechanics. As for Kings Quest, people fear that they will do the same to gear it towards a larger audience. If that happens many people here wont be supporting TellTale anymore.
thom-22, your definition of "game" is limited, moreso than accepted dictionary definitions. One of the definitions from Oxford Dictionaries is "an activity that one engages in for amusement". Anything that matches this description fulfils the dictionary definition. Clearly any kind of interactive movie is not outside the definition, nor are regular films or books, for that matter.
Of course my definition is limited, limited to the context at issue here. Dictionary definitions are immaterial. (Quoting the dictionary is often a good sign that someone is actually trying to re-define something away from everyday experience.) Not every "amusement" is a game in the way most people use the term game, especially wrt video games.
All games are limited to a greater or lesser extent. You can only do things that have been made possible by the creators of the game. Therefore, the difference between an interactive movie such as The Beast Within and a real-time 3D game such as Outcast is quantitative, not qualitative. All the content has been preprogrammed in both cases and you are simply engaging with it via different gameplay mechanics and interfaces and rendering systems.
I have no idea what you're trying to demonstrate here or why you think The Beast Within is merely an interactive movie. It is a full-fledged adventure game, and an excellent one at that. One plays it by applying a set of skills to the challenges presented -- skills and challenges conventionally associated with adventure-game gameplay -- and one can either win or lose, all while enjoying an excellent, integrated story. (The actual mechanics used for interaction are rather a more trivial aspect of gameplay, one I'm not particularly concerned about.) The differences between it and Outcast are merely ones of genre and graphics style, full-motion video vs. real-time 3D. But they are both video games.
Well, in that case I should say that I am pretty darn sure and leave it at that. I do care about gameplay mechanics. As I said: "Of course I wish the mechanics to be such that I get as much enjoyment out of the experience as possible ..." I was only disagreeing about the claim that what made Sierra games great was the specific gameplay mechanics involved.
You're disagreeing with your own straw man. Nobody is saying that any specific gameplay "mechanic" is what made Sierra games great. But the overall gameplay style of King's Quest -- not to mention the fact that they are games and not merely interactive stories -- cannot be disregarded as essential aspects of the series' popularity and excellence.
I mean, it seems like many assume, for example, that there will not be the option for manual saving in the new game just because Back to the Future apparently did away with manual saving (if I understood correctly).
I don't see anyone assuming there won't be manual saving. The concern is that we won't have a choice but to be put right back into an automatic do-over after a death (as in the Jurassic Park gameplay video). BTTF's problems have nothing to do with its save system -- it's so not-a-game that the save system is irrelevant.
There is no reason that I can see to suppose that this game will share a similar design philosophy to that of BttF, yet that assumption keeps getting dredged up all the time. Have Telltale said anything that links their respective approaches to KQ and BttF? (Maybe they have and I simply missed it.)
I'm pretty sure we've been quite clear as to the factual basis for our concerns, and that you're the one going strictly on assumptions or blind faith. In fact, I'm almost sure that I posted in direct response to a post of yours on this very matter a while ago. The decline in difficulty level started (at least) with The Devil's Playhouse. Moreover, puzzle-ruining hints were included even for those who turned hints completely off and TTG staff responded cavalierly to players' forum comments that certain episodes were getting too easy. There is also a long article in which a TTG developer discusses design philosophy that is particularly horrifying to those who prefer real video games to "entertainment experiences". I do not have time to look up a reference, but Rather Dashing cites it frequently.
And then there's BTTF. If BTTF was merely an exception, an attempt to appeal to a broader audience, why didn't TTG use the opportunity to attract these new "players" as customers for future products by teaching them how to play and raising the difficulty curve gently over the course of the game, instead of having an exceedingly low, flat difficulty curve throughout?
For the record, I have no problem with adventure-game developers adding mechanisms that enable casual "players" to turn an adventure game into nothing but a click-through movie or story -- hint systems, automatic do-overs upon death, whatever. I really don't care how other people consume their entertainment products. After all, any adventure game can be turned into a trivially interactive movie/story with a quick visit to gamefaqs.com. But when it comes to continuing a video-game franchise known for challenging gameplay, that legacy should be respected by producing a real, whole game, playable with hints and do-overs turned off, for fans of the originals.
I don't have time now to respond to the rest of your post, it seems a lot of words, loose definitions and special pleading that KQ is primarily a storytelling vehicle rather than a video game known for engaging, story-integrated gameplay that required some thought to proceed. (King's Quest I. Storytelling. Really?) It would be just as easy to come up with specious arguments that KQ is primarily a vehicle for puzzles and story is inconsequential. I would argue against that with equal vigor.
Personally I feel that dead ends are simply poor design, and "manual save only / no retry on death" is a personal preference rather than a creator-designed immersion technique.
Anyway, to each their own. I highly doubt the save mechanism is a make-or-break purchasing decision for any of us.
I disagree, dead-ends are vital in Sierra games and they add to the realism. I mean, if you go off on a quest without stocking up on supplies, you are asking for a slow and painful death.
Like not bringing the mirror with you to the underworld in KQ6. Or not taking the sunscreen in LSL2.
Having inventory items magically appear in your inventory with little or no context however, is a much worse design.
At least some games have done that fairly well, like Broken Sword, but I prefer having to acquire items that will only be used later, or risk getting stuck. As I said, it makes the game more realistic and challenging. And it was never an issue with multiple save slots anyway.
If they screw with this mechanic it will only hurt the overall product in my opinion.
I disagree, dead-ends are vital in Sierra games and they add to the realism. I mean, if you go off on a quest without stocking up on supplies, you are asking for a slow and painful death.
Like not bringing the mirror with you to the underworld in KQ6. Or not taking the sunscreen in LSL2.
Having inventory items magically appear in your inventory with little or no context however, is a much worse design.
At least some games have done that fairly well, like Broken Sword, but I prefer having to acquire items that will only be used later, or risk getting stuck. As I said, it makes the game more realistic and challenging. And it was never an issue with multiple save slots anyway.
I think it's actually a lot harder to design a game where you can't get stuck than it is to design one with multiple dead ends. For that reason I wonder whether dead ends were a conscious design choice on the part of Sierra creators, or if they were in there simply because they didn't try to work around them. It's probably worth noting that later Sierra games removed the possibility of getting stuck at the end without an item you need (not sure if that was a move to what they saw as better design, or simply a result of "marketplace realities").
Of course it's totally legitimate to enjoy the realism dead ends add to a game, I just wonder whether that was indeed the effect intended when the earlier Sierra adventures were designed.
Ron Gilbert (yes an ex-LucasArts guy, hear me out!) gave a great lecture at a German games conference this year about the design of Maniac Mansion. Maniac Mansion is probably the most complex adventure game I've come across in terms of the number of different combinations and possibilities there are to play the game to completion. It's quite realistic in that the different player characters you can choose each have different skills, and who you chose at the beginning as part of your group partially dictates the path you take to play through the game. Different problems have different solutions depending on who you have at your disposal, and some character combinations open up new puzzles entirely. Even though the creators tried to design the game without dead ends, the sheer complexity of their undertaking means there are still a couple of ways to get yourself hamstrung.
I'd definitely recommend a listen to anyone with an interest in adventure game design (I'd strongly recommend checking out the game too!). The talk can be found here (click on 2011, then on Ron Gilbert's talk), and there's a discussion thread about it on the forums here.
If anyone knows of any similar talks/interviews given by any of the prominent ex-Sierra people, I'd very much appreciate a link. It'd be interesting to compare the different philosophies.
thom-22, you have misrepresented everything I wrote.* I also feel your responses to me here are quite hostile in tone. You seem to be attacking me instead of engaging in conversation.
Unless we can keep things polite and make actual attempts to understand each other, I recommend we drop this subject while we are behind.
I would prefer to have you as a friend, man! But the attempt has to be mutual. Right now we are just failing to communicate here. Don't you think?
* For the record:
1) I definitely think The Beast Within is an adventure game (an excellent one). I was reacting to your comment that "interactive movie" is the antithesis of gameplay. TBW is often described as an interactive movie, you know. I was defending its value as a game and a story (interactive story). You implied there was a qualitative difference between "interactivity" and "gameplay" when you wrote: "real, honest-to-god gameplay, not just 'interactivity' ". But gameplay is interactivity.
Dictionary definitions are necessary reminders for many of us that words mean more than the limited uses they are often put to. Everyone is free to go by their own more limited definitions if they wish, but they have no grounds to claim that their way is somehow more correct than definitions formulated over centuries by recognised experts of the field. So here are some more from Oxford Dictionaries:
gameplay: "the features of a computer game, such as its plot and the way it is played, as distinct from the graphics and sound effects." (my Italics)
interactive: "allowing a two-way flow of information between it and a user; responding to the user's input"
In light of these accepted definitions, "gameplay" and "interactivity" refer to the same thing. Feel free to dismiss these definitions, but please do not expect me to do the same. Words mean what they mean, not what we may hope them to mean when we use them.
2) So an interactive story is a game by my definitions. (See also point 5 below.) You said: "KQ has all the markings of a game." It also has all the marks and makings of a story. In fact, you could eliminate the gameplay aspects entirely and still have it accepted as King's Quest. But you could not eliminate or change the story aspects while retaining only the gameplay! Unless you think Space Quest qualifies as King's Quest. This clearly shows that King's Quest is a story first and foremost. Roberta turned the story into an interactive one by making it into a game.
3) People - including you, thom-22, in the very paragraph where you dispute this - are claiming that the gameplay mechanics (plural all along, rather than the singular, "specific" gameplay mechanic you use in your argument) were an important part of what made Sierra great. (Just reread this thread - and also see what you wrote in the paragraph just mentioned.) My belief is that it was mainly the story content and those aspects of gameplay relating to the richness of the interactive storytelling only.
