Comments on: Text Adventure Untexted (But with text)

By: Fenchurch

Fenchurch — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 20:23:14 +0000

@Crispy

You have renewed my desire to go play Realms of the Haunting somehow!

By: Crispy

Crispy — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 00:08:23 +0000

I see your point, Mo, but it really depends on what you want from an adventure game. Aside from the interactivity, I’d prefer much more to read lots of text in print than on screen. Then when I look at the added interactivity of the text adventure, having been born maybe a few years too late to ever really get into them, I’m privee to the interactive superiority of being able to control 3 axis of movement, to time my actions and cut them short as I see fit, to walk away from boring conversation or ‘fluffy’ exposition that I know is simply there to eat up time and make the game longer without tying in with the plot.

That’s why I prefer the qualities the third dimension in the adventure genre can offer in terms of immersion. Even if a game hasn’t the resources to record hours of in-game dialogue, a simple trick like making the text fade away form the screen as I distance myself from the speaker does add a bit more choice and consequence to the experience. It helps situate me in all three dimensions in a much more realistic way.

Now all of this I can do with my imagination by reading a book, but that’s prescriptive, and I must render myself up to the author’s storytelling (which, if it’s a good book, I accept wholeheartedly). But I don’t think that text-based adventures provide a happy medium between narrative and interactivity. Because I’m on a PC I’m constantly aware of how the game could play out with that 3rd dimension, and how much more thankful my eyes would be reading from non-flickering paper format and the comfort of an armchair.

By: Mo

Mo — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 20:35:39 +0000

I’m not so sure this is a great idea. I mean, I don’t see the harm in it, but I don’t see a benefit either.

I think that the best part of text adventures is that, like a book, it leaves a good deal of atmosphere-building to the imagination of the player/reader. Having the game in text and graphics seems pointless to me. Worse still, having watched the video, I’m convinced that scene would have been more emotionally powerful in its original textual form. I’ve never played the game, but that’s my hunch.

And adding to what Alistair said above, I think a point-and-click text adventure would be great. That is, have the game entirely textual, with “lit up”/coloured words which you can interact with via mouse-driven contextual menus. This gives you the best of both worlds … the rich atmosphere/immersion of a text adventure coupled with the simple-to-play nature of point-and-clicks … there’s nothing more annoying than getting “I don’t understand X” feedback from the text parser.

By: Crispy

Crispy — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 14:45:48 +0000

I have to say I’ve found first-person 3D adventure games much more satisfying than 2D. I’m playing through Broken Sword at the moment and it just cannot compare with Gremlin’s Realms of the Haunting.

In both you play as the main character and see yourself from the third person (in RoH this only happens in cutscenes), but embodying the first-person for most of the game in RoH gives you much more pseudo-freedom than I have in Broken Sword. Essentially they’re similar in that they’re point and click adventures, but the fixed perspective in BS and the player-controlled perspective in RoH gives you enough interactivity to make the game more immersive without stepping too hard on the narrative (interactivity and narration being pretty much diametrically opposed in my opinion).

As far as the textual interface, I’m not so hot on the input side of it. Output is fine, but having to stop to type (fixing the perspective and halting movement as you do so) just doesn’t have the same sense of freedom as a mouseclick.

By: Sub-kamikaze

Sub-kamikaze — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 10:49:42 +0000

Does anyone remember Douglas Adams’s “Starship Titanic”. It was a flawed, but comic romp through a dilapidated spaceship. It was similar to this in that it had a first person perspective, but it wasn’t freeform (so you moved the mouse cursor to the corner of the screen to move to a different room, or to pick up items etc), but the way you interacted with the various characters was entirely text-based. You could have (sort of) lengthy conversations with them since there were thousands of lines of dialogue recorded for each. I think swearing at the parrot was my favourite…

Well, I liked it…

By: Alistair

Alistair — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 09:53:34 +0000

I always liked the idea of context sensitive right-click menus in graphical games. Easy way to give the player more options than shoot/use.

By: malkav11

malkav11 — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 03:27:19 +0000

The impression I get from the above screenshot and video is that they’re giving you essentially the original text adventure with 3D visuals bolted on. That is, all the original description text and so forth. And in that context…sure, why not? It’s a lot more work than just a text adventure, but it might well have some advantages.

I don’t much care for graphical games where only your direct interaction with the game is textual, though, (like Trilby’s Notes, the third of Yahtzee’s horror adventure games) because you don’t have the textual cues to inform you what things are called and how to interact with them. It’s essentially the worst of both worlds.