How important do you think a narrator is?
There are a couple of things I'd really like to see carried over from the previous King's Quest point & click games. Firstly, a narrator like there's been in KQ5, KQ6 and the fan-project The Silver Lining. A narrator just adds that much more feeling to the game, and I for one would be very disappointed if the Telltale game doesn't have a narrator.
Secondly, something I think is equally important is additional ways to interact with objects in the game world. The Sierra model has always had changeable icons for looking, touching and talking, while the Telltale adventure games do not have this feature. In the Telltale games you click on something, and the character will do whatever he's scripted to do, whether it's talking or picking something up or commenting on it.
Adventure games need to have the ability to just examine something, and in the King's Quest franchise this is especially important.
There should be the traditional "hand, eye, talk" icons and a narrator with a wide array of voice-acted lines to make the game world feel a bit more three-dimensional, or it just won't do justice to the King's Quest genre at all.
So I'm curious, what are other people's views on this? How do you feel about the TT games so far only having a mouse-pointer that doesn't change into for example an examine-icon?
And is a narrator something you guys will be expecting?
Secondly, something I think is equally important is additional ways to interact with objects in the game world. The Sierra model has always had changeable icons for looking, touching and talking, while the Telltale adventure games do not have this feature. In the Telltale games you click on something, and the character will do whatever he's scripted to do, whether it's talking or picking something up or commenting on it.
Adventure games need to have the ability to just examine something, and in the King's Quest franchise this is especially important.
There should be the traditional "hand, eye, talk" icons and a narrator with a wide array of voice-acted lines to make the game world feel a bit more three-dimensional, or it just won't do justice to the King's Quest genre at all.
So I'm curious, what are other people's views on this? How do you feel about the TT games so far only having a mouse-pointer that doesn't change into for example an examine-icon?
And is a narrator something you guys will be expecting?
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Comments
I think they should, but they won't. I also doubt we'll be getting a narrator.
I also really think they should revise their model with the single-purpose icon and use multi-icon for this particular game. Not doing so would be a mistake. Sure, it may be appropriate for some of their earlier titles like BTTF and Sam and Max, but not for KQ.
That said, the narration either needs be to extremely well written and interesting or concise and to the point or both. I don't want a TSL-style narrator who drones on and on for ages about absolutely nothing. Josh Mandel is the only one who can get away with writing paragraph after paragraph of pun-filled prose about tiny, insignificant things in the background.
I actually think Amy Kurylo is doing an outstanding job as narrator in TSL. She breaks the fourth wall a bit too much maybe, but the voice-acting is splendid.
The Roger Wilco comments in the pawn shop had me laughing really hard though, hehe. More references like that certainly wouldn't hurt.
And on the main point - yes, I do think there should be a narrator. It wouldn't feel like a King's Quest game without one.
As for narration, I agree with MI, sporkman and Freeze -- I've seen only the first episode of TSL and didn't care for the narration at all, mostly due to the writing; the voice-acting wasn't bad but it didn't seem particularly special, either. I prefer the narration style in KQ 5/6 and the AGDI remakes.
As for multi-icon interface and "pointless" interactions--I don't think any fan would argue that they were really pointless. MI meant pointless from Telltale's point of view. As of BttF, Telltale's games have already devolved into mindless click-to-advance cutscenes, so doing almost ANYTHING that diverged from that model would be a good thing. I doubt they will, since they seem pretty much committed to transforming (read: destroying) the adventure game genre by turning their "games" into barely-interactive movies. But we shall see. It'd be harder to do WORSE than BttF from a game design standpoint, so I am cautiously optimistic that KQ will be better.
And I agree with the hope that KQ will be better. If BTTF was meant to cater to non-gamers because of what it represents, then it should likewise be the opposite for KQ; this game series is meant for adventure gamers more than any other as it was the one that launched the genre, for all intents and purposes.
Regarding the topic: although I would love to see a narrator, I would be very surprised if Telltale was even considering it. Same goes for the icon interface.
For me, gameplay, story, and overall charm come first. A narrator and icons would be icing on the cake, but I'm definitely not holding my breath.
Telltale isn't exactly known for "icing." A narrator would require extra work and time for coding in the narrations and actually writing them, so I'm hanging out on the side of "doubtful" for this one. I still think it's possible it may happen, but I won't hold my breath.
As Telltale uses a variety of literary and cinematic devices in their games' narratives, I could easily see them using a narrator for the exposition of the story. But that's a separate question from having a narrator describe each interaction with the game-world. While a narrator and icons, strictly speaking, might be just icing, I think that having multiple modes of interaction and feedback with every combination -- for the sake of both atmosphere and more complex puzzle-solving -- is fairly important to the King's Quest style of gameplay.
And since somebody already made a reference to it, I also think Telltale needs to dream bigger with these sort of franchises, at this point. If a narrator is icing, the ice away.