4) Assuming that KQ will be like BttF or later S&M is unwarranted unless Telltale say something explicitly along those lines. The interview part frequently quoted as supposed indication of this is nothing of the kind, in my opinion. The reaction to that is part of the overreaction common on this forum. No good reason so far to suppose the sky is falling!
5) Re: King's Quest I. Storytelling? Really. Absolutely storytelling! What aspect of a story is missing? Honestly, I would be very curious to know. What do you think made the whole thing even relatable, let alone interesting, if not the story? (And every single action you can take and every response from the game is part of the interactive narrative.) Replace all the characters and locations with Tetris blocks and eliminate the character/character and character/environment interactions (pure interactive storytelling, all of it) and see how many people will play. You are seriously undervaluing the story content of these games, my friend!
Backtracking a bit, I think the issue of the definition of interactivity is each of our own opinions on what is an acceptable level of interactivity. Pressing a "Next" button to advance to the next cutscene could be said to be interactive but that doesn't mean it's fun. Sure call it a game all you want but the fact is all you get to do is press a button. I'm exaggerating but I'm just making the point that there are multiple levels of interactivity with multiple levels of immersion. Speaking of which, how do you define immersion? Merely being swept away by the story like a movie? Or feeling like everything you do has some affect on the world around you and yourself and you truly are playing the character you're controlling?
And I think Thom's point about KQ1 is that there is a lot less story than there is gameplay. As opposed to something like BTTF where there are insanely easy (and short) puzzles intermittently present between dialogue and cutscene sequences. KQ1 is all interactivity. All exploration. All gameplay. There isn't even any dialogue. At least in the AGI original. In the remake there's one or two areas of dialogue but no intense conversations beyond the introduction. KQ5 and KQ6 may have more involved stories but it's basically the same. It's all gameplay.
I have no easy personal definition of immersion. It is mainly a feeling of engagement, both intellectual and emotional. For me, immersion even in a film is an active state. I am unable to get totally swept up by a film in any kind of passive sense of just watching and accepting everything I see and hear.
I only get immersed in a film if it wins my "complicity" (acceptance) by passing at least most of my mental filters regarding quality, attitude to audience, the space given to the audience to actively interpret and form their own opinions of things, ethical viewpoints seemingly espoused (if at all), etc.
The same is true of games, but then additional criteria come into play. These are harder to pin down. What if I give examples of games I find immersive? These would include practically every adventure game from Sierra, particularly from the SCI era on. These all have a great deal of freedom of exploration, and the addition of voiceovers some way into this era was a huge improvement in helping the sense of immersion for people like me, to whom the aural component of films and games is extremely important.
But I also find very immersive the Cryo games Atlantis: The Lost Tales and Beyond Atlantis despite their lack of great freedom of exploration. Those games create immersion with their combination of deceptively innocuous-seeming (yet profound - in my opinion!) storytelling, lush music, and atmospheric graphics. Also great voiceovers. They have an aesthetic all their own that is quite different from any American style. (All of them valid approaches, of course, though the Sierra style is the one I could not do without.)
The Beast Within is extremely immersive even though there is not a great sense of actually directing the course of the story. The key to the immersion here may lie in part with something Jane Jensen once said about what she was trying to achieve with this game: that it was not only a whodunnit (though it was that, too), but also a whytheydunnit. So the goal was to pull the audience into the story by inviting (virtually forcing) them to actively interpret what they see and hear (what all did this person reveal by what he or she said and did?) and mentally put the pieces together.
Games that are not immersive to me at all include Myst, Keepsake and Syberia. I admire some aspects of all these, but I never had that sense of mental engagement in any of them. I also confess that I have never found many Lucasfilm/LucasArts games actually immersive. They have been entertaining and lovable in their own, different ways, but immersion is not the word I would use for them, apart from exceptions that include at least The Dig and Loom.
Erm, so, as a general rule, immersion for me requires that the game is not only artistically acceptable in all the ways that I mentioned in connection with films (Hopkins FBI, for example, fulfils none of those criteria and remains the only adventure game I have precisely no interest in ever completing), but also lets me do a lot of other things than only take the steps necessary for completion. It should encourage personal initiative in exploration. King's Quest VII is the least immersive of the series for me partly because it has so little optional stuff to find.
Far from a definitive answer, but I hope that is understandable, considering this is the aspect every game maker probably struggles the most to bring into being with every game.
Would you agree or disagree with any of this, Brandon? Or anyone else? I do suspect our differing definitions of immersion sparked off some of the heat here, so I appreciate your asking.
thom-22, you have misrepresented everything I wrote.* I also feel your responses to me here are quite hostile in tone. You seem to be attacking me instead of engaging in conversation.
Unless we can keep things polite and make actual attempts to understand each other, I recommend we drop this subject while we are behind.
I would prefer to have you as a friend, man! But the attempt has to be mutual. Right now we are just failing to communicate here. Don't you think?
I have never attacked you personally. Everything I've written has been in response to what you have written. I argue about ideas, I don't attack people. I am well aware that my style of argumentation, in which I try to be as straightforward, concise and rational as I can be, does not always come across friendly. That's not the same thing as hostility, and there's really nothing I can do about it, and nothing I should have to do. I have not, nor would I ever attack you or anyone else personally.
1) I definitely think The Beast Within is an adventure game (an excellent one). I was reacting to your comment that "interactive movie" is the antithesis of gameplay. TBW is often described as an interactive movie, you know. I was defending its value as a game and a story (interactive story). You implied there was a qualitative difference between "interactivity" and "gameplay" when you wrote: "real, honest-to-god gameplay, not just 'interactivity' ". But gameplay is interactivity.
Yes, but the point is that not all interactivity is gameplay, not all interactive entertainment products are games. MusicallyInspired already covered this. A busy box is an interactive amusement, but it is not a game, in any everyday sense of that word, involving the objective of meeting of a predefined challenge. If you do not get that distinction, then you're literally the first person I've ever met who doesn't.
Dictionary definitions are necessary reminders for many of us that words mean more than the limited uses they are often put to. Everyone is free to go by their own more limited definitions if they wish, but they have no grounds to claim that their way is somehow more correct than definitions formulated over centuries by recognised experts of the field.
It doesn't matter how old a definition is if it's applied out of context.
In light of these accepted definitions, "gameplay" and "interactivity" refer to the same thing. Feel free to dismiss these definitions, but please do not expect me to do the same. Words mean what they mean, not what we may hope them to mean when we use them.
One can treat them as the same thing, but they are not fundamentally the same thing. An interactive busy box is not a game.
(See also point 5 below.) You said: "KQ has all the markings of a game." It also has all the marks and makings of a story.
While KQ has all the markings of a game, I wasn't implying that it's just any old kind of game. I thought it went without saying that as an adventure game, a story -- a fictional world with a protagonist and some kind of narrative that serves as a basis for gameplay, and can even be enjoyed more than the gameplay by those players so inclined -- is an essential part of KQ as well.
In fact, you could eliminate the gameplay aspects entirely and still have it accepted as King's Quest. But you could not eliminate or change the story aspects while retaining only the gameplay! Unless you think Space Quest qualifies as King's Quest. This clearly shows that King's Quest is a story first and foremost. Roberta turned the story into an interactive one by making it into a game.
This here is the fundamental point of contention. I don't see how anything you've said "clearly shows" that King's Quest is a story first and foremost. You've merely asserted that without backing it up. One could just as easily assert, and even come up with arguments to support, that King's Quest is first and foremost a puzzle game. I believe that King's Quest is an adventure game, meaning story and gameplay are equally important. Moreover, KQ adventure games are ones known for being on the challenging side. Including either story or gameplay without the other -- or story or gameplay that bears no relationship to the story and gameplay of the originals -- in an interactive entertainment product with the King's Quest name would be an affront to the series' legacy and its fans.
Unfortunately I don't have time to continue but will have to come back to it. For now what I offer to support my views is the first eight KQ games themselves, looked at objectively, at all that they offered to all those who played them, and not just the aspects that you personally enjoyed.
Thanks for the explanation, thom-22. I accept that you have not been deliberately provocative. I want to assure you that neither have I.
The last part of your message touches on probably the biggest miscommunication between us. I have enjoyed pretty much every aspect of every King's Quest game! That includes the manual saving, all the gameplay challenges you speak of, the puzzles, etc.
Where our views go their separate ways is when it comes to what we wish for future instalments in the series. You and many others wish for similar gameplay structure as the existing games. I and many others think it is not as important to carry on the form as it is the content.
The form can incorporate all the design elements from previous games, if they are found appropriate by the designers. The only point where I disagree with you here is on whether they must be included.
Again, I want sudden deaths and I want manual saving and I want deep gameplay just as you do. But this thread has been (at least nominally) about the suggested compromise of having the option to have "Try Again" in addition to manual saving. (Having both would be my preference.)
About King's Quest being a story first and foremost: Remember that I consider it an interactive story and an adventure game and that I consider these terms synonymous. It is indeed more a matter of viewpoint than of facts, but I do feel that what I wrote (the paragraph you quote and the later part of my message, about the Tetris blocks) shows that the most essential part of KQ - the part that makes it possible to recognise it as KQ - is the story content, not the gameplay, since you could remove or transform the latter, but not the former. Roberta Williams did that gradually herself as the series progressed.
To me it seems analogous to say that your essence concerns your personality rather than your body. You use your body to express your personality (and both shape each other), just as the gameplay gives expression to the story. But in my view the essence lies in the story and personality.
Really, we probably agree on most of the issues. It now seems to me that we have been talking about the same thing with the words gameplay, interaction, story, mechanics, etc. And I reckon we can get along fine as long as we accept our slightly different word choices.
