The early Sierra games have a naive charm about them, but they haven’t aged well at all. Things got better with SCI0, then worse again with SCI1, by which time LucasArts had lifted the bar so high that they didn’t stand a chance.

But Quest For Glory got everything right that the other Sierra games got wrong. Free roaming, multiple solutions to puzzles, and you could tackle things in any order you liked.

Still Life 2 sounds awful though – I felt like throwing my keyboard at the wall just from reading John’s description.

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I like Walker’s handling of adventure games, he’s honest and fair. Keep it up!

Although I must say I think he cut GK3 a bit short, flawed as it was it was better than almost anything has been since. :D (PCG, August (?) 1999, 67%)

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Anyway, I too liked the series a lot and I agree that it tried something refreshing and different. Yet I can’t say these games provided really decent puzzle alternatives (how can I guess that I should wait for the minotaur to go to sleep, for instance?). I’d even say they were often much more frustrating and tedious than typical adventure gaming stuff. Probably that’s the main reason why nobody tried to copy their gameplay style.

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But I do agree some stats aren’t balanced well in QFG1. Actually 2 isn’t balanced as much as it could be also, 4 is the best in this regard, I feel. Shame most people didn’t play it due to the show stopper bugs that have now been completely fan-patched. I’m not saying these games are perfect (Sierra didn’t do ‘perfect’), I am just very glad they tried something different in the adventure game module as far as conflict resolution and variable success goes.

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Making the thief a magic user ruins the whole point of classes and without already knowing the game well you can easily ruin your vital stats with such experiments. At least that’s what the manual said, but the stats requirements in the game were badly balanced anyway.

Quest for Glory 3 is my second favorite in the series after 5 as everything worked well for my thief character there, I needed no tedious stats boosting exercises, and the whole game moved forward at a steady pace.

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Yes, the graphics were dated. Yes, the voice acting was about what you’d expect from a low-budget eastern European title. Yes, the dialogue was of rather variable quality, what puzzles there were were rather uninspired, and it seems to end about a third of the way through the story. But I found myself so intrigued by its ideas that I still enjoyed the experience, and hope that other games take notice of what it did.

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In QfG1 my thief character had to climb the tree about a hundred times to reach the required climbing skill level and there was no optional way for this class to solve a certain puzzle. In QfG2 I had to try my lockpicks on like a thousand doors (none of which you can actually open of course) to reach the required lock picking skill level. These are just examples of the worst problems.

Yes, those two games had ambitious gameplay concept, but didn’t live up to it. Fortunately, the later titles in the series got much much better, but none was completely devoid of similar problems. And they are much more frustrating than a straightforward adventure game.

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I can go back to the c64 and play Exile, and it holds up on the whole. It’s exciting, the exploration is interesting once you get used to the controls. The action sequences are fast and skill-based and if you lose the game is forgiving. There are teleportation-based innovations that even modern games haven’t considered. There is a huge seamless world to explore. You have a jetpack! Great adventure game.

I can play Prince of Persia (the old dos game, not Sands of Time) and it still makes perfect sense and is enjoyable. There is a great learning curve, the movement physics are chunky and the deaths visceral. The minimal plot is conveyed with between-level cinematics placed with a care by Mechner that modern developers seem to lack, something new happens on every level (sword, swordfights, skeleton, shadow, fat man, mouse & slowfall potion, long climb and shadow merge, jaffar fight)… most people wouldn’t consider it an adventure game, but that’s what it seems to be to me.

Do adventure games need a new UI? Well they need a less simplified UI. Exactly when the verblist was condensed into ‘look/use’ they devolved into pointless clickery games it seems. Stuff like Penumbra feel fresh even if they have basic puzzles just because the physics-based UI offers analogue solutions to digital problems. You feel as if there’s an element of fudging along finding solutions that the developer didn’t even intend but the world allows, feels immersive not just Guess What I Was Thinking or Suffer in Limbo.

“Why? Is it better trial-and-error the same phase again and again that a still game?”

I posit that it is. Skill-based video-gaming in essence is about variable degrees of success in repetition of the same phase. In Prince of Persia I might miss a jump and it might mean my death and restart of the level. But often it means I just fell somewhere lower and I might have to backtrack up where I was again, and oh shit, I now am at 1 hp and I left a guard alive in the next screen so I don’t know if I’m gonna make it this time, but I’ll try and it’ll be exciting.

