A Developer’s Point of View
A Developer’s Point of View
Revolution Software was founded back in 1990 specifically so its founders (Charles Cecil, David Sykes and me) could indulge our love of adventure games. We had all played adventures right from their humble text parser beginnings. Somehow, the games that we were playing at the time fired the imagination and created a sense of “being there” and involvement that reaction-based games, fun as they were, could not equal. By the time we got started, the text adventure had more or less ceased to be a reality, and companies such as Sierra were pioneering a new breed of 2d graphical games–a style that has endured pretty much unaltered to this very day but as a genre is very much under great pressure at the moment. It is why graphic adventures are in trouble and what the future might hold that I’d like to talk about.
Two Major Phases
Thinking about the adventure as most people know it, we have had two major styles–text and 2D graphical. The text adventures were truly great–I’ll bet that players familiar with them have far more vivid recollections of games they played over ten years ago than they do of more recent 2d games. Games like the original Unix “Adventure,” Zork and the Level 9 games were truly rich experiences. You read the text and imagined the scene. The picture was always perfect as your mind had created it for you. Usually these games were big and lots of stuff happened–it could be because text-only content was cheap to create. A designer just went crazy until someone told him or her to stop and as a result there were lots of these games. The problem for text adventures was that they didn’t appeal to everyone. For a start, you had to stop and read before you saw what it was all about. That’s a tall order in a game store when all the other screens have gee-whiz graphics on them. The other problem was the text parser–in a bad game you spent your time figuring out how to communicate with the computer rather than gaming. Not surprisingly this put some people off. So the text adventure lived in the shadow of more graphical games; people who understood were fanatical–others just ignored the genre.
Eventually, a few games made a tiny move forward that pretty soon led adventures into a monumental shift away from text and straight to the 2D graphic format that we know today. Designers realized that for adventure to stand out you simply needed to draw a picture of the scene and draw it above the text. At first these scenes were not animated and only major locations would have a picture–maybe 5 percent of all locations in a game had a graphic. The screens acted as a neat reward for players as they progressed through the game, and they got the games noticed in the magazines and in the game stores. Game producers soon saw the future and realized that every location required a picture. If you have a picture of the scene, then why not animate it? And hey, what’s this difficult text parser–let’s put the guy in the scene and use the mouse to move him. The 2D graphical adventure was born. The first consequence of this was that the games cost many times more to produce. It takes minutes to write a description of a scene–it can take weeks sometimes to draw and animate a scene to a high level. Before you know it, you’re in the same business as Disney. As a result games, were far prettier than those dull-looking text adventures but far smaller too.
2D Adventures Today
Graphic adventures today are much the same as the first major graphical games of the late 80s. Sure, the interface is nicely refined and the animation excellent, but they are basically the same but with higher production values. Today there is much debate among gamers as to the future of graphic adventures. There seem to be less and less major releases with promising projects being canceled, excuses being made and petitions signed and delivered. As an independent developer, I can tell you in all honesty why this is–2D graphic adventures cost a fortune to create and sell less and less every year. We have reached a point where they are no longer commercially viable. As a developer, you cannot approach a publisher and get the backing you need to create a game as good as a recent Lucas Arts game or one of our Broken Sword (Circle of Blood) games. To succeed at all, successive games must be better than those that came before, not just in terms of gameplay but also graphics. Graphics are where the money goes, and graphic adventures gobble it up at a rate that would strike fear in the heart of every first-person shooter. So these games cost more every year but, surprisingly perhaps, sell less copies. A publisher must spend more money chasing less sales with each successive adventure game it produces. Now you see why the shelves are full of Quake and Command and Conquer clones?
One thing is for sure–adventure creators have to innovate and players have to open their minds to a new wave of games–a third phase. To try to imagine how the future for adventures might look, we need to consider what the fundamental elements of an adventure game are. I think that more than anything it is the story and plot aspect of an adventure game that sets it apart from other games and alongside this goes interaction. Thinking about those now ancient text adventures, there sure was a lot you do in them–far more perhaps than in more recent games where graphical style often dominates. Through interacting with the game world, you progressed further into the game. This was your reward and progressing kept you interested. Ideally, the player could work through the game at a similar pace to reading a novel. Get stuck for too long and you’d be bored. The difference between reading and adventuring was in the “interacting.”