I think that for now we have covered most of the ground and expressed our views as clearly as we can. It has been quite time-consuming, and I could not afford to spend so much time on this in the future.
I want to thank you for taking the time to respond to my concern, and I regret if I lack the energy to address your every point.
I just think King's Quest was fun and as uniquely entertaining as it was for a reason. And those reasons being the gameplay mechanics that many wish were not present in future instalments. To me, that's not a King's Quest game at all. What was King's Quest? Story? I think not.
And anyway, a choice would be fine. If I can choose not to have a Try Again button appear, have any autosaves occur, and have deaths that mean something then I'd be somewhat happy. I'm still not convinced that Telltale can even pull off a King's Quest game properly, though. We'll see.
Well, I agree with you that it is what it is for many reasons.
I think it has always been a playable story (emphasis on both words), a game that would be nonsensical if all the story elements were removed or made abstract. The same is not true of games like Breakout or Tetris, as there all the elements could be (and have been) changed into something quite different. Those games remain recognisably the same as long as the gameplay remains unchanged.
Whereas in King's Quest, if all the characters and objects were changed into Tetris blocks and all the narration was removed or made gibberish, there would be no reason to suppose that it would be necessary to manoeuvre the block previously known as Graham into the block previously known as the royal castle. The only thing that makes the goals even make sense is the story content.
Wow. I'd venture a guess that there's more text in this thread than there are lines of code in the original King's Quest game.
Just sayin.... maybe there's a little too much thought going on here. I mean, the point of games is to entertain and escape..... this sounds like WORK to me.
Sure, but some of us find the whole phenomenon of games fascinating and spend a lot of time thinking about them anyway, out of personal or professional interest, or both. The thoughts I was trying to express were not straightforward and seemed to call for lengthy explanations. However, I agree with you that brief is best when possible. But also, there is no obligation for anyone to read lengthy posts.
True, true. I was just suggesting less is more for your OWN sanity, really. Trust me, I love, love, love, the games too - but I try not to delve TOO deeply into it.
3) People - including you, thom-22, in the very paragraph where you dispute this - are claiming that the gameplay mechanics (plural all along, rather than the singular, "specific" gameplay mechanic you use in your argument) were an important part of what made Sierra great. (Just reread this thread - and also see what you wrote in the paragraph just mentioned.) My belief is that it was mainly the story content and those aspects of gameplay relating to the richness of the interactive storytelling only.
I'm not exactly sure what you're saying here. I stand by my statement that while I don't think any specific gameplay mechanic can be cited as something that made Sierra games great, what I termed the "style" of gameplay in KQ (and I do mean KQ; I'm not talking about Sierra in general here) is just as much a part of what made KQ great as story is. I admit that "gameplay style" is vague; more on this below. I think that your idea of "those aspects of gameplay relating to the richness of the interactive storytelling only" is a good one but far from complete.
4) Assuming that KQ will be like BttF or later S&M is unwarranted unless Telltale say something explicitly along those lines. The interview part frequently quoted as supposed indication of this is nothing of the kind, in my opinion. The reaction to that is part of the overreaction common on this forum. No good reason so far to suppose the sky is falling!
I have never assumed anything about the forthcoming KQ game. I have suggested there is cause for concern, I gave a list of facts in support of that contention, and there are others here who agree with this reasoning. (Also, I forgot to include on that list the negative comments that were made by the Jurassic Park developers concerning adventure gaming.) So you take one of my reasons, say it isn't valid "in your opinion", offer no opposing reasons of your own, and you expect that to be persuasive? Just because you say so? At least attempt to make a rational counter-argument before accusing people of overreacting.
5) Re: King's Quest I. Storytelling? Really. Absolutely storytelling! What aspect of a story is missing? Honestly, I would be very curious to know. What do you think made the whole thing even relatable, let alone interesting, if not the story? (And every single action you can take and every response from the game is part of the interactive narrative.) Replace all the characters and locations with Tetris blocks and eliminate the character/character and character/environment interactions (pure interactive storytelling, all of it) and see how many people will play. You are seriously undervaluing the story content of these games, my friend!
My quip about the first King's Quest was not to say that any aspect of a story was missing or that story was unimportant in the game, but rather that the story was less detailed those of the later KQs or games like GK2. I do not undervalue the importance of story in KQ. I've said repeatedly that story and gameplay are equally important. And the only reason I've responded to your posts is because you are undervaluing gameplay, with your last statement below and this earlier one:
In fact, you could eliminate the gameplay aspects entirely and still have it accepted as King's Quest. But you could not eliminate or change the story aspects while retaining only the gameplay! Unless you think Space Quest qualifies as King's Quest. This clearly shows that King's Quest is a story first and foremost.
Where have I said anything like that with terms "gameplay" and "story" switched?
Where our views go their separate ways is when it comes to what we wish for future instalments in the series. You and many others wish for similar gameplay structure as the existing games. I and many others think it is not as important to carry on the form as it is the content.
You don't need to convince me that there are many people who believe it is more important to carry on the KQ content than the form; I was aware of that going in. In fact, that in and of itself, rather than anything you've said here, is enough to conclude that content must be essential in defining what KQ is, what makes it great, why fans love it. What I don't get is why, when so many KQ fans in this forum have made it clear that gameplay is important to them, you can be so dismissive of that portion of the fanbase and what we find to be essential about KQ, what makes it great, etc. There have been quite a few threads in this forum on gameplay -- on deaths, danger, exploration, the Sierra puzzle style, etc. -- that fly in the face of the idea that gameplay could just be eliminated entirely from a KQ "game" and the KQ fanbase would accept it as King's Quest.
The form can incorporate all the design elements from previous games, if they are found appropriate by the designers. The only point where I disagree with you here is on whether they must be included.
Again, I want sudden deaths and I want manual saving and I want deep gameplay just as you do. But this thread has been (at least nominally) about the suggested compromise of having the option to have "Try Again" in addition to manual saving. (Having both would be my preference.)
While this thread was about manual saving, your ideas to which I've been responding went well beyond that. My comments in this latter part of the thread are not motivated by a desire to defend manual saving. I have jumped into that discussion primarily to defend its legitimacy in game design in general, and to request that it be preserved as an option in TTG's KQ game. There is no narrow aspect of gameplay, as narrow as manual saving, that I have said "must" be included. But I think there are more broadly defined aspects of gameplay -- like exploration, and complex interactivity, and engendering a sense of danger, and engaging puzzles that are not trivial to solve -- that are essential to KQ. Those things couldn't just be eliminated, or transformed beyond recognition, in a King's Quest game that the fanbase (at least that part of it that play the games for more than story) would find satisfying.
In other words, there is some bounded area within the realm of gameplay-space outside of which a KQ game would not be acceptable. For instance, you couldn't make a KQ video poker game, even if the story is dead-on, and claim that it respects the legacy of the existing KQ games. Now, where those boundaries lie would be difficult to define precisely; the list I gave above is intended to be suggestive, not definitive. But that doesn't mean boundaries don't exist. At the same time, there is a lot of leeway within the area -- in part because, as you've said, the gameplay varied in the existing KQ games and in part because it can't be defined with sufficient precision -- for Telltale to design the gameplay with their own touch; some things included in the existing games will be subtracted, other things will be added. But in the end, the game will be evaluated by the fanbase as to how well it feels like KQ in terms of gameplay as much as it will be in terms of story. Individuals will differ in the terms they use, a few perhaps even sticking to narrow criteria like whether or not it includes manual-saving; but I believe there is enough of a consensus among those of us who believe it is important to "carry on the form".
About King's Quest being a story first and foremost: Remember that I consider it an interactive story and an adventure game and that I consider these terms synonymous.
How, under this scheme, do you account for something that is clearly interactive, and clearly fiction, and yet demonstrably not a game, in the everyday sense of that word? Because the most generic dictionary definition of "game" you could find encompasses such a thing, you just declare it a game anyway and move on? Even though there is a community dedicated to and creators of interactive fiction who would bristle at the notion of describing their works as "games"?
(You said before something to the effect that words "mean what they mean" and not what we hope they mean. Do you not see the irony in that you have done exactly that by picking only one of a multi-part definition without regard for context and its relevance to which of the definitions offered is most appropriate?)
To further demonstrate that there is a real or commonly understood distinction between these things, I'll note something about discussions going on in the BTTF forum. There have been some thorough and eminently logical arguments demonstrating that BTTF cannot reasonably be considered a game. But here's the interesting part: BTTF's defenders do so on the basis of its fictional content, that it works fine as a (trivially) interactive movie, that it is still an enjoyable entertainment experience; but to the best of my knowledge, there have been no serious attempts to defend it as a game.
It is indeed more a matter of viewpoint than of facts, but I do feel that what I wrote (the paragraph you quote and the later part of my message, about the Tetris blocks) shows that the most essential part of KQ - the part that makes it possible to recognise it as KQ - is the story content, not the gameplay, since you could remove or transform the latter, but not the former. Roberta Williams did that gradually herself as the series progressed.
The paragraph where you merely restate your hypothesis and call it a conclusion? Neither facts nor viewpoints mean much without logic. So the Tetris argument...
A. KQ would be "nonsensical if all the story elements were removed or made abstract". (That is not in dispute, btw.) B. There are some games that "remain recognisably the same as long as the gameplay remains unchanged". (Also not in dispute.) C. Therefore "the most essential part of KQ - the part that makes it possible to recognise it as KQ - is the story content, not the gameplay". I'm sorry, but that is a non sequitur if I've ever seen one! Your conclusion simply does not follow from your premises.
I still feel we are failing to communicate. I can think of no more ways to phrase what I wanted to say, and you seemed to ignore important parts of my posts. You even suggest I went out of my way to find the most generic dictionary definition of "game", when that is simply not true. I use Oxford Dictionaries as my first-stop quick reference and that definition (here) is the only one that applies to computer games.
