What SHOULD be changed for the new KQ?
There has been a lot of good discussion here about what makes King's Quest King's Quest, and what old-school styles and design elements we'd like to see retained. With that in mind, what are some things we feel SHOULD be changed for a new King's Quest? And what are some risks the new designers should be willing to take?
These are strictly my own opinions:
I for one would like to see more personality -- I never felt like I knew who Sir/King Graham really was as a person. Who is this man who apologizes for disturbing insects, yet pushes old women into ovens without thinking twice about it? Is he a wise and effective ruler, or in over his head?
I'd like to see a few conversation puzzles, along with traditional give-the-right-thing-to-the-right-character KQ interactions. There are always colorful characters in the KQ universe, and monologues don't tell us very much about them.
I'm also happy to let navigation challenges fade away -- spending twenty minutes gingerly edging around the poisonous thorns in KQ II (because I didn't find the better alternate solution, I know!) was not an experience I'm anxious to repeat. If we must have physical movement puzzles, let them be like climbing the aerie cliff in KQ VI, where it's more a matter of timing and planning a route than pixel-level maneuvering.
I'd like to see "background" elements that are transformable conceal themselves better -- this shouldn't be a problem now, but the VGA palette subdivision provided unintended hints in a few of the old games.
And I'd like to get rid of the absolute dead-ends the old games were prone to -- I realize this may be seen as dumbing-down by many, but I would argue that forced backtracking does not create play value either. I'm very happy to realize I must have missed something after beating my head against a puzzle -- but I'd like an opportunity to find my way back to where I can correct it, without having to replay what I've already done!
These are strictly my own opinions:
I for one would like to see more personality -- I never felt like I knew who Sir/King Graham really was as a person. Who is this man who apologizes for disturbing insects, yet pushes old women into ovens without thinking twice about it? Is he a wise and effective ruler, or in over his head?
I'd like to see a few conversation puzzles, along with traditional give-the-right-thing-to-the-right-character KQ interactions. There are always colorful characters in the KQ universe, and monologues don't tell us very much about them.
I'm also happy to let navigation challenges fade away -- spending twenty minutes gingerly edging around the poisonous thorns in KQ II (because I didn't find the better alternate solution, I know!) was not an experience I'm anxious to repeat. If we must have physical movement puzzles, let them be like climbing the aerie cliff in KQ VI, where it's more a matter of timing and planning a route than pixel-level maneuvering.
I'd like to see "background" elements that are transformable conceal themselves better -- this shouldn't be a problem now, but the VGA palette subdivision provided unintended hints in a few of the old games.
And I'd like to get rid of the absolute dead-ends the old games were prone to -- I realize this may be seen as dumbing-down by many, but I would argue that forced backtracking does not create play value either. I'm very happy to realize I must have missed something after beating my head against a puzzle -- but I'd like an opportunity to find my way back to where I can correct it, without having to replay what I've already done!
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Also, while those scenes may have been a pain in the ass, I want this game to have at least one long twisty pathway where a single bad step is instant death. It's tradition.
Haha, I did exactly the same thing in KQIV to get across the plank in the cave because I didn't find the lantern. Key tap, save... key tap, save...
Funny, the Graham I played with always had lots of personality. The insect-witch thing is simple good vs. evil, fairy-tale style. What further explanation is needed?
The last thing Telltale needs is encouragement to keep pretending that dialogs are puzzles or an adequate substitute for meaningful gameplay.
I suspect this won't come into play because hot spots are not exact enough in 3D. But I hope there is some kind of pseudo-ambulatory challenges in the game -- that's exactly the kind of gameplay variety that distinguishes the Sierra-style.
The worst possible answer to the question "What should be changed for the new KQ" is "strip it of everything that isn't standard in today's generic adventures". Do you really not have enough of those to play?
...if you never wanted to play King's Quest, if you hated King's Quest before, what's with the sudden desire to play a game that is no different from others you may have played but with the skin of a series you never appreciated in the first place?!
The only thing I think they should avoid with this new King's Quest is dead ends and arbitrary deaths (by that I mean stick to tense situation deaths like in Gabriel Knight or the first two Broken Sword games and deaths that are foreshadowed like going out in dangerous places are OK too [when you're warned how dangerous it is either by a character, the narrator, or even just by sight and/or sound]), but stay away from deaths that aren't obvious or foreshadowed). Sierra was already phasing those things out, and those are definitely two things that Telltale shouldn't bring back.