The best stories are usually written books, and the best books get made into movies. Books have been around hundreds of years and movies a hundred or so. Its not surprising that these genres are both pretty well-tuned by this stage. Interaction and gameplay by comparison are still in their infancy. Combining prewritten stories and player interaction is the single hardest thing to do–that’s why most games don’t feature a strong in-game storyline. There’s no single correct way to do it. and very few rules have been written down and agreed. But people do love good stories with plot twists and characters they can relate to. Some games have tried to combine the tried-and-tested mechanisms of film and TV and left the critical interaction element for another day. It is an easy route to take but surely not the correct one. The problem for designers is knowing how to write a story and plot and then add a player into it whereby that player has a high degree of freedom. Today’s graphic adventures are all guilty, to some extent, of being too conservative with their interaction, relying on graphics alone to carry the game–this is so apparent when you think back to those early pioneering text games.
Looking around the broad world of computer games, there is some really neat stuff going on. I haven’t mentioned too many games specifically but one I played recently was Diablo. In single-player mode, it is a nicely done, well-paced RPG. Not being a diehard RPG fanatic, I eventually tired of the single-player game and thought I’d try its multiplayer option out of curiosity. What followed really blew my mind once I realized the importance of what I’d just played. Up to four of us would push deeper and deeper into Diablo’s dungeons, chatting, fighting together, helping each other out, swapping equipment and fending off other human aggressors who’d come along to spoil our fun. Each game was different–different players and a totally new adventure each time. The game provided a basic environment, but the adventure, story and plot were written in real-time by ourselves. This kind of experience is not new, of course. Text-based MUD games have been around decades. But only now can they be graphical and priced so as to appeal to a wide audience with so many homes now connected to the Internet. Most multi-player games are guns-a-blazing violent. These games have little hope of weaving in a storyline and don’t need to, as the people they appeal to don’t seek that kind of experience. Viewing the entertainment industry as a whole–movies, TV, gaming, etc., it can be argued that the current crop of violent action multi-player games are themselves a niche concept with a limited appeal. I don’t think many more people are going to discover Quake than are already playing it. In fact, I believe these genres are probably being pushed as far as they can go–sure, the graphics are getting better, but they too look like they now need some radical innovation. Furthermore, what really made the first person and strategy games was their newly found use of multiplayer.
Is it possible, then, that a multi-player adventure style game holds the key to the future of not just adventure games but also the games industry itself? I’m imagining a game world where the emphasis is not on killing things but on solving mysteries, following clues and interacting with people. What’s different is that many people might be playing the same game at once. You’d not be talking to prescripted characters created by a designer, you’d be talking to real people. You’d team up with others to help solve the game. Players could choose the graphics for their character from a huge menu and they would use their own dialogue–via text or speech–rather than text written for them by the game creators. The game world would be an open environment where people could do pretty much what they wished. Each game session would feature a set of key events–such as one player being kidnaped–which players work through on their quest. These events might be preplanned by the computer for each game. Players could choose to play in games with one team or perhaps several. A quest to find and escape with a sacred jewel could be so much more fun if another team’s quest is to prevent you from doing so. The inventiveness of the other team would likely surpass the puzzles normally placed before adventurers in today’s games. The whole experience would be far more subtle and incredibly more vivid than just you verses the computer. Every game would be different, and you’d not need to put a game aside once you’d played it through once or twice. The major difference between this type of game and current multi-player games is that currently most games have one type of interaction–shooting. What’s required now is a multi-player game with a rich vocabulary of interactivity. Perhaps such a game would help the industry move further toward the mass market of entertainment and compete with mainstream TV and film? I really think it could!
Meanwhile, I think both adventure creators and players must look to other genres for inspiration and try to create a new breed of games that combine traditional adventure storytelling with new graphic engines and player interfaces. Certainly, we at Revolution are looking to combine the best features of our past games with elements of action and high tension as found not only in cinema but also other game types. We’re doing this because we feel adventures could be so much more than they currently are. What the adventure genre really needs are major hits which draw attention back to the genre and encourage new gamers into the field. These gamers need to be not just players of other genres but also people from the vast multitude who own a PC but don’t currently play games. To do this requires a break from the past, which requires developers to take new risks and current game players to look beyond their current idea of what an adventure game really is and to try new games. With any luck, a third phase of adventure gaming will emerge. Happy adventuring!