It does match the way I have long regarded most activities that you would probably consider passive and not games, such as reading and watching films. There is the same sense of playfulness and need to actively relate oneself to the proceedings as there is with computer games. This is a point of view shared by many psychologists and researchers today and is a way of seeing things that I find fertile.
I am not dismissing anyone else like you suggest! You have to understand that my default assumption is that what each of us says has equal value. Accordingly, my posts carry no more (or less) weight than yours, for example. I am only a single voice and certainly Telltale is not going to make the game based on what any one of us says. So there is no reason to suppose my words will have any great effect.
I say this because you seem to see me almost as someone out to destroy what makes King's Quest beloved to you and others. But I clearly stated I have no problem with any or even all of the old gameplay mechanics being included if they are found appropriate and desirable by the designers. I only feel they are not required, and I remain open to new ideas. What more can I possibly say...?
I am sorry, but I feel I would be wasting time and energy I genuinely need elsewhere if I continued our point-by-point exchange. (As Blackthorne519 was right to point out.) That is not intended as an insult - just a statement about the extent of miscommunication and misinterpretation I feel is going on both ways. No offence intended, and I do look forward to reading your reactions (as well as those of others) when the game comes out!
I think everyone needs to take a deep breath and calm down. You're arguing over which way of enjoying the game is better, and that's not an argument that can be won. Play the game the way you enjoy it, and don't worry about why other people enjoy it.
Which is why I think a "Retry" button should be included. Ideally with the option to turn it off, but if you truly believe it detracts from the game, just hit the "Restore" button right next to it. I've only played Tales of Monkey Island and a little bit of Sam & Max (too many games, not enough time), but I seem to recall that they both had manual saves as well. I see no reason TTG can't let us have our cake and reload, give the gemstone to the ogre, climb up the cliff wall, save the game this time, and eat it, too.
I still feel we are failing to communicate. I can think of no more ways to phrase what I wanted to say, and you seemed to ignore important parts of my posts. You even suggest I went out of my way to find the most generic dictionary definition of "game", when that is simply not true. I use Oxford Dictionaries as my first-stop quick reference and that definition (here) is the only one that applies to computer games.
Sorry, I take back any suggestion (never intended) that you went out of your way to find the most generic definition, but that hardly negates the point I was making. You cited the second definition given in that link, rather than the first more specific one, which most certainly does apply to computer games. I'm not sure what you think I'm ignoring; I thought my last two posts touched on everything in the posts quoted.
It does match the way I have long regarded most activities that you would probably consider passive and not games, such as reading and watching films. There is the same sense of playfulness and need to actively relate oneself to the proceedings as there is with computer games. This is a point of view shared by many psychologists and researchers today and is a way of seeing things that I find fertile.
I am not dismissing anyone else like you suggest! You have to understand that my default assumption is that what each of us says has equal value. Accordingly, my posts carry no more (or less) weight than yours, for example. I am only a single voice and certainly Telltale is not going to make the game based on what any one of us says. So there is no reason to suppose my words will have any great effect.
Ideas do not all have equal value. They need to have a logical, rational basis behind them before they can be considered worthy. In contrast, personal experiences are indeed equally valid. That you (and many others) experience KQ as interactive story and I (and many others) as video game (a particular kind of game in which the story is essential, to be sure) is what it is and not something to be debated or resolved. Which is why I find your idea that content is more important than form, story more important than gameplay, to the KQ legacy as not only ill-conceived (when asserted as anything more than a personal preference) but somewhat ironic. Because it fails to take into account how many players, including many who have posted about various gameplay issues in this forum, experience KQ. Saying that story is more important, that gameplay could be eliminated without altering the very nature of KQ is dismissive of our experience, Simo, there's no way around that. I'm a little skeptical this is simply a case of miscommunication because you've made the same assertion several times and never really addressed any of my counterarguments or revisited your own argument that was clearly fallacious.
I say this because you seem to see me almost as someone out to destroy what makes King's Quest beloved to you and others. But I clearly stated I have no problem with any or even all of the old gameplay mechanics being included if they are found appropriate and desirable by the designers. I only feel they are not required, and I remain open to new ideas. What more can I possibly say...?
No, I do not see you as someone out to destroy anything, or as someone with any ill intentions whatsoever. But talk about ignoring posts -- I've tried to explain I think twice now that I'm talking about how more fundamental aspects of gameplay are essential to KQ; I have always understood that you have no problem with any specific mechanics being included and are not arguing against them, as I have no problem with their being excluded. Of course the designers are going to pick and choose among mechanics and include new ones of their own, but the whole they come up with can and will be evaluated by many players in terms of how consistent the overall feel of the gameplay is with that of the previous games.
I am sorry, but I feel I would be wasting time and energy I genuinely need elsewhere if I continued our point-by-point exchange. (As Blackthorne519 was right to point out.) That is not intended as an insult - just a statement about the extent of miscommunication and misinterpretation I feel is going on both ways. No offence intended, and I do look forward to reading your reactions (as well as those of others) when the game comes out!
No apology or explanation is required here. That's the beauty of discussion forums. Participation is entirely voluntary, non-obligatory and self-motivated.
Thanks, thom-22. I reckon it all comes entirely down to our different ways of seeing things.
The Tetris block example seems completely indisputable to me, but you see it as a non sequitur and think my conclusion does not follow from my premises. I confess that I quite honestly fail to see how it does not follow. Maybe I am missing an important part of your counterargument, but that is not deliberate.
About the dictionary definitions from the source I used, I don't see the first definition as applying to computer games, since I don't see all computer games (certainly not adventure games) as a "competitive activity or sport". However, "played according to rules", sure. But then, books are read and films are viewed according to some rules, too.
On the "gameplay" vs "story" issue: In my way of looking at this, almost everything you might call gameplay (and that I have been thinking of as gameplay for the purposes of this thread) is actually part of the story. This is really the true and whole meaning of my thinking of it as an interactive story. And yes, it is a personal view only and I am not trying to convert anyone into sharing it!
What I mean is, "story" comprises not just the scenario or premise or basic plot. It also includes the narration, the dialogue, every action, every consequence, the sights and sounds - just like with a story in any other medium. The only difference is that the player controls the actions of the main character(s). Playing an adventure game (or most other types of games) is almost nothing else than story.
But please note I never suggested "gameplay" should be eliminated. I was only trying to make the reasoning behind my viewpoint as clear as possible by giving two contrasting examples, one where a variable is changed but the subject remains recognisable, and one where another variable is changed and the subject becomes unrecognisable. It was an illustration, not a suggestion.
I hope this goes some way towards addressing the points you felt I had ignored earlier. I suspect we will not be able to reach agreement on these things, but I don't want you to feel I intentionally ignored anything you said.
Comments
The argument that having to save manually makes the deaths have consequences is not very persuasive in my view, because in that case the consequences are no more part of the story than they would be with the "Try Again" option enabled. I would say it is consequence enough to see the player character (and possibly others) die! And I agree with those who have said that it is silly for people to complain about the option to either have "Try Again" enabled or not. If they want to punish themselves, they are free not to utilise that option. Just don't ask everyone else (not to mention the game's sales) to suffer for you...
Lol...hyperbole much? I would call this a bit of an overstatement, especially considering EVERY Telltale game so far has had manual save-game mechanics in place.
No it doesn't. Seriously, watch this part of a KQ6 Let's Play and tell me how long it takes to save your game. Was the immersion broken for the guy playing? No. It took 4 seconds to save. Did he have to backtrack? No. He was careful. What if he hadn't saved before he did that? Well, I guess he'd say "oh crap" (or another expletive) and learn to be more careful next time. It still would have immersed him further into the gameplay by making him feel stupid for not having saved.
This isn't about being immersed in the story, it's about being immersed in the game. It's a game, not just a story. The save mechanic affects the gameplay, and the gameplay is important. Being held responsible for your own gameplay choices is important. If you walk into a dangerous situation without having saved in a long time and then get killed, kicking yourself for not having saved may break the story a small bit, but it immerses you in the gameplay by teaching you a lesson for being foolish. If you're going to quit playing a game and say it sucks because you hadn't saved in over an hour and have to retrace your steps (albeit taking 10 minutes the second time because now you know where everything is) then that sounds rather a childish way to react to what is clearly your own mistake.
Really? I'd like to know how much the BTTF game's sales have suffered because that game is so intent on keeping you from breaking the story for any reason. A meaningful gameplay experience is equally as important as a meaningful story.
You are describing your own experience when you say that habituating yourself to save regularly enhances your immersion in the game. (Or story. For me, it is primarily a story, an interactive one.) But it does not work that way for everyone. Personally I do not mind the constant saving with older games, since the choice there is either to accept it or not to experience these wonderful games at all, but my preference for new games is to let the game keep track of saving, for the same reason that I feel relieved to use the iPad to write down notes knowing that everything is always saved automatically.
Lambonius, you may have misinterpreted my statement if you thought it was an exaggeration. I was saying that everyone other than those who want only manual saving (no "Try Again") would be likely to find such a system archaic and off-putting. I may be wrong, but that is my feeling. The comparison with earlier Telltale games is not valid, as you could not die in most of them (at least the ones I have played).
Anyway, I have stated my opinions to my satisfaction, and I am not going to change my views any more than you are, Chyron and Lambonius. Clearly we have each formed our respective views based on extensive personal experience and consideration.
I reckon the results of the poll reflect the likely preference of the public at large. I think the solution suggested in the original post is very good.
Cheers and peace.
Bt
This is the issue (at least for me). If you want an interactivce movie or story or whatever, go play BttF. That is the complaint many have had. It isn't an adventure game. As an interactive movie, it is quite good, but it was advertised as an adventure game, and by doing so, TellTale deceived many gamers who probably would not have purchased it if they had know what it really was.