The one time graham pushed a women into an oven, she was a witch who kept turning kids into gingerbread, so I don't think graham needs a psych eval for that. They mention in KQ2 Graham has ruled fine, although you could argue about Daventry's condition in KQ3.
They are a traditional kind of Adventure puzzle actually, but mainly for companies like Lucasarts and Revolutiohn Software (see Broken Sword for an example) and others...
Largely left out of Sierra games, until Quest For Glory and Gabriel Knight (maybe a few others)...
When they're puzzles, ie. there is more than one possible outcome. The point is TT's dialogs never have any stakes; you just keep clicking until you hear everything.
Hey, that gives me a great idea for a fan game! Valanice (assuming she survives her suicide attempts in TSL) plots to murder Graham for what he did to Rosella, paralleling the Clytemnestra-Agamemnon-Iphigenia myths. LOL
Sophocles would be pleased.
Bt
Yes, I forgot about it in The Walking Dead :rolleyes: because it just came out and I have no interest in playing it. Does it come anywhere close to the deep branching gameplay of KQ6, or is it just another half-ass novelty for Telltale to overhype?
Nah, even in Sierra games, when they were conversation 'puzzles' they weren't always part of more than one outcome, there was usually only one path. In Quest for Glory and Gabriel Knight for example. The 'puzzle' was simply to find a certain specific bit of information, that would give you a point. Learning that information then would allow you to ask about it from someone else, which is required to learn something important so you can move on in the game (I.E. you might not be able to pick up a certain item or evidence until you learn about it first from a conversation). Without the 'information' you can't go further. It's fairly linear. There were no 'multiple choice' questions/answers in general.
Actually, KQ6 has a diaologue puzzles, but its rather linear, no choice version of a dialogue puzzle. That is to say you need to talk to someone, and learn a certain detail before you can push the game forward. I.E. the magic map dialogue puzzle (learn about Ali being friends with the Ferryman, and then learning about the Magic Map from the Ferryman, which then gives you the option to get the magic map from the Pawn Dealer and trade for it in the pawn shop). There are no choices in dialogue but its clearly a puzzle that has to be solved to get the map, and its pretty linear solution.
Actually most of the telltale 'conversation puzzles' work this way... Learn information from dialogue, that then leads you to someone else, or an item. Very simplified dialogue puzzles. The only difference is that they give the player different comments to go about getting that information. From nice to more snarky choices. But all lead to the same outcome, just like in the old Sierra dialogue puzzles.
Another example of a fetch quest/treasure hunt puzzles mixed with simple dialogue puzzle is the simple puzzles in Roberta William's Mixed-Up Mother Goose adventure game. Which basically involved talking to someone to learn what item you need to pick up, and then pickign up that item, and then bringing it back to the character who wanted it! It's probably one of the most simplified adventure games ever...
Eh, TSL isn't even the official continuation of KQ (and its not part of Telltale's continuation either), and even contradicts some details from the games or official spinoff material... You could take your fanfic anyway you want to...
I misspoke in my earlier post, he actually pushes her into a bubbling cauldron (at least in Sierra's EGA remake of KQ 1, which my memory was trying to summon up!) I'm being tongue-in-cheek about all of this, but I think what bothered me in this scene was Roberta Williams' insensitive prose: Sir Graham "courageously" pushes the woman to her gruesome death by sneaking up on her from behind, and the popup ends with "Congratulations!" No trial, no investigation about whether she could just change the children back; it just made me feel icky.
At any rate, if Graham feels any moral ambivalence about his action here, or his killing of the Yeti and Dracula at other times, it's never really presented in-game. He seems much more upset that "Drat! My sled is broken!" in KQ V.
Baggins, I know all that. I said "when", as in "in those cases" -- I didn't assert that those cases weren't few and far between. My point was that Telltale overuses such dialog "puzzles", relative to other kinds of non-dialog puzzles and gameplay, in comparison to most adventure games (or most well-regarded classic adventure games with a few exceptions of course) whether Sierra, Lucasarts, Revolution, whatever. Yes, there were a lot of single-outcome dialogs in Gabriel Knight, but they were balanced with much more exploration and puzzle-solving so the dialogs never felt like filler.
Jesus Christ, it was a joke!
Playing "The Secret of Monkey Island" with a college buddy of mine in the pre-talkie days was terrific, because we could not resist voicing all of the characters out loud as we played. It would SO not have been the same experience if it were limited to puzzles and pop-up, non-interactive dialogues. The writing and characters made that game -- the gameplay was solid, too, but the reason I go back to it every now and then is for the interactive dialogue. "I'm Guybrush Threepwood, and I mean to kill you all!"
