I'm deep inside your children; They'll betray you in my name...
As might have become obvious since I posted my last entry, I probably won't be finishing the story. It's not necessarily the story's fault, though Chapter III was a pothole that drained a lot of my enthusiasm for the venture. Jardin is a fun protagonist because of her slant on being the Chosen One (simultaneously resenting the inconvenience and taking for granted the immutable destiny protecting her), but ultimately the very, very poor end to Fallout 2 has soured me on retelling the tale. Long story short, Jardin travels far and wide and eventually tracks down Vault 13. However, the inhabitants have since been abducted by the Conclave, a faction which is apparently the last remnant of the US government, alive and well on an oil platform off the coast of Northern California. The depth and breadth of stupid, insulting storytelling shoehorned into the end of an otherwise brilliant RPG is rather starggering, and I will summarize in brief. Jardin returns with a GECK to Arroyo, but finds that (surprise!) the Conclave has been there too, and killed or kidnapped everyone for reasons never explained. Jardin goes to the Conclave's oil platform, kills the President of the United States (seriously), rescues the survivors of her tribe and those from Vault 13, and generally saves the day. You aren't missing out on anything.
Because I've been feeling unusually retro lately, I also played Escape from Monkey Island, which admittedly is not really a retro game itself but is a member of a retro game series which I never actually played when it was current, much to my shame. It reminded me of some other great LucasArts games that I should have played but didn't, such as Sam & Max, Full Throttle and Day of the Tentacle. Except for Sam & Max, all of these games (or their predecessors in the case of Monkey) benefitted from the golden touch of Tim Schaffer, who has since moved on to found Double Fine Productions and release the brilliant Psychonauts. As much as I love Psychonauts, it makes me sad that I can't share it with people who I think would really love it. It's a platformer, and a particularly 3D one at that, and even I get a headache eventually when I play for too long. I can't help but feel that at its heart Psychonauts was envisioned as an adventure game in the tradition of the great LucasArts classics, but became a platformer because of market considerations. Admittedly, it makes a great platformer; I just lament the accessibility that is lost in the conversion.
Accessibility is also a concern with regard to Fallout 3, in development by Bethesda Softworks. I love Bethesda's work, and perhaps more importantly I trust them to create a game that is true, explicitly and thematically, to the originals -- though for the reasons mentioned above, if the word "Conclave" was omitted from future games entirely I would not miss it. But I am concerned that the howling barbarians on Fallout fan board might be right, and Fallout 3 may turn out to be a first-person action/RPG with a presentation strikingly similar to a certain other major action/RPG franchise developed by Bethesda. Although this itself would not keep me from playing and enjoying the game, I'm sure it would prevent many other players who might otherwise love to play Fallout 3 from sharing that experience.
I think that part of what made adventure games like the LucasArts classics and CRPGs like Fallout so popular in their day was the fact that they were so very accessible to gamers who are either unable to or uninterested in playing "twitch" games. And although I do love me a good twitch action/adventure from time to time, I can certainly embrace the appeal of a slow-paced, methodical gameplay paradigm, whether that is the turn-based combat of Fallout or the item puzzles of Monkey Island. It used to be that games could get by without "fast-paced, in-your-face visceral combat". Somewhere along the line that changed.
Now, two things happened in the latter half of the nineties. One, adventure games -- and I include Fallout herein, for reasons I will discuss below -- started taking a dive as far as sales were concerned. And two, adventure games started transforming themselves to try and capture elements of more-popular action games. I don't have a timeline handy and I am too lazy to do any research, so I'm working from memory, but my recollection is that these two things happened more or less simultaneously. The way I see "history books" for the adventure genre being written, it sounds like the consensus is that in response to waning market share adventure games began to mutate and seek out new niches that would support them. Some of them took on traits of RPGs (Anachronox), while others became FPSs (Half-Life), while still others became platformers (Psychonauts). This is true to a point, but it doesn't explain what killed the adventure genre in the first place.
As I remember it, adventure games were still doing OK when they started taking on traits of the more popular genres, and I think the impact of this can't be overestimated. Most adventure game players did not *want* combat mixed in with their item puzzles, Full Throttle. Most adventure game players didn't mind the mouse interface, Grim Fandango. I can recall adventure game players feeling that their genre was being stolen away from them by twitch gamers who would simply not appreciate its strengths. And let's not forget to mention Dreamcatcher, that harbinger of doom, that plague of mediocrity. Dreamcatcher moved into the House that Myst Built and proceeded to have a fire sale. The sheer volume of derivative tripe produced by that font of lies and woe could choke any genre.
