41–50 of 53 posts
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King's Quest 8 just came out recently ... they've kept with the times: https://www.humblebundle.com/store/kings-quest-the-complete-...
I think it is just "King's Quest". But if it was numbered it would be the ninth one. (Mask of Eternity would be the eighth.)
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> All the KQ games do seem poorly designed in retrospect but I do remember chugging through the first few of them through trial and error. I've wondered if that perseverance is something that is part of the stupid bullheadedness of youth (or the weakness of age), or if at the time, we just accepted that games were supposed to be unfair and cruel. A) We've come a looong way in terms of game abilities, and design. Desi…
A lot of it wasn't so much design inexperience as an intentional difference in design-style due to those factors B and C. Where today we speak of "replay value", of games that you finish and then want to play again, no such concept existed back then. Instead, it was assumed that a game that was "beaten" (let alone "mastered") would be put away, and so a game should resist being beaten for as long as possible to make…
I always thought the games being designed that way was to add replay value. You could get close to the end but then have to start over again because you missed something.
They also had the much better option of optional quests/points.
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I think the fail states in Sierra's games were actually part of the fun. Just because of the variety and how tongue-in-cheek many of them were. It was amusing and sort of an easter egg hunt to find all the ways you could die. > The much bigger problem comes when you can make the game unwinnable, but not actually lose right away Yeah, that sort of thing instilled a life-long habit of constantly saving my progress and…
That "Dead End Dread" had a more sinister form, where you weren't sure whether the lack of progress was due to an unwinnable state, or a bug, which caused me to look up walkthroughs and cheat despite having the best intentions not to (I swear!)
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A lot of it wasn't so much design inexperience as an intentional difference in design-style due to those factors B and C. Where today we speak of "replay value", of games that you finish and then want to play again, no such concept existed back then. Instead, it was assumed that a game that was "beaten" (let alone "mastered") would be put away, and so a game should resist being beaten for as long as possible to make…
> Where today we speak of "replay value", of games that you finish and then want to play again, no such concept existed back then. Instead, it was assumed that a game that was "beaten" (let alone "mastered") would be put away, and so a game should resist being beaten for as long as possible to make it "more worth the money." I always thought the games being designed that way was to add replay value. You could get clo…
In the arcade-game era, a "play" was the outermost unit of gameplay. It's what you'd get in exchange for a quarter from an arcade machine: one attempt at beating the game (possibly with the assistance of mechanisms like extra lives.) So "re-play-ability", if it came up in the game-design vocabulary of that era, would refer to how effectively a game could continue to solicit quarters from a given player. This included difficulty, but also required a feeling of progression rather than frustration, and a decent minimum length for any given "play" (because no parent would keep giving their child quarters for a machine that eats one every minute or two.)
Coming with the era of battery-backed save files, the "play" (play-session) was replaced as the overarching unit of gameplay consumption with the play-through: the creation and on-and-off usage of the same save file, for weeks/months, until you get to some point where the game shows you a "The End" screen and you (in many games) get a percentage score for how many of the game's optional puzzles you solved. (Basically bringing to home consoles the conception of gaming that existed on time-sharing mainframe systems in the 70s.)
Both before and after the ability to restore progress, players could decide to quit a game before beating it, unless the game was good enough to drag them back in; and both before and after, players might continue to play after beating a game, to do better. But the arcade† and arcade-inspired eras definitely favoured the first kind of "replay value" compared to the progessive-play-through era.
† (Assuming that "beating" the game was a sensible thing to talk about. Many games of the arcade era would let pretty much anyone "get to the end" with the barest effort; the point of them was instead to compete on point-score or leaderboard-ranking. "Replay value", in these games, effectively referred to the same thing the term "depth" does in competitive games like chess: how well the game serves to measure skill difference in high-level play.)