This feature is definitely not a novelty. They definitely do make for a deep branching gameplay because decisions you make affect the outcome of the episode you play, and they also carry over to the next episodes too (episode one already shows this as the episode two preview in episode one changes based on the decisions you make). In episode one, there's already at least four different outcomes, and when you figure in the branching based on your decisions in the next four episodes, the possible outcomes factor into the dozens.
I hope Telltale continues using it in Fables and King's Quest and beyond, because I feel it's actually the best thing to happen to Telltale's episodic gaming structure since they switched to monthly episodes with Sam & Max Season One. It helps give the entire season a feeling of cohesiveness as a complete game in a way that was never there before.
Maybe. That's if they don't just have 4 alternate pathways that simply don't deviate much through the entire season. We'll have to see.
I think the main point thom was trying to get across is that conversation puzzles shouldn't be the ONLY puzzles.
Of course. But include too many at the expense of other kinds of gameplay and you don't really have a game anymore; you have a trivially interactive content-delivery system. If Telltale wants to do that to its TV/movie properties, fine, but it is the antithesis of what King's Quest is.
The Walking Dead is simply a very good fit for Telltale's existing game design philosophy and the kinds of things they've been saying they want to do wrt storytelling. It's an evolution of a design they tried to graft, Frankenstein-like, onto Jurassic Park for which it was NOT an appropriate fit, and for which many fans said -- way in advance! -- that it wasn't an appropriate fit.
Moreover, Telltale has consistently portrayed their trivially interactive content-delivery system game-style not merely as something different, to be used only where appropriate, but as some kind of "wave of the future", an "improvement" or "correction" or "modernization" of the basic structure and elements of classic adventure gaming for which they have, on various occasions, expressed utter disdain.
So I cannot rationally regard TWD as evidence that Telltale responds to fans or take it on faith :rolleyes: that they're going to do a 180° on game design, which is the only possible way to do KQ right.
I hope they don't, only because there's only so much they can fit into those teeny tiny episodes and they need to focus on more important aspects of getting KQ right. Dialog "puzzles" -- whether single or multiple outcome -- do NOT make a game in and of themselves.
I highly doubt they'll treat King's Quest like The Walking Dead (but as I said, implementing the multi-episode branching dialog feature introduced in that series wouldn't be a bad thing). Telltale have said they still plan to make games in several adventure game styles (adventure game (ala Sam & Max and Monkey Island), EZ adventure (ala Back to the Future) and cinematic adventure (ala Jurassic Park or The Walking Dead). King's Quest would fall into the first category, and Telltale knows this.
Where? Citation?
I am dead serious. Each death should be logical and avoidable, but ONLY if the player has thoroughly explored and observed his surroundings. Deaths should be telegraphed or foreshadowed by careful use of the LOOK icon (as opposed to the WALK or HAND icons) for interaction with all parts of the environment. Of course, this would require the game to actually HAVE multiple modes of interaction, which I strongly doubt Telltale will ever do, because they don't make adventure games.
http://www.telltalegames.com/forums/showpost.php?p=568652&postcount=161
Got anything else?
I think a lot of the negative speculation about King's Quest is driven by the differences between the humor/character-driven Lucasarts style, which Telltale has largely carried on, and the more puzzle/map-driven Sierra style.
KQ VII was the closest thing we've seen to a hybrid of the two approaches, and for better or worse it's the best predictor I can point to at this writing. It's episodic in structure (although there's some ability to return to the settings of previous episodes to retrieve needed items), deaths do not force re-playing from a save, its heroines have a sense of humor and personality, and we do get to know some of the characters beyond their puzzle-positing jobs.
As I've said before, I am optimistic that Telltale will treat King's Quest with the same respect it has treated its other licenses. King's Quest has a lot of history behind it, and Telltale knows that nostalgia is the primary sales driver for this title. I predict the discussion as more details become known is likely to be about WHICH KQ/Sierra influences are most prominent in the design -- not about how nobody expected the new King's Quest to be set up as a first-person shooter or a hidden-object game.
And it's not like all the new The Walking Dead fans who haven't really played an adventure game before are going to be saying, "Oh, man! I can't wait for KING'S QUEST!" They're more likely to be wondering what this incredibly generic title could possibly mean. "So, like, there's a king? And he goes on a quest? Is this the Sir Thomas Malory license?"
Fables? That sounds pretty generic too, since there are like at least three games already with that name or similar, and aren't even connected to the same franchises!
