31–40 of 53 posts
Ah, hearing the name "Sierra On-Line" brings back some memories. Caesar, Earth Siege... Does anyone here happen to know where their licensing portfolio/copyrights/code have ended up?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same here! I absolutely loved the King's Quest and Space Quest games (and really most of Sierra's adventure games) and have very fond memories of them. Definitely a big part of it was due to the settings, characters and stories. And the interaction and exploration of those worlds... on a computer. Which I was just naturally fascinated by. I was also fascinated by Ken and Roberta's story about creating games from thei…
That entire genre had a lot of issues. People like to talk about the Gabriel Knight 3 / cat hair moustache as being the pivotal moment for the death of adventure games, but really it was all along in the design. Puzzles were difficult, natural language processing is a hard problems, and commands/grammers could get weird/complex. The icon based point-n-click cleared this up a little, but Sierra had a business model bu…
Really? I don't remember having to look up hints a single time in part 2. The puzzles were more difficult, but definitely not "Sierra model". The solutions were logical if you paid attention, with the possible exception of the tree joke (I don't remember if that was part 1 or part 2).
The knot puzzle was probably the most annoying of them, but the problem with that one was having to take the long walk back and forth every time you failed.
> 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…
Yeah, I'd consider it a design flaw of the game, if it would reach a dead end that way. A better solution would be to turn mistakes in consequences of the story itself. I.e. not mechanically being stuck on something, but the plot taking a different turn, environment changing in different fashion and so on. I.e. reactivity of the game should reflect those choices and mistakes in more organic fashion. Even better, the game could provide alternative solutions to problems, allowing to work around previous missteps even at later stages (but may be requiring more effort and time).
Ah, hearing the name "Sierra On-Line" brings back some memories. Caesar, Earth Siege... Does anyone here happen to know where their licensing portfolio/copyrights/code have ended up?
Vivendi Games (owned by Vivendi Universal, the huge french conglomerate) bought them (they also owned Blizzard, amongst others), then VG merged with Activision and were in majority control, then Vivendi (parent company) decided they wanted out of the gaming business to focus on other ares (one being telecoms) and sold their shares to Activision, making a nice profit. In what is one of the most Vivendi "we don't know…
> 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…
> 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 having saves that go back many hours. I specifically blame King's Quest II for that. There was a bridge that you could only cross a handful of times and then it collapsed. If it collapsed too early in the game, you are screwed and need a save prior to crossing it unnecessarily.
> 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…
Ah, hearing the name "Sierra On-Line" brings back some memories. Caesar, Earth Siege... Does anyone here happen to know where their licensing portfolio/copyrights/code have ended up?
Vivendi Games (owned by Vivendi Universal, the huge french conglomerate) bought them (they also owned Blizzard, amongst others), then VG merged with Activision and were in majority control, then Vivendi (parent company) decided they wanted out of the gaming business to focus on other ares (one being telecoms) and sold their shares to Activision, making a nice profit. In what is one of the most Vivendi "we don't know…
Too bad. I highly doubt Activision will ever release them. I tried to contact a bunch of companies via email, regarding the source code for EarthSiege 2, but never got a reply :(
If anyone knows anyone who worked on ES2 and might shed a light on some weird things I encountered during reverse engineering, please contact me!
A NBC News piece about Sierra Online in 1983; brought back lots of great memories, and feels like the 80's version of the feature piece on a startup unicorn: http://www.nbcuniversalarchives.com/nbcuni/clip/51A17175_s01...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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…
LucasArts made their name by being the "anti-Sierra" and having far more respect for the player's time.