Deadly Sins of Graphic-Adventure Design
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Deadly Sins of Graphic-Adventure Design
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Re: Deadly Sins of Graphic-Adventure Design
#2He makes some really god points, such as the magic pixel locations, blind alleys to the no win-scenario, and the guess-the-verb syndrome, but other points are simply opinions that are highly arguable. One is the elaborate death messages in the SQ games. Those aren't there to simply make you feel bad, they're part of the humor. One may not LIKE that type of humor, but then one probably wouldn't play too many SQ games were that the case. It's like saying Abbot & Costello or Seinfeld were bad simply because you didn't like them.
Re: Deadly Sins of Graphic-Adventure Design
#3Since a lot of this adventure-gaming-retro-examination comes on the heels of the King's Quest revival...I think it's worth noting that the original KQ suffers from quite a few of these "sins"...and yet, from my hazy memory, it was one of the most open-ended adventure games, back then and even today.
There are at least a couple of key puzzles that can be solved in several ways...and in different order. The one that comes to mind is the dragon in the cave. Yes, it's also very easy to be completely and irrevocably stuck...but other than Maniac Mansion, it's hard to think of another adventure game that gave you so much freedom to solve puzzles with different combinations of items and in a non-linear order. I don't recall there being multiple ways to solve puzzles in the Police Quests, or the LucasArts Indiana Jones in Atlantis game, or more modern games such as Grim Fandango. For a game of KQ's era to have that kind of coherent branching is pretty impressive.
Re: Deadly Sins of Graphic-Adventure Design
#4He makes some really god points, such as the magic pixel locations, blind alleys to the no win-scenario, and the guess-the-verb syndrome, but other points are simply opinions that are highly arguable. One is the elaborate death messages in the SQ games. Those aren't there to simply make you feel bad, they're part of the humor. One may not LIKE that type of humor, but then one probably wouldn't play too many SQ games…
The elaborate death messages insulting the player: a matter of taste.
These messages not including a "go back to last non-fatal point" button: objectively horrible.
Re: Deadly Sins of Graphic-Adventure Design
#5I agree with MANY of these points. In enjoyed this category of games, both in my youth and when there was a post-Curses revival in interactive fiction/text adventures.
I was never able to get through Zork because of the inherent illogic (e.g. if I go west, going east should take me back).
Hitchhiker's Guide was perhaps the only one of these games that I finished, and that because it had a built in hint system. As I recall, it was nonetheless guilty of at least two of the listed sins, but the combination of the hint system and vague connection to the book got me through it.
Re: Deadly Sins of Graphic-Adventure Design
#6He makes some really god points, such as the magic pixel locations, blind alleys to the no win-scenario, and the guess-the-verb syndrome, but other points are simply opinions that are highly arguable. One is the elaborate death messages in the SQ games. Those aren't there to simply make you feel bad, they're part of the humor. One may not LIKE that type of humor, but then one probably wouldn't play too many SQ games…
The elaborate death messages insulting the player: a matter of taste. These messages not including a "go back to last non-fatal point" button: objectively horrible.
I generally have a beef with games that will criticize the player for choices the game forces you to make.
Imagine a game where you have to work with an NPC - an NPC that you have no doubt will betray you, but you have no choice to advance in the game except to cooperate.
Surprise! The NPC betrays you. You are then chastised (often at length) by other NPCs for your folly. That just bugs me.
Re: Deadly Sins of Graphic-Adventure Design
#7I agree with this article. Classic adventure games have a lot of terrible, frustrating design.
On the other hand... I think there's something to be said for obscurity as a mechanic.