Kings Quest IS an adventure game and if it is made into an interactive movie, that will really piss people off because it will go against what the game is and should remain. The "story immersion" argument works well for an interactive story as you put it, but not so much for kings quest.
As much as you wouldn't probably enjoy King's Quest by Telltale as much as others if it followed this design philosophy, we didn't enjoy BTTF which employs your philosophy.
I will be buying Telltale's King's Quest, no matter what. The saving system is not a deal-breaker for me (but anyone who definitely will not buy the game if the wrong saving system is adopted, please raise your hand...), nor is it even in the top ten of elements I consider vital to the success of King's Quest.
I am as big a fan of Sierra as anyone else here. So King's Quest is also "my" baby, if a property can ever be said to be the audience's baby. I have been playing computer games since the mid-80s, adventure games since 1987. So my opinions are not due to my not being enough of a fan of Sierra. I say all this because there seems to be this assumption that any "true" fan of Sierra and King's Quest, anyone who has been dedicated to these games for long enough, will automatically be of the opinion that manual saving only is the way to go.
Well, guess what... I am a huge Sierra fan and I disagree with that. My opinion is based on as much experience as anyone else's around here. Once it was traditional to have games on floppies. It was traditional to wait for quite some time for a game to load. And it was traditional to have to pay for a hintbook rather than go online for free help. These changes have all been for the better, in my opinion, and the earlier circumstances were not an important aspect of the experience for me.
I am also open to more gameplay mechanics than some others appear to be, including interactive movies, automatic saving, and manual saving. Like I said, the saving system is not a huge deal for me, but that is because I am an experienced gamer. Thinking beyond just myself (though taking into consideration my preference for future games, rather than just what I have been used to), I think it would be a poor commercial decision for Telltale not to include some kind of automatic saving system in case they do include sudden deaths in the game (which I hope they do).
(One of the potential problems with manual saving only is that this would lead to some less experienced players using a single saved game and then getting stuck half-way through the game because they saved in a position from which it was impossible to recover. This would lead to some of them giving up in disgust, in turn leading to them not bothering to buy the next episode, in turn possibly leading to no more King's Quest. Even for those of you who dislike the idea of a "Try Again" button, is it really too high a price to pay to have more people onboard for the duration?)
The Beast Within is an adventure game for me, and an adventure game is just a variety of interactive story as far as I am concerned. What matters to me about interactive stories is the content, not the gameplay mechanics. Gameplay mechanics are only there as the interface between me and the story. Of course I wish the mechanics to be such that I get as much enjoyment out of the experience as possible, but that is it.
So there is no hard and fast rule for me that a King's Quest positively needs to use any of the gameplay mechanics from the past. To be perfectly clear: I am a long-time Sierra fan and I feel the artistic and story content is what made Sierra what it was. It was not the gameplay mechanics. It was Graham and Daventry, so to speak, not manual saving or sudden deaths (even though I like the latter, as I said). The gameplay mechanics (aside from such aesthetically important points as interaction density and optional interactivity), including the saving system, were incidental, in my opinion, a product of the times and subject to the technological and software limitations thereof.
I have no idea whether Back to the Future utilises the kind of saving system I meant or not because I have not played any of the series. But since I have indeed not played it or even mentioned it in this context, I feel it is not appropriate to associate my name with it the way you did, Brandon. It would be as inappropriate for me to say that Hopkins FBI "employs your philosophy". Do you see the problem? But probably it was just a bad choice of words.
The frequent Back to the Future comparisons are not terribly relevant, anyway. We know BttF was designed to appeal primarily to non-gamers, because the brand is a film series first and and foremost. We can also be pretty darn sure Telltale will be aiming King's Quest for a different demographic, because King's Quest was always a game series first and foremost.
P.S. chucklas, you seem to have not understood what is meant by immersion in a game. It involves interaction. I might as well tell you to go play baseball if you want a game and not a story. :rolleyes: And no, I am not going anywhere. Sheesh!
I never thought that King's Quest was about story so much as gameplay, as opposed to LucasArts games. It was about the adventure. The journey. The puzzles. The danger. The story was just the starting point and the goal. Yes, even in KQ6. You found out stuff along the way and helped people in side stories but it wasn't all about story.
I don't think it's quite so simple as "us and them". And I think it's rather unfair to say BTTF employs a LucasArts design philosophy. I sure never played an oldschool LucasArts game like that. There is simply no comparison between games like The Secret of Monkey Island and BTTF.
If I'd had to choose back in the day between Sierra and LucasArts, I would've gone with Sierra. I certainly considered myself a Sierra fan. I played plenty of manual-save-only, die-and-you're-dead Sierra games. And maybe I was a little late to the party, but many of the Sierra games I grew up with did have a retry-on-death option, as far as I recall. I can't remember exactly because it's never been terribly important to me. I suppose from my angle, I see the move away from "manual saves only" as a design evolution rather than pandering to a less patient audience. That's how I see the move away from dead-end possibilities too.
Personally I feel that dead ends are simply poor design, and "manual save only / no retry on death" is a personal preference rather than a creator-designed immersion technique. Even with auto-saves and retry options, I still create my own manual saves. But that's just second nature to me, not an integral part of the immersion.
Anyway, to each their own. I highly doubt the save mechanism is a make-or-break purchasing decision for any of us.
Only KQ7, SQ6, and maybe one or two other sierra adventures ever had a try again button. And those were the later hi-res games in around 95/96 when their touch was waning.
My apologies, when you said "we didn't enjoy BTTF which employs your philosophy" I assumed you were talking Sierra vs LucasArts.
Aye, the ones I remember as having retries would be mid-nineties-ish. But they are Sierra games nonetheless (including an entry in the KQ series), so I don't think its fair to say "Sierra = death" as an absolute. Anyway, as I said, it never mattered much to me either way.
For the record, I would certainly like to have a manual saving option in addition to the automatic retry option. And I would not even mind having both options optional for the really HC among us.
Where the manual saving only would become a fairly large annoyance for me personally is on replays after the first time through. That is when I like to try everything possible. If there were many deaths lurking in wait and a lot of flags to be triggered, it would become a chore to save after almost every step (but necessary in order to preserve the flag states).
But I thought the purpose of this thread was to see if the compromise suggested in the original post was acceptable to most of us? I think the answer to that has been established as positive. I do confess to still failing to see the rationale of opposing leaving this up to the player.
What?!? "Interactive movies" is not a gameplay mechanic. In fact, it's the antithesis of gameplay.
We can?!? You're taking that for granted because you don't care (about gameplay). We do care, and all the signs we see point to a real concern that TTG will neglect gameplay. The whole tenor of this sub-forum would be entirely different if we weren't pretty darn NOT sure.
This counterpoint to chucklas' comment is untenable. King's Quest is a game -- you acknowledged that yourself ("KQ is a game series first and foremost") -- so we're not the ones who should go elsewhere to look for the kind of product, ie. game, we enjoy. Just because you personally turned a video game into an interactive story doesn't mean it's not fundamentally, unmistakeably a game. KQ has all the markings of a game. There are challenges involved. There is a predefined set of actions and rules you employ to meet those challenges. You can succeed or fail at those challenges. There is a point system to track your progress. Telltale can put their own spin on it, but the challenges part -- real, honest-to-god gameplay, not just "interactivity" -- is not optional in a video game, especially one calling itself King's Quest and capitalizing on its legacy.
All games are limited to a greater or lesser extent. You can only do things that have been made possible by the creators of the game. Therefore, the difference between an interactive movie such as The Beast Within and a real-time 3D game such as Outcast is quantitative, not qualitative. All the content has been preprogrammed in both cases and you are simply engaging with it via different gameplay mechanics and interfaces and rendering systems.
There is a loud contingent among hardcore adventure gamers who say that interactive movies are not true adventure games, and there is a loud contingent among hardcore gamers who say that adventure games are not even real games, that adventure games "play themselves". I think this is silly snobbery that has its roots in a recognised psychological phenomenon:
People tend to feel the need to establish that they are better than or at least very different from their immediate neighbours and near-equals, especially when they feel in danger of getting lumped together with them, but not so often when it comes to people further away, people who are not close to them in status or wealth or caste or whatever (since there is less chance of getting mixed up with these groups). In light of this, defensiveness about game genre boundaries is an implicit admission that indeed adventure games and interactive movies and shooters are closely related, certainly inasmuch as the physical activity of playing is concerned. There is far less difference between us adventure gamers and shooter fans and casual gamers and wedding or other "life" gamers than we tend to think.
Or, for an alternative response to this point: I meant, "gameplay mechanics ... including those collectively constituting what are frequently termed interactive movies".
Well, in that case I should say that I am pretty darn sure and leave it at that. I do care about gameplay mechanics. As I said: "Of course I wish the mechanics to be such that I get as much enjoyment out of the experience as possible ..." I was only disagreeing about the claim that what made Sierra games great was the specific gameplay mechanics involved. (That is a matter of subjective opinion, so not really worth arguing about. We can all state our own views on this, but it is not a testable matter. Analysis of the past is only useful up to a point, anyway. After identifying what inspired us, we ought to, ideally, try to incorporate those things in what we create ourselves. I am sure the Telltale designers will be doing just that. And of course all this analysis may be helpful in figuring out those great things.)
As I said, I am confident that Telltale will not neglect gameplay by any reasonable standards. They will certainly not please everyone, particularly the most HC on this forum, because those demands pretty much equate to pretending the world has not moved on since a whole generation ago. As far as I can see, the tenor of this forum is so negative because a lot of us have extremely fixed ideas from our childhood about what King's Quest should be like (more fixed than any ever had by, say, Roberta Williams herself) and because a lot of things are getting either assumed or blown out of proportion.