There is the Fable which is an old adventure game from 1996, and then there are the unrelated three Fable rpg games (that form a trilogy)!
I suspect its all just a matter of how close a fan is to a series... For it to feel 'nongeneric' to them.
I think, if we had been anothers group of fans shoes, and King's Quest had come first, that the fans of the other series might be making similar complaints about their preferred series not coming out 'fast enough', or not getting enough 'informatin' about them!
Many KQ fans are hoping that its better than KQ7, and not as critically panned than that game was... Also it wouldnt' hurt to have puzzles that are a bit more complicated than the generally more simplified 'fetch-quest' style that that game offered. That is to say that almost every puzzle in KQ7 revolved about learning what you needed to find either visually on screen or from the mouth of a character, and then giving it to the character who lost it (you saw him lose it), or asked for it. These unfortunately make up 90% of the item puzzles in Telltale games as well... Nothing particurarly complicated (other than perhaps in Tales of Monkey Island that allowed for some inventory manipulation style puzzles).
On the other hand, we all have different pain thresholds for difficulty and the types of puzzles that annoy us, so it's very hard to create something that provides the "right" level of challenge for everyone. I tend to get stuck on my own bad assumptions -- I think I've already looked in a cabinet or explored a path when in fact I've missed it altogether -- so a subtle verbal or visual reminder or hint is often much appreciated.
Maybe one path to a better future could rely on the idea that different types of adventurers also have different expectations about what constitutes "victory" -- there are ways to let a casual player experience the whole story by stumbling through it, and reward more serious players for finding better solutions to the puzzles as was done in the early KQ games. (The bronze/silver/gold medal system in Jurassic Park was a simple but effective way to do this -- you need to meet a minimum standard, but needn't master every scene to progress. But that's easier to measure in a QTE context.)
The art of interactive entertainment needs to keep evolving -- I just finished playing Roberta Williams' "Mystery House" for the first time last night, and was disappointed (SPOILERS!) that I was not penalized or admonished for stabbing Joe the Gravedigger myself and stealing his shovel, which was wholly unnecessary as it turned out, instead of letting the villain take care of him and maintaining the moral high ground. On the other hand, I couldn't just run off with the jewels and claim victory, I had to find the gun and shoot Daisy myself to be declared a WIZARD GURU.
As I said, they know that King's Quest is an adventure game.
They're doing EZ adventures and cinematic adventures based on movie and TV licenses (which they have always done: see CSI), but as I said in another thread all of their licenses based on adventure game properties (or a license that already had an adventure game) have been handled respectfully. Also note that they have never released an adventure game license in one of their casual categories.
Even Sam & Max: The Devil's Playhouse was an adventure game, and that was made in 2010, the same year that the first episode of Back to the Future episode 1 came out. It had standard inventory puzzles as well as puzzles based on Max's new-found and re-found psychic powers. It also had a much more challenging difficulty than Telltale's EZ adventures or cinematic adventures, and it's difficulty got more challenging as the season went on, like their other adventure games.
They know that their adventure games are different than their casual games. They released an adventure game in the same year as a casual game (which shows they haven't abandoned adventure games), and they haven't screwed up an adventure game license yet.
Their track record shows that they handle their adventure game licenses differently than their movie and TV licenses (as evidenced by CSI vs. Sam & Max and Monkey Island). They have always been respectful to the other adventure games in whatever series they are licensing. They haven't done anything to show that this still isn't true.
I've heard of all of this before. :rolleyes: Long-winded "defenses" that are nothing more than generalities about what Telltale has done in the past.
Rewind back to the time between The Devil's Playhouse and BTTF, their first "EZ" adventure. If you had said BTTF would follow a pattern established by previous games, you would have been wrong! You have absolutely no way of knowing that the pattern you're describing will hold.
It's simply not an answer to the things Telltale has repeatedly been saying in interviews and elsewhere about their game design philosophy. They didn't say, "we don't think walking around is important for how we want to do our Jurassic Park game in particular"; they said, "Walking around is boring." Period.
If Telltale plans to keep making classic-style adventure games (when the license calls for it), they could have said so at any time, but they haven't. Why not? How easy would it have been to add one measly little sentence to their answers to KQ-related interview questions that reaches out to and reassures KQ's fanbase? The "they'll follow the pattern" non-defense I repeatedly hear from Telltale's sycophants proxies simply does not compensate for Telltale's deafening silence.