Actually, the narrators in King's Quest games rarely provide a lot of introductory exposition. The intros to the games are usually very cinematic and and primarily driven by character dialogue. In King's Quest V and VI you don't hear the narrator at all until the actual gameplay has started and you have a chance to look around and interact with the environment.
Yeah, but there is such a thing as over-developing a work of art. Sierra hit on a winning formula with KQ5, refined it a bit with KQ6, and then decided to reinvent the wheel just for the sake of keeping true to their "experimenting with the latest tech" roots. And then the series took a major dump and never recovered. The end. Roberta didn't know how to quit while she was ahead. Yet another reason why contacting Roberta was such an empty gesture.
Right. I wasn't arguing that there should be a lot of cinematics and exposition in a King's Quest game, I was just pointing out that what exposition there is usually comes from a dialogue-driven cinematic rather than narration. The narrator's job in a King's Quest game is to describe the game world and events as they take place during the gameplay, not to provide the backstory.
Yeah, that's the way Sierra did it. Part of my point was that Telltale might not do it the same way. If they're not going to give us many points of interaction or the game-world and event descriptions that go along with them -- ie. if the game is like all their others with the single mode of interaction -- then I could see Telltale still keeping the narrator but giving him/her a different "job". I'm not saying that's a good thing, believe me. Just that I could see it going that way.
Also I never felt like WAS the kq character I always felt more like I was helping the character in a great story.... I do not need to feel like its me there.. Otherwise it would be a first person game.
I say make the effort get someone great with range to narrate I'm looking at you kid beyond.
This is exactly why I never bought that "narrations destroy your immersion in the character" garbage. Sierra tried to make that argument, and I never bought it then either. Sierra failed to understand that narrations are a design choice, and they have pros and cons just like any other design choice. They treated narrations like baggage to be dumped when they made KQ7. Good narrations make the game feel like a storybook being read to you, which is precisely the right fit for a fairytale series like KQ. Heck, Sierra even made the design choice to change the narration style from first person to third person voice in KQ5 and 6. There is no other reason to make that change unless you are shooting for the storybook feel.
As for multiple icons, once again, hard for me to say. I wasn't a big fan of cycling through the icons in Kings Quest or Space Quest. It just felt a bit tedious having to cycle through several useless commands (seriously, how many times did you have to use the smell feature? Though some funny lines did come out of it) to find the one you want. I loved the system LucasArts used in Full Throttle though, when the icons came up after holding down the mouse button and you could quickly select what you wanted to do. I also liked typing what I wanted my character to do in the early Kings/Space Quest games, but that was hampered by the limited vocabulary of the games. Once again though, I'll say it would be more good than bad.
This is what became the "verb coin" I mentioned above, because the pop-up looked like a coin in the later Curse of Monkey Island. I liked that FT/CoMI interface mechanism, too.
But it was worse than SQ because she drones on and on, nagging and nattering, at times insulting or condescending to the player (narrator in SQ usually just insulted Roger), and tries too hard to be funny. Gary Owens actually is funny. It all just comes off feeling forced.
In the case of KQ V, it was pretty obvious that the text was written for popup windows and felt (IMO) longwinded when read aloud. The streamlining that has occurred in this area is welcome, in my book.
And I agree with those who felt narration was distancing once we entered the "talkie" era. I'd rather have the character give me his or her impressions firsthand, from the character's own perspective at this point in the story, than some mostly-omnisicient but occasionally oddly-limited narrator. I write for radio once in a while and I always have to remind myself, "Don't TELL the listener what's going on too much -- whenever possible, find a way to communicate through sound effects and dialogue."
If you remember KQ is inspired by the fairy tale storybook it makes absolute sense to have teh narrator in there for that reason. As long as it doens't get too long winded. It gives the game 'style' and a 'feel'. Something it kinda of lost in KQ7, and KQ8.
What I disliked was having an audible narrator describe objects visible onscreen -- these popup blurbs never felt like they flowed when read aloud, and they were usually much quicker to scan in text form. "An old lamp hangs on the line." "Another old lamp waits for a customer." "This old lamp is a fine-looking antique." "A rusty lamp looks just heavy enough to KILL ME NOW."
A lot of incidental details that a proper story would edit out or summarize were dragged kicking and screaming into the audiovisual era in KQ V and VI.
The point of narration I think is to get you immersed in the story, which they did splendidly in KQ6 in particular. Narration can't be bland, generic or unimaginative. The narrator in KQ6 does a great job of describing the important objects which are needed to advance the story, but he also describes unimportant objects in a way I think is entertaining.
For example if you look at a rock on the Isle of Crowns: "Rocks abound on this mystical island."
Or if you try to talk to a rock: "The rocks remain silent, as they have been for ages untold."
The seriousness and objectivity with which the narrator says these things always makes me smile
John Bell in the KQ redux games is also a dear favorite of mine, some of his comments are questionable but he never really broke the fourth wall.
A narrator in a KQ game has to be detached from the actual story, only recounting the events that take place in the game without being involved in the story itself.