I mean, it seems like many assume, for example, that there will not be the option for manual saving in the new game just because Back to the Future apparently did away with manual saving (if I understood correctly). There is no reason that I can see to suppose that this game will share a similar design philosophy to that of BttF, yet that assumption keeps getting dredged up all the time. Have Telltale said anything that links their respective approaches to KQ and BttF? (Maybe they have and I simply missed it.)
Yes, of course King's Quest is a game series. I never disputed that. I want it to be a game series. The problem seems to be that our definitions of neither "game" or "story" match. For me, King's Quest is a playable story and all adventure games are playable stories. We can each of us form our own interpretations of what a "game" is (as you did with the characteristics listed in your last paragraph), but those are subjective matters and as such cannot be disputed as erroneous or counterfactual.
I guess we have all heard the catchphrase "the story is the puzzle" (or variations thereof)? That is almost how I see the true potential of adventure games as a viable storytelling medium with an unlimited expected lifespan, with this modification: "the story is the game" (or "the game is the story"). If the story (and there is no reason to assume a story needs to be fixed or unflexible or passively observed!) is woven effectively and densely and dynamically enough (and I would hope it involves great freedom of exploration, not storytelling on strict rails), and if it generates a sense of playfulness and fascination and involvement, it will be a game and a story at the same time. Then there will be no need to shoehorn in artificial puzzles or "challenging gameplay".
Games like The Colonel's Bequest went a long way towards the goal of making the interactive story sufficiently playable and enjoyable and explorable without very many traditional "gameplay challenges". As we all know, Roberta Williams continued exploring this territory of "pure story" with Phantasmagoria, so clearly it was something that intrigued her. I believe she too grew tired of the contrived puzzles when she mostly wanted a living story. Just my impression, of course.
But please note, everyone, that I am not trying to make anyone else change their views on any of these things! I simply felt the need to weigh in with an opposing viewpoint to that of many of the most frequent posters on this forum, from someone with an equal amount of love for Sierra yet who has not arrived at the same conclusions. Unfortunately the forum is now so polarised that anyone who expresses an opinion that even vaguely sounds like one of the polar opposites is automatically assumed to hold just that extreme of opinion, with no allowance made for our individual nuances of thought and viewpoint. At least I definitely felt that way looking at the reactions to my posts in this thread.
But like a Zen master said, only gardening is important in this life, and even that is not very important... In other words, none of this will make or break any of our lives or (I reckon) enjoyment of the coming game. So again, peace to everyone and I hope this mammoth post (if read at all) is taken in the spirit in which it was written: as nothing more than an attempt to take part in a useful and constructive discussion that hopefully Telltale will be able to use in gauging the variety of opinions out there, and that may have been of some positive interest or value to the individual posters (as the posts of others have been to me).
Really? You think people don't like BttF because of manual saves? Really? I think BttF is a great interactive movie. It was advertised as an adventure game, and I feel as though that was quite misleading. I believe this is the gripe with BttF. It has nothing to do with save game mechanics. As for Kings Quest, people fear that they will do the same to gear it towards a larger audience. If that happens many people here wont be supporting TellTale anymore.
Of course my definition is limited, limited to the context at issue here. Dictionary definitions are immaterial. (Quoting the dictionary is often a good sign that someone is actually trying to re-define something away from everyday experience.) Not every "amusement" is a game in the way most people use the term game, especially wrt video games.
I have no idea what you're trying to demonstrate here or why you think The Beast Within is merely an interactive movie. It is a full-fledged adventure game, and an excellent one at that. One plays it by applying a set of skills to the challenges presented -- skills and challenges conventionally associated with adventure-game gameplay -- and one can either win or lose, all while enjoying an excellent, integrated story. (The actual mechanics used for interaction are rather a more trivial aspect of gameplay, one I'm not particularly concerned about.) The differences between it and Outcast are merely ones of genre and graphics style, full-motion video vs. real-time 3D. But they are both video games.
You're disagreeing with your own straw man. Nobody is saying that any specific gameplay "mechanic" is what made Sierra games great. But the overall gameplay style of King's Quest -- not to mention the fact that they are games and not merely interactive stories -- cannot be disregarded as essential aspects of the series' popularity and excellence.
I don't see anyone assuming there won't be manual saving. The concern is that we won't have a choice but to be put right back into an automatic do-over after a death (as in the Jurassic Park gameplay video). BTTF's problems have nothing to do with its save system -- it's so not-a-game that the save system is irrelevant.
I'm pretty sure we've been quite clear as to the factual basis for our concerns, and that you're the one going strictly on assumptions or blind faith. In fact, I'm almost sure that I posted in direct response to a post of yours on this very matter a while ago. The decline in difficulty level started (at least) with The Devil's Playhouse. Moreover, puzzle-ruining hints were included even for those who turned hints completely off and TTG staff responded cavalierly to players' forum comments that certain episodes were getting too easy. There is also a long article in which a TTG developer discusses design philosophy that is particularly horrifying to those who prefer real video games to "entertainment experiences". I do not have time to look up a reference, but Rather Dashing cites it frequently.
And then there's BTTF. If BTTF was merely an exception, an attempt to appeal to a broader audience, why didn't TTG use the opportunity to attract these new "players" as customers for future products by teaching them how to play and raising the difficulty curve gently over the course of the game, instead of having an exceedingly low, flat difficulty curve throughout?
For the record, I have no problem with adventure-game developers adding mechanisms that enable casual "players" to turn an adventure game into nothing but a click-through movie or story -- hint systems, automatic do-overs upon death, whatever. I really don't care how other people consume their entertainment products. After all, any adventure game can be turned into a trivially interactive movie/story with a quick visit to gamefaqs.com. But when it comes to continuing a video-game franchise known for challenging gameplay, that legacy should be respected by producing a real, whole game, playable with hints and do-overs turned off, for fans of the originals.
I don't have time now to respond to the rest of your post, it seems a lot of words, loose definitions and special pleading that KQ is primarily a storytelling vehicle rather than a video game known for engaging, story-integrated gameplay that required some thought to proceed. (King's Quest I. Storytelling. Really?) It would be just as easy to come up with specious arguments that KQ is primarily a vehicle for puzzles and story is inconsequential. I would argue against that with equal vigor.
I disagree, dead-ends are vital in Sierra games and they add to the realism. I mean, if you go off on a quest without stocking up on supplies, you are asking for a slow and painful death.
Like not bringing the mirror with you to the underworld in KQ6. Or not taking the sunscreen in LSL2.
Having inventory items magically appear in your inventory with little or no context however, is a much worse design.
At least some games have done that fairly well, like Broken Sword, but I prefer having to acquire items that will only be used later, or risk getting stuck. As I said, it makes the game more realistic and challenging. And it was never an issue with multiple save slots anyway.
If they screw with this mechanic it will only hurt the overall product in my opinion.
except for the fish in Space Quest 6, of course
I think it's actually a lot harder to design a game where you can't get stuck than it is to design one with multiple dead ends. For that reason I wonder whether dead ends were a conscious design choice on the part of Sierra creators, or if they were in there simply because they didn't try to work around them. It's probably worth noting that later Sierra games removed the possibility of getting stuck at the end without an item you need (not sure if that was a move to what they saw as better design, or simply a result of "marketplace realities").
Of course it's totally legitimate to enjoy the realism dead ends add to a game, I just wonder whether that was indeed the effect intended when the earlier Sierra adventures were designed.
Ron Gilbert (yes an ex-LucasArts guy, hear me out!) gave a great lecture at a German games conference this year about the design of Maniac Mansion. Maniac Mansion is probably the most complex adventure game I've come across in terms of the number of different combinations and possibilities there are to play the game to completion. It's quite realistic in that the different player characters you can choose each have different skills, and who you chose at the beginning as part of your group partially dictates the path you take to play through the game. Different problems have different solutions depending on who you have at your disposal, and some character combinations open up new puzzles entirely. Even though the creators tried to design the game without dead ends, the sheer complexity of their undertaking means there are still a couple of ways to get yourself hamstrung.
I'd definitely recommend a listen to anyone with an interest in adventure game design (I'd strongly recommend checking out the game too!). The talk can be found here (click on 2011, then on Ron Gilbert's talk), and there's a discussion thread about it on the forums here.
If anyone knows of any similar talks/interviews given by any of the prominent ex-Sierra people, I'd very much appreciate a link. It'd be interesting to compare the different philosophies.
Unless we can keep things polite and make actual attempts to understand each other, I recommend we drop this subject while we are behind.
I would prefer to have you as a friend, man! But the attempt has to be mutual. Right now we are just failing to communicate here. Don't you think?
* For the record:
1) I definitely think The Beast Within is an adventure game (an excellent one). I was reacting to your comment that "interactive movie" is the antithesis of gameplay. TBW is often described as an interactive movie, you know. I was defending its value as a game and a story (interactive story). You implied there was a qualitative difference between "interactivity" and "gameplay" when you wrote: "real, honest-to-god gameplay, not just 'interactivity' ". But gameplay is interactivity.
Dictionary definitions are necessary reminders for many of us that words mean more than the limited uses they are often put to. Everyone is free to go by their own more limited definitions if they wish, but they have no grounds to claim that their way is somehow more correct than definitions formulated over centuries by recognised experts of the field. So here are some more from Oxford Dictionaries:
gameplay: "the features of a computer game, such as its plot and the way it is played, as distinct from the graphics and sound effects." (my Italics)
interactive: "allowing a two-way flow of information between it and a user; responding to the user's input"
In light of these accepted definitions, "gameplay" and "interactivity" refer to the same thing. Feel free to dismiss these definitions, but please do not expect me to do the same. Words mean what they mean, not what we may hope them to mean when we use them.