I don't agree with that. Or at least I don't think being merely "respectful" (which is really too vague for useful analysis) is an adequate measure of how successful they are in adapting a license. Telltale has on occasion done what they wanted to do, regardless of whether it fit with the property or not. There were a number of aspects of Tales that I found to be quite un-Monkey Island-like. The Devil's Playhouse had a significantly different tone and style of humor than the previous seasons. And Jurassic Park was a complete abomination against that franchise.
That's only a tip of the iceberg, and I don't even agree that your characterizations capture the differences between Lucasarts and Sierra styles that I find important. I don't find the characters in Sierra games any less prominent or important in defining the Sierra style than they are in Lucasarts games, and I don't find Lucasarts games any less "puzzle-driven" than Sierra games. (Whatever the hell all this "driven" business means anyway; when I play a game, I do my own driving thank you very much.)
I don't agree with that. Episode 2 was the only episode I found to have any kind of complexity that makes for challenging gameplay. AFAIC, the trend toward EZ adventures -- and more importantly, de-emphasis of gameplay in favor of flashy, cinematic content delivery for passive player consumption -- began with The Devil's Playhouse, not a movie/TV license.
They changed things around in The Devil's Playhouse and Tales of Monkey Island, no doubt (the complete overhaul of game mechanics in The Devil's Playhouse, a much more murderous LeChuck in Tales of Monkey Island, etc). Any change is due to alienate some portion of the fanbase, but I'm of the mind that change can be good. And I thought the change in those two franchises were worthwhile. The Monkey Island creators Ron Gilbert and Dave Grossman thought the changes were good in Tales (and even contributed to them). Sam & Max creator Steve Purcell thought the changes in Sam & Max: The Devil's Playhouse were good (and ditto with the contributing to them). King's Quest creator Roberta Williams has offered advice to Telltale for King's Quest, which the team found "invaluable". So, it's likely there will be change. But, the change could be good for the franchise. We'll just have to wait and see.
It does follow a pattern though. There were four Telltale CSI games starting in 2007, each an EZ adventure, and that was a licensed property not based on adventure games. Back to the Future is a licensed property not based on adventure games (or based on a property that already had an adventure game). Following that pattern, it would make sense that Back to the Future was an EZ adventure like CSI.
It may not have been said explicitly, but it turned out to be referring just to the game play of Jurassic Park. There is walking around and exploring in The Walking Dead.
The biggest point I was trying to make was about Dan Connors realizing that Back to the Future is a different category than Sam & Max and Monkey Island. This is a very good thing. Before that, I was worried too that they would carry the casual gameplay to King's Quest and any future adventure based property. The fact they know that Back to the Future is not a traditional adventure game is a load off my mind.
I didn't say it was untrue, I said it was over-generalized and inconsequential.
No, we don't have to do that. I mean, you can if you want to, but you can't tell me I can't take into account Telltale's statements about game design and their lack of even the mildest affirmation that they intend to modify their current design principles for KQ when I express concerns about its prospects.
Oh, FFS. Way to miss the forest for the trees. The walking thing was merely an example of how they have transitioned away from the fundamentals of adventure gaming. Of course they made some changes to the approach used in a game that was trashed from here to kingdom come by a huge majority of reviewers. But the basic structure of TWD is the same as JP: exceedingly linear gameworld, little exploration beyond the immediate environment, mundane tasks and simplistic, self-contained puzzles masquerading as gameplay. (I admit that I have not played TWD, but I am taking my information from credible sources, ie. players who are NOT fanboys/girls of Telltale.) It simply doesn't wash as evidence that Telltale is likely to do a complete 180° and give us a KQ that measures up to the originals in terms of meaningful exploration and interactive and puzzle-solving complexity.
I'm sorry, but I find that laughable. Acknowledging that his fans see the obvious distinctions among their existing games produced by their own changes in approach to design is a far cry from saying he actually cares about making games using the previous approach.
I choose to be optimistic. But for the sake of self-awareness I will note that I'm not a huge fan of the King's Quest games to date -- I've played through all of them, but only once each in most cases -- so it's more likely that I will see changes as good things.
He also stole the leprichaun king's scepter!
Richard Aronson's falsetto can be annoying...
Point taken
She wasn't some 'little old lady'!
Although, one could ask the moral and ethical questions, was it right for Graham to trespass on her property, to plan his attack? Plus the cheese and note robbery after?
Plus, what's so wrong about killing a dragon? Perhaps his mistake was letting that dragon live! Maybe as it grew up, it grew two more heads, and came back for revenge! Maybe, it left to another kingdom and caused havoc, after it got its flames back?
He has a weird mixed sense of justice...