Games these days tend to be easy and digestible. They're built on systems that we're all intimately familiar with, and we can usually tell how a game's going to go from the first 15 minutes. So when I played Metro 2033 for the first time, I suddenly found myself in unfamiliar territory. My mask could get smudged and break. My filters could run out, as could my ammo. I knew that I could easily box myself in and ruin my save if I didn't manage my resources carefully. So I found myself running around and exploring some really terrifying nooks and crannies — air running out and ammo on the low! — just for the chance to get some extra bullets or scavenge the filter off a corpse. At one point, in a dark cavern surrounded by dangerous monsters, I even found myself switching to my rare currency-ammo — something I would never do in any other action game — just because I hadn't brought enough supplies with me. I eked out with just a few bullets remaining, wondering if they'd last me until the end of the mission. It was truly exhilarating.
Another great example is the metroidvania platformer La-Mulana. From an outside perspective, that game is incomprehensible. You can go in one of a dozen different directions. There are obscure phrases scribbled on the walls, each corresponding to a puzzle somewhere in the ruins. Pushing a button is as likely to open a door right in front of you as it is one across the map. You find strange items all over the place, none of them with any obvious function. Some traps insta-kill you or wall you in, and some items can't be found again if you approach them the wrong way. A real mess, right? But this sense of mystery — that I'm in way over my head — is something that truly excites me, rekindling distant memories of exploring strange shareware worlds through my creaky, yellow-tinted CRT. Back then, as a kid, the world past my backyard was a nebulous, murky unknown to me, and games were an extension of that feeling. Now, as an adult, I mostly understand how the world works. That frontier is closed. But that feeling can still be found in those few difficult, incomprehensible games that don't follow the trends. You're not coddled by them. There are no rails. You're in a hostile world that wants you out, and it's up to you to figure out how to survive it.
I don't like consulting walkthroughs. I don't like instant-death traps. I don't like stumbling around aimlessly looking for a solution. And yet, when I'm deep in a game like this, I somehow find that I can't pull myself away.
Re: Deadly Sins of Graphic-Adventure Design
#8Some of these games (eg, SQ) essentially little post-modernist satires of their own genre, in that they make save/restore part of the game mechanic, and when you hit an obstacle, the search space isn't just the four screens you can walk to now, but the game thus far. Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy played this up in a very fast and funny way -- where there's about eight things you need to do in quick succession to get the Babel Fish from the vending machine, and it keeps coming up with outlandish ways to thwart you, and you need to have brought the junk mail from your doorstep.
Most of the best Fighting Fantasy books in the 1980s did the same thing -- turning down the wrong corridor would result in an imaginative and gruesome death, knowing full-well that the reader has their fingers and thumbs in the three previous pages.
Essentially, you're solving a maze through the game state -- you are supposed to hit several dead-ends before you find the right path.
I did also find it rather daft that the author of the article devotes a paragraph to complaining about being insulted -- when that's clearly the humour of it (that the designer is pouring out mock insults on you for him making that screen overtly pernicious).
There was a hacking adventure game I remember from the 1980s, where if I recall they didn't put the code you needed for one of the puzzles anywhere in the game -- because you solve that one by dumping the game code and finding it (so you get to feel like you've hacked the hacking game). Part of the point of 1980s adventures was imaginatively breaking the conventions of how games are "supposed" to work, and being "unfair" so you have to find a tricky way to make it easy.
Re: Deadly Sins of Graphic-Adventure Design
#9Chris Crawford, who the author quotes, has written a lot of books on game design, which I've read some of and find interesting, but he has not written a game I enjoyed.
I think the reality of Sierra and games of the era was they were enjoyable because they looked beautiful and told a cool story in a new medium.
You needed pixel perfect challenges else the game was over and you had nothing else to play. Plus you made friends discussing them and the stupid bits. Different times.
But I think people really underestimate how hard it is to create challenges that are just logical, this is very very hard. But I think people in their heads think it's easy even though they have never done it.
Re: Deadly Sins of Graphic-Adventure Design
#10I recently played The Talos Principle, which is basically just a puzzle game. They included a little making of featurette that included a great line about how every player experiences puzzles differently.
What one person thinks of immediately, another player could spend an hour trying to solve. The makers of this game did extensive testing and some brilliant level design to allow for this variation.