2) So an interactive story is a game by my definitions. (See also point 5 below.) You said: "KQ has all the markings of a game." It also has all the marks and makings of a story. In fact, you could eliminate the gameplay aspects entirely and still have it accepted as King's Quest. But you could not eliminate or change the story aspects while retaining only the gameplay! Unless you think Space Quest qualifies as King's Quest. This clearly shows that King's Quest is a story first and foremost. Roberta turned the story into an interactive one by making it into a game.
3) People - including you, thom-22, in the very paragraph where you dispute this - are claiming that the gameplay mechanics (plural all along, rather than the singular, "specific" gameplay mechanic you use in your argument) were an important part of what made Sierra great. (Just reread this thread - and also see what you wrote in the paragraph just mentioned.) My belief is that it was mainly the story content and those aspects of gameplay relating to the richness of the interactive storytelling only.
4) Assuming that KQ will be like BttF or later S&M is unwarranted unless Telltale say something explicitly along those lines. The interview part frequently quoted as supposed indication of this is nothing of the kind, in my opinion. The reaction to that is part of the overreaction common on this forum. No good reason so far to suppose the sky is falling!
5) Re: King's Quest I. Storytelling? Really. Absolutely storytelling! What aspect of a story is missing? Honestly, I would be very curious to know. What do you think made the whole thing even relatable, let alone interesting, if not the story? (And every single action you can take and every response from the game is part of the interactive narrative.) Replace all the characters and locations with Tetris blocks and eliminate the character/character and character/environment interactions (pure interactive storytelling, all of it) and see how many people will play. You are seriously undervaluing the story content of these games, my friend!
And I think Thom's point about KQ1 is that there is a lot less story than there is gameplay. As opposed to something like BTTF where there are insanely easy (and short) puzzles intermittently present between dialogue and cutscene sequences. KQ1 is all interactivity. All exploration. All gameplay. There isn't even any dialogue. At least in the AGI original. In the remake there's one or two areas of dialogue but no intense conversations beyond the introduction. KQ5 and KQ6 may have more involved stories but it's basically the same. It's all gameplay.
I have no easy personal definition of immersion. It is mainly a feeling of engagement, both intellectual and emotional. For me, immersion even in a film is an active state. I am unable to get totally swept up by a film in any kind of passive sense of just watching and accepting everything I see and hear.
I only get immersed in a film if it wins my "complicity" (acceptance) by passing at least most of my mental filters regarding quality, attitude to audience, the space given to the audience to actively interpret and form their own opinions of things, ethical viewpoints seemingly espoused (if at all), etc.
The same is true of games, but then additional criteria come into play. These are harder to pin down. What if I give examples of games I find immersive? These would include practically every adventure game from Sierra, particularly from the SCI era on. These all have a great deal of freedom of exploration, and the addition of voiceovers some way into this era was a huge improvement in helping the sense of immersion for people like me, to whom the aural component of films and games is extremely important.
But I also find very immersive the Cryo games Atlantis: The Lost Tales and Beyond Atlantis despite their lack of great freedom of exploration. Those games create immersion with their combination of deceptively innocuous-seeming (yet profound - in my opinion!) storytelling, lush music, and atmospheric graphics. Also great voiceovers. They have an aesthetic all their own that is quite different from any American style. (All of them valid approaches, of course, though the Sierra style is the one I could not do without.)
The Beast Within is extremely immersive even though there is not a great sense of actually directing the course of the story. The key to the immersion here may lie in part with something Jane Jensen once said about what she was trying to achieve with this game: that it was not only a whodunnit (though it was that, too), but also a whytheydunnit. So the goal was to pull the audience into the story by inviting (virtually forcing) them to actively interpret what they see and hear (what all did this person reveal by what he or she said and did?) and mentally put the pieces together.
Games that are not immersive to me at all include Myst, Keepsake and Syberia. I admire some aspects of all these, but I never had that sense of mental engagement in any of them. I also confess that I have never found many Lucasfilm/LucasArts games actually immersive. They have been entertaining and lovable in their own, different ways, but immersion is not the word I would use for them, apart from exceptions that include at least The Dig and Loom.
Erm, so, as a general rule, immersion for me requires that the game is not only artistically acceptable in all the ways that I mentioned in connection with films (Hopkins FBI, for example, fulfils none of those criteria and remains the only adventure game I have precisely no interest in ever completing), but also lets me do a lot of other things than only take the steps necessary for completion. It should encourage personal initiative in exploration. King's Quest VII is the least immersive of the series for me partly because it has so little optional stuff to find.
Far from a definitive answer, but I hope that is understandable, considering this is the aspect every game maker probably struggles the most to bring into being with every game.
Would you agree or disagree with any of this, Brandon? Or anyone else? I do suspect our differing definitions of immersion sparked off some of the heat here, so I appreciate your asking.
I have never attacked you personally. Everything I've written has been in response to what you have written. I argue about ideas, I don't attack people. I am well aware that my style of argumentation, in which I try to be as straightforward, concise and rational as I can be, does not always come across friendly. That's not the same thing as hostility, and there's really nothing I can do about it, and nothing I should have to do. I have not, nor would I ever attack you or anyone else personally.
Yes, but the point is that not all interactivity is gameplay, not all interactive entertainment products are games. MusicallyInspired already covered this. A busy box is an interactive amusement, but it is not a game, in any everyday sense of that word, involving the objective of meeting of a predefined challenge. If you do not get that distinction, then you're literally the first person I've ever met who doesn't.
It doesn't matter how old a definition is if it's applied out of context.
One can treat them as the same thing, but they are not fundamentally the same thing. An interactive busy box is not a game.
Not necessarily. A busy box with a story is no more a game than a busy box without one.
While KQ has all the markings of a game, I wasn't implying that it's just any old kind of game. I thought it went without saying that as an adventure game, a story -- a fictional world with a protagonist and some kind of narrative that serves as a basis for gameplay, and can even be enjoyed more than the gameplay by those players so inclined -- is an essential part of KQ as well.
This here is the fundamental point of contention. I don't see how anything you've said "clearly shows" that King's Quest is a story first and foremost. You've merely asserted that without backing it up. One could just as easily assert, and even come up with arguments to support, that King's Quest is first and foremost a puzzle game. I believe that King's Quest is an adventure game, meaning story and gameplay are equally important. Moreover, KQ adventure games are ones known for being on the challenging side. Including either story or gameplay without the other -- or story or gameplay that bears no relationship to the story and gameplay of the originals -- in an interactive entertainment product with the King's Quest name would be an affront to the series' legacy and its fans.
Unfortunately I don't have time to continue but will have to come back to it. For now what I offer to support my views is the first eight KQ games themselves, looked at objectively, at all that they offered to all those who played them, and not just the aspects that you personally enjoyed.
The last part of your message touches on probably the biggest miscommunication between us. I have enjoyed pretty much every aspect of every King's Quest game! That includes the manual saving, all the gameplay challenges you speak of, the puzzles, etc.
Where our views go their separate ways is when it comes to what we wish for future instalments in the series. You and many others wish for similar gameplay structure as the existing games. I and many others think it is not as important to carry on the form as it is the content.
The form can incorporate all the design elements from previous games, if they are found appropriate by the designers. The only point where I disagree with you here is on whether they must be included.
Again, I want sudden deaths and I want manual saving and I want deep gameplay just as you do. But this thread has been (at least nominally) about the suggested compromise of having the option to have "Try Again" in addition to manual saving. (Having both would be my preference.)
About King's Quest being a story first and foremost: Remember that I consider it an interactive story and an adventure game and that I consider these terms synonymous. It is indeed more a matter of viewpoint than of facts, but I do feel that what I wrote (the paragraph you quote and the later part of my message, about the Tetris blocks) shows that the most essential part of KQ - the part that makes it possible to recognise it as KQ - is the story content, not the gameplay, since you could remove or transform the latter, but not the former. Roberta Williams did that gradually herself as the series progressed.
To me it seems analogous to say that your essence concerns your personality rather than your body. You use your body to express your personality (and both shape each other), just as the gameplay gives expression to the story. But in my view the essence lies in the story and personality.
Really, we probably agree on most of the issues. It now seems to me that we have been talking about the same thing with the words gameplay, interaction, story, mechanics, etc. And I reckon we can get along fine as long as we accept our slightly different word choices.
I think that for now we have covered most of the ground and expressed our views as clearly as we can. It has been quite time-consuming, and I could not afford to spend so much time on this in the future.
I want to thank you for taking the time to respond to my concern, and I regret if I lack the energy to address your every point.
And anyway, a choice would be fine. If I can choose not to have a Try Again button appear, have any autosaves occur, and have deaths that mean something then I'd be somewhat happy. I'm still not convinced that Telltale can even pull off a King's Quest game properly, though. We'll see.
I think it has always been a playable story (emphasis on both words), a game that would be nonsensical if all the story elements were removed or made abstract. The same is not true of games like Breakout or Tetris, as there all the elements could be (and have been) changed into something quite different. Those games remain recognisably the same as long as the gameplay remains unchanged.
Whereas in King's Quest, if all the characters and objects were changed into Tetris blocks and all the narration was removed or made gibberish, there would be no reason to suppose that it would be necessary to manoeuvre the block previously known as Graham into the block previously known as the royal castle.
Just sayin.... maybe there's a little too much thought going on here. I mean, the point of games is to entertain and escape..... this sounds like WORK to me.
Bt
Bt
I'm not exactly sure what you're saying here. I stand by my statement that while I don't think any specific gameplay mechanic can be cited as something that made Sierra games great, what I termed the "style" of gameplay in KQ (and I do mean KQ; I'm not talking about Sierra in general here) is just as much a part of what made KQ great as story is. I admit that "gameplay style" is vague; more on this below. I think that your idea of "those aspects of gameplay relating to the richness of the interactive storytelling only" is a good one but far from complete.
