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!