My point is that I think the adventure genre could have survived. It would not have been the first-person shooter; to even entertain dreams of such was silly. But it did not have to die. The trouble was that publishers decided that adventure games were going to have to Get With The 3D Era, and tried to broaden (or perhaps narrow, but certainly reshape) the scope of the genre in an attempt to grab unwitting twitch monkeys. They did not think their core demographic would abandon them, because where would they go? They failed to realize that if adventure games ceased to resemble the genre that demographic loved, it would rather just not play at all. LucasArts, which was single-handedly responsible for some of the best games of the genre (bite me, Sierra), decided that the money was in Star Wars games and never looked back. And so the adventure game genre met its ignoble end.
Understand that as far as I am concerned both Fallout and Monkey Island are adventure games. However different their thematic or presentational properties, they are both games about character, about plot, and about exploring a fictional world. The mode of conflict, which assumes the burden of gameplay, is different: Monkey Island asks you to perform a series of thinly-disguised key hunts until the game ends, whereas Fallout presents you with repetitive tactical engagements reminiscent of hex-based strategy games. What makes these games different from the adventure games which aren't widely considered to be part of the adventure genre (Deus Ex, Anachonox, Psychonauts, Half-Life, most RPGs) is that their mode of conflict was widely-accessible, thus enabling anyone interested in experiencing those adventure components to do so. If I love adventure games, but first-person shooters make me motion sick (as they do many gamers), it doesn't matter how good you say Deus Ex is -- I am not able to receive that experience. No player capable of operating a computer is going to find herself *unable* to handle the control scheme of The Dig, on the other hand. And if she finds that she is lacking either the problem-solving or persistence to figure out the puzzles, there's GameFaqs.com. Adventure games let anybody play.
And that may be why many gamers did not like them. I am always shocked whenever I read words on my screen, written by other human beings, that say they hate Myst. They have never played Myst or any of its sequels, or indeed anything that ever looked even remotely like Myst, but they hate it. Because it could be played by five-year-olds or grandmothers. Because it was accessible, they hated it. I honestly believe that the dominance of the first-person shooter has everything to do with this. I hear people talk about immersion and precision, and those are good reasons, but they aren't the real reasons. FPSs reign because not everyone can play them, and not everyone who can can play well.
And yet the video game industry seems painfully, achingly aware that it needs to expand and encompass "casual" gamers (who need to be segregated from "real" gamers who won't play anything that doesn't have sixteen buttons and two joysticks). Why haven't they realized that adventure games can be a part of that? Will adventure games sweep the casual market? I doubt it; most casual gamers just want variations on Bejeweled. But the genre can live again, and won't have to dress up in awkward disguises as it does now.
I've been thinking about the form that adventure games will need to take, and I'll be thinking about it some more. Perhaps I'll talk more about it in this space. In the mean time, as soon as some spare income turns up I'd like to invest in some LucasArts classics that I didn't play the first time around. I only wish I'd appreciated them when they were new.
Because I've been feeling unusually retro lately, I also played Escape from Monkey Island, which admittedly is not really a retro game itself but is a member of a retro game series which I never actually played when it was current, much to my shame. It reminded me of some other great LucasArts games that I should have played but didn't, such as Sam & Max, Full Throttle and Day of the Tentacle. Except for Sam & Max, all of these games (or their predecessors in the case of Monkey) benefitted from the golden touch of Tim Schaffer, who has since moved on to found Double Fine Productions and release the brilliant Psychonauts. As much as I love Psychonauts, it makes me sad that I can't share it with people who I think would really love it. It's a platformer, and a particularly 3D one at that, and even I get a headache eventually when I play for too long. I can't help but feel that at its heart Psychonauts was envisioned as an adventure game in the tradition of the great LucasArts classics, but became a platformer because of market considerations. Admittedly, it makes a great platformer; I just lament the accessibility that is lost in the conversion.
Accessibility is also a concern with regard to Fallout 3, in development by Bethesda Softworks. I love Bethesda's work, and perhaps more importantly I trust them to create a game that is true, explicitly and thematically, to the originals -- though for the reasons mentioned above, if the word "Conclave" was omitted from future games entirely I would not miss it. But I am concerned that the howling barbarians on Fallout fan board might be right, and Fallout 3 may turn out to be a first-person action/RPG with a presentation strikingly similar to a certain other major action/RPG franchise developed by Bethesda. Although this itself would not keep me from playing and enjoying the game, I'm sure it would prevent many other players who might otherwise love to play Fallout 3 from sharing that experience.