I have never assumed anything about the forthcoming KQ game. I have suggested there is cause for concern, I gave a list of facts in support of that contention, and there are others here who agree with this reasoning. (Also, I forgot to include on that list the negative comments that were made by the Jurassic Park developers concerning adventure gaming.) So you take one of my reasons, say it isn't valid "in your opinion", offer no opposing reasons of your own, and you expect that to be persuasive? Just because you say so? At least attempt to make a rational counter-argument before accusing people of overreacting.
My quip about the first King's Quest was not to say that any aspect of a story was missing or that story was unimportant in the game, but rather that the story was less detailed those of the later KQs or games like GK2. I do not undervalue the importance of story in KQ. I've said repeatedly that story and gameplay are equally important. And the only reason I've responded to your posts is because you are undervaluing gameplay, with your last statement below and this earlier one:
Where have I said anything like that with terms "gameplay" and "story" switched?
You don't need to convince me that there are many people who believe it is more important to carry on the KQ content than the form; I was aware of that going in. In fact, that in and of itself, rather than anything you've said here, is enough to conclude that content must be essential in defining what KQ is, what makes it great, why fans love it. What I don't get is why, when so many KQ fans in this forum have made it clear that gameplay is important to them, you can be so dismissive of that portion of the fanbase and what we find to be essential about KQ, what makes it great, etc. There have been quite a few threads in this forum on gameplay -- on deaths, danger, exploration, the Sierra puzzle style, etc. -- that fly in the face of the idea that gameplay could just be eliminated entirely from a KQ "game" and the KQ fanbase would accept it as King's Quest.
While this thread was about manual saving, your ideas to which I've been responding went well beyond that. My comments in this latter part of the thread are not motivated by a desire to defend manual saving. I have jumped into that discussion primarily to defend its legitimacy in game design in general, and to request that it be preserved as an option in TTG's KQ game. There is no narrow aspect of gameplay, as narrow as manual saving, that I have said "must" be included. But I think there are more broadly defined aspects of gameplay -- like exploration, and complex interactivity, and engendering a sense of danger, and engaging puzzles that are not trivial to solve -- that are essential to KQ. Those things couldn't just be eliminated, or transformed beyond recognition, in a King's Quest game that the fanbase (at least that part of it that play the games for more than story) would find satisfying.
In other words, there is some bounded area within the realm of gameplay-space outside of which a KQ game would not be acceptable. For instance, you couldn't make a KQ video poker game, even if the story is dead-on, and claim that it respects the legacy of the existing KQ games. Now, where those boundaries lie would be difficult to define precisely; the list I gave above is intended to be suggestive, not definitive. But that doesn't mean boundaries don't exist. At the same time, there is a lot of leeway within the area -- in part because, as you've said, the gameplay varied in the existing KQ games and in part because it can't be defined with sufficient precision -- for Telltale to design the gameplay with their own touch; some things included in the existing games will be subtracted, other things will be added. But in the end, the game will be evaluated by the fanbase as to how well it feels like KQ in terms of gameplay as much as it will be in terms of story. Individuals will differ in the terms they use, a few perhaps even sticking to narrow criteria like whether or not it includes manual-saving; but I believe there is enough of a consensus among those of us who believe it is important to "carry on the form".
How, under this scheme, do you account for something that is clearly interactive, and clearly fiction, and yet demonstrably not a game, in the everyday sense of that word? Because the most generic dictionary definition of "game" you could find encompasses such a thing, you just declare it a game anyway and move on? Even though there is a community dedicated to and creators of interactive fiction who would bristle at the notion of describing their works as "games"?
(You said before something to the effect that words "mean what they mean" and not what we hope they mean. Do you not see the irony in that you have done exactly that by picking only one of a multi-part definition without regard for context and its relevance to which of the definitions offered is most appropriate?)
To further demonstrate that there is a real or commonly understood distinction between these things, I'll note something about discussions going on in the BTTF forum. There have been some thorough and eminently logical arguments demonstrating that BTTF cannot reasonably be considered a game. But here's the interesting part: BTTF's defenders do so on the basis of its fictional content, that it works fine as a (trivially) interactive movie, that it is still an enjoyable entertainment experience; but to the best of my knowledge, there have been no serious attempts to defend it as a game.
The paragraph where you merely restate your hypothesis and call it a conclusion? Neither facts nor viewpoints mean much without logic. So the Tetris argument...
A. KQ would be "nonsensical if all the story elements were removed or made abstract". (That is not in dispute, btw.) B. There are some games that "remain recognisably the same as long as the gameplay remains unchanged". (Also not in dispute.) C. Therefore "the most essential part of KQ - the part that makes it possible to recognise it as KQ - is the story content, not the gameplay". I'm sorry, but that is a non sequitur if I've ever seen one! Your conclusion simply does not follow from your premises.
It does match the way I have long regarded most activities that you would probably consider passive and not games, such as reading and watching films. There is the same sense of playfulness and need to actively relate oneself to the proceedings as there is with computer games. This is a point of view shared by many psychologists and researchers today and is a way of seeing things that I find fertile.
I am not dismissing anyone else like you suggest! You have to understand that my default assumption is that what each of us says has equal value. Accordingly, my posts carry no more (or less) weight than yours, for example. I am only a single voice and certainly Telltale is not going to make the game based on what any one of us says. So there is no reason to suppose my words will have any great effect.
I say this because you seem to see me almost as someone out to destroy what makes King's Quest beloved to you and others. But I clearly stated I have no problem with any or even all of the old gameplay mechanics being included if they are found appropriate and desirable by the designers. I only feel they are not required, and I remain open to new ideas. What more can I possibly say...?
I am sorry, but I feel I would be wasting time and energy I genuinely need elsewhere if I continued our point-by-point exchange. (As Blackthorne519 was right to point out.) That is not intended as an insult - just a statement about the extent of miscommunication and misinterpretation I feel is going on both ways. No offence intended, and I do look forward to reading your reactions (as well as those of others) when the game comes out!
Which is why I think a "Retry" button should be included. Ideally with the option to turn it off, but if you truly believe it detracts from the game, just hit the "Restore" button right next to it. I've only played Tales of Monkey Island and a little bit of Sam & Max (too many games, not enough time), but I seem to recall that they both had manual saves as well. I see no reason TTG can't let us have our cake and reload, give the gemstone to the ogre, climb up the cliff wall, save the game this time, and eat it, too.
Sorry, I take back any suggestion (never intended) that you went out of your way to find the most generic definition, but that hardly negates the point I was making. You cited the second definition given in that link, rather than the first more specific one, which most certainly does apply to computer games. I'm not sure what you think I'm ignoring; I thought my last two posts touched on everything in the posts quoted.
Ideas do not all have equal value. They need to have a logical, rational basis behind them before they can be considered worthy. In contrast, personal experiences are indeed equally valid. That you (and many others) experience KQ as interactive story and I (and many others) as video game (a particular kind of game in which the story is essential, to be sure) is what it is and not something to be debated or resolved. Which is why I find your idea that content is more important than form, story more important than gameplay, to the KQ legacy as not only ill-conceived (when asserted as anything more than a personal preference) but somewhat ironic. Because it fails to take into account how many players, including many who have posted about various gameplay issues in this forum, experience KQ. Saying that story is more important, that gameplay could be eliminated without altering the very nature of KQ is dismissive of our experience, Simo, there's no way around that. I'm a little skeptical this is simply a case of miscommunication because you've made the same assertion several times and never really addressed any of my counterarguments or revisited your own argument that was clearly fallacious.
No, I do not see you as someone out to destroy anything, or as someone with any ill intentions whatsoever. But talk about ignoring posts -- I've tried to explain I think twice now that I'm talking about how more fundamental aspects of gameplay are essential to KQ; I have always understood that you have no problem with any specific mechanics being included and are not arguing against them, as I have no problem with their being excluded. Of course the designers are going to pick and choose among mechanics and include new ones of their own, but the whole they come up with can and will be evaluated by many players in terms of how consistent the overall feel of the gameplay is with that of the previous games.
No apology or explanation is required here. That's the beauty of discussion forums. Participation is entirely voluntary, non-obligatory and self-motivated.
The Tetris block example seems completely indisputable to me, but you see it as a non sequitur and think my conclusion does not follow from my premises. I confess that I quite honestly fail to see how it does not follow. Maybe I am missing an important part of your counterargument, but that is not deliberate.
About the dictionary definitions from the source I used, I don't see the first definition as applying to computer games, since I don't see all computer games (certainly not adventure games) as a "competitive activity or sport". However, "played according to rules", sure. But then, books are read and films are viewed according to some rules, too.
On the "gameplay" vs "story" issue: In my way of looking at this, almost everything you might call gameplay (and that I have been thinking of as gameplay for the purposes of this thread) is actually part of the story. This is really the true and whole meaning of my thinking of it as an interactive story. And yes, it is a personal view only and I am not trying to convert anyone into sharing it!
What I mean is, "story" comprises not just the scenario or premise or basic plot. It also includes the narration, the dialogue, every action, every consequence, the sights and sounds - just like with a story in any other medium. The only difference is that the player controls the actions of the main character(s). Playing an adventure game (or most other types of games) is almost nothing else than story.
But please note I never suggested "gameplay" should be eliminated. I was only trying to make the reasoning behind my viewpoint as clear as possible by giving two contrasting examples, one where a variable is changed but the subject remains recognisable, and one where another variable is changed and the subject becomes unrecognisable. It was an illustration, not a suggestion.
I hope this goes some way towards addressing the points you felt I had ignored earlier. I suspect we will not be able to reach agreement on these things, but I don't want you to feel I intentionally ignored anything you said.