> One could wish that Roberta’s ambivalence about killing her new female heroine at every possible juncture had led her to consider the wisdom of indulging in all that indiscriminate player-killing at all It's interesting, how in comparison in Loom[1], there are practically no such deaths at all. The most that can happen - you'll get stuck with progress and will have to return to previous areas to finish what you mis…
Others have mentioned that LucasArts games in general avoided deaths and failstates, but just frequent death wasn't the real issue with the Sierra model in my mind. An immediate "Game Over" is not a huge deal, you just lose progress back to your last save (or less in today's checkpointed and autosaved games). It's like choosing the path with the deadly spiked pit in a choose-your-own-adventure book, and just flipping…
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Others have mentioned that LucasArts games in general avoided deaths and failstates, but just frequent death wasn't the real issue with the Sierra model in my mind. An immediate "Game Over" is not a huge deal, you just lose progress back to your last save (or less in today's checkpointed and autosaved games). It's like choosing the path with the deadly spiked pit in a choose-your-own-adventure book, and just flipping…
I think the fail states in Sierra's games were actually part of the fun. Just because of the variety and how tongue-in-cheek many of them were. It was amusing and sort of an easter egg hunt to find all the ways you could die. > The much bigger problem comes when you can make the game unwinnable, but not actually lose right away Yeah, that sort of thing instilled a life-long habit of constantly saving my progress and…
In addition at the very end the bad guy casts a spell at you, and the bird flies into the way and you don't die... if you didn't save that bird 4 hours earlier you have no way to possibly know that is why you are doomed to failure in the final fight.
It felt like shitty game design at the time, and by today's standards it would be completely unacceptable to most players.
> One could wish that Roberta’s ambivalence about killing her new female heroine at every possible juncture had led her to consider the wisdom of indulging in all that indiscriminate player-killing at all It's interesting, how in comparison in Loom[1], there are practically no such deaths at all. The most that can happen - you'll get stuck with progress and will have to return to previous areas to finish what you mis…
That's the case with virtually every Lucasfilm game I've ever played, including Indiana Jones: Fate of Atlantis, Full Throttle, and Grim Fandango. I believe you can die in the climaxes of those games, otherwise you just get knocked unconscious at worst. That feature was a nice reprieve after playing the Sierra-designed games. Though sometimes the abrupt endings in the Sierra games had their point; for example, forget…
"No... that's not what happened."
Then you start the scene over.
> One could wish that Roberta’s ambivalence about killing her new female heroine at every possible juncture had led her to consider the wisdom of indulging in all that indiscriminate player-killing at all It's interesting, how in comparison in Loom[1], there are practically no such deaths at all. The most that can happen - you'll get stuck with progress and will have to return to previous areas to finish what you mis…
Stupid cleaning robots....
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I think the fail states in Sierra's games were actually part of the fun. Just because of the variety and how tongue-in-cheek many of them were. It was amusing and sort of an easter egg hunt to find all the ways you could die. > The much bigger problem comes when you can make the game unwinnable, but not actually lose right away Yeah, that sort of thing instilled a life-long habit of constantly saving my progress and…
I remember in one of the Kings Quests games you could throw either a shoe or a stick at a dog chasing a bird; both awarded you points, but one led to not being able to complete the game. In addition at the very end the bad guy casts a spell at you, and the bird flies into the way and you don't die... if you didn't save that bird 4 hours earlier you have no way to possibly know that is why you are doomed to failure in…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the fail states in Sierra's games were actually part of the fun. Just because of the variety and how tongue-in-cheek many of them were. It was amusing and sort of an easter egg hunt to find all the ways you could die. > The much bigger problem comes when you can make the game unwinnable, but not actually lose right away Yeah, that sort of thing instilled a life-long habit of constantly saving my progress and…
I remember in one of the Kings Quests games you could throw either a shoe or a stick at a dog chasing a bird; both awarded you points, but one led to not being able to complete the game. In addition at the very end the bad guy casts a spell at you, and the bird flies into the way and you don't die... if you didn't save that bird 4 hours earlier you have no way to possibly know that is why you are doomed to failure in…