This isn’t about (at least that’s not why I am having this conversation for one) whether you or I like some graphical adventure games but dislike others. For example I believe the Quest for Glory series, especially 1 and 4, are largely exempt from my critique and are extremely playable games even today where there are degrees of success, different ways to solve – generally straightforward – puzzles, optional segues, enjoyable combat for conflict resolution on top of the great characters, story and atmosphere. Guess how many modern adventure games are taking a page from the Cole book of adventure game design: exactly zero. Instead we get April Ryan clones solving stilted CSI investigations by dropping their shit to carry mattresses. One thing is easier to design and code than the other, after all. And the niche market will buy it anyway, so why worry we’re less innovative than a game from 1990. Still Life has a niche audience, whereas once adventure games seemed to be aiming for much more. My position remains that once these games were the ‘high end fps’ games of their time in terms of graphical presentation and that people were enchanted by stories and characters and mostly suffered through puzzles to get the reward of more art and story. In the age of 8bit consoles, that’s what computers could do that they couldn’t. Throw -slow loading- full-screen adventure game graphics on the screen. When computers become more powerful and other types of games with more analogue conflict resolution like FPSes became possible that were actually, you know, fun to play they took both the wow factor and the characterization tropes from adventure gaming (to degrees), and what the former were left with to maintain their identity were the vacuous puzzles. I am pointing my finger exactly there and saying that’s bad. This isn’t an ‘I hate adventure games’ rant, I have a very very specific point there. I suggested then that if people are so determined to mine the conservative adventure game niche they should instead go with the high road and try to appeal with storytelling and beautiful presentation than with “they are puzzles!” puzzles, otherwise we’re left with variations of Still Life. And if they have a larger ambition than just selling copies to a niche audience they should, once they have great presentation and characters, attempt to innovate on the core mechanics of how an adventure game works, introduce variable degrees of success and paradigms of conflict resolution that are more fun than pointless clickery in a static world.

Your argument is ‘some games are good, some are not’ and it’s difficult to disagree with this, but it’s also not all we could be talking about. If we start connecting the dots we see patterns emerge. Aren’t they also important to discuss, instead of deflecting any theory on that oh that was a specific design flaw and oh that is an old sierra game and oh everybody is different in their brains and oh, fpses are also all just repetitive corridor shooters?

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And, well. Innovative. Conservative adventure games. Do you really think that those games need a change of interface?

Let’s go to the other answer:
“There’s a very simple answer to this. A hard platforming puzzle or an FPS battle is a matter of increasing your skill until you can pull it off. The conditions for defeat and victory are analogue. You can fail, or you might do marginally ok (finish a difficult FPS battle with only 5 hp left for example) or you can do better than that and be rewarded later on by getting along easier or you can do absolutely excellent and the time and effort you sink into it will be rewarded as you watch yourself master the game and its flow. In an adventure game though, victory and loss are a binary affair most of the time (stuff like Star Trek: 25th Anniversary are sadly not very remembered). There are no shades of success. It’s either Guess What I’m Thinking or it’s Suffer In Limbo. Adventure games are standing still completely while you’re trying to solve a bullshit puzzle. Once most gamer notes this the suspension of disbelief is shattered.”

Why? Is it better trial-and-error the same phase again and again that a still game? I don’t see that in this way at all (I was really pissed off, to the point of letting the game sleep for years, with Half Life and its never ending tunnels with the same enemies) I don’t think that FPS games are more rewarding at all, and I don’t think that Star Trek 25th Annivesary was a good adventure game (really, as I think that those puzzles you mention from Larry 1 and Police Quest are specific design flaws), and I don’t think that just put graphics and a never-ending list of verbs did anything for innovation in Legend games (the great thing about those games is how well designed and told they were). So, as long as you are showing lot of knowledge in these kind of games, I still don’t know why you put all of them in the same sack. Kyrandia 1 was a bad game, Kyrandia 2 was a great game with some blatant flaws, Indy 4 is an excellent game and Space Quest 5 is too. Many others aren’t. It’s like saying Command & Conquer is a great game but Outpost isn’t.

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Of course everyone works a bit differently but I do think I’m safe when I say that a majority used to play these games to get to the pretty stories and characters and graphics and they suffered through a lot for this and of course if you suffer for something and then are rewarded you feel a degree of pride for your accomplishments. But nowadays a game like Still Life 2 doesn’t look good enough probably won’t have characters deep enough or a storyline involving enough or a point to it all really, to justify the suffering through the gameplay for it.

If people still want to make conservative graphical adventure games like in the old days it would serve them well to have great stories, great characters, great art to back up their pointless clickery. I probably wouldn’t suffer through ridiculous puzzles for them still but at least I’d understand why other people did much more.

To not sound all negative, even back in the early 90′s the company Legend was making innovative and very playable IF-with-Graphics in the form of the two Gateway games. They had a few icky puzzles but again because they weren’t bound by engine and art dept. limitations as much as full graphical games, they got away with a lot more and the games are oozing with atmosphere and they have a point to them as well. So instead of rose-tinted glasses about Sierra or LEC, perhaps these games deserve reexamination instead.

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In every adventure game’s case if you get stuck over a puzzle there’s a 90% chance you will hard feelings towards it. It’s even worse getting stuck over an easy puzzle – no way to make up excuses then. That’s something that will always be present in adventure games.

If you can figure it out by yourself Gabriel Knight’s sekey module is a plain brilliant puzzle. There were dozens of GK1 puzzles I found much more problematic. The truth is everyone’s mind works a bit differently.

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