I think that part of what made adventure games like the LucasArts classics and CRPGs like Fallout so popular in their day was the fact that they were so very accessible to gamers who are either unable to or uninterested in playing "twitch" games. And although I do love me a good twitch action/adventure from time to time, I can certainly embrace the appeal of a slow-paced, methodical gameplay paradigm, whether that is the turn-based combat of Fallout or the item puzzles of Monkey Island. It used to be that games could get by without "fast-paced, in-your-face visceral combat". Somewhere along the line that changed.
Now, two things happened in the latter half of the nineties. One, adventure games -- and I include Fallout herein, for reasons I will discuss below -- started taking a dive as far as sales were concerned. And two, adventure games started transforming themselves to try and capture elements of more-popular action games. I don't have a timeline handy and I am too lazy to do any research, so I'm working from memory, but my recollection is that these two things happened more or less simultaneously. The way I see "history books" for the adventure genre being written, it sounds like the consensus is that in response to waning market share adventure games began to mutate and seek out new niches that would support them. Some of them took on traits of RPGs (Anachronox), while others became FPSs (Half-Life), while still others became platformers (Psychonauts). This is true to a point, but it doesn't explain what killed the adventure genre in the first place.
As I remember it, adventure games were still doing OK when they started taking on traits of the more popular genres, and I think the impact of this can't be overestimated. Most adventure game players did not *want* combat mixed in with their item puzzles, Full Throttle. Most adventure game players didn't mind the mouse interface, Grim Fandango. I can recall adventure game players feeling that their genre was being stolen away from them by twitch gamers who would simply not appreciate its strengths. And let's not forget to mention Dreamcatcher, that harbinger of doom, that plague of mediocrity. Dreamcatcher moved into the House that Myst Built and proceeded to have a fire sale. The sheer volume of derivative tripe produced by that font of lies and woe could choke any genre.
My point is that I think the adventure genre could have survived. It would not have been the first-person shooter; to even entertain dreams of such was silly. But it did not have to die. The trouble was that publishers decided that adventure games were going to have to Get With The 3D Era, and tried to broaden (or perhaps narrow, but certainly reshape) the scope of the genre in an attempt to grab unwitting twitch monkeys. They did not think their core demographic would abandon them, because where would they go? They failed to realize that if adventure games ceased to resemble the genre that demographic loved, it would rather just not play at all. LucasArts, which was single-handedly responsible for some of the best games of the genre (bite me, Sierra), decided that the money was in Star Wars games and never looked back. And so the adventure game genre met its ignoble end.
Understand that as far as I am concerned both Fallout and Monkey Island are adventure games. However different their thematic or presentational properties, they are both games about character, about plot, and about exploring a fictional world. The mode of conflict, which assumes the burden of gameplay, is different: Monkey Island asks you to perform a series of thinly-disguised key hunts until the game ends, whereas Fallout presents you with repetitive tactical engagements reminiscent of hex-based strategy games. What makes these games different from the adventure games which aren't widely considered to be part of the adventure genre (Deus Ex, Anachonox, Psychonauts, Half-Life, most RPGs) is that their mode of conflict was widely-accessible, thus enabling anyone interested in experiencing those adventure components to do so. If I love adventure games, but first-person shooters make me motion sick (as they do many gamers), it doesn't matter how good you say Deus Ex is -- I am not able to receive that experience. No player capable of operating a computer is going to find herself *unable* to handle the control scheme of The Dig, on the other hand. And if she finds that she is lacking either the problem-solving or persistence to figure out the puzzles, there's GameFaqs.com. Adventure games let anybody play.
And that may be why many gamers did not like them. I am always shocked whenever I read words on my screen, written by other human beings, that say they hate Myst. They have never played Myst or any of its sequels, or indeed anything that ever looked even remotely like Myst, but they hate it. Because it could be played by five-year-olds or grandmothers. Because it was accessible, they hated it. I honestly believe that the dominance of the first-person shooter has everything to do with this. I hear people talk about immersion and precision, and those are good reasons, but they aren't the real reasons. FPSs reign because not everyone can play them, and not everyone who can can play well.
And yet the video game industry seems painfully, achingly aware that it needs to expand and encompass "casual" gamers (who need to be segregated from "real" gamers who won't play anything that doesn't have sixteen buttons and two joysticks). Why haven't they realized that adventure games can be a part of that? Will adventure games sweep the casual market? I doubt it; most casual gamers just want variations on Bejeweled. But the genre can live again, and won't have to dress up in awkward disguises as it does now.
I've been thinking about the form that adventure games will need to take, and I'll be thinking about it some more. Perhaps I'll talk more about it in this space. In the mean time, as soon as some spare income turns up I'd like to invest in some LucasArts classics that I didn't play the first time around. I only wish I'd appreciated